Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [17]
We stop in the town of Tongsa, dominated by Tongsa Dzong, a massive, magnificent fortress. Rita takes us to a restaurant she knows, where the proprietor, a grave and beautiful Tibetan woman, leads us into the warm kitchen overlooking the dzong. We sip hot tea, studying the temple roofs and towers of the dzong, the ladder steps and turrets, the golden spires. Sasha makes a quick sketch. Once again, I have the feeling that I am an aberration in the face of something immense and very old. “The land that time forgot,” I say but Lorna makes a face. “The last Shangri-La. That’s starting to bug me,” she says.
“But it does seem like that,” I say. “Like all those stories about stepping backwards in time.”
She chews the inside of her lip. “I just think if I lived here, I’d hate to have a bunch of foreigners telling me this was Shangri-La. Especially if they came from a nice cushy life in a wealthy country.”
In late afternoon, we come over a pass into the Bumthang valley in central Bhutan, wide and gentle, full of pale gold grass and surrounded by dark pine-covered slopes. The Swiss Guest House, which Rita has promised will have pine-paneled rooms, wood-burning stoves called bukharis, a hot shower, and toast for breakfast, is full, so we stay instead at a tourist hotel, where the cabins have bukharis but no wood to burn in them, and the taps in the bathroom remain disappointingly dry after much-promising gurgling.
Rita corrects our pronunciation of Bumthang. “Bum—thang!” she drawls, laughing. “What is that, a disorder of the backside?” Bumthang, pronounced boom-tahng, is also called Jakar, which means place of the white bird. Jakar Dzong, looking stern and remote on a knoll above the town, started out as a monastery in the sixteenth century. Construction of the building had already begun at a different site when a white bird was seen circling the knoll. This was taken as an omen, and the monastery was moved. The valleys of Bumthang, Rita tells us at dinner, are considered very holy, full of monasteries and temples and pilgrimage places. No animals may be slaughtered in the valley, and smoking is banned. This is where Padmasambhava, also known as Guru Rimpoché, arrived in the eighth century to help a king who had fallen gravely ill after offending a local deity. Through meditation, Guru Rimpoché subdued the deity, turning it into a fierce protector of the Dharma, and the king was restored to health. The cave where Guru Rimpoché meditated still bears the imprint of his body. Rita says that Guru Rimpoché is worshiped in Tibet and Bhutan as the second Buddha. “The Buddha apparently predicted he would return to teach a more evolved form of Buddhism,” she says. “Guru Rimpoché is seen as that incarnation, and any place where he meditated is considered extremely sacred.”
Bumthang is also the birthplace of the terton Pema Lingpa, who dove into a lake in the next valley with a burning lamp and emerged with religious treasures and the lamp still lit. I want to hear more about the hidden treasures, but this is all Rita knows: that terma, religious treasures—scriptures, scrolls, statues, ritual objects—were hidden by Guru Rimpoché, to be discovered centuries later by tertons, treasure-finders. Another thing on the List of Things to Look Up.
We are woken in the early morning by the rusty call of crows. The sun has not yet risen over the ridge, and a cold mist hangs over the valley. The dzong of the white bird lies in shadow. It looks like the Bhutan of long, long ago, I think, remembering Rita’s history lessons. An older, colder, forbidding Bhutan. Our breath makes frosty clouds as we shiver