Israelis in India for 'the right not go insane'

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Unknown faces of Tibet

Israelis in India for 'the right not go insane'

"...Ofer, who is here, so he says, trying to forget Operation

Defensive Shield (an Israeli army operation in Jenin in 2002). "The

army damages people," he says. "Who wants to hit an old woman? We

didn't force her to get up. But a terrorist was hiding behind her,

and as we were leaving he jumped out and shot my friend to death.

That's why I'm in India," he says sadly. "Maybe that's why we're all

in India." `The right not to go insane'

 

By Micha Odenheimer

The monsters

After seeing the Dalai Lama moving with the clumsy grace of an

elephant, his kindly, avuncular face bending toward the crowd with

an expression of pure benevolence, and hearing his deep, mellifluous

voice explain the purpose of Mahayana Buddhism - to bring all

sentient beings to enlightenment and liberation - the monsters in

the Tibetan Buddhist temples come as sort of a surprise. Ceramic

faces frozen into expressions of horrible rage, fangs extending from

wide-open mouths, rows of orange skulls strung like a garland across

grotesque heads, huge, weapon-like sexual organs. These are the most

frightening idols one can imagine. The paintings on the walls of the

temples are no less gruesome. Monsters eat the entrails of a doomed,

screaming man. A huge eagle flies away carrying a man's eyes in his

beak. Only if you look carefully, amid all the horrors, can you see

the image of a man meditating in a cave crusted with snow, an eye of

calm at the center of a storm of cruelty.

 

"This is the protector of the monastery," explains an elderly monk

in a dark room in the monastery that lies high above the village of

Disket in the remote Nubra Valley region of Ladakh. He has opened

the room just for us, and he is motioning toward a particularly

frightening statue, whose giant white head has the face of a

deranged clown. "A few hundred years ago, a Muslim army tried to

conquer the region. The commander came up here to the monastery and

immediately fell down dead. The monks threw the body into the river,

but it kept mysteriously reappearing in the monastery. Finally, one

of the monks cut off the commander's head and placed it in the arms

of the idol. After that the body stopped returning."

 

My eyes now adjusted to the dark, I stare at the idol's large hands.

Still cradled between them like a toy, stuck now to the hands by the

accumulated residue of centuries, is the commander's skull.

 

Counter-clockwise prohibition

 

One thing that is strictly forbidden in the world of Tibetan

Buddhism is to turn the prayer wheels counterclockwise. The wheels,

placed strategically at street corners, at the entrance to

monasteries, or over a rushing stream, contain a prayer that is

activated when they are turned - by hand, by a waterwheel, or

through the force of hot air emerging from a perpetually lit oil

lamp. Not until we meet Tshering Dorje in Keylong, the regional

capital of the Lahaul district, do we understand why the

counterclockwise direction is taboo.

 

When Mr. Dorje was 12 years old, his parents sent him to a famous

monastery in western Tibet, 20 days' journey from home. There he was

expected to become a high-ranking lama, filling a seat that his

family, he tells us, had held for seven generations. When he was 18

years old, the systematic Chinese attacks on Tibetan monasteries

began, and his teachers were arrested or killed. Tshering returned

home to India. Now close to 70, his gray eyes tinged with a cloudy

blue, he is obsessed, not with the fate of Tibetan Buddhism, but

with the tribal religion called "Bon" that it defeated and

incorporated. The events of his life, including the Chinese invasion

of Tibet, have sent him searching for origins. "The Bon religion

that came before Buddhism was basically a form of shamanism. It is

still alive in the villages here." For the Bon, Tshering tells us,

counter-clockwise held magical power, so the Buddhists made sure to

reverse directions.

 

Tshering is an intellectual - he has several volumes of the Talmud

in his extensive library - who had a long career with the Indian

civil service. But in the last decade or so he has devoted himself

to befriending and investigating the male and female "oracles," in

the area near his ancestral home. Trained from the time they are

children, the oracles enter trance states in which they are

possessed by the gods of trees, waterfalls or mountains. Dancing

wildly, often twirling unbearably heavy objects, sometimes piercing

their faces and necks with metal pins, they foretell the future and

cure the illnesses of the villagers in attendance. "When they awaken

from the trance," Tshering tells us, "the oracles remember nothing."

 

"And these oracles are Buddhist?" I ask.

 

"No, they are not Buddhist," Tshering answers. "The villagers who

believe in them may be Buddhist, but classic Buddhist texts

absolutely forbid this kind of thing."

 

"But the Dalai Lama has oracles as well," I remark.

 

"State oracles!" Tshering answers, cutting the air with his hand for

emphasis. "He can't move a single step without consulting them."

 

"So Tibetan Buddhism is actually part shamanism?" I ask.

 

"Fifty percent," Tshering answers. "At least 50 percent!"

 

Roads and bridges

 

Thirty or 40 million years ago, the Indian subcontinent was still an

island floating in the sea, like Australia. When it crashed into

Asia, the Himalayas were formed, pushed upward by the impact. During

successive ice ages over the last million or so years, glaciers

ground and cut the mountains, scooping and carving the stone,

exposing layers of bent and colored rock, stripping the mountains

naked and brilliantly adorning them at one and the same time. Across

this Himalayan bridge, Buddhism penetrated to Tibet from India in

the seventh century.

 

Tibetan Buddhism quickly spread in numerous directions, including

south and west into Ladakh, Lahaul, Spiti and Kinnaur - tiny,

continuously threatened Himalayan kingdoms that are now part of

India. Until the early 1990s, many of these areas, which form part

of India's often-tense border with China, were closed to foreigners,

and there are still places where the official Indian relief maps

suddenly go blank, with etchings of mountain ranges and lakes are

replaced by the single word: "restricted." Ladakh also borders

Pakistan to the west. In 1999 the Pakistani army infiltrated glacial

outposts high above the Nubra Valley that the Indian army had

abandoned for the winter. More than 5,000 combatants were killed

during the Kargil war that erupted after the snows melted in June;

aided by Ladakhi scouts at home in the forbidding high-altitude

terrain, the Indian air force pummeled the Pakistani army into

retreat.

 

The roads to Ladakh, Spiti, Lahaul and Kinnaur are not meant for

those who fear heights. They hug the edge of mountains; on one side,

there is always an abyss. Open only for five months of the year

because of the heavy snowfall, the sections made of asphalt crack

during the freezing winters. Crews of dark-skinned workers, from the

poorest Indian state, Bihar, can be seen camping by the road every

few kilometers, heating and spreading tar, working under the

supervision of the Indian army, which has a vital interest in

keeping the roads clear.

 

"Are you happy to be working here?" I ask one crew who are on lunch

break, eating rice with lentils.

 

"It's a good deal," they tell me. "We earn 100 rupees [NIS 10

shekels] a day - twice as much as at home."

 

Every hundred kilometers or so, at the top of a pass or the entrance

to a new district, soldiers write the names and passport numbers of

travelers passing through in huge official notebooks. In the middle

of the night, a middle-aged soldier with a paunch and three days'

growth of beard, working by the light of a single candle, asks me a

question to which I have a hard time formulating an adequate reply,

perhaps because of the hint of bitterness clouding his voice.

 

"Most of the people traveling here are Israelis 22 years old or so.

How do they have the time? Don't they have to work at all?"

 

Kibbutz India

 

Israelis, indeed, are everywhere. "India is like a kibbutz," says

Naomi Harpaz, an Israeli woman old enough to remember the days of

the European kibbutz volunteers who spent a lot of time seemingly

idle, smoking Lebanese hash and listening to Led Zeppelin in the

huts where they lived, duly segregated from the kibbutz

teenagers. "Except all the volunteers are Israeli."

 

And indeed many of the Israelis seem to be doing as little as

possible while in India, playing backgammon, smoking charas, trading

insights about guest houses in the Himalayan towns on the Israeli

route to Dharamshala, Manali, Leh, Kosul and Rishikesh, and calling

home to Netanya or Rishon to reassure their parents at reasonable

intervals. But there are still enough Israelis around so that the

most energetic travelers we meet, the most

 

adventurous, daring and learned, are also Israeli: Yahel, a mountain

climber who speaks Hindi and has been traveling through India for

six years on a motorcycle; Yaki, who has been studying Tibetan for

the past three years and has been asked to accompany a famous Lama

to Australia; and Gila, a fiery, vigorous woman in her forties who

is translating the Dalai Lama's lectures into Hebrew, but says that

she is hard-pressed to find the Hebrew equivalent of "mindfulness."

 

We are unusual for Israeli travelers: four families, six adults and

12 children ranging in age from 7 to 16, making our way together

through the mountains. When we arrive at Old Manali, where nearly

every store has signs in Hebrew, and Steakiyat Itzik Hagadol

competes with Falafel Yehuda me'Goa, the kids pour into Ha'ayin

Hashlishit, a restaurant that serves shakshuka, labaneh and hummus,

whose young Indian owner has an Israeli girlfriend and where Meir

Ariel tapes are played over and over again, until the Nepali waiter

complains to me that he is sick of Israeli music.

 

Outside Ha'ayin, late one night, the teenagers meet Ofer, who is

here, so he says, trying to forget Operation Defensive Shield (an

Israeli army operation in Jenin in 2002). "The army damages people,"

he says. "Who wants to hit an old woman? We didn't force her to get

up. But a terrorist was hiding behind her, and as we were leaving he

jumped out and shot my friend to death. That's why I'm in India," he

says sadly. "Maybe that's why we're all in India."

 

`The right not to go insane'

 

In Dharamshala, I meet Lhasang Tsering, mustachioed, eloquent, the

proprietor of the Bookworm bookshop and a leading Tibetan politician

and intellectual, who introduces himself to me, with a touch of

irony, as the Dalai Lama's "opposition." He is heartbroken, he says,

about what is going on in Tibet, and furious at the Dalai Lama's

policy of nonviolence. The leader's misplaced trust in the Chinese,

his retreat from the demand for Tibetan independence to a quest for

autonomy and peaceful coexistence with the Chinese are wrong, all

wrong. What tortures Lhasang the most is that there is still a slim

window of time left in which to change things. The Chinese settlers

who are being poured into Tibet by the government haven't really

taken root there. The Three Gorges Dam, a giant hydroelectric

project the Chinese are building, and which will change the

ecosystem of the Tibetan plateau, is not yet completed.

 

A plump, white-haired American woman who is searching the bookstore

for the three-volume guidebook of rules for Tibetan nuns is shocked

by the vehemence of the proprietor's critique of the Dalai

Lama. "Don't give up," she chides him softly, her face a mask of

piety, as if the fate of his soul were in danger.

 

"Don't give up?" Lhasang is practically screaming now. "Tell him not

to give up!"

 

Born in Tibet, Lhasang and his family escaped to India in the early

1960s. When he was 18, in the early 1970s, he heard about the

Tibetan resistance fighters in the Mustang region of the Tibet-Nepal

border, who had been trained by the CIA in Colorado for sabotage

missions in Tibet. He asked to join the fighters, and was sent for a

meeting with the Dalai Lama: "He practically jumped out of his seat

and raised his voice to me. `Do you think you alone can defeat the

Chinese?' he asked me. But he eventually gave me his permission."

 

In 1973, Henry Kissinger's historic visit to China resulted in a

withdrawal of U.S. support for the Tibetans, and a Nepali crackdown

on the Tibetan guerrillas. The Dalai Lama sent a taped message to

the fighters - in order, Lhasang says, that there would be no

mistaking his distinctive voice - ordering them to lay down their

arms. "Commanders and some of the fighters committed suicide after

hearing that tape. What did they have to live for anymore?"

 

Lhasang believes that there is an inherent contradiction in a

religious leader, like the Dalai Lama, being entrusted with the

political future of the nation. "The Dharma [a Buddhist's spiritual

path] is about freedom from the world. Politics is about freedom in

the world," he says. "The Dharma will survive," he declares

dramatically, "but Tibet is in mortal danger. This life, I am

devoting to Tibet. But it's not only about Tibet," he adds.

 

If you include India, China and Southeast Asia, Lhasang argues, it

means that half the world's population is hostage to the conflicts

that will surely develop along the Indian border with China. "An

independent Tibet could be a buffer zone between the two countries.

Right now it is quiet, but the Chinese see themselves as the

eventual rulers of the world. And the dams they are building are

changing weather patterns in all of India. Tibet is the roof of the

world, and the Chinese are making a hole in it."

 

Although in his fifties, Lhasang says he is ready to drop everything

and fight once more. "My home, this bookshop - it's all in my wife's

name. Why do I still have hope? I am exercising my final right: the

right not to go insane."

 

Global warming

 

Dolka and Tinless, two petite 20-year-old Ladakhis in jeans, take us

on a trek across 4,000-meter-high mountain passes. It takes us five

hours of sweat and muscle burn to climb each pass, but the local

students walk over them to high school every day, returning home in

the evening. The path is yellow dust, the mountains are blue, ash

gray, orange, red. At night we sleep in villages - islands of

luxuriant green, with streams pouring down from glaciers that feed

water-operated mills for crushing barley into flour, as well as

prayer wheels spinning enlightenment for all sentient beings.

Ladakh, like Spiti and Lahaul, is a desert with water, as much as

anyone might need.

 

But even that may be changing. Motti Stein, from the geology

department at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says that the glaciers

are shrinking rapidly, probably because of global warming caused by

cars and industry, and that when the water dries up, possibly in 100

years or so, the villages will no longer survive.

 

The concerns of Dolka and Tinless are more immediate. They belong to

a student's organization that is fighting to change the school

system in Ladakh. Officially part of the larger state of Jammu and

Kashmir, Ladakhi schoolchildren are taught in Urdu instead of

Ladakhi. The textbooks make no mention of the things the Ladakhi

children are familiar with: yaks, barley, Buddhism or the Ladakhi

kitchen, with its orderly rows of copper pots, its urns for churning

butter. Teachers from Kashmir beat the students, they say, and imply

that they are incapable of learning because Ladakhis are stupid.

According to the young women, it is nearly impossible for Ladakhis

to pass the matriculation exams the Indian government requires after

10th grade.

 

"So what do the boys do?" I ask.

 

"After the Kargil war," they say, "the Ladakhis gained respect as

fighters. Now all the Ladakhi boys are in the Indian army."

 

And, in fact, in the villages, many of the women are living alone -

their husbands are in the army or the police, or driving a Jeep for

tourists - or, as in the case of Tinless's elder sister, they are

widowed. She works the fields by herself, and also attends to a tiny

Buddhist temple in a room off the courtyard of her home. In the

early morning, she lights butter lamps on the altar and sweeps the

temple clean.

 

The village of Mudh, population 120, is the last outpost in the Pin

Valley district of the Spiti region. From here, it is a four-day

walk across a high mountain pass to the next village. In the winter,

snow leopards can be seen as they hunt ibex or, if they are daring

and desperate, one of the yaks that are more numerous here than

people. "If a leopard doesn't manage to break the yak's neck on the

first try," our host tells us, "then the yak has the advantage." The

woman of the house we are staying in here have a different problem

then the women we met in Ladakh: multiple husbands. We count two

moving through the house simultaneously. Although in Ladakh, and

among Tibetan refugees, the practice is dying out, here in Spiti,

polyandry - the opposite of polygamy - is very much alive. When an

elder brother marries, his wife automatically becomes the de facto

bride of all his younger brothers. In a region with sparse arable

land, this is a method for ensuring that farms are not subdivided

every generation, and also a way to keep the population down.

 

Do people know which of the brothers is the father of each

child? "The woman may know," I am told, "but this is a closely

guarded secret, the secret that keeps everything together." And what

about the extra women? Who do they marry? "If there are extra female

children, perhaps they are consecrated as nuns."

 

Another guest house, where part of our 18-member traveling party is

staying, is run by a smiling middle-aged woman with creases of

infinite patience that line her face: she is a nun, and the guest

house belongs to her brother, a policeman in Spiti's capital, Kaza.

In addition to the guest-house, she is charged with taking care of a

small temple built on a hill above the village. Two bus drivers,

Indian Hindus from Kullu, are sleeping at the guest house. Like

drivers everywhere, they like to talk about sex.

 

"Yes, she is a nun, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have sex. It

just means it is forbidden for her to get pregnant. I don't mean her

specifically, but in these villages, sex is quite free. I mean, not

with outsiders, but among themselves."

 

His friend smiles, takes issue. "Not only among themselves," he

says. "At least not always."

 

"And what about your children?" I ask the host in my guest

house. "Will any of them become monks or nuns?"

 

"Perhaps our middle daughter, the 12-year-old. She is talented at

school and has been recommended by her principal."

 

"And who will decide?"

 

"The final decision? That is in the hands of the rinpoche."

 

The rinpoche and the rabbi

 

The rinpoche is the head of the monastery, the religious leader of

the villages in his region, and he is nearly always, like the 14th

Dalai Lama, believed to be the incarnation of the last religious

leader to have held his post. The incarnate lamas are thought to

have special powers: They are healers, rainmakers, name-givers, and

they even decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether the dead of their

congregation will be buried, burned, cast into the river or placed

on a mountain top to be eaten by animals.

 

Tenzin Kalsang Rinchen is the rinpoche of the Key monastery, which

rises on a barren mountaintop high above Kaza, the capital of Spiti.

At the age of four, he was discovered by the search committee

appointed by the Dalai Lama, aided by official oracles, to look for

the 19th incarnation of Rinchen Zangpo, the "great translator" who

was born in 958 and is one of the most important personalities in

Tibetan Buddhist history. At the age of five, in 1966, Tenzin was

enthroned as the rinpoche of Key. In the early 1990s, Tenzin was

appointed head of the search committee to locate the new incarnation

of the Panchen Lama, the Tibetan leader second in importance only to

the Dalai Lama himself. The Chinese later kidnapped the child they

found and consecrated. His whereabouts and those of his family are

still a mystery.

 

Visiting the Key monastery, we ask if we can meet the rinpoche, and

we are surprised: He readily agrees. We fill the long room where he

sits on a wooden chair elevated on a platform - 13 of us, without

the smallest of the children. He is handsome, humble, fluent in

English and - part of his charm - appears to be as interested in us

as we are in him, willing to talk to everybody, including the

children, as equals. "You have some problems in Israel ... Some

Europeans told me the land belongs to the Palestinians. Is it so?"

 

"You see," we tell him, "we were in exile for a long time. Like the

Tibetans. There are many Arab Islamic countries. But we have only

one place. The question is whether the Arab Muslims are willing to

allow another people and religion to live and have political freedom

in the Middle East."

 

"Yes," he assents. "We have to be tolerant of all religions, but

Islam - it seems to be a problem today. We Buddhists experience it

in Ladakh, with the Kashmiris."

 

Shira, 16 years old, asks him the question we all want to ask. "Do

you really feel that you are the 19th reincarnation of somebody?"

 

He smiles, pauses for a moment, and answers: "I don't know about all

19. But I do feel that I am the incarnation of the previous

rinpoche. I remember when I was a child recognizing his friends,

experiencing many different memories."

 

"And you still remember?"

 

"No, not anymore. But I remember having remembered."

 

"And do you try to have the same ideas and make the same decisions

that the previous rinpoche would have, in your understanding?"

 

"No. Decisions must be made according to circumstances. Now there

are new circumstances."

 

"What I want to know," asks Natan, also 16, "is about all the

monsters, the frightening statues and pictures you have. If Buddhism

is supposed to be about peace, about enlightenment, why so many

scary things."

 

"Ah," he remarks, reminding himself. "You don't have idols. Things

are not as they seem. These frightening objects represent our

innermost fears. When we meditate on them, we lose our fears. You

see, we don't believe in a creator god. We believe that our minds

create our own reality. Because if there is a creator, why did he

create the world, where there is so much suffering?"

 

"But life is not all suffering," someone in our group exclaims.

 

"No," the rinpoche agrees. "Not all suffering."

 

Another member of our group, an Orthodox rabbi, continues arguing

the merit of creation with the rinpoche. "You say that it would be

better if we were all enlightened beings, if we all had already

reached a far higher level of consciousness. But if 10,000 years

from now we all do achieve enlightenment, won't it still be so

beautiful that we met each other today?"

 

The rinpoche is intrigued. "Today?" he repeats. "So beautiful?"

 

"Do you know the story of Pinocchio?" the rabbi asks.

 

"No," the rinpoche answers.

 

"It's about a wooden puppet that wants more than anything else to

become a real little boy," the rabbi says. "The way I understand

what the Jewish tradition is saying, God created the world in order

to allow us the chance to become more real."

 

The rinpoche nods his head, as two young monks enter the room to

tell him he is urgently needed somewhere else in the monastery. Like

the generous host he is, he allows us the last word.

 

"More real," he repeats, as if turning his supple, fearless mind

around the notion. "More real."

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