Tiger's Nest

The Taktsang Monastery, known as Tiger’s Nest, is built atop a vertical cliff 2,600 feet above the valley floor. The parking area is 8,400 feet above sea level. To get to the monastery one must climb to the first vantage point where there is, thankfully, a teahouse. It is at 9,460 feet. A second vantage point is 700 feet above that at 10,160 feet. The climb is a hard one, harder than the climb to Cheri and Tango. It is not that it is steeper. It is just twice as long. The people who service the teahouse make the trip every working day. They manage it in 30 minutes. It takes Nancy and me an hour and a half.

Guru Rinpoche founded Tiger’s Nest in the 8th century. He flew to the spot on the back of one of his consorts. She had taken the shape of a tigress for the journey, anticipating Claire Chennault’s World War II Flying Tigers by thirteen centuries. The main temple of the Taktsang Monastery, the one surrounding the cave, was built in 1692, 46 years after the first Shabdrung visited the spot.

Once we reached the teahouse I collapsed into a green plastic chair with a cup of tea. I was too tired to focus on the flurry of activity around me. Before I knew it Nancy was on the path to the second vantage point. She asked if I wanted to join her, but I was so tired, I couldn’t muster the energy.

"I'll just hold you back," I said feebly.

No sooner was she out of sight but I regretted my decision. I was like a child too tired to stay up and too tired to go to bed. I should have known that when Nancy got to the second vantage point, there was no way she was not going on to the monastery itself.

As I sat at the teahouse, scanning the mountainside with my binoculars, I saw a small white structure pressed into a crevice below the monastery. It was a meditation hall. Inside, I learned, was a forty-year old monk. No one knew how long he had been there, but his intention was to stay in utter seclusion for three years, three months and three days. He would, in fact, do that three times in this life. As I sat in the teahouse, I tried to imagine him sitting cross-legged, his beard down to his knees, turning his mind into a movie screen after the movie was over. Something told me to train my binoculars higher up. Suddenly, I saw Nancy coming out onto the edge of a veranda in the monastery itself. She had made it all the way up to Tiger's Nest, as I guessed she would. My first reaction took me by surprise. I was angry. Perhaps I resented that she had made it to the top and I hadn't, I thought. But that wasn’t it at all. Quite the contrary I was glad she was able to push her body to the point where she reached the high point of our Bhutan trip, the Tiger's Nest monastery at Paro.

Why, then, was I angry? Everyone I talked to who had been there had come away with an intense recollection of the experience. They didn’t want me to feel bad. But I could read between the lines. One person told me that the ornamentation around Guru Rinpoche's cave was stunning. Another said stepping into Tiger's Nest was like stepping into another world. Nancy’s comment was the most painful of all. She said, I was wise not to go. Sidestepping the subject let me know just how wonderful it must have been.

Nobody likes looking their limitations in the face. I have seen Tiger's Nest. I have watched its gold spires glint in the sun, its white walls painted whiter by the afternoon light, marveled at the single-mindedness of a group of builders who put a monastery in a place most people would think of as suicidal. But I have seen all that from a distance. For me leaving Taktsang Monastery was like walking out of King Lear before the third act curtain.

That's what dying must be like. No wonder I was angry.

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Reincarnation

Traveling from Jakar to Wangdhu we passed a column of Toyoto sedans. They were parked by the roadside. A car labeled “Police Pilot” was at the head of the column. The policeman made sure traffic kept moving, albeit slowly. In a nearby clearing someone had set up a picnic table and a blue and white striped awning. Underneath the awning two monks sat, an older monk, probably in his mid-forties, and a young monk, twelve or thirteen years old. He was the reincarnation of Diego Khentse Rimpoche.

A cadre of monks scurried around, bringing food and mats for a picnic. The older monk was the grandson of the man who was reincarnated in the young monk’s body. In other words, the grandson of Rabjam Rimpoche was looking after his dead grandfather.

Traditionally, when a person of importance dies, a guru or a desi, he leaves a letter explaining where his next incarnation will be found. When a possible candidate emerges, he must pass several tests. One involves identifying artifacts from the time when the guru being reincarnated lived. Typically, one of the selected artifacts is genuine. All the others are decoys. If the candidate chooses the real one, he becomes a serious contender. The current Dalai Lama, now living in exile from Tibet, apparently failed the artifact test. The test came down to two artifacts. He couldn't make up his mind which of the two was real. It turned out that whoever set up the test had made a mistake. He had included two genuine objects. Naturally the Dalai Lama could not choose just one. It was an accidental trick question that lent great credibility to the claim that he was a genuine incarnation.

Recently the Chinese government has declared that it must give permission before a reincarnation of the Dalai Lama can be designated. The motive for this is obvious. The Chinese want the next incarnation to be their man. If, as it happens, the current Dalai Lama chooses his successor from among the 100,000 or so exiled Tibetans, we are likely to have a re-run of the Great Western Schism when, by the early 15th century, three popes claimed to be the Bishop of Rome.

Ashi Dorji Wango Wangchuck, the present Queen of Bhutan describes the part she played in discovering the present reincarnation of Desi Tenzin Rabgye Rimpoche, the fourteen year old monk who now lives in Tango Monastery. This is the monk who has a personal copy of my book of children’s poems, The Pond God and Other Stories, thanks to my friend, Ugyen Tashi, a monk at Tango monastery.

In 1998 the Queen was in eastern Bhutan to celebrate National Day at Kanglung. After serving lunch, she noticed a little monk who could not be more than four years old sitting by himself. She describes her encounter in her book A Portrait of Bhutan (pg. 94):

I took him by the hand and brought him to our enclosure, where the King was sitting on a folding chair. The little one let go of my hand and walked straight up to the King. Reaching up to grip the armrest of the chair he announced: ‘I have something to tell you.’

“I’m listening,” replied the King.

‘We have met before. You were very old, you had a long beard then, and I was very young,’ the child declared. Amused, the King let the little monk continue.

‘I built Taktsang on your orders,” he said, and added calmly, ‘and now I want to go to Tango.’

‘And why do you want to go to Tango?’ asked the King.

‘I’ve left my things there,’ he replied. ‘And besides, I have to meet my Norbu and my Ugay.’ (We later learnt that these were the names of Desi Tenzin Rabgye’s monk-attendant and close companion.)

‘So you have been to Tango already?’ asked the King.

‘Yes—a long time ago. It was I who built Tango.’

….‘What are your parents’ names? The King asked.

‘Tsewang Tenzin and Damche Tenzin,’ he replied. (These were, as we later found out, not his own parents’ names, but those of Desi Tenzin Rabgye’s parents.)

I haven’t the slightest doubt that Ashi Dorji Wango Wangchuck is telling the truth as she remembers it. I also cannot bring myself to believe in re-incarnation. The apparent contradiction doesn’t bother me in the least. I am delighted that the incarnation of Desi Tenzin Rabgye is sitting in Tango Monastery and that he can point out to its present occupants the room where he slept four hundred years earlier.

I wish the Chinese government felt the same.

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The Battle of Bhutan

The drive from the Tsonga Dzong to Jakar is close to three hours. We will have traveled over 200 twisting and turning kilometers to get there from Paro. On the map the straight-line distance is 120 kilometers. Bhutan is a country in which the saying “you can't get there from here” is almost true.

The countryside is all mountain and valley, the very opposite of mid-western America's gigantic basin, a geographical blessing that has made it possible for 2% of the country to grow 100% of its food, freeing the rest of us to do things like writing blogs. 80% of the Bhutanese are farmers. Whoever said geography is destiny got it right. Bhutan looks as if God tore a sheet of green paper out of her notebook, crumpled it up and dropped it into a wastebasket called Earth.

“Now,” she said, “Let's see you grow something on that.”

The long drive is conducive to story telling. Chencho, our guide, tells us about the battle in 2005 when Bhutan drove 3,000 members of the Assam Liberation Front out of the country. Since 1999 the encroachers had been conducting sorties into India, blowing up bridges and then retreating for safety into Bhutanese territory. The government had tried for six years to negotiate to no avail. In the end Bhutan, wisely refusing an offer from India to send 30,000 troops, went south with 3,000 of its own men. In one week the Bhutanese routed the Assam fighters, killing 200 and taking several thousand prisoners, all at a loss of 12 of its own soldiers. The fourth king and the younger brother of the fifth king fought alongside the Bhutanese army. Their presence underscored just how high the stakes were. This was a war for nothing less than the preservation of the homeland. It is not hard to see why the Bhutanese fought so well.

I went into the Kyichu Monastery in Bhutan. In one corner of a prayer hall where monks sat chanting I saw a dusty Russian Kalashnikov AK-47 automatic rifle leaning against the wall. I asked Chencho what a weapon was doing in a temple. Chencho said that such weapons were in temples throughout Bhutan. They were used in expelling the Assam militants. The Bhutanese consider the weapons to have been blessed by the gods for having given them victory. That is why they belong in a place of worship, along with statues of the Buddha. One of my companions remarked that putting the weapons there after a war was far better than putting them there to acquire a blessing in anticipation of war.

In The Soul to Battle Victor Davis Hanson quotes General Sherman as saying, “There is a soul to an army as well as to the individual man, and no general can accomplish the full work of his army unless he commands the soul of his men, as well as their bodies and legs.”

Hanson argued that an intense ideological commitment to a cause is crucial to military victory. He describes three wars in which the victorious army, because of its “soul to battle” overcame tremendous odds. The generals were Epaminondas, who fought the Spartans, Sherman, who fought the rebel south and Patton, who, against all advice from his counselors, drove through the heart of Europe to Berlin. Each of these generals was committed to destroying something they and their men found deeply repugnant. In the case of Epaminondas it was the system of Spartan slavery called helotry; for Sherman, it was slavery in the American South; for Patton it was another form of slavery, genocidal Nazism.

The king of Bhutan and his soldiers fought for the territorial integrity of their own country, a country that had never been conquered, a country whose dzongs had never been breeched.

It is instructive to think about this in light of the Iraqi war. The author of The Soul to Battle might argue, I'm guessing, that the war is going badly because the enemy is willing to blow itself up whereas our side isn't.

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