Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [120]
I feel that I have changed and changed and changed, like Ulysses’s ship changed one part at a time until every part had been replaced. It seems strange that after two years, everyone here is still talking about the same things, this aunt still not talking to that niece, that niece still saving up for a Corvette, cousin Bill and his wife are thinking about going to this new beach they opened up in Florida, someplace different, we went out to that new mall they got in Edmonton, the world’s biggest mall, they got everything under the sun in there, hotels, swimming pools, skating rink, you name it they got it, Mary got married and you shoulda seen her dress, cost her somewhere up around four thousand dollars, the whole wedding must have set them back fifteen, twenty thousand but what the hey, his old man’s loaded.
I tell people that I have become a Buddhist, and the responses are mixed. A few friends express concern, wondering if I am not taking this Bhutan thing a little too far; my brother is interested, and borrows my Dharma books; my parents are accepting, although my mother looks a little sad. My grandfather, however, is hostile to the idea. “You better not become a Buddhist,” he says whenever the topic of religion comes up.
“It’s more a philosophy than a religion,” I tell him. “It has the same ethical rules as Christianity. It’s not as foreign as you might think.”
He says he doesn’t want to hear about it.
People complain endlessly. The government this and the government that, the cost of everything, inflation, unemployment, taxes. Five minutes ago, they were telling me how lucky we are to have been born here, we have so much, we should be grateful, but they are not. What would it take to make you happy, I want to ask, but I think they do not know. A small dose of Buddhism would go a long way here.
A friend tells me how awful his mother is, she just doesn’t understand him, she doesn’t try to communicate with him. She always wants something from him that he just can’t give. She never hugs him. “But your mother is seventy,” I say. “She’s from a whole other generation. They didn’t hug back then.”
No, that’s not it, he says. It’s not that she doesn’t love him, it’s not that she abused him or mistreated him, it’s not that she was an alcoholic or anything like that. Then what is it? I ask. I am seeing it from the Bhutanese point of view: your mother raises you, she does her best, she’s not perfect but it’s hard to raise a child, and her mistakes arise out of the same ignorance that yours do. But this sounds hopelessly archaic and wrong when I say it, and my friend looks at me oddly and changes the subject.
I am shocked at the sheer number of claims and trivial objections and why-should-I’s. Why should I give up a whole Saturday afternoon to help her move when she can hire movers. Why should I look after his cat. Why should I give her half of the furniture. In Bhutan, I often felt frustrated by the absence of questioning, and constrained by the strong social mores. In Bhutan, you should because everyone else does. You should because that’s the way it has always been done. You should because if you don’t, you will be criticized, perhaps ostracized, and ostracism is dangerous in a village. Here, I feel equally frustrated by the whining and the self-absorption. I can see the advantages of the mind-set in Bhutan, the cohesiveness it generates, the social security net, and the disadvantages as well, the fear of critical questioning, the rigidity that stifles creativity.
It is the same with privacy. It is a relief in some ways to walk down Yonge Street thinking, “Not a single person here knows who I am and no one will ask