Himalayas Most of the Buddhists in India Had Gone Back to Being Hindus Again
The Himalayas' Subconscious Kingdom
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September 20, 1992
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WE stopped for our picnic of boiled eggs, roast potatoes and cheese on the rim of the Phobjika Valley, not far from where the road vanishes into the shadow of the Gantey monastery. The essence of Kingdom of bhutan, the last Himalayan Buddhist kingdom, was all around.
Behind us, obscured by a thicket of brilliant Apr rhododendrons -- cerise, lavender and yellow plants the size of trees -- was the retreat where Gantey'due south Buddhist abbot had retired for a long meditation. In forepart of u.s., on the valley floor where black-necked Siberian cranes had wintered, were one-half-timbered farmhouses, clusters of bamboo poles with flapping prayer flags and the emerald fields of spring.
Once a string of Buddhist civilizations stretched secure in their mountain valleys or on plateaus from the Hindu Kush to Tibet. In what is now Pakistan, they prevarication in ruins. The culture of Tibet is existence irreversibly diluted nether Han Chinese rule. In Nepal, where Guatama Buddha was built-in, Buddhism can be held suspect in a Hindu kingdom, except in the higher mountain communities far from the Katmandu Valley. Ladakh and Sikkim were absorbed by Republic of india, where Buddhism has all but disappeared as a major organized religion in the state where it first took root.
In the subconscious kingdom of bhutan, with fewer than a meg people, information technology is not just Buddhism that has survived, just Tantric Tibetan Buddhism, with its temples of florid, erotic and sometimes terrifying statuary, its lamas in maroon robes chanting to ancient instruments. Traditional costumes, by police, must exist worn by all Bhutanese citizens: the articulatio genus-length robelike kho for men and ankle-length kira for women. Houses and public buildings are still built in traditional style and trimmed in folk-fine art designs.
As we sabbatum past the roadside near Gantey, I thought of old photographs I had recently studied in an business relationship of 19th-century Bhutanese life. Viewed from where I sabbatum, as from most other places in Bhutan, nothing had changed. No buses, no trucks, no cars. Just blossoming magnolia copse among the rhododendrons. And silence.
There is simply one narrow highway that snakes across the inner Himalayas from due west to east (or east to west, except that you lot can't start at that end). Barely two lanes wide, it connects virtually of the country's major historic fortress towns, from the upper-case letter, Thimphu, in the west, through Wangdiphrodang, Tongsa and Bumthang to Tashigang in the remote eastward. Punakha, the ancient capital and home for half the year of Bhutan'south highest-ranking lama, the Je Khenpo, is a sidetrip away. And so is Gantey.
Each fortress town caters to the traveler's every need, spiritual and temporal in this agrestal mountain country, which has no cities every bit nosotros know them. Thimphu has the air of a frontier outpost. The approaches to the dzongs are almost ever spectacular, with the seemingly impenetrable fortress-monasteries rising above wooded slopes or river valleys to stand sentinel over daily life beneath.
In interior Bhutan, the kingdom the Bhutanese call Druk Yul, the State of the Thunder Dragon, foreigners are few, every bit a thing of national policy. This small kingdom, untouched by the mass tourism that has marred other Himalayan countries, remains ane of the globe's most exclusive -- and expensive -- destinations. In 1991 barely two,000 foreigners (not counting Indians from next door) visited the realm. Some Bhutanese retrieve that's too many, and worry about the futurity now that the Authorities of King Jigme Singye Wangchuck has lifted the limit to iv,000 to encourage private investment in small hotels and trekking companies.
The determination had one immediately positive effect, all the same. A number of prominent Bhutanese families take ventured cautiously into tourism, opening exquisite Bhutanese-style inns in Thimphu and on the edges of the upper-case letter region. Tourists should asking this kind of accommodation in advance; it allows visitors to avoid the drafty if colorfully busy one-time regime hotels or guest houses and the seedy Indian-run hostelries built for commercial tradesmen.
Not just anybody can go to Bhutan, where all tours must exist booked from abroad. Not just anybody would desire to. The $220 a 24-hour interval fixed fee gear up by the Regime for room, lath and internal transportation, payable in advance, is a deterrent, as information technology is meant to exist. And the inner temples of Bhutan'south spectacular hilltop monasteries are airtight to tourists, who are accompanied everywhere they go past gracious if omnipresent guides.
The national airline, Druk Air, has merely one aeroplane -- a small, sleek, 80-passenger British Aerospace 146 jet -- and no other flights are permitted to state at the sole Bhutanese drome at Paro, in western Bhutan, nigh a two-hour bulldoze from Thimphu. The arroyo to Paro follows a river valley flanked by peaks.
For the company, the positive side of Bhutan's national tourism policy is the custom tour each foreigner can program. Tourists tin can come for history and civilization, for trekking or for nature tours in the nearly protected -- by majestic decree -- environment in the Himalayas. On the trails, tent accommodations are cheaper than hotels -- about $130 a day, all inclusive.
My husband and I kickoff went to Bhutan every bit a "trekking party" of two in the days when journalists were not welcome on reporting trips. Friends have put together advertisement-hoc parties of four or six. On my last visit I went lone to research a book, and therefore was assigned a full-time foreign service officer as a guide and interpreter. In all cases a reasonably new car or van is fabricated available for travel within the country, along with commuter and guide. Many foreigners concur that Bhutanese drivers are the safest and near skilled in Asia.
30 years ago there were no roads there, no currency, no postal service and no tourists. Bhutan was effectively airtight to the outside earth. When tourism began, haltingly, niggling more than a decade ago, the Bhutanese first hoped to offer outsiders a rare glimpse of their endangered Tibetan Buddhist culture. But they soon drew back, stung by disruptive beliefs and thefts from temples and monasteries.
The Bhutanese do allow foreigners access to temple festivals called tsetchu, sacred dances and dramas held in courtyards of the fortress-monastery dzongs. Such festivals accept place simply in one case a yr just on a dissimilar date in each monastery town, usually in the spring or fall, and tourism reaches information technology tiptop in those months. Then does Bhutanese anxiety. At the Paro tsetchu in March tourists barged into ceremonies with video recorders and ate and drank noisily during what were essentially religious rites, according to ruffled Bhutanese and some of the few strange residents of Bhutan.
When in that location are no festivals in progress, some dzongs, the seats of local government besides equally religious authority and scholarship, welcome outsiders in small groups year round into public areas inside their high walls. There the unique architecture of a dzong, with its blend of administrative, martial and sacred functions, is on lavish display.
In Thimphu, the 17th-century (just extensively restored) Tashichhodzong, the fortress that houses the royal and national upper-case letter offices too equally the Je Khenpo's residence for the months he is not in Punakha, is a spacious structure in a river valley. Only the pattern is familiar: nearly vertical wooden staircases lead upward from the inner court to temples, monks' quarters and the throne room of the King.
ON the other side of the capital, the older Simtokha Dzong, now a school for monastic and linguistic studies, is more characteristically perched on an overlook for security, a reminder that Bhutan was a prepare of warring principalities until early on in this century.
Considering Simtokha Dzong is a schoolhouse, foreigners can enter and wait at its religious paintings and bronze, while also glimpsing children at their lessons.
For more lessons in Tantric Buddhist art, foreigners tin enter the Memorial Chorten in Thimphu, a richly decorated monument dedicated to the retentiveness of the King's late father, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck. Here tin be seen the panoply of temple ornamentation, including the copulating figures that Tantric Buddhists see every bit the union of knowledge and wisdom.
A visit to the national art schoolhouse in Thimphu is fun. Children from rural villages are taught classical Buddhist arts and the national Dzongkha language, along with English language. In a calculated gamble, King Jigme Wangchuck and his late begetter declared English the linguistic communication of instruction, so that the immature could motility with skill and confidence into higher education away.
Visitors to Paro, where everyone arriving and leaving by plane has the choice of spending at least ane night, should have time to go to the minor but very informative national museum built into the big watchtower loftier above the primary dzong, but reachable by road. Even higher, and accessible only by a rigorous climb or on horseback, is Taksang Monastery, with a view of most of the Paro Valley.
Punakha, an imposing fortress nigh the confluence of 2 Himalayan rivers, tin be seen in a day trip from Thimphu. Of special interest is reconstruction there to supersede a portion of the dzong destroyed several years ago by burn down. All the piece of work is existence washed in traditional style by artisans with classic adroitness and tools. Many Bhutanese contribute their craft work as an human activity of religious merit.
Farther afield from Thimphu and Paro, merely still within a journey of a day or two from the capital, are the dzongs at Tongsa and Bumthang.
Tongsa'south monastery-fortress is arguably the well-nigh arrestingly placed of all, soaring higher up fingered valleys where the e-due west highway meets one of the few roads southward toward India, notwithstanding tucked into a small hilly town.
On shops and houses in Tongsa, stories from Buddhist mythology are painted by local artists. (In more rural villages along the way, the decor is ofttimes more basic, with elaborately detailed phalluses fashioned on plaster well-nigh doorways to plead for fertility.)
In Tongsa, traditional weavers can exist seen working on yatras, narrow lengths of woolen cloth in distinctive Bhutanese colors of rust, red, blue and aureate. The yatras are stitched together by Bhutanese seamstresses to make blankets, upholstery or jackets. They are besides on sale, for less than $8 for a length of about 6 feet, in Bumthang, and in the hamlet of Gyetsa, on the road between Bumthang and Tongsa.
Bhutanese recommend buying these and other crafts in villages and towns away from Thimphu because patterns are more accurate and prices lower. In the national craft emporium in the capital, a total-length winter coat fabricated of several yatra lengths volition cost $175 or more.
If there is time to visit Bumthang, the rewards are many. Bumthang, a two-mean solar day trip by car from Thimphu through virgin forests and dramatic mountain passes, is considered the spiritual center of Bhutan.
The name Bumthang covers an surface area that includes the Jakar Dzong, a less dominating presence than fortresses overlooking other valleys, and a collection of temples associated with 2 of Bhutan's most revered Buddhist saints.
Guru Rinpoche -- known in the wider Buddhist world every bit Padmasambhava, a monk who legend says flew miraculously to Taksang, near Paro, in the eighth century from the Swat Valley in what is now Islamic republic of pakistan -- brought Buddhism to Kingdom of bhutan. Pema Lingpa, believed to be a reincarnation of the Guru Rinpoche, was built-in in Bumthang in the 15th century. He founded monasteries, wrote philosophical treatises and introduced sacred dances.
A few miles out of town along the road from Jakar to Mongar, at that place is an unusual complex of temples at Kurjey Lhakhang, where Guru Rinpoche meditated and left the imprint of his body on a rock, according to Bhutanese belief.
A 17th-century temple was built on the spot, to which take been added two newer temples.
BUT Bumthang has more prosaic sites to offer those who want to amend understand the soul of Bhutan. From the comfy Wandichoeling Guest House, a small lodge where about foreigners stay -- unless it is overcrowded in the fall tsetchu season -- it is a brusk walk to an extraordinary infirmary congenital in two as make clean and reasonably well-equipped wings, one for modern medicine and the other for traditional healers. Patients are encouraged to cross from side to side for their chosen treatment.
Bhutanese say that the hospital, built with aid from Switzerland, Bhutan's most active strange partner in development, is symbolic of the mesh of cultures the nation hopes to achieve.
Next door to the guest house is another local institution with a tale to tell about the pragmatism of a people caught between a earth of reincarnation and mundane concerns for the future of their children: a handsome primary school where young Bhutanese start the day with Buddhist prayers and then move into classrooms to learn about the environment, about sanitation and health, basic scientific discipline and simple arithmetic.
No primal government decree ordered the school into existence, the local administrator said. The parents of Bumthang built information technology themselves in less than a month, when they decided that the time was right to start educating their children in the ways of a wider world. A GUIDE TO ARRANGING A TRIP AND TO HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS Getting There
All tours to Kingdom of bhutan must exist booked abroad, only visitors tin can decide on their route into the country. Bhutan's only airport, at Paro, connects by Druk Air flights to Katmandu, Nepal; Bangkok, Thailand; Dhaka, Bangladesh, Calcutta and New Delhi. Tourist visas are required ($xx) and are almost hands obtained through a travel agent. Tour Companies
Nearly a dozen American bout companies offer advice and a reliable reservation service for trips to Kingdom of bhutan, co-ordinate to the Kingdom of bhutan Tourism Corporation in Thimphu. Among them are:
Kingdom of bhutan Travel, 120 East 56th Street, Suite 1430, New York, N.Y. 10022; telephone (212) 838-6382 or (800) 950-9908.
In a higher place the Clouds Trekking, Worcester, Mass. 01602; (508) 799-4499 or (800) 233-4499.
Insight Travel, 502 Livermore Street, Yellowish Springs, Ohio 45387; (513) 767-1102. Insight, which caters to practioners of Buddhism every bit well as other spiritual traditions, describes its tours more equally pilgrimages than vacations.
Inner Asia Expeditions, 2627 Lombard Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94123; (415) 922-0448 or (800) 777-8183.
Tourcan Vacations, 3200 Dufferin Street, Due north York, Toronto M6A 2T3. (416) 787-0334. Where to Stay
Although visitors must buy a bundle bout, tourism officials and private hotel owners in Kingdom of bhutan say tourists can asking a particular hotel instead of being assigned one. The price will be the same. All rooms are clean and accept private baths and Western-style beds.
In Thimphu, the capital letter, many tourists are assigned to the Mothithang Hotel, on a colina above the city. The setting is superb, but the hotel is big, a fleck desolate and too far for a stroll into boondocks. The alternatives:
Hotel Druk is a workaday Indian-owned business hotel within walking altitude of shops and the Memorial Chorten.
Jumolhari Hotel, shut to the Druk on Thimphu's main street, Norzin Lam, is smaller and more Bhutanese in character.
Yu Druk, a thoroughly Bhutanese inn on a hillside away from the boondocks center (but non equally far away every bit the Mothithang), is endemic by the well-known family of Sonam Wangmo Tenzing, whose local travel agency too organizes trekking tours and welcomes direct communications from tourists. Mrs. Tenzing can exist reached by fax at (00975) 22116.
Dechen Hotel, some other family-run inn in a residential section, is slightly closer to town. The family -- Dechen Zam and her husband, Dasho Dukpon -- also owns Dechen Cottages, in Mendegong, a hilltop retreat between Thimphu and Punakha with a wonderful view over farming villages. A traditional stone bathroom, with water steamed over hot rocks, is almost $6 actress and takes three hours to set up.
In Paro, the lodges and cottages of the Olathang Hotel, in a woodland setting, are undergoing a face-lift.
In Tongsa, Bumthang and Tashigang, visitors exercise not yet have a choice of hotels. In Phunsholing, Bhutan'southward commercial center on the Indian border, the Hotel Druk is best, though non outstanding. What to Eat
Bhutan's hotels usually offer a small variety of Indian, Western and a few Bhutanese dishes. Amongst the local items are momo, the small Tibetan dumplings filled with cheese, vegetable or meat. More than Bhutanese are the fern fronds cooked like asparagus; pakshee paa, a sliced pork dish with chilis and radishes; ema datsee, a chili and cheese dish, or hewa datsee, a combination of potatoes, cheese and chilis. Most Bhutanese dishes are very hot -- green chilis are eaten at that place as vegetables: beware of dishes that look like string beans. In Bumthang, specialties are buckwheat pancakes or noodles.
Potatoes, asparagus in season, mushrooms, carrots and leap onions are arable, equally are oranges, apples and mangoes, among other fruits. Attempt Bhutanese red rice, a succulent side dish. Currency
The Bhutanese unit of currency, the ngultrum, is pegged to the Indian rupee, now virtually 25 to the dollar. Indian currency is accepted in Bhutan, every bit are some credit cards in larger hotels, merely Bhutanese money is often preferred. Traveler's checks must usually be cashed at a banking concern in Thimphu earlier trips to the interior. There is now an American Limited agent in the capital, Chenddu Travels, on Norzim Lam, where traveler's checks can be bought with the American Limited card. What to Read
There is but 1 thorough and reliable guide, written recently past the French scholar Francoise Pommaret. Her volume, "An Illustrated Guide to Bhutan," includes both an introduction to Bhutanese culture and arts and down-to-earth information. The guide, published past Editions Olizane in Geneva, is sold in crafts shops and bookstores in Thimphu in French or English for nearly $ten. What to Purchase
Bhutanese handicrafts are generally expensive because they are non made in quantity. Larger hotels accept small craft shops, but there are four adept stores in Thimphu where the selection is relatively large. These are the Handicrafts Emporium, a Regime-congenital exhibit near the Bank of Bhutan; Peljorkhang, upward a flight of stairs off Norzin Lam near the main crossroads; The Larder, a pocket-sized shop about the Bistro restaurant off the boondocks square, and Etho Meto, near the Thimphu movie house, which also sells maps.
Bhutan'south crafts, some unique to the country, include dance masks, handmade paper, woven fabrics -- on a recent visit a kho length of virtually eight feet cost $150 in raw silk and a kira $300, with a set of cotton wool placemats under $10. There is also inexpensive silvery jewelry or more valuable items of silver and gold, turned wooden bowls of various sizes (a rice basin with lid is about $20) and coats made of yatra cloth for $100 to $200.
The widest range of crafts (plus postcards and books) are on display at the Handicrafts Emporium. Etho Meto often has the best selection of Bhutanese stamps, including first-mean solar day covers prized by collectors. Peljorkhang has a good pick of woodcraft, masks and small shrines. The Larder sells handwoven purses, cosmetic cases and attractive slippers for nether $10.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/20/travel/the-himalayas-hidden-kingdom.html
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