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By Root 449 0

ma’am, isn’t that why it is so beautiful in the first place? If everything was the same forever, well, we can’t even imagine that,” one student says. I think of Keat’s Grecian Urn, frozen perfection, and agree. He is a slight young man, with a quiet, reflective face and a brush cut. His name is Nima, which means “sun,” and he has a smile that lights up a room. I ask him about the practices of tantric Buddhism, how they seem to contradict the Buddha’s teachings against superstition and empty ritual. He says that the lamas know the real meaning behind the rituals. “We know only the simple meaning. Like when we are filling the water cups on the altar, we must not spill one drop because we say it will draw the demons. But actually, miss, we aren’t supposed to spill one drop because we are supposed to be doing it carefully, and if we aren’t concentrating, then we aren’t doing it right. So maybe the people couldn’t understand this, and the lamas tried to think of a way they would remember, so they made up the story about the demons coming.”

“So you don’t believe in demons,” I say.

“No, miss, I am believing. We just can’t say about them, so it is better to believe, isn’t it?”

There is a lot of this in the students, this preference for both/and over my insistence on either/or. Either the Buddha said there is no God and therefore Buddhism is not theistic, and therefore tantric Buddhism with its pantheon of deities is a contradiction of the original school of thought, or there are gods and therefore there is no contradiction. It is not so for the students. Yes, they say, the Buddha said he was not a god, and at the same time we worship him as a god, and there are many other gods as well, and there is no contradiction.

“Anyway,” Nima says, “my father says it’s not what you believe or say you believe that matters, it’s what you do.” Nima’s father is a gomchen in a village three hours walk from Tashigang. He brings my questions to his father when he goes home and carries the answers carefully back to me. “Like for example, you must be knowing that in Buddhism we say all beings were our mothers in our past lives.”

This is the rationale behind treating all beings with loving-kindness. It is why you should not kill any sentient being, even an insect. In our millions and billions of past lives, every being was at one time our mother. “Yes, I’ve read this,” I tell Nima. “But I don’t know if I believe it literally.”

Nima says, “You see, miss, what matters is not what you believe but what you do. The important thing is whether you treat all beings the way you treat your mother. With that much love and respect. Of course, for we Bhutanese, it is best to believe and do. But if you believe and don’t do, then the belief is nothing.”

Nima visits regularly, along with his roommates, Arun, a tall, emaciated southern Bhutanese who wants to be a doctor, and Wangdi, short and sturdy and almost irritatingly cheerful. I try to learn the subtle tonal differences between a “no-thank-you” that really means “no” and one that means “yes but I’m being polite.” Often I resort to asking, “Is that a Bhutanese no?” They are so tactful that I have to learn to read the most minute indicators. Nima winces slightly when I flip a spoonful of sugar into his cup backhandedly but says nothing. “What is it, Nima?” I ask.

“Nothing, miss.”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No, miss ...” He clears his throat and runs his hand across his shorn head. “Actually, miss, in Bhutan, we never pour anything in that backward way unless someone in the house has died. That is how we serve the dead.”

During these visits, I learn not to whistle inside someone’s house (it may call in spirits) or step over religious books. I learn to flick a drop of tea from a full cup before I drink as an offering to hungry ghosts, whose excessive desire in previous lives has left them wandering in a realm of perpetual lack and longing; their stomachs are grotesquely swollen with hunger and thirst but their throats are knotted up. I learn to eat rice like the Bhutanese do, with my right hand, using