A Year in Tibet. Sun Shuyun

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       THREE Journey to the Next Life

      TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS after the death of his mother, Tseten calls again. The family is preparing for a special fire ritual, the most elaborate they have performed so far. Do we want to film it?

      ‘Are you sure?’ I ask, cautiously. I am keen to film it, but I do not want to intrude. In the time since she passed away, I have often found myself thinking of Tseten's mother. Despite my own beliefs, I seem in some curious way to be growing concerned about the passage of her soul.

      But Tseten assures me it will be all right.‘Mila has invited you,’ he says.

      We set off immediately. As we approach the house, we see villagers arriving, carrying baskets of food or large jars of chang. One man struggles under the weight of a huge sack full of cowpats. Coming up the stairs by the stable, we find the Rikzins' upper courtyard packed; half the village seems to have turned up. Three shaven-headed nuns in maroon robes are arranging food on a long table: barley and barley flour, butter, sugar, tea, mustard seeds, rice, Chinese dates, spices, and quite a few other things that I don't recognise. Two more nuns are cleaning two five-foot long ceremonial horns. In a far corner of the yard, a couple of men are mixing a vast heap of tsampa with brown sugar to make tso, small cones of offerings. The heap gets bigger all the time, as new visitors add tsampa, sugar, and raisins they have brought with them. I watch a little girl who quietly waits her turn behind the adults. She holds a small bowl of tsampa in both hands, with a piece of yellow paper — a prayer for the dead, perhaps — tucked into the middle of it; when her turn comes, she tips it onto the heap.

      Mila is standing in the centre of the courtyard. He looks calm and serene, like the rest of the family. Had I not known, I would not have suspected that he had just lost his wife. The only difference I notice is that he seems rather shabby, even dirty, his chin unshaven, the collar and the sleeves of his shirt shiny with grease. I have been told it is the custom for the family not to wash for forty-nine days after a death. He greets us warmly. He is wearing his usual outfit — a crimson sweater and brown vest — and his eyes are crinkling behind the pink plastic rims of his spectacles in the bright sun. He is watching as Tseten bends over a couple of pillow-sized mud bricks. Dondan is pouring sand from a sack. I ask Mila what they are doing. ‘We are making a mandala for the ritual today,’ he says. He points to the small packets of coloured sand on the windowsill. I am surprised. I have seen the famous murals of mandalas in the Palkhor monastery — large, gorgeous murals meant to represent the cosmos. They are so intricate, so vivid, and yet also so ingenious. Are we thinking of the same thing? I check with Tseten. ‘You just wait.’

      Although it is late October the sun is very strong, and Mila invites us to rest in the prayer room. There he introduces us to a young man, Tseten's cousin, who is making torma. I have often seen Tseten making them — they are little blocks made of tsampa and butter, some painted red, intended to represent both the peaceful and wrathful deities. The good deities will be thanked, praised, and put on the altar for the protection of the family; the bad deities are pacified and then left on the rooftop, at crossroads, or on the outskirts of the village, supposedly taking away with them any bad influences that might trouble the family.

      In the midst of the torma is a reclining human figurine in red, which I assume embodies the deceased woman. Mila carries it and the finished torma to the altar table. He stands and stares at the altar for quite a while. I wonder what he is thinking. I know Mila believes that grieving will distract his wife from her rebirth, so is he trying not to be sad? When he sits down with us, I ask him. ‘Imagine you are caught in a storm,’ he tells me. ‘That is what it is like for the souls of the dead. Our tears would be like a hurricane; our cries would be like thunder. They would frighten the soul. It is best to stay calm.’

      I look at Mila long and hard. Perhaps the next life is so important and he is so engrossed in ensuring his wife will have a good rebirth, he simply has no time for grieving. Or does absorption in the ritual give him a natural tranquillity?

      I am just about to ask him more questions when he is called to the courtyard to supervise the preparations. I take the opportunity to peek into the next room. There, two nuns are busily refilling empty butter lamps. A huge pot of melted butter is bubbling away on an electric stove, and rows and rows of lamps glow in front of a statue of the Buddha of Infinite Light. The amount of work required to fill and refill all the lamps is daunting, but the nuns seem very happy doing it, chanting while they work.

      ‘Why so many lamps?’ I ask them.

      ‘To guide the soul in the bardo,’ one of the nuns, who is tall and striking, replies.

      I ask her to tell me more. She shakes her head, insisting that she is not knowledgeable enough, that she may mislead me. But when I plead with her, she relents. She lists ten functions of the butter lamp; among other things, a butter lamp can help the eyes to see more clearly, illuminate the difference between kindness and evil, dispel the darkness of ignorance, help us to be reborn into a higher state of being, and help us to escape quickly from sadness. Quite a lot for a humble lamp.

      But they had a disaster last night, she tells me sadly. A large lump of butter brought by one of the visitors was fake, made of solidified oil, and quite a few of the lamps did not burn at all. ‘Even the butter that people offer to the Buddha is often fake these days,’ she grumbles. She tells me that even if the fake butter burns, it makes a lot of smoke. It pollutes the air and darkens the old murals and statues in the monasteries. ‘The saddest part is that the pilgrims who buy it know it is fake because it is so cheap. But they do not want to pay more for real butter. Money is eating at their hearts. May they not go to hell in their next life for cheating,’ she says, sighing.

      I sit down to help them, and as I refill the cups with butter, I can't help wondering about the cost: the Rikzins will burn hundreds of lamps, day and night, for forty-nine days. How much butter is that? And butter is only a part of it. Monks and nuns who come to the service have to be fed and СКАЧАТЬ