Читать книгу A Year in Tibet - Sun Shuyun - Страница 8

TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS after the death of his mother, Tseten calls again. The family is preparing for a special fire ritual, the most elaborate they have performed so far. Do we want to film it?

‘Are you sure?’ I ask, cautiously. I am keen to film it, but I do not want to intrude. In the time since she passed away, I have often found myself thinking of Tseten's mother. Despite my own beliefs, I seem in some curious way to be growing concerned about the passage of her soul.

But Tseten assures me it will be all right.‘Mila has invited you,’ he says.

We set off immediately. As we approach the house, we see villagers arriving, carrying baskets of food or large jars of chang. One man struggles under the weight of a huge sack full of cowpats. Coming up the stairs by the stable, we find the Rikzins' upper courtyard packed; half the village seems to have turned up. Three shaven-headed nuns in maroon robes are arranging food on a long table: barley and barley flour, butter, sugar, tea, mustard seeds, rice, Chinese dates, spices, and quite a few other things that I don't recognise. Two more nuns are cleaning two five-foot long ceremonial horns. In a far corner of the yard, a couple of men are mixing a vast heap of tsampa with brown sugar to make tso, small cones of offerings. The heap gets bigger all the time, as new visitors add tsampa, sugar, and raisins they have brought with them. I watch a little girl who quietly waits her turn behind the adults. She holds a small bowl of tsampa in both hands, with a piece of yellow paper — a prayer for the dead, perhaps — tucked into the middle of it; when her turn comes, she tips it onto the heap.

Mila is standing in the centre of the courtyard. He looks calm and serene, like the rest of the family. Had I not known, I would not have suspected that he had just lost his wife. The only difference I notice is that he seems rather shabby, even dirty, his chin unshaven, the collar and the sleeves of his shirt shiny with grease. I have been told it is the custom for the family not to wash for forty-nine days after a death. He greets us warmly. He is wearing his usual outfit — a crimson sweater and brown vest — and his eyes are crinkling behind the pink plastic rims of his spectacles in the bright sun. He is watching as Tseten bends over a couple of pillow-sized mud bricks. Dondan is pouring sand from a sack. I ask Mila what they are doing. ‘We are making a mandala for the ritual today,’ he says. He points to the small packets of coloured sand on the windowsill. I am surprised. I have seen the famous murals of mandalas in the Palkhor monastery — large, gorgeous murals meant to represent the cosmos. They are so intricate, so vivid, and yet also so ingenious. Are we thinking of the same thing? I check with Tseten. ‘You just wait.’

Although it is late October the sun is very strong, and Mila invites us to rest in the prayer room. There he introduces us to a young man, Tseten's cousin, who is making torma. I have often seen Tseten making them — they are little blocks made of tsampa and butter, some painted red, intended to represent both the peaceful and wrathful deities. The good deities will be thanked, praised, and put on the altar for the protection of the family; the bad deities are pacified and then left on the rooftop, at crossroads, or on the outskirts of the village, supposedly taking away with them any bad influences that might trouble the family.

In the midst of the torma is a reclining human figurine in red, which I assume embodies the deceased woman. Mila carries it and the finished torma to the altar table. He stands and stares at the altar for quite a while. I wonder what he is thinking. I know Mila believes that grieving will distract his wife from her rebirth, so is he trying not to be sad? When he sits down with us, I ask him. ‘Imagine you are caught in a storm,’ he tells me. ‘That is what it is like for the souls of the dead. Our tears would be like a hurricane; our cries would be like thunder. They would frighten the soul. It is best to stay calm.’

I look at Mila long and hard. Perhaps the next life is so important and he is so engrossed in ensuring his wife will have a good rebirth, he simply has no time for grieving. Or does absorption in the ritual give him a natural tranquillity?

I am just about to ask him more questions when he is called to the courtyard to supervise the preparations. I take the opportunity to peek into the next room. There, two nuns are busily refilling empty butter lamps. A huge pot of melted butter is bubbling away on an electric stove, and rows and rows of lamps glow in front of a statue of the Buddha of Infinite Light. The amount of work required to fill and refill all the lamps is daunting, but the nuns seem very happy doing it, chanting while they work.

‘Why so many lamps?’ I ask them.

‘To guide the soul in the bardo,’ one of the nuns, who is tall and striking, replies.

I ask her to tell me more. She shakes her head, insisting that she is not knowledgeable enough, that she may mislead me. But when I plead with her, she relents. She lists ten functions of the butter lamp; among other things, a butter lamp can help the eyes to see more clearly, illuminate the difference between kindness and evil, dispel the darkness of ignorance, help us to be reborn into a higher state of being, and help us to escape quickly from sadness. Quite a lot for a humble lamp.

But they had a disaster last night, she tells me sadly. A large lump of butter brought by one of the visitors was fake, made of solidified oil, and quite a few of the lamps did not burn at all. ‘Even the butter that people offer to the Buddha is often fake these days,’ she grumbles. She tells me that even if the fake butter burns, it makes a lot of smoke. It pollutes the air and darkens the old murals and statues in the monasteries. ‘The saddest part is that the pilgrims who buy it know it is fake because it is so cheap. But they do not want to pay more for real butter. Money is eating at their hearts. May they not go to hell in their next life for cheating,’ she says, sighing.

I sit down to help them, and as I refill the cups with butter, I can't help wondering about the cost: the Rikzins will burn hundreds of lamps, day and night, for forty-nine days. How much butter is that? And butter is only a part of it. Monks and nuns who come to the service have to be fed and paid; food and drink must be served to the relatives and villagers; large quantities of tsampa are used to make offerings. Much of the elaborate ritual is repeated every seven days to guide the soul, since it is supposed to experience death seven times. After the forty-nine days, Tseten and the family will go on pilgrimages to the most famous monasteries and temples to make sure the deities there recognise their mother's reincarnation should it appear in their domain. A death can push families into debt.

We have always been lectured in China about the wastefulness of Buddhism. There are endless lists of figures to bolster the message: the old Tibetan government spent 90 per cent of its income on religious activities, while its people led miserable lives; at the time of the liberation of Tibet in 1951, as many as a quarter of all Tibetan men were in monasteries, the highest ratio to the general population of any country; in the two hundred years from the mid-eighteenth century to 1951, Tibet's population increased by just over 100,000, virtually a standstill.¹²

No money to invest in the economy, too little manpower on the land, not enough young people to drive society forward. Buddhism drained Tibet's wealth and was a recipe for paralysis.

Strangely, this Communist critique reads almost exactly like that of Austin Waddell, a British medical officer in the early twentieth century; he was just as scathing of the lamas:

They have induced the people to lavish all their wealth upon building and beautifying scores of temples, and filling them with idols; and through their power over the latter, the priests, as the sole mediators between God and man, are supposed to be able to drive away the hordes of evil spirits that are ever on the outlook to inflict on the poor Tibetan and his family disease, accident, or other misfortune.¹³

A hundred years later, the same view of the dominance of religion and its impact on the old Tibet was voiced again by British historian, Charles Allen, if more mildly worded: ‘When a nation's gross domestic product is expressed largely in terms of prayer, meditation, study, pilgrimage and religious art, and its productive population is small, scattered and static, the final outcome can never be in doubt.’¹⁴

The great 13^th Dalai Lama did try to shake Tibet out of its rut early in the twentieth century. He introduced an Englishstyle school for the children of the aristocracy, and sought to modernise the army and reduce the power of the unruly monks. The monasteries, and the lamas who made up half the government, rose in unison to prevent any reform. More authority for the army, modern and ‘atheistic’ ideas, and more representative government — these would dent the monasteries' coffers, and break their hold on society. They prevailed. The army commander-in-chief, a favourite of the Dalai Lama, was sacked. Later the leading reformer, Lungshar, was imprisoned and had his eyes gouged out; he died shortly after. The English school was shut down, with the monasteries even threatening ‘to send their fierce fighting monks to kidnap and sexually abuse the students’.¹⁵ Football, which had become popular in Lhasa, was banned because it generated too much passion, and was dangerous to social and cultural stability. ‘Ironically, by trying to protect Tibet's cherished Buddhist values,’ says Melvyn Goldstein, the pre-eminent historian of modern Tibet, the conservative monasteries themselves made Tibet ‘unable to defend and preserve those very religious values from the Chinese Communists’.¹⁶

I emerge from the room full of lamps into the sunny courtyard, and find Mila and Tseten totally immersed in the making of the mandala. They sit, bent low, holding pointed iron tubes filled with coloured minerals. By gently tapping the tubes, they let the colours fill in the drawings on the floor. It is painstaking work — one small slip with the coloured sand can ruin the whole thing. Their design is much smaller and simpler than the versions I saw in the monastery, but it is beautiful nonetheless. At its centre is a six-pointed red star enclosed within a blue circle. Around this is a circle coloured black and filled with gold dorje, the thunderbolt symbolising the power of the dharma to destroy ignorance. The last and outermost circle is made up of brightly coloured flames.

Tseten and Dondan clear the space around the mandala and Yangdron and some of the villagers lay carpets around it. Mila disappears into the house and then re-emerges wearing a maroon shawl and a crown-like hat of red and yellow silk. He sits down facing the mandala. A small settee is brought out and placed near him, and a long black dress — his wife's, presumably — is on the settee. Three nuns take their seats on the carpets to the right of the mandala — two of them hold the large ceremonial horns, and the third a smaller horn and a bell. The two nuns who were tending the lamps join the others on the carpet with sutras in their hands. Tseten sits down next to Mila, with his hand drum, a bigger drum on a stand, and a pair of cymbals. At this point, the huge sack full of cowpats I saw on my way in is dumped in front of the mandala.

Mila shuts his eyes and begins to pray, and Tseten and the nuns join in. Then the prayers stop abruptly, and the horns and trumpets burst out in the deepest baritone imaginable. The richness of the sound takes me by surprise — it is such a small band, and all women at that. It seems to come from the depths of space, like rolling thunder. Some Tibetans liken this music to the roaring of a tiger. To me it sounds very much as though the nuns are trying to communicate with another world. If the soul is listening, I think, it must hear this.

When the playing stops, the man who has been making the tso goes to the mandala and, much to my dismay, starts laying cowpats on it. Mere minutes have passed since Tseten and Dondan completed it! The cowpats look awful, like warts on the cheeks of a beautiful woman. The man sets the cowpats on fire and soon a huge red flame leaps into the air, lighting up his face. Butter is poured on the flames, and immediately I feel the heat from where I am crouching, some distance away. I wonder aloud at its intensity, and the man who has lit the fire takes a step back and reveals the secret: the cowpats are from the rare red yak, known to produce the fiercest flames, and therefore the most purifying power. ‘With the mandala at their base, these flames can reach the soul of the dead wherever it is, and purify any sins it might have,’ he tells me proudly.

But before the flames can work their magic power, there is something more mundane to be done. The soul of the dead must be fed. In the midst of the nuns' chanting and the crackling cowpats, plates of food are thrown into the flames one by one. Mila says a special prayer with every offering. ‘He is pleading for the soul to enjoy its favourite food,’ the fire-tender tells me. ‘They are giving her the best food because from today on, the soul can no longer taste anything from this world.’

‘But can the soul eat?’ I ask him, genuinely curious. For some reason, I can imagine the soul hearing the chanting, but not quite gulping down all these dishes, even if they are her favourites.

‘You are right,’ he says. ‘She can hear the chanting, but she can only smell the food being offered in her name, and the incense.’ He points to the clay pots hanging on the wall, with juniper twigs burning in them.

I find myself grappling with the gaps between these beliefs and my own. There has to be a soul there somewhere, otherwise what is the point of all this? I smile to myself as I remember a curious story. Hugh Richardson, another well-known British diplomat, stationed in Lhasa in the 1940s, went to offer condolences on the death of a Rinpoche, an incarnate lama. The abbot told him that the ‘Rinpoche’ would like to receive him in his cell. He wondered if he had made a mistake. He found the Rinpoche sitting in his usual seat. Before he could say anything, the abbot said: ‘The Rinpoche welcomes you and asks if you had a good journey, and are you in good health?’ It went on like this for some time. ‘Everything seemed to be as usual, so that the visitor almost began to doubt his own senses.’¹⁷

I look around and catch sight of Loga, sitting near the stairs with a bucket of water at his side. What is going on inside that locked head? Does he know that his mother has died and her soul is struggling for rebirth? My experience of the ritual may not be all that different from his. I can follow the process, even enjoy it, but it is like watching a play in a foreign language — fascinating, but mostly beyond my grasp.

In the midst of my distractions, I hear a loud sob. It is Tseten's sister, Samchung, from Shigatse, standing on her own in the corner, her eyes swollen with tears. Soon I see that she is not the only one crying. Dondan has tears welling up in his eyes; Tseten is wiping his face with his shawl. They all gather in front of the burning mandala — Tseten, Dondan, Samchung, and Yangdron, all weeping openly now. Mila drops five balls of tso, one red torma, and a slip of white paper into the fire. Then Tseten walks up to it, and tosses something into the flames. Before I can tell what it is, the fire consumes it. Tseten stands before the fire like a statue, his eyes fixed on the dancing flames. Just then, the sonorous long horns boom out again. The ritual is coming to an end.

I turn back to the fire-tender for an explanation. He tells me that Mila and his family believe that up until now, the four devils who took their mother's life — the devils of air, blood, flesh, and spirit — are still badgering her soul. The devils are represented by the red torma. By chanting prayers and feeding them with tso, they hope to pacify these devils. In case that does not work, the four wrathful deities guarding the four gates of the mandala are also invoked, and asked to bring the devils under control in the flames of the red yak cowpats. At the same time, the soul of the dead, represented by the slip of white paper, is purified of its sins, and readied for its next life.

‘But why was everyone crying? Were they no longer worried about distracting the dead?’ I ask him.

‘Until today, the soul of the dead can remember its previous life. It can smell its favourite food. But from now on, the soul's karma is stronger — what the family does will not matter to it. Also this is the last time that the soul of the dead sees its family.’

The mention of karma makes me ask something that has been troubling me. If reincarnation depends on your karma, what difference does the ritual make? Why all the prayers, all the offerings, the mandala, and the fire? A poor family cannot possibly afford them; what happens to their dead?

My questions take him off guard. ‘It doesn't matter whether you're rich or poor. What matters is that you do your best. But every little helps,’ he says after a pause.

I suppose I should not be posing difficult questions right now. I just ask if he noticed Tseten throwing something on the fire.

He nods. ‘Perhaps photographs of his mother. They have to go. All traces of the dead must be removed. Also, after today, the family will not mention her name in the house.’

Tseten's mother has been dead for a month, but, according to the family's belief, it is only now that she is transformed — she is no longer a mother, no longer a wife. Just as the family have tried to make the devils let go of her soul, now they too have to let her go, completely. From this point on, if they wish to mention her, they will refer to her simply as ‘the one who has passed away’, and never by using her name. It is perhaps for this reason that the Tibetan word for body is iu, which means ‘the thing that is left behind’.

The ceremony I have been watching marks the final big push to the soul's quest for its next life. The family's faith in reincarnation is absolute, as it is among all the Tibetans we are filming. But my doubts do not want to go away. Does it never even enter their minds that there is possibly no next life? And if there is not, then what?

Perhaps reincarnation can be seen as a state of mind, a mental construct. But I know that is not what the Rikzin family means by it, nor what Tibetans seek when they look for the reincarnate being who will be their new Dalai Lama, their supreme spiritual and political leader. Successors to the important Buddhist lineages are chosen based on the belief of reincarnation, a method that dates back to the fourteenth century. Patterns of water and clouds over a lake, dreams, and of course, wills and instructions of the incumbent incarnation lamas — these are all guides. The present Dalai Lama, the 14^th, described his selection in his autobiography: ‘The Regent saw the vision of three Tibetan letters — Ah, Ka, and Ma — followed by a picture of a monastery with roofs of jade green and gold and a house with turquoise tiles.’¹⁸ That was during the official search by a party of senior lamas at the holy lake, Lhamo Latso, about ninety miles southeast of Lhasa. The three letters indicated the region and district, where they found a monastery that satisfied the description. In the house with the turquoise tiles they found a two-year-old boy, who was declared to be the reincarnation of the 13^th Dalai Lama.

The present Dalai Lama admits that the traditional method of selection has had its drawbacks. In the seventeenth century, for example, a young boy named Tsangyang Gyatso was believed to be the reincarnation of the 5^th Dalai Lama, one of the most potent rulers Tibet had ever seen. Born in 1683, Tsangyang Gyatso was chosen with all the usual auspicious signs: his mother drank water from a fountain and it began to pour milk; his grandfather dreamt of two suns in the sky just before his birth, and so on. But Tsangyang refused to accept his destiny. He declined to wear robes and broke all the monastic rules. Wine and women were his passions. He wrote hundreds of poems about them:

If the bar-girl does not falter

The beer will flow on and on;

This maiden is my refuge

And this place is my heaven.

Or again:

I seek counsel from a wise lama

To escape from my predicament,

But my mind remains captivated

By my sweetheart.

If one's thoughts toward the dharma

Were as intense as feelings of love,

One would become a Buddha

In this very body, in this very life.¹⁹

As tolerant as the Tibetans were, Tsangyang's lifestyle challenged all their beliefs — and some came to doubt that he really was the reincarnation of the 5^th Dalai Lama. He was eventually deposed and died when he was twenty-four.

I know better than to discuss my doubts about reincarnation, and especially these thoughts about the Dalai Lama, with the Rikzin family, or even with my Tibetan crew. It is an offence to mention his name or to hang his portrait — punishable by imprisonment. A personal incident made me realise just how risky it could be. Before boarding my plane to come here I had picked up a photo book called 365 Days of Buddhist Offerings. I turned a few pages and thought the picture and the Buddhist text for each day would be inspiring. I kept it in my room, and looked at the day's page when I woke up, my morning dose of beauty and spirituality. One day a visitor to the house picked the book up. I watched as he leafed through it, interested to see what he made of it. Suddenly he stopped at one page. A look of shock and disbelief ran over his face. He quickly turned past the page as if it was contaminated. After fumbling abstractedly through the rest of the book, he went back to it and stole another glance. Then he put it down and left with the briefest of goodbyes. I wondered what had brought on that look, and went through the entire book myself, for the first time — and found a picture of the Dalai Lama. I learned a lot in that moment. Talking about him might put an end to our film. Even worse, it would put their lives at risk. So I just have to keep these ruminations to myself.

The fire on the mandala is now just a pile of smouldering ashes. The villagers and relatives are beginning to gather round it. A young man, impatient, scoops up a handful of ashes, but they are too hot and he drops them quickly. The fire-tender rakes them over to cool them down. Mila is taking off his headdress and his robe. Everyone is now bending down, and putting the cooled ashes in plastic bags, folded newspapers; one woman puts some in her apron. I ask Mila why they want the ashes. ‘They will keep them in their homes or spread them on their fields to bring luck and protection.’

‘What will happen now?’ I ask Mila.

At the end of a year, he says, the family will ask a high lama to divine what has become of her soul. Enlightenment is one possibility — a rare one; then she will be alongside all the Buddhas and other enlightened beings. Or maybe she will be reborn as a human among their relatives, the next best thing.

I hope the lama will give them the answer they have prayed for.

‘We'll be happy either way,’ Mila says.