So Close to Heaven by Barbara Crossette

Author:Barbara Crossette
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307801906
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-19T20:00:00+00:00

IN DISCUSSING theology, Khenpo Rigzin and Ngawang Tenzing Zangpo both dared to venture the opinion that because of the political nature of the Tibetan exile movement, the Dalai Lama’s base in the northern Indian mountain town of Dharamsala, harder to get to than Kathmandu, is no longer a universally accepted center of the Tibetan Buddhist universe in scholarly and spiritual terms. The Dalai Lama is a Gelugpa reincarnate, and much of the activity in Kathmandu is associated with other Buddhist orders, but that is not the issue. “His Holiness has one foot in the dharma and one in politics,” Khenpo Rigzin said. “He can’t move on either side. We Tibetans have to be militant, but I don’t believe my religion should bring me into politics. The political activity has weakened the Dalai Lama as a religious teacher.”

Himalayan Buddhist lamas and abbots are now free to return to Tibet, where most of them were born or studied, and many are making the spiritual journey. They help restore monastic links and sometimes support the rebuilding of shattered gompas. His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche was among those who returned to Tibet in peace in the 1980s. He led an international campaign to restore the original Shechen monastery in Kham, in eastern Tibet, one of the six leading Nyingmapa centers. The monastery, where the rinpoche had gone as an incarnate tulku at the age of eleven, was ruined like many others in China’s Cultural Revolution. Such a trip for the Dalai Lama would be all but impossible short of a significant change of heart in Beijing. And so Dharamsala grows ever more remote from the Tibetan Buddhist mainstream.

Robert Thurman, a Columbia University Buddhist scholar who was ordained as a monk in his youth, agrees that Tibetan Buddhists are making a big impact on Nepal in both economic and religious spheres, though he deplores the damage the chemical dyes of the Tibetan carpet industry, now Nepal’s largest foreign-currency earner, have done to the environment of the Kathmandu Valley. Buddhists should be protectors of nature, he says. But Thurman, who has known the Dalai Lama for many years, gave a sympathetic accounting of the exile leader’s predicament when we met in Bumthang, in Bhutan.

“His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the only one who has had to combine intellectual and religious leadership with responsibility for a community,” he said. “He had to oversee the setting up of a curriculum for schoolchildren in exile that would give them both some preparation for the modern world and would restore their culture; give them some sense of pride in a situation where they had nothing. They literally came out of Tibet in rags, and barely survived. Many family members died in the exodus. And so that experience has made His Holiness very practical and very firm about certain things. He has constructed large monasteries. He also supported technical education and innovation. He’s had to really think through a lot of these things. I don’t think he’s done a perfect job, and I don’t think he thinks he’s done a perfect job.

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