Sacred Art
Buddhism has a large cosmology, with its six realms (inhabited by
humans, animals, demons, hungry ghosts, demi-gods, and gods), buddhas
(past, present, and future) and boddhisatvas, though whether they're
viewed as genuine entities, or as conceptual aspects depends on the
practitioner, I believe. Statues and murals in Tibetan monasteries reflect
such diversity.
Mandalas are a circular two-dimensional representation of an imaginary
three-dimensional structure, the image of which is to be meditated on.
We saw a few three-dimensional models at different places, including a
couple made from dyed butter (rare). There are colour mandalas, too
which look like paint swatches and provide a more abstract meditative
aid.
There are also the eight auspicious symbols - conch shell, lotus
blossom, eight-spoked wheel, parasol, endless knot, pair of fishes,
banner, and vase - and within one design, elements of the others will
be seen. As the collection, they appear primarily displayed outside
monastery buildings, but they also appear in statues and artwork. Some
Tibetan women wear a conch shell around their wrist as a bracelet.
Swastikas - a cruciform representation of the wheel of dharma appear in
decorations -- incidently, the image of the hexagram (Star of David) is
also used but for educational bodies, generally with a book and/or lamp
in its centre.
Thangkas are more a medium than a religious art form, I think - it
looks like you get the same pictures in murals, but thangkas are
painted on canvas/cloth, and so are rollable. Monasteries' thangkas
may be multi-storied in height, only to be unrolled and displayed at
special locations at particular times of the year. Individuals will
have smaller thangkas. Pretty much every component of a thangka is
formalised, from the choice of colours, to the figures and what they
are wearing. It's mathematical in its precision, with exact ratios and
specific postures for figures to be in. Before a thangka is painted,
drafting lines are pencilled in, then the specifics of the entire piece
are added.
Japp's friend Shashi is a thangka painter; they met in Holland through
Japp's aunt when Shashi came over to exhibit/lecture. He teaches at
the Tsering Art School at Shechen monastery near Bodhnath in Kathmandu,
and has a small room where he and his two assistants produce Thangkas.
I asked him what individual creativity a thangka artist was allowed,
and he told me that he had some flexibility in producing backgrounds.
A genuine thangka takes about a month of labour to produce.
Unfortunately the artists who make them are in competition with those
who only imitate the form of the thangka; a lookalike can be completed
much quicker because the time required for layout and preparation is
cut. It takes five years to apprentice as a thangka painter - there's
not only the technique to learn, but also all the symbols, postures,
and ratios to memorise. I admire the skill, but unfortunately - as art
- it's not for me.
Some of us visited the traditional medicine hospital in Lhasa, where we
were shown medicine thangkas. Tibetan medicine, is partially religious
in nature, and uses thangkas as reference works for diagnosis and
healing. Much of it sounded fairly medieval - they've all kinds of
instruments for blood letting, prayer and meditation is used, and
urinalysis includes the doctor tasting it. Jeff, who'd done a year of
medicine before he went on to more sleep-friendly studies, was not
quite impressed.
Topics for the Dinner Table
It's obvious just how fungible reality is when you compare things from
the perspective of the Chinese Government and the Tibetan Government in
Exile. The realities they lay out are as different as white and
black. In one, Tibet is a land full of happy frolicking people
liberated from the yoke of serfdom, in the other, life has rarely been
worse for the Tibetans suffering under the yoke of colonial invaders
dedicated to stamping out all things Tibetan. With the limited
information I have, the truth appears to be one of those awkward shades
of grey.
Long ago, the Tibetans were ruled by and/or politically connected to
the Mongols -- "Dalai" is Mongolian for "ocean", and the title "Dalai
Lama" was bestowed by a Mongol Leader in the mid-16th century, well
after the start of Tibetan Buddhism. Owing to the one-time Mongol
unification of Mongolia/China/Tibet and later suzerainty or sovereignty
by China over Tibet, the Chinese now justify sovereignty over Tibet.
If you'd like a minor complicating factor, when Nepal invaded Tibet a
couple of centuries back, China kicked them out and obtained tribute
for over a hundred years. Further complicating the whole mess is the
fact that the "Greater Tibet" claimed by the Tibetan Government in
Exile is about double the size of what is now the Tibetan Autonomous
Region - an area that while having an ethnic Tibetan majority was never
in its entirety ruled by the current Dalai Lama. And there are perhaps
strategic reasons for holding Tibet, too: many of the region's major
rivers originate there - Mount Kailash is the source of four - and it's
been argued that water is the major reason many of the wars of this
century will really be (and in some cases have been) fought.
And the historical boundaries of territory is one of those nasty grey
areas; just look at the changes in Europe since the mid-16th century.
For that matter, just look at the changes in Europe since the mid-20th
century -- or 1990, for that matter. Should the fact that X percentage
of Tibetans want independence from China matter? Should the fact that X
percentage of Kurds want independence from Turkey/Iraq or Y percentage
of the Northern Irish want independence from Britain or Z percentage of
Basques want independence from Spain matter? There are independence
movements all over. Is there a minimum percent? And how consistent
should one be in supporting claims, whether historical or
ethnogeographic - if, indeed, one should? England used to belong to
well... lots of places, Texas used to be part of Mexico, much of Vietnam
used to belong to the Cambodians, Egypt belonged to Macedonia (Greece,
not Yugoslavia), etc., and in the mid-16th century there wasn't a European or
Asian on the east coast of Australia. I don't have an answer, sorry,
but I am very happy being Australian and living in Australia.
Nepal has a lot of Tibetans living here. When the Dalai Lama fled in
1959, so did a hundred thousand other Tibetans, more have fled since,
and many of them didn't travel as far as he did. There's a large
population in Kathmandu, but a far more visible population in and
around Pokhara, where they try to sell handicrafts to any and all.
Apparently many of the souvenirs in Tibet are imported from Nepal.
They are still refugees - the daughter of one exile told me that even
though she was born in Nepal, she couldn't get a Nepali Passport. I
wonder, though, how the Tibet of pre-Chinese 1948 aligns with the
memory of those few adults and adolescents who were alive then, or even
how the Tibet of 1959 aligns with the memory of adults and adolescents
who were not of privileged castes.
"
All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and
medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a
freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?" - from Monty Python's Life of Brian
I know that the Chinese have been for much of their rule been bad for
many Tibetans. There have been a lot of Tibetans killed and arrested.
Numbers are fuzzy and up for a lot of debate - the Tibetan Government
in Exile claims 1.2 million, but consensus is that the figure is
unhelpfully exaggerated but still in the hundreds of thousands. There
are still Tibetans being arrested or killed. An influx of other
ethnicities has occurred. There's been repression and religious
persecution and censorship. And yet, I don't know - balance of evils -
if the Tibetan populace is worse or better off since 1948, and if so by
how much. Mortality rates have dropped, education has climbed, and
monks now have the benefit of cell phones, cigarettes, and computers.
Life expectancy used to be woeful, not helped by a hideous infant
mortality rate. It's still not great, comparatively speaking, but it's much better than it was. Education
rates are far better than they were. Penn and Teller, by the way, did
a scathing segment on life in Tibet under the Dalai Lamas on their show
Bullsh*t. When the Dalai Lama still ruled Tibet, it did, it seem, have
slavery/serfdom. As a republican and an atheist, I find the
combination of feudal monarchy and theocracy an ugly one, though
god-kings probably find the combination of republicanism and atheism
ugly too. And the benefits of traditional culture versus colonialism
vs savagery (noble or otherwise) vs progress is a longstanding and
worldwide debate. I'm not sure that life for nomadic Tibetans is worse now than in 1948.
You can't even say that life has never been worse for Dalai Lamas than
under Chinese Rule. Of the fourteen Dalai Lamas, five out of thirteen
died before the age of twenty-five, three of them before achieving
their majority. It's probable that some, if not all, were murdered.
There's nasty internal politics going on with the Gelugpa sect, too -
in recent years a schism between the Dalai Lama and his followers and
those who worship Shugden has arisen and monks have been murdered.
China has meddled, too. In particular, when the 10th Panchen Lama
died, the 11th was announced by the Dalai Lama. This boy was
unacceptable to the Chinese government, and the monk who selected the
boy was arrested, the boy and his family were taken into 'protective
custody', a new round of lots were shaken and drawn. As a result a
Chinese approved Panchen Lama instated. Not that Chinese interference is needed - there are two rival candidates as Karmapa Lama of the Kagyupa sect. It's all very Holy Roman Empire
with its popes and antipopes, and would be a little less theologically
problematic if the High Lamas of the Gelugpa and Kagyupa sects didn't reincarnate.
The Sakyapa sect's lineage is done by heredity instead.
But there are arrests and repression and just recently what appears to
be the cold-blooded murder of unarmed civilians by troops. Tibetans who
flee to Dharamsala in India and then return to Tibet face not only
arrest, but difficulty in getting employment once they return. And
there's censorship. There are websites unaccessible from China; the
BBC was one, and Wikipedia was only unblocked while we were in the TAR.
Just as the Great Wall of China failed to keep the barbarians from
invading - twice it failed catastrophically allowing them to take over
- so the Great Firewall of China fails to stop news from coming in.
There are proxy servers and minor websites and news aggregators and a
myriad of other ways for information to filter in.
And, as a tourist, it's the atmosphere of repression that's a bad thing - you watch
what you write and particularly what you say. There were security
cameras and (reportedly) hidden microphones in various places. There
may have been fake monks, informers, and agents provocateur. Rumours
swirled about a foreign tour group that was arrested at Shigatse's
Tashilumpo Monastery after the tour leader told his group about the
Panchen Lama controversy. I can't find a source for it - who knows, it
may just be a legend - but it was feasible, and that's enough. That's
probably why the topics of choice at our dinner table seemed to
invariably end up being scatological, and that's no Bullsh*t.
Some source material:
The 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica entry written before Tibet's period of de-facto independence (highly recommended)
An Atlantic Monthly article on Tibet through Chinese Eyes
A counter-view on repression in TibetUN stats (the data sources may be biased, particularly for the early figures, though)
Wikipedia's Entry (like all wikipedia articles take with buckets of salt)
A counter-view on Tibet (with some more links down the bottom)
Background and analysis of the Shugden controversy Open letter from Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, the founder of the breakaway NKT
sect/organisation
A decade-old Tibet FAQ (much of the information may be out of date)
Sacred Sites
One night as we sat around, C. railed against corruption in the
monasteries. He'd been a monk for a couple of weeks, and was currently
alcoholised and angry; luxuriously soft beds, mobile phones, the
exploitation of nomads who made barely anything a year, and fat
monks were his targets.
I've alluded elsewhere to the cash-centrism in Tibetan temples, and
his rant - from what I saw - seemed at least reasonable. Few places
felt sacred; many of them just felt crowded and oldish, and some just
felt crowded. In addition to a few minor locations - a couple of
hill-side nunneries and hermitages, and a few small back-street temples
- the complexes that seemed to me to retain a real sense of the sacred
were Pabonka, parts of Samye, and Sakya.
Pabonka, west of Sera Monastery, is possibly the oldest monastery in
Lhasa; there's some debate as to whether it or the Jokhang is older. We visited it as part of our
stroll up the mountain. It was a quiet but welcoming
place, which few temples seem to be, and the monk stationed at the main
temple was happy to show us around - the carefully-painted murals, the
statues of bodhisattvas and lamas, and the main relic of Pabonka: a
stone carving of "om mani padme hum", supposedly the oldest in
existence. Outside and up some stairs is a small shrine in a
walled-off cavelet, its ceiling low and sloping. On top of the rock is
built the monastery proper; when we were there, the monks were busy
chanting in the cramped chapel on its upper floor. There's a nunnery
up the hill that's worth a visit, too. It has a sacred well/spring in
a walled-off grotto barely large enough for use to stand in.
Samye was where the first monastery in Tibet was built. We stayed in a
fairly rudimentary hotel built within the monastery grounds. Adjacent
to the the hotel is the main building, which was damaged during the
Cultural Revolution but renovated some years back. It contains a
temple as well as some minor chapels and shrines; there's one that you
access from the main room by crawling through a hatch in a panel and
climbing up a ladder. I walked the khora (a circuit round a sacred
site) around the outskirts of the grounds, spinning the prayer wheels
and ducking into the outbuildings, each of which had one or more
shrines. I actually found I preferred some of the outbuildings to the
main building -- go figure.
Sakya was the last of the major monasteries that we visited. Although
there were many older places that we visited, Sakya felt the most
ancient. Its walls were roughly plastered with a section that had
crumbled away under repair, its ground was uneven, and its arrangement
of prayer wheels odd: just as Buddhist swastikas are clockwise in
rotation, so Tibetan Buddhists walk their khoras widdershins, spinning
prayer wheels with their right hand. At Sakya, however, there were
prayer wheels placed so that they could only be spun with the left hand
unless you were walking the khora deosil, which is done only by Bon
practitioners. It was lunch, so the Sakya buildings were closed and we
didn't go inside, but there was one chapel with a skull on the door,
and interesting decorations hanging from the roof of the porch:
motheaten stuffed wolves, vultures, and other predators.
I was not alone, might I add, in finding a number of the holy sites we
visited to be little more than buildings, though some also really liked
the Jokhang. The Jokhang is the central temple in old Lhasa. It's
large and ancient, and devout pilgrims prostrate themselves before it,
around it, and in it. For me, it's not the Jokhang but the Barkhor
around it that I like. The Barkhor is in many ways just a market area,
with stalls on stone cobblestones, but because it surrounds the Jokhang
there's one-way foot-traffic around it, and signs to streets running
off it are labelled as exits. At dusk, when it's time for evening
prayers, a flow of Buddhists and others walk khoras around it.
Tibetan Buddhism is heavily influenced by the pre-Buddhist shamanistic
Bon religion, the Bon religion is traditionally a sky-centric religion,
and more than walled spaces and enclosed candle-lit buildings, it is
the high barren places which retain the most magic. White stupas sit
on hilltops smothered in a tangle of prayer flags. Every time a prayer
flag flutters, it sends a prayer. Prayer flags - yellow, green, red,
white, blue, over and over - are strung over passes, and over gullies
above Pabonka, too. From sufficient distance with their colour bleached
it looks as though some gigantic spider has webbed the crevices of the
mountain. White scarves, "kotas", are thrown at holy statues and
stupas, or tied to prayer flags where they too can flutter. Where many
traverse the high places, a litter of prayers on squares of paper coat
the ground - stacks of "wind horses" that have been tossed in the
breeze. In death, Tibetans are neither cremated nor inhumed. Instead,
they undergo "sky burial", where their corpses are taken up-mountain
and prepared for the vultures to strip. [Incidently, Colin, Japp, Jeff
and Liz, who had been attempting to reach the top of the mountain
behind Sera the same day we did the less-strenuous mid-mountain path up
from Pabonka, had to turn back when they were hundreds of vultures who
had turned up for a sky burial gathered and started swooping].
