A Year in Tibet. Sun Shuyun

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СКАЧАТЬ large quantities of tsampa are used to make offerings. Much of the elaborate ritual is repeated every seven days to guide the soul, since it is supposed to experience death seven times. After the forty-nine days, Tseten and the family will go on pilgrimages to the most famous monasteries and temples to make sure the deities there recognise their mother's reincarnation should it appear in their domain. A death can push families into debt.

      We have always been lectured in China about the wastefulness of Buddhism. There are endless lists of figures to bolster the message: the old Tibetan government spent 90 per cent of its income on religious activities, while its people led miserable lives; at the time of the liberation of Tibet in 1951, as many as a quarter of all Tibetan men were in monasteries, the highest ratio to the general population of any country; in the two hundred years from the mid-eighteenth century to 1951, Tibet's population increased by just over 100,000, virtually a standstill.¹²

      No money to invest in the economy, too little manpower on the land, not enough young people to drive society forward. Buddhism drained Tibet's wealth and was a recipe for paralysis.

      Strangely, this Communist critique reads almost exactly like that of Austin Waddell, a British medical officer in the early twentieth century; he was just as scathing of the lamas:

      They have induced the people to lavish all their wealth upon building and beautifying scores of temples, and filling them with idols; and through their power over the latter, the priests, as the sole mediators between God and man, are supposed to be able to drive away the hordes of evil spirits that are ever on the outlook to inflict on the poor Tibetan and his family disease, accident, or other misfortune.¹³

      A hundred years later, the same view of the dominance of religion and its impact on the old Tibet was voiced again by British historian, Charles Allen, if more mildly worded: ‘When a nation's gross domestic product is expressed largely in terms of prayer, meditation, study, pilgrimage and religious art, and its productive population is small, scattered and static, the final outcome can never be in doubt.’¹⁴

      The great 13^th Dalai Lama did try to shake Tibet out of its rut early in the twentieth century. He introduced an Englishstyle school for the children of the aristocracy, and sought to modernise the army and reduce the power of the unruly monks. The monasteries, and the lamas who made up half the government, rose in unison to prevent any reform. More authority for the army, modern and ‘atheistic’ ideas, and more representative government — these would dent the monasteries' coffers, and break their hold on society. They prevailed. The army commander-in-chief, a favourite of the Dalai Lama, was sacked. Later the leading reformer, Lungshar, was imprisoned and had his eyes gouged out; he died shortly after. The English school was shut down, with the monasteries even threatening ‘to send their fierce fighting monks to kidnap and sexually abuse the students’.¹⁵ Football, which had become popular in Lhasa, was banned because it generated too much passion, and was dangerous to social and cultural stability. ‘Ironically, by trying to protect Tibet's cherished Buddhist values,’ says Melvyn Goldstein, the pre-eminent historian of modern Tibet, the conservative monasteries themselves made Tibet ‘unable to defend and preserve those very religious values from the Chinese Communists’.¹⁶

      I emerge from the room full of lamps into the sunny courtyard, and find Mila and Tseten totally immersed in the making of the mandala. They sit, bent low, holding pointed iron tubes filled with coloured minerals. By gently tapping the tubes, they let the colours fill in the drawings on the floor. It is painstaking work — one small slip with the coloured sand can ruin the whole thing. Their design is much smaller and simpler than the versions I saw in the monastery, but it is beautiful nonetheless. At its centre is a six-pointed red star enclosed within a blue circle. Around this is a circle coloured black and filled with gold dorje, the thunderbolt symbolising the power of the dharma to destroy ignorance. The last and outermost circle is made up of brightly coloured flames.

      Tseten and Dondan clear the space around the mandala and Yangdron and some of the villagers lay carpets around it. Mila disappears into the house and then re-emerges wearing a maroon shawl and a crown-like hat of red and yellow silk. He sits down facing the mandala. A small settee is brought out and placed near him, and a long black dress — his wife's, presumably — is on the settee. Three nuns take their seats on the carpets to the right of the mandala — two of them hold the large ceremonial horns, and the third a smaller horn and a bell. The two nuns who were tending the lamps join the others on the carpet with sutras in their hands. Tseten sits down next to Mila, with his hand drum, a bigger drum on a stand, and a pair of cymbals. At this point, the huge sack full of cowpats I saw on my way in is dumped in front of the mandala.

      Mila shuts his eyes and begins to pray, and Tseten and the nuns join in. Then the prayers stop abruptly, and the horns and trumpets burst out in the deepest baritone imaginable. The richness of the sound takes me by surprise — it is such a small band, and all women at that. It seems to come from the depths of space, like rolling thunder. Some Tibetans liken this music to the roaring of a tiger. To me it sounds very much as though the nuns are trying to communicate with another world. If the soul is listening, I think, it must hear this.

      When the playing stops, the man who has been making the tso goes to the mandala and, much to my dismay, starts laying cowpats on it. Mere minutes have passed since Tseten and Dondan completed it! The cowpats look awful, like warts on the cheeks of a beautiful woman. The man sets the cowpats on fire and soon a huge red flame leaps into the air, lighting up his face. Butter is poured on the flames, and immediately I feel the heat from where I am crouching, some distance away. I wonder aloud at its intensity, and the man who has lit the fire takes a step back and reveals the secret: the cowpats are from the rare red yak, known to produce the fiercest flames, and therefore the most purifying power. ‘With the mandala at their base, these flames can reach the soul of the dead wherever it is, and purify any sins it might have,’ he tells me proudly.

      But before the flames can work their magic power, there is something more mundane to be done. The soul of the dead must be fed. In the midst of the nuns' chanting and the crackling cowpats, plates of food are thrown into the flames one by one. Mila says a special prayer with every offering. ‘He is pleading for the soul to enjoy its favourite food,’ the fire-tender tells me. ‘They are giving her the best food because from today on, the soul can no longer taste anything from this world.’

      ‘But can the soul eat?’ I ask him, genuinely curious. For some reason, I can imagine the soul hearing the chanting, but not quite gulping down all these dishes, even if they are her favourites.

      ‘You are right,’ he says. ‘She can hear the chanting, but she can only smell the food being offered in her name, and the incense.’ He points to the clay pots hanging on the wall, with juniper twigs burning in them.

      I find myself grappling with the gaps between these beliefs and my own. There has to be a soul there somewhere, otherwise what is the point of all this? I smile to myself as I remember a curious story. Hugh Richardson, another well-known British diplomat, stationed in Lhasa in the 1940s, went to offer condolences on the death of a Rinpoche, an incarnate lama. The abbot told him that the ‘Rinpoche’ would like to receive him in his cell. He wondered if he had made a mistake. He found the Rinpoche sitting in his usual seat. Before he could say anything, the abbot said: ‘The Rinpoche welcomes you and asks if you had a good journey, and are you in good health?’ It went on like this for some time. ‘Everything seemed to be as usual, so that the visitor almost began to doubt his own senses.’¹⁷

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