Название: A Year in Tibet
Автор: Sun Shuyun
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007283996
isbn:
I go to visit the blacksmith's wife with Pantog, our housekeeper, to offer my condolences and to seek her permission. She lives in one of the old parts of Gyantse at the foot of the fort; I like walking there, through its well laid-out lanes lined with traditional houses. But the blacksmith and his wife did not live in one of those. Their dwelling is at the back, where the road stops. It is barely a house, just three mud walls stuck on the side of a stone ruin — there is no door. When I enter I see she has a tiny kitchen area, and a single main room, which is empty except for a small table. On it a few butter lamps flicker wildly. Her husband's body lies on the floor in a corner wrapped in a white cloth. I can hardly believe what I see; I would not have thought anyone in modern Tibet lived this desperately. Pantog hands her a khata and a 50 yuan note. ‘He drank everything away,’ she wails through her tears. ‘Now he's gone, the easy way. But what am I going to do? How am I going to live?’
I cannot think of anything to say that might comfort her. I leave without making my request. I decide I will just go to the burial, without the cameraman, and trust that she will not mind. If her husband took so little care of this life, perhaps he would not be too concerned about the next one.
When the day comes, I get up very early. I walk from the back of our house under a dark blue sky, past the racetrack and the government grain store, heading for a barren hill. It is about two hundred yards from the sky burial site, but I have brought a powerful pair of binoculars. The site is at a gentle height, standing on its own, surrounded on every side by low meandering hills. Phuntsog has told me that this makes it easy for vultures to see the smoke from his juniper twigs and to land. Aside from two simple shelters and a semicircle of large flat stones made shiny from use, the site is bare. The only colour I can make out is the maroon robe of a monk, sitting and meditating in one of the shelters. I am told that monks often choose such places for meditation: their being places of death helps them to conquer their fears, and to appreciate the impermanence of life.
Just as the sky begins to lighten, the body of the dead man is brought up. Two men carry it, and two others follow behind. Once the corpse is on the ground, the men circle it three times, and then they take a break in the shelter. They drink tea and chang and talk; I see that they are even laughing. After about thirty minutes, they re-emerge. One man lights a pile of juniper twigs and tsampa, the smoke wafting away. Phuntsog lays out his tools — a huge knife, a pair of hooks, and two hammers.
The body remains on the ground, face down, while Phuntsog begins cutting it into large pieces, which he hands to the other men. The men lay the flesh on the stones and, using the hammers, begin pounding it into a pulp. Watching them do this, I cannot imagine Tseten and Dondan looking on while it was done to their mother. However they might try to rationalise their emotions and think of what is good for the soul, this would be too much. Perhaps this is the real reason why close relatives are not allowed at the sky burial.
Suddenly I hear singing — a work song, cheerful and rhythmical. I look around to see where it is coming from. The men at the burial site have their backs to me, but one turns in my direction and I can see — it is them! They sing with gusto, as though they are bringing in a harvest, or working on a road gang. Have they forgotten this is a death? No, I realise, for them the death is not the point. The death has already happened; they are charged now with helping the soul on its journey.
When they have finished, Phuntsog rolls some of the flesh into a ball, and walks towards the open space. I can hear him calling ‘Come, come!’ His deep voice echoes in the air, as he looks up at the clouds. Then he drops the ball on the ground. Everyone looks skyward, hoping for a sign of the vultures. Twenty minutes pass. Phuntsog has warned me that it can take hours for the vultures to come, depending on the weather. Just as he is calling again, a single vulture appears. It circles the site several times, and then straightens its legs and lands. I watch as, with a last flap of its wings, it pounces on the ball — it has the whole of it to itself.
In what seems like no time at all, twenty or thirty more vultures appear in the sky. Their wingspan looks to be more than a metre across. I wonder if my body would be enough to feed even one of them. The men continue to rub their hands with tsampa and mix it with the flesh, handing it to Phuntsog, who lays it out for the vultures. In a flash the birds gobble everything down. There is relief on the men's faces. They believe that when the vultures eat the body quickly, without leaving anything behind, reincarnation will be swift too. The intestines are the last to go — perhaps because they are the richest part. Phuntsog has told me that once the vultures have eaten these, they will not take anything else. If the vultures do not finish the corpse — sometimes there are several bodies on a particular day — he will discuss this with the families, and then he will either burn what is left, or take it to the water. Everything must go, he says.
Phuntsog has also told me something else. Vultures have a secret, he claims: whatever they swallow, they leave nothing on the ground, not even their own waste. They defecate in the sky, thousands of metres up, and the waste is immediately dispersed by strong winds and currents. Even when they are dying, they will fly higher and higher, towards the sun, until the sun and wind take them to pieces, leaving no trace. Phuntsog says this is why no one has ever seen a vulture's corpse.
After everything has been consumed, Phuntsog cleans his equipment, wraps up his poles and ropes, and leaves with the others. The vultures are still on the slope, lingering. (‘Were they still hungry?’ I ask Phuntsog later. ‘Oh, sometimes they are just digesting. They are too heavy to fly.’) I sit down and wait.
The Chinese have always been appalled by the practice of sky burial. One of the last Ambans declared it to be ‘without morals and without reason, and cruel beyond words’. He tried to forbid it and demanded the Tibetans bury their dead as we do.11 It did not occur to him that the ritual might have practical origins. In the whole Tibetan area, less than 1 per cent of the land is arable, so burial in the ground is hardly practical. The cold winter lasts more than five months of the year, and during that time the earth is frozen. Digging is difficult, if not impossible, in many parts of Tibet. Also most Tibetans live on grassland, and they roam wherever there is water and grass. If they bury their dead, they will be leaving them behind.
But the rituals of death are deeply ingrained in a culture. For us Chinese, who have been so tied to the land for generations, a burial is seen as a way of returning to Mother Earth. Only then can the dead have their final rest. And for my grandmother, such a burial was an event to be prepared for well in advance. When she turned seventy, she announced to us all that she was ready to go and presented my parents with a list of items that she would require: a coffin, four sets of clothes for the four seasons, a house, a boat, a table and two chairs, a wardrobe, a number of animals and plenty of money. I was flabbergasted. How could we possibly afford these things? I remember asking my mother, who laughed and said, ‘Don't be silly. Grandmother's treasures will all be made of paper, except for the clothes.’
My father's response to all this surprised me even more. A staunch Communist, he was usually impatient with Grandmother's superstitious beliefs. Once he had caught her praying in the dark and shouted, ‘Your Buddha is not worth a dog's fart. Why don't you pray to Chairman Mao for a change?’ But this time, he simply said, ‘This is your grandmother's last wish. We should satisfy her.’
My grandmother lived to be ninety-four. For more than a decade, one fixture of my summer vacation was to help her air her burial clothes. We did this covertly, one outfit at a time, so that none of the neighbours would suspect us of being superstitious. My grandmother would remind me again and again to make sure that, when the time came, my mother dressed her in all four of the outfits while she was still breathing — otherwise, she would be going СКАЧАТЬ