Читать книгу A Year in Tibet - Sun Shuyun - Страница 6

IT IS EARLY MORNING, and the sky is leaden — not at all like the crystal blue Tibetan vault on the postcards. Dark clouds hang over the village of Tangmad and the mountains behind it, the sky lit now and then by a dramatic flash of lightning. We are huddled in the Rikzins' kitchen, watching the rain. It is not heavy, quite gentle in fact, but it is unrelenting. For four days in a row, the family has got up at two or three in the morning, hoping for it to break. But they — and we — have been disappointed every time. Loga, the oldest brother, Dondan, the middle one, Tseten, the youngest, who is also the village shaman, and Yangdron, the wife they share, are not saying very much. They are drinking yak-butter tea and eating tsampa — roasted barley flour — which they mix with the tea. Mila, the brothers' father, is praying in his room.

Yangdron breaks the silence. ‘Do you think the rain will stop this morning? Yesterday, we could not get into the fields. It was so wet. Last year the harvest was already in by now.’

‘It should be all right,’ Tseten says breezily, trying to lighten the atmosphere.

Dondan turns his head to look out of the window. The clouds over the horizon are becoming thicker and thicker. He sighs. ‘It could be worse,’ he says.

The only truly cheerful one is Loga. He has the mental age of a child. He does not understand; with hot butter tea and tsampa, what is there to worry about? It is the start of another day.

I have heard that the village held a festival two weeks ago for the local god Yul Lha. He is one of the most powerful deities. He is supposed to control the mountains, the rivers that flow from them, the land beneath them, the people and animals who live near them — and the weather. It was before we started filming. I ask Tseten to tell me about it.

‘We have a shrine to Yul Lha on the edge of the village. Each family brought a bundle of their best crops, barley, mustard seeds, and peas as offerings. I recited mantras to invoke the presence of Yul Lha, asking him to come and enjoy them. You know, he is responsible for just about everything important — the rain and the harvest, sickness and health, the safety of men and animals.’

‘Will it be a good harvest this year?’ I ask. I noticed that some of the fields we passed on the way to the village looked rather pitiful, like an old man's hair, the stalks short, the ears sagging.

‘We could have done with a bit more rain earlier after the planting,’ Tseten concedes, ‘but we cannot complain.’

I have found mentions of some offerings made in the past in a book I have been reading: widows' or prostitutes' menstrual blood in a bowl made from the skull of an illegitimate child, hearts and livers, flowers, incense, and a sampling of the finest food available. In the 1950s, an assembly of monks required ‘one wet intestine, two skulls, and a whole human skin’ for a ritual to pray for the Dalai Lama's longevity.⁶ The best barley and peas seem a bit ordinary by comparison.

Tseten laughs. ‘Yul Lha is not so hard to please. If you are respectful and sincere, he will help you.’

Tseten refers to Yul Lha with reverence, but also with familiarity, as though he is a real presence. Of course it is his job as a shaman, but it still comes as a surprise to me. I know the Cultural Revolution destroyed much of the fabric and culture of Tibetan life, and took from the Tibetans what they had for centuries valued most — their monasteries, their monks, their religious rituals. But I did not realise how many of the old traditions had returned in the years since, how much people's lives were once again dominated by the old beliefs.

I made a mistake when I first came to Tangmad village looking for the Rikzin family in July. I met a little girl with clear, radiant eyes, and a beautiful smile, and she was holding her mother's hand. When I complimented the mother on her daughter's beauty, she did not look at all pleased. She took the girl off in a hurry. My Tibetan researcher, Penpa, told me the woman would probably head for the monastery to pray to her daughter's deity in order to appease any anger or jealousy I might have invoked. I had put the girl at risk.

After three months in Tibet, I have learned that gods are everywhere. One day, I had arranged to follow Tseten on one of his rounds to see what it was like. He was an hour late to meet us. When he appeared, he apologised — he had been praying to the tree god for his neighbours before they cut down a tree to make a beam for their new house. Trees, flowers, crops, animals, humans, houses, wells, springs, rivers, mountains, earth, heaven — all have gods assigned to them. Humans, too, have gods keeping an eye on them: the one over your shoulder is the fighting god, the one under your right armpit is the masculine god and the one under your left the feminine god; the house god is present on the four corners of your roof, and the storage god in the cupboards; there is a god in the well, in the stable, and in the kitchen — if you make the stove dirty, you might offend the stove god, and she will make the whole family sick.

In fact, the story of how Buddhism came to Tibet is embedded in the mythology of these demons and gods. In the eighth century, King Trisong Detsen invited an Indian master to come to teach and to build the first Tibetan monastery. Legend has it that devils did their best to halt the construction. The master's life was also threatened by followers of Bön, the widespread indigenous religion. So another great Indian master, Padmasambhava — or Padam, as he is known — was called upon to travel to Tibet. Again, the same devils put obstacles in his path. The God of Gnyan Chen Tanggola, one of Tibet's holiest and highest mountains, was his most notable assailant. Padam's response was to sit in deep meditation on this mountain top, and, soon enough, the snow started to melt, creating a torrent, bringing earth and rocks down with it. The mountain god surrendered, convinced of Padam's superior powers, and offered his loyalty. Padam made him a protective deity in the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon, together with all his 360 subsidiary gods and goddesses, and numerous other devils and spirits.

These gods and goddesses are duty-bound to protect and to bring prosperity to the monasteries and monks, and the faithful. But they have been allowed to keep their bad habits — they are carnivorous, thirsty for blood, and often consumed by ego, anger, jealousy, and greed. They are quite unBuddhist; they have nothing to do with delivering enlightenment — that is left to the numerous Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.

Traditionally, it is the shaman who intercedes with the deities and spirits, to honour them, to placate them, and to plead with them for help. When we were choosing characters to feature in our documentary film, every Tibetologist we consulted recommended that we include a shaman. After hunting for several weeks in the villages, Penpa, the researcher, came back one day in early August looking very pleased with himself, ‘You owe me a big present. I think I've found just the family you want.’

I drove with him the next day to Karmad — one of the eighteen districts (xiang) of Gyantse County. We turned off onto a stony track after twenty minutes on the main road to Shigatse, the second biggest city in Tibet. It was lined with willow trees, and through them I could see the vast expanse of yellowing barley fields under brilliant sunshine, stretching to the dark mountains on either side. The track went on straight for miles to the end of the valley, into the huge space of sky and clouds. Where were we going to end up? We crossed the Nyangchu River and passed several villages, all looking very inviting. I asked Penpa repeatedly, ‘Is this one ours?’ At last we slowed down and went left into Village No. 1, Tangmad, at a row of prayer-wheels. We went by a water tap where the villagers were queuing, the only tap for 600 people, Penpa told me. As far as I could see, as we drove through the lanes of traditional mud-brick houses, that was the only sign of modernity, bar some telephone lines and the occasional motorbike or car.

We parked outside a wide corrugated-iron gate. Penpa pulled a rope that opened the inside latch of the narrow side, and we entered the Rikzins' house. Like the others, it has two storeys of the traditional kind, the cows and sheep on the ground floor, and the family on the first floor, with a big courtyard where chickens run amongst the tractor and cart, and cowpats dry on the walls. We climbed up a flight of stairs to the small upper courtyard. Yangdron came out of the kitchen to greet us, smiling warmly. She had a broad oblong face, handsome rather than beautiful, with dark wide-set eyes, and brilliant white teeth — her smile really lit up her face.

‘This is our director, Sun, who wanted to find a shaman family,’ Penpa introduced me. ‘You want to see Tseten,’ she said, taking my hands in hers. ‘He has someone with him. But let me take you to his room.’

My first sight of Tseten was a little curious. He was sitting on a narrow bed in the family prayer room, in front of a wall hung with tangkas, ritual paintings of the Buddha and various deities. On a bench under the windows to his right was his patient, a young woman with a badly swollen face. He leaned over to her and spat on her cheek. After half a minute, he stopped and beckoned us with a smile to sit next to her, and went on with his spitting. I noticed Tseten's smooth, pale skin, unlike any villager we had seen. I supposed he spent a lot of time indoors. His smile seemed to express a benign disposition — no doubt a comfort to the woman. I immediately took a liking to him.

The patient left, bowing with gratitude. We had a brief chat with Tseten about our film, and then he led us to the kitchen to meet the rest of the family. I felt I was taken back to another time. A liquidiser for making butter tea, a solar reflector in the courtyard for boiling water, a telephone presumably for Tseten's activities, and a small black and white TV in a corner — these were the only reminders of the modern world. The family were sitting around the stove, drinking and chatting. Dondan, tall and solid, greeted us with a handshake. Penpa had told me he was forty-six, eleven years older than Tseten; he was a man of very few words, but the pillar of the household who took care of the farm. Loga was sitting in a corner, staring at us with a grin that revealed tiny teeth with big gaps between them. Although the oldest at forty-eight, he was also the slightest. I took a closer look at him. Something seemed to be wrong with him: his complexion was sallow and his hair sparse and yellowish. I looked at Penpa; he whispered, ‘He's had some illness all his life, the family does not know what it is.’ The two older sons were there, Jigme and Gyatso, looking like younger versions of Dondan, but behaving like typical, bored teenagers. There were two younger children, Tseyang — the only daughter — and Kunga, but they were still in school that day.

Mila, their grandfather, was away in Shigatse, visiting his wife in hospital. I was keen to find out more about him. Mila has been more than a shaman. He was a lama at the Palkhor Monastery in Gyantse for a decade, but was thrown out in 1959, after the Tibetan uprising against the Communists. He was forced to marry, but that was not enough — he was persecuted right up to the late 1970s. From him I hoped I could learn about the violent upheavals of those times, and how, despite everything, the old traditions have come back, and not just in his family.

I wonder whether Yul Lha did not hear Tseten's prayers. Or was he not pleased with the villagers' offerings? For the next week, whenever the weather looks like brightening up, we go back to the village, hoping to film. But the rain still does not let up enough for them to start harvesting, and if it goes on, the crop will be ruined. Now frustration is turning to fear — the rain might become hail. The villagers say that is Yul Lha's revenge for transgressions against him. Powerful as he is, Yul Lha is also easily offended. Forgetting to say a prayer to him, talking too loudly on the mountain top, making a fire in the forest — these are just a few of the things that displease him. Gale-force winds, thunder and lightning, downpours, blizzards, drought, and hailstones are his other weapons. It is said that Yul Lha has a consort to help him; according to one legend she has lightning in her right hand and hailstones in her left, ready to launch these wherever she is directed.

The Tibetans have a famous story about hail, which dates back to the eleventh century. It is the story of Milarepa, one of their most beloved sages. Born into a wealthy family, Milarepa and his mother and sister were turned out of their own home by an uncle and aunt after Milarepa's father died. Milarepa's mother was incensed, and told him to go away and learn the black arts so he might come back and take vengeance for the loss of their property. Milarepa did as his mother asked, and returned to his village an accomplished sorcerer. First, he made the roof collapse on a wedding party, killing thirty-five members of his clan. But this did not satisfy his mother, who demanded he launch a hailstorm and destroy all their relatives' crops. Milarepa created not one storm but three — and devastated the barley fields of the entire area. He was so appalled by the destruction he had unleashed that he soon turned to Buddhism to find repentance.

Hailstorms do not come around often in Gyantse, but when they do, they can destroy everything in the space of half an hour. Tseten tells me that five years ago villages further up the valley had a disaster. Right before their eyes, the ripened barley was flattened; nothing was left but useless heaps on the ground. They had worked the whole year for nothing. I have read of another hailstorm in 1969 in the County records, more widespread, and even more devastating. All these years later, just mentioning it still sends chills down the villagers' spines.

A hailstorm would be the worst thing for the Rikzin family, especially now. Even in a normal year, they have to be careful. This year, they will need a lot of extra money if Jigme and Gyatso get into university. In other parts of rural China, farmers have extra income from their migrant sons and daughters and from the highly successful ‘town and village enterprises’, the small local businesses which began with the economic reforms of 1979. I have seen none of them around Gyantse, except for families weaving carpets. The young men in Tangmad village have begun to seek work further away. But they speak only Tibetan and have no skills; they can do manual jobs — building houses for nomads, road construction, menial labour in the city for roughly 15 yuan a day (about £1). The Rikzin family do not have even that income, because they want all their four children to be educated.

‘Cheer up,’ Penpa says to the family one day at lunch time. They — and we — have spent yet another morning waiting for the rain to stop. ‘If you are so worried, how do other families cope? After all, you have a hailstone lama under your roof. Surely that is some guarantee?’ We all smile.

Indeed, ‘hailstone lama’ is what the villagers call Tseten, now I think about it. But strangely, since I started following Tseten in August, he has never mentioned his anti-hailstone work. On a particularly threatening day like today, does he not have to say a special prayer? Is there something he is not telling me? Why, when everyone is so worried about hail, is the ‘hailstone lama’ just sitting here, not doing anything?

‘I'm unemployed now. The government brought an antiaircraft gun a few years ago to disperse the clouds and prevent hailstorms. So I have been made redundant,’ he says, laughing perhaps a little too loudly.

‘Which is more effective?’ I ask him. ‘You or the gun?’

‘Our family has done anti-hailstone work for six generations. You can ask anyone in this village. Tangmad has not been hit by hailstorms in recent times.’

‘What about the one I read about in the County record?’

‘That was not us. Our village has never been hit by hail,’ Tseten says gently, but confidently. ‘One year the hail was particularly powerful. All the trees were killed; even the ground was pitted. But it did not land in the fields. It stopped just outside them because of the power of my mantras. The three villages up the valley suffered for two years in a row after they bought the gun!’

‘What do the villagers prefer, relying on the gun or placating Yul Lha?’ I ask cheekily.

‘Some other villages still invite me to do my mantras, but I say no.’

‘Why?’

‘They say the guns can do it. So let them do it.’ He sounds a little peevish.

I ask Tseten if I can film him demonstrating his anti-hail ritual; he agrees. While our cameraman gets ready, Penpa asks if we are going to film the demonstration inside or outside.

‘Oh, wherever Tseten usually does it,’ I tell him.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Why not? Is there a problem?’

‘I think it is better indoors.’

Is he worried that Tseten might be embarrassed if the neighbours see him doing it?

Penpa shakes his head. ‘Suppose his mantra works? If we're outside, it will make it rain and we'll all get wet.’

I burst out laughing — something Penpa has often managed to make me do. He is a tremendous asset to our team. Four years in Beijing and another four years abroad for postgraduate study have given him a broad perspective, and he is wonderful with people, at least when he has not been drinking. I feel so lucky to have borrowed him from the Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences. ‘A laugh a day makes you ten years younger,’ he likes to tell me. ‘Why take yourself, and me, so seriously? You need cheering up.’ But sometimes, like now, it is hard to tell whether he is joking.

Inside his prayer room, Tseten puts on a maroon conical hat with stiff wings around its base. The hat is something he wears only for this ritual. In front of him on a tray is a bundle of pointed wooden batons, some short rods, half a dozen clay tshatshas which look like miniature stupas, two white conches decorated with stars, and a rosary, all pressed into a heap of barley on the tray. Tseten explains that these items have been much prayed over. The batons stand for male gods, the rods for female gods, the tshatshas for the Buddhist message, and the conches for the instrument through which the message is delivered. These, and a robe like the one a monk wears, are his complete equipment for taking on the mighty gods up in the sky.

Tseten says he used to begin his anti-hailstone ritual a full three months before the harvest, shutting himself away to meditate. In June, when the crop was just five inches tall, he would place sticks and rods around the fields — these represented his control over the fields. Then he would conduct a ritual for the whole village, during which he would enter into a trance, invoking Yul Lha and other gods, and asking them not to harm the village. For the rest of the summer, whenever the clouds looked threatening, he would be up twenty-four hours a day, praying and preparing for action. His vigil would last until all of the crops were brought in.

When I listen to Tseten explain the rituals, I am struck by how naïve he sounds. I cannot help wondering if he simply thinks the gods, the mantras, and his communication with the divine are all beyond me. I try to press him for more details.

‘What is the first thing you do in the morning?’

‘I watch the sun rise and observe how the clouds are moving.’

‘Do you pray too?’

‘Yes, I pray in the morning and at night. That is to let the heavenly deities know I am keeping a vigil against them.’

‘If there are a lot of clouds in the sky, what do you do then?’

‘There is a special ritual, but it is a heavenly secret, I cannot read it out to you. I only recite it in my heart. But through the ritual, I can change the way the clouds are moving so they won't form a mass. Or if they do, I will blow this conch at the right moment. As soon as the deities hear it, the clouds disperse. But you can only use this when it is really critical, and you cannot blow it more than five times.’

‘What if the weather is really bad?’

‘As a last resort, I fan the air with my lama robe, and then throw the robe into the air. That will definitely stop it.’

‘How long did it take you to master the whole ritual?’

‘I started learning from Mila when I was seventeen, and I've practised for eleven or twelve years. Before then my grandfather was the hailstone lama in this area, and my great-grandfather was also a hailstone lama.’

‘Is there anything that the villagers have to do to help?’

‘There is a custom that once the shaman controls a field, if a woman or a sheep walks into it, it is a bad omen for hail. That is why, after dusk, women are not allowed to come near the fields and sheep are all kept inside.’

‘What is the possible retribution from the gods if you are causing them so much trouble?’

‘If my ritual and mantra have worked against the heavenly gods, they will need a rest for several years. This is me committing a sin really, and I will be punished, perhaps by living a few years less.’

I hesitate, but in the end I ask Tseten about the fee for his anti-hail services. He says that when the crops were safe from hail, each of the ninety-six households in the village would give him a portion of their harvest, totalling roughly 500 kilos of barley. I do a quick calculation: a kilo of barley sells for 1.5 yuan, which is 10 pence. That means he would have earned about £50 — not much for six months' hard work. He made less than Dondan and Yangdron.

‘Oh, but I did four other villages apart from our own, including one seventy kilometres away,’ he tells me.

‘Do they telephone you when a hailstorm is coming and you go over there?’

‘No, I only have to stand on the roof of my house to see the direction the clouds are heading. I am connected to the fields with the batons, remember?’

But does Tseten possess considerable powers, or has the village just been lucky? I cannot help remembering a funny story I read in The People of Tibet by Charles Bell, written in the 1920s. Bell was briefly the British trade agent in Gyantse, and later became a confidant of the 13^th Dalai Lama. He was informed by a highly placed lama official that hail was not allowed to fall on the Potala, the Dalai Lama's palace. ‘Hail is believed to fall chiefly in countries in which the inhabitants are quarrelsome, or in which many illegitimate children are born,’ Bell wrote. But while he was in Lhasa, the unthinkable happened — a storm brought hail to the Dalai Lama's palace. The two lamas charged with warding off the hail were immediately sacked — for negligence, Bell claims, too polite to say explicitly that their mantras were not up to the task.⁷ Tibetans believe that the successive Dalai Lamas are the incarnations of the God of Compassion. If hail falls even on the Potala Palace, what chance do mere mortals' villages have?

An unemployed hailstone lama? It was slightly hard to fathom at first, but now I can see Tseten has lost a considerable income, nearly 2,500 kilos of barley. I feel for him. We have filmed him treating patients, but in the last couple of weeks very few have come; with the harvest on the way they will only do so in an emergency. And almost all other ceremonies and rituals — marriages or house buildings — are on hold until the harvest is over. Tseten really is unemployed in what used to be his busiest months of the year.

A few days after we recorded Tseten's ritual, the rain finally stops. The Rikzin family and all the villagers swarm into the fields and start the harvest. They are so obviously relieved after all the weeks of tension and anxiety. It is great for us to be filming outdoors again, with the postcard blue sky, everyone singing, the sickles swinging, the grain being tied up, and the tractors and carts taking it home.

Soon Yul Lha seems to change his mind, and the clouds are gathering again over the mountains. I decide to try to film the gun in action. We find it, painted green and mounted on a cart in a big open barley field, its long thin barrel pointing at the sky. It is manned by four gunners, all of them dressed in khaki fatigues. They are farmers from surrounding villages — one of them is Tseten's neighbour. I ask them about their job. They tell me that they have been trained by the Gyantse County Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Department, and that four different villages share the cost of their salaries and the shells they use. Despite the villagers' mounting concern, the gunners have not yet concluded that the clouds are a threat. In fact, not a single shot has been fired all summer. They are only too pleased when we ask them to demonstrate their skills for us on camera.

We pay 240 yuan, about £17, for four shells. While they are loading the shells with military precision, we ask them how they feel about the gun. ‘It's very powerful,’ one says enthusiastically. ‘Five or six minutes after we fire it, the clouds disappear, the sky is blue. You'll see for yourself.’

‘And how do you feel about a hailstone lama like Tseten?’

‘In the old times, before we had the gun, we relied on the hailstone lama. Now we have the gun, we don't need one.’

‘It is a good thing, too. The lamas took far too much of the villagers' crop as their reward,’ another gunner says.

‘But did Tseten or other shamans do a good job protecting the village from hail?’ I press them for a clearer answer.

‘The gun is definitely effective. Let's watch the demonstration,’ the first man replies.

The clouds look heavy and are covering the hills. The gunners turn the wheel to get the right elevation, adjust the direction of the barrel, and fire. The bang is loud, but it is like wailing without tears — no rain comes, and I cannot see that the clouds have noticeably dispersed. Perhaps the aim was faulty, or perhaps we should have waited for the clouds to move closer.

While they reload, my mind flashes back to Tseten demonstrating the hail ritual in his prayer room. He was doing it for our film, but I could not have told that from his demeanour — he was totally immersed in his communication with the gods, whether or not they were listening. His whole life has been spent working for the villagers as an intermediary between the known and the unknown. Now the unknown is being pushed back even here. Tseten has lost his most important job; I wonder what else will be taken away from him.

Tseten said his family is keen to pass on the shaman tradition to one of the children, but I suspect we might have seen the hailstone lama's last performance in this valley.

A second bang interrupts my thoughts. The shell explodes closer to the clouds, but still with no result. Either the gunners need more practice — this is only their first outing this year because the shells are expensive — or the gun is not very effective. ‘If you don't believe us, ask the villagers. A few years ago, the gun drove away the clouds, but other villages got hailed on,’ they hasten to assure me. ‘And the technology will get better. Some countries use planes or missiles now.’

Before we say goodbye to the gunners, something suddenly occurs to me: how did the villagers cope with hail during the Cultural Revolution, when shamans were forbidden to practise and when there were no guns?

‘They put dynamite on the mountain tops and set it off, hoping the explosions would disperse the clouds,’ one of the gunners says with a laugh. ‘Or they relied on Mao's Red Book.’

‘What? How could that save them from hail?’ I ask in disbelief. I remembered seeing a photograph from the 1970s: Tibetan peasants from a production brigade carrying portraits of Mao on sticks, and pushing them into the ground on the edge of a field, while they recited passages from Mao's Little Red Book. I had assumed the photo was just propaganda.

‘No, that was exactly what they did,’ the gunner says. ‘They took Mao's Red Book, stood around the fields, and read passages aloud; they thought that would stop the hail.’

Later on I did come across a reference to the 1969 hailstorm in Gyantse and its aftermath. The local Communist Party chief did not move swiftly to help the devastated peasants; instead he began a witch-hunt. He suspected a political reason for the failure of Mao's Red Book against the hail. Maybe it was sabotage by enemies of the people. Or it was the curses of the expelled lamas and nuns, or the debarred shamans. The witch-hunt went on for weeks. Quite a few of the supposed ‘enemies’ were severely punished.⁸

But that day on the way back from the gunnery demonstration, I could not get that image out of my mind — Tibetan peasants wielding Mao's Red Book against the weather. But perhaps I should not be surprised. When I grew up during the Cultural Revolution, we learned to revere Mao as the great helmsman and saviour; from our earliest years we were taught that we should be ready to follow in the footsteps of our revolutionary forefathers, to lay down our lives for the Communist cause if Mao gave us the order. In the political jargon of the time, Mao's thoughts were carved on our bones and melted into our blood. And many Red Guards really did pin a Mao badge on their flesh.

As I was taught, so were the Tibetans. In the past, they recited mantras, fingered their rosaries, made offerings, and went on pilgrimages to accumulate more and more merit. They set up family altars, built prayer walls, stupas, temples and monasteries to safeguard their homes, villages, and towns. Then monasteries and temples were destroyed; prayer flags were taken from the rooftops. There was no more burning of incense, no votive butter lamps, no praying at all other than to Chairman Mao. Mao's portrait replaced the images of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas that had once hung in every household. Every family kept Mao's Collected Works on the altar. In the first three years of the Cultural Revolution, 7,344,000 copies of Mao's works were distributed, for a population of over one million. Tens of thousands of training sessions in political studies were organised, attended by over a third of the adult population. In 1968 Chairman Mao sent some mangos to the Tibetan people: the massed crowd at the presentation was like a pilgrimage to see the relics of a great lama.⁹

Did the Tibetans ever believe Mao was their new god? Possibly many did. In their harsh environment, they needed a faith, a saviour. We were still driving through the valley on our way back to Gyantse when this idea really came home to me. I had asked the driver to stop so we could take a general view of the valley. There were a dozen villagers working in the foreground. Then I moved away to take a wider shot from a distance. Under the immense sky, the villagers were suddenly so tiny, so lonely and small: an insignificant speck in a vast landscape of mountain and plain. The menacing black clouds looked ready to drop their huge weight and crush them. And this valley is one of the most fertile and densely populated in Tibet. Most of Tibet is far wilder, just boundless barren scrub and grasslands stretching in every direction. I try to imagine what it is like for a nomad with his herds out on those huge plateaus wandering for weeks without encountering another soul — one man against the elements, and completely at their mercy. Is it any wonder that they have so many gods? Mao is gone, and the Tibetans have returned happily to their Yul Lhas, and all their ancient traditions and beliefs.

After three weeks of backbreaking work, a race against time, the harvest is finally in. The Rikzin family kept at it day and night, whenever it was not raining. It is not a good year for them. They have only reaped half the usual crop. When I come to film them at the end of their labours, I expect to see disappointment or sadness on their face, but there is none. They seem to have been prepared for much worse.

Do they blame the gods? I would think that they might, that after all the offerings they have made they would need someone or something to blame for the bad year. I ask Tseten whether he feels Yul Lha has let them down. He says blaming is not part of the Tibetan culture. The villagers' response to a bad harvest is to perform a ‘repentance’ ritual, asking for forgiveness. It is they, not Yul Lha, who have not done enough. They promise to do better next year.

I find this hard to take. I know what the Chinese peasant would do: he would shake his fist at the sky and stamp on the ground, railing at the gods for cheating him, complaining about his wasted offerings, and threatening not to pray to them any more. I mention the contrast to Tseten. He smiles gently, ‘Our rituals are really just the way we express our faith. We may or may not get anything in return. But that is not what matters most. Buddhism is about giving; it is a virtue in itself and brings its own reward. That is how we will have a better life, now or in the next world.’