Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [31]
“Don’t people go to the hospital in Pema Gatshel?” I ask.
“Mmm, they’d almost always go to a lama first, because illness is usually seen as having a spiritual cause. If the lama is unable to do anything they might go to the hospital, but by then it’s often too late, and if the person dies in the hospital, people blame the foreign medicine.”
“Is traditional Bhutanese medicine herbal?”
“Some of it is,” Jane says. “But most of the treatment here consists of particular prayers and pujas. They also do a couple of other things, like blood-letting. Tiny incisions are made at a certain place on the body. The worst thing I’ve ever seen was the searing. I didn’t actually see it, only the scars on Pema. They burn the skin with a heated metal rod.” She draws thick rectangles on her arm with her thumb and forefinger to show me.
She tells me about another treatment which Pema underwent for her chronic stomach pain. After some prayers, she said, Jangchuk had taken a cow’s horn with a hole in the tip and applied the base to Pema’s stomach. He sucked on the tip and then lifted the horn—there on Pema’s stomach was a black clot, which Jangchuk hastily threw out. Jane said he hadn’t made an incision; she had been watching carefully, and there was no sign of bleeding. “What was it, do you think?” I ask. Jane shrugs. “I don’t know. Jangchuk said it was the thing that was making her sick, and sure enough, she got better shortly afterward.”
I do not answer. I am thinking about magician’s techniques, sleight-of-hand, a false-bottomed horn. “Do you think it could have been a trick?” I ask Jane.
She says she considered this, but why would he trick his own wife?
“Maybe it was psychological,” I said. “A placebo.”
But Jane shakes her head. “No,” she says. “Jangchuk believes in his medicine. You know, in the beginning, people would tell me so-and-so was sick because he’d seen a ghost or a black snake, or he hadn’t made an offering to his guardian deity, and I’d just shake my head. But now, I’m not so sure.”
“But do you believe that people really get sick because they’ve seen a ghost?” I ask.
“I can’t say anymore. So many things happen here that you just can’t explain, and I don’t know enough of the language to understand the whole picture. I ask the older students but I think a lot gets lost in the translation. They say ‘ghost’ or ‘black magic’ but who knows exactly what that means? We’re seeing just the tip of a whole belief system. Faith makes things real.”
“But only psychologically,” I say. “Not physically real, right?”
“With ghosts and black magic, what’s the difference?”
I watch her soap and pound her clothes on the rock, wring them out and drop them into her bucket. Laughter floats down from the groups of other women washing their clothes upstream. We climb back up to the main path. Jane goes home to hang up her clothes, and I go to the temple, where Jane says there will be a puja, a religious ceremony, held regularly in honor of Guru Rimpoché.
The temple is surrounded by a stone wall. In the flagstone courtyard, prayer flags hang limply in the warm air. The whitewashed walls of the main building taper slightly as they rise to the gently pitched roof. Around the top, under the eaves, is the broad band of dark red paint that indicates a religious structure. Inside, under the window where the light falls in, men wearing maroon scarves over their ghos sit in a row, their musical instruments in front of them: bronze and silver horns, some very long, a drum held upright on a carved wooden handle, cymbals, a bell. Prayer books, consisting of long narrow sheets of unbound paper between thin wooden covers, lie open in front of them. I remember to take off my shoes and stand hesitantly in the doorway until Jangchuk sees me and gestures for