Out of the Mouths of Children

Our hotel, the Druk Hotel, is located in the center of Thimphu. Just outside the dining room window you can see the town square. An amphitheater really, it is a large stone apron, maybe a block long, surrounded by shops on one side and, on the opposite side, several concrete tiers spanning the entire length of the amphitheater.

On this particular afternoon townspeople, mobs of them, are seated all along the amphitheater’s length, watching a performance put on by school children from Thimpu's secondary school. They are in uniform, long sleeve white blouses and long gray skirts for the girls, white shirts and dark pants for the boys. Music is being pumped out over loudspeakers just like any concert on the green back home. The music is Bhutanese pop and the movements of the students are toned down hip-hop, a kind of line dancing but without the machismo.

The children dance in phalanxes, squares that are in children’s units, 20 x 15. They move in easy, flowing precision, twiddling their arms, swirling their tiny hips, taking daintily rhythmic steps to the left and then to the right. They are the kind of children my aunt would have described as “good enough to eat.”

I have taken my place among the townspeople, who have moved over to make room for me as if I were a visiting relative. At one point the children perform a 360º turn. Only then do I see that there are signs pinned to their backs. Fortunately, I have my binoculars with me. I’m too far away and my eyes too weak to make out what is written without them. I focus. One sign says, “Sex with more than one partner without a condom is unsafe sex.” Another says, “Sex with one partner who has HIV or STD without a condom is unsafe sex.”

These messages are being brought to the community by children ranging in ages from 10 to 18. After the dances the children put on a skit designed to show that AIDS is transmitted by contact with blood. It’s a barber shop skit. It hinges on an AIDS carrying customer knicked by a razor and a careless barber passing the infection on to the next customer who has the misfortune of being knicked with the same razor. The actors are 12 year olds. While they are performing, dancers with skin colored balloons that, inflated, look like condoms prance around the stage.

As a coup de grâce, clowns in demon masks come out into the crowd and distribute free condoms to the audience. In other words this perfectly fresh, friendly, good-humored, open-minded and health conscious performance by the local secondary school for the benefit of the people of Thimphu and themselves would, if transported to America, cause a riot.

As I accept my free condom from the clown-demon, I'm wondering who to give it to to do the most good.

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The Hall of One Hundred Pillars

Punakha Dzong is the second of Bhutan's Dzongs built by order of the first Shabdrung in 1637. His body is housed in a room inside a sealed casket attended by two monks. The Bhutanese believe that his body has never decomposed, a moot point since the casket cannot be opened.

The central shrine of the Dzong, the utze, is magnificent. It is six stories high with a Sakyamuni Buddha that extends from floor to roof. This is the hall of 100 pillars, though, in fact, there are only 54. Each pillar is wrapped in embossed copper and leafed in gold. The traditional thousand buddhas are painted on the wall at the very top of the hall while around the sides are 69 statues representing each of the abbots of the Dzong since its foundation in 1637. Once the Dzong was built the Shabdrung established a body of monks here, 600 strong, all of whom were brought from the Cheri Monastery in the upper Thimphu Valley.

The hall exudes serenity. Even though 54 pillars break up the space, it is not a nervous space. The pillars impart confidence. And then there is that massive six-story high Sakyamuni Buddha, his half-closed eyes looking downward and inward, the quiet smile on his face communicating pleasure in what he is seeing.

Contrast this with a cathedral in Rome. The figure that greets the visitor is of a God with nails driven into his palms and his feet, hanging from a cross on which he has been taunted and tortured. The message of the Buddha is something like, I am in this state of bliss because of the way I used my mind to pierce the veil of illusion we all live in. If you do the same, you, too, will find bliss. The message of Christ on the Cross is, I have suffered excruciating pain and contemptible mutilation because of your sins. You, therefore, are responsible for it. What are you going to do about it?

There is a paradox for me as I enter the hall of 100 pillars. The message that the iconography imparts is attractive. The iconography that that message has engendered is less so. In the west it is exactly the opposite. There the message is torturous, the iconography beautiful. For me, the peak of western sculpture is Michaelangelo's Pieta, an incredible work of art of the highest order whose inner meaning of suffering, torture and painful death couldn't be more of a downer. If it is true that great art comes from suffering, Christianity is the perfect engine for it.

Buddhist temple art on the other hand rests on repetition. Every temple is a near replica of every other temple and every Buddha the spitting image of the previous one. Why? Because originality is prized in the west, much less so in the east. In general the farther east one goes the more communal the culture becomes and hence the less original. The two ends of the cultural spectrum are represented by Japan on the one hand, where, as the saying goes, the nail that sticks up is hammered down, and by the United States on the other, where individualism is our national mantra.

Which is better? Well, you pays your money and you takes your choice.

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Not Even a Fly

The reason I went to Bhutan was to see at firsthand a country devoted to the principle that the happiness of its people is more important than the total value of all its saleable goods and services.

Thirty years ago, the 4th King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, declared that Gross National Happiness trumped Gross National Product. Happiness became a national goal, alongside the free health care and education now enjoyed by the Bhutanese. The King was saying, in his own way, what the Beatles had said twenty years before him:

For I don’t care too much for money
For money can’t buy me love.

The first thing I noticed was what wasn’t there. I didn’t hear a single argument anywhere, or a raised voice for that matter. There must have been some, but not within earshot of me. Then there are the drivers. How people behave behind the wheel tells you a lot about how they behave behind closed doors. In Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu, there are 4,000 cars. I never heard anyone honk a horn. The town used to have a traffic light. It had to be removed. The people didn’t like it. Now in the center of town a single traffic cop with white gloves directs traffic as if the drivers were an orchestra and he, the maestro. I’m not sure of this but I don’t believe there is a single traffic light in the whole country.

The Bhutanese believe that everything has a right to life. To live like that requires discipline. Nancy tried it. One day a wasp flew into our van. Instead of whacking it with her Guide to Bhutan, she used the guide to nudge it out of the window. The wasp stung her...badly. The welt stayed around for days. Another day she was more successful. A fly had fallen into my tea cup and was floundering on the surface. A few more seconds and it would have drowned in its hot buttered ocean. Nancy ladled the fly onto the tabletop with a spoon, blew gently on it until its wings were dried and watched contentedly as it flew off.

This attitude toward all living things would put me to the test. I hate mosquitoes.

William Wadsworth wrote a sonnet the first line of which is the title. It begins:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

The Bhutanese live as if they have taken these lines to heart, or rather, it is as if Wordsworth learned them from the Bhutanese.

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