A Year in Tibet

I cannot think of anything to say that might comfort her. I leave without making my request. I decide I will just go to the burial, without the cameraman, and trust that she will not mind. If her husband took so little care of this life, perhaps he would not be too concerned about the next one.

When the day comes, I get up very early. I walk from the back of our house under a dark blue sky, past the racetrack and the government grain store, heading for a barren hill. It is about two hundred yards from the sky burial site, but I have brought a powerful pair of binoculars. The site is at a gentle height, standing on its own, surrounded on every side by low meandering hills. Phuntsog has told me that this makes it easy for vultures to see the smoke from his juniper twigs and to land. Aside from two simple shelters and a semicircle of large flat stones made shiny from use, the site is bare. The only colour I can make out is the maroon robe of a monk, sitting and meditating in one of the shelters. I am told that monks often choose such places for meditation: their being places of death helps them to conquer their fears, and to appreciate the impermanence of life.

Just as the sky begins to lighten, the body of the dead man is brought up. Two men carry it, and two others follow behind. Once the corpse is on the ground, the men circle it three times, and then they take a break in the shelter. They drink tea and chang and talk; I see that they are even laughing. After about thirty minutes, they re-emerge. One man lights a pile of juniper twigs and tsampa, the smoke wafting away. Phuntsog lays out his tools — a huge knife, a pair of hooks, and two hammers.

The body remains on the ground, face down, while Phuntsog begins cutting it into large pieces, which he hands to the other men. The men lay the flesh on the stones and, using the hammers, begin pounding it into a pulp. Watching them do this, I cannot imagine Tseten and Dondan looking on while it was done to their mother. However they might try to rationalise their emotions and think of what is good for the soul, this would be too much. Perhaps this is the real reason why close relatives are not allowed at the sky burial.

Suddenly I hear singing — a work song, cheerful and rhythmical. I look around to see where it is coming from. The men at the burial site have their backs to me, but one turns in my direction and I can see — it is them! They sing with gusto, as though they are bringing in a harvest, or working on a road gang. Have they forgotten this is a death? No, I realise, for them the death is not the point. The death has already happened; they are charged now with helping the soul on its journey.

When they have finished, Phuntsog rolls some of the flesh into a ball, and walks towards the open space. I can hear him calling ‘Come, come!’ His deep voice echoes in the air, as he looks up at the clouds. Then he drops the ball on the ground. Everyone looks skyward, hoping for a sign of the vultures. Twenty minutes pass. Phuntsog has warned me that it can take hours for the vultures to come, depending on the weather. Just as he is calling again, a single vulture appears. It circles the site several times, and then straightens its legs and lands. I watch as, with a last flap of its wings, it pounces on the ball — it has the whole of it to itself.

In what seems like no time at all, twenty or thirty more vultures appear in the sky. Their wingspan looks to be more than a metre across. I wonder if my body would be enough to feed even one of them. The men continue to rub their hands with tsampa and mix it with the flesh, handing it to Phuntsog, who lays it out for the vultures. In a flash the birds gobble everything down. There is relief on the men's faces. They believe that when the vultures eat the body quickly, without leaving anything behind, reincarnation will be swift too. The intestines are the last to go — perhaps because they are the richest part. Phuntsog has told me that once the vultures have eaten these, they will not take anything else. If the vultures do not finish the corpse — sometimes there are several bodies on a particular day — he will discuss this with the families, and then he will either burn what is left, or take it to the water. Everything must go, he says.

Phuntsog has also told me something else. Vultures have a secret, he claims: whatever they swallow, they leave nothing on the ground, not even their own waste. They defecate in the sky, thousands of metres up, and the waste is immediately dispersed by strong winds and currents. Even when they are dying, they will fly higher and higher, towards the sun, until the sun and wind take them to pieces, leaving no trace. Phuntsog says this is why no one has ever seen a vulture's corpse.

After everything has been consumed, Phuntsog cleans his equipment, wraps up his poles and ropes, and leaves with the others. The vultures are still on the slope, lingering. (‘Were they still hungry?’ I ask Phuntsog later. ‘Oh, sometimes they are just digesting. They are too heavy to fly.’) I sit down and wait.

The Chinese have always been appalled by the practice of sky burial. One of the last Ambans declared it to be ‘without morals and without reason, and cruel beyond words’. He tried to forbid it and demanded the Tibetans bury their dead as we do.

(#litres_trial_promo) It did not occur to him that the ritual might have practical origins. In the whole Tibetan area, less than 1 per cent of the land is arable, so burial in the ground is hardly practical. The cold winter lasts more than five months of the year, and during that time the earth is frozen. Digging is difficult, if not impossible, in many parts of Tibet. Also most Tibetans live on grassland, and they roam wherever there is water and grass. If they bury their dead, they will be leaving them behind.

But the rituals of death are deeply ingrained in a culture. For us Chinese, who have been so tied to the land for generations, a burial is seen as a way of returning to Mother Earth. Only then can the dead have their final rest. And for my grandmother, such a burial was an event to be prepared for well in advance. When she turned seventy, she announced to us all that she was ready to go and presented my parents with a list of items that she would require: a coffin, four sets of clothes for the four seasons, a house, a boat, a table and two chairs, a wardrobe, a number of animals and plenty of money. I was flabbergasted. How could we possibly afford these things? I remember asking my mother, who laughed and said, ‘Don't be silly. Grandmother's treasures will all be made of paper, except for the clothes.’

My father's response to all this surprised me even more. A staunch Communist, he was usually impatient with Grandmother's superstitious beliefs. Once he had caught her praying in the dark and shouted, ‘Your Buddha is not worth a dog's fart. Why don't you pray to Chairman Mao for a change?’ But this time, he simply said, ‘This is your grandmother's last wish. We should satisfy her.’

My grandmother lived to be ninety-four. For more than a decade, one fixture of my summer vacation was to help her air her burial clothes. We did this covertly, one outfit at a time, so that none of the neighbours would suspect us of being superstitious. My grandmother would remind me again and again to make sure that, when the time came, my mother dressed her in all four of the outfits while she was still breathing — otherwise, she would be going to the next world naked. Unfortunately, by the time my grandmother died, burial had been forbidden in China because of the population explosion and pressure on the land. Cremation was the order of the day. Although peasants could still get away with burying their beloved in the family plots, Party officials like my father would be severely punished for breaking the new decree. My father had always followed the Party's every command, but this time, he was in agony. He went missing for days and my mother later told me that he was out trying to find a way to transport my grandmother's body secretly to our home village. He did not succeed. The roads were bad, and the trip would have taken too long — the corpse might rot. So Grandmother's meticulous preparations went up in flames.

As I watch the last vulture flapping its wings and flying off, I stand up to leave. It is lifting itself further and further away, into the void. Is it taking the soul of the dead body with it? I wonder. As I walk back to the house, the scene of the sky burial plays over and over in my mind. I had expected something far more brutal, far bloodier. After having seen it for myself, I now understand why there is generally no family present. But for a dispassionate observer like myself, the matter-of-factness of the sky burial is hard to deny. There is something peaceful and dignified about it, and it produces no waste or pollution of any kind. By giving their bodies to the vultures, Tibetans are performing their last offering in this life. I remember what Phuntsog told me: ‘Giving is in Tibetans' nature, in life or in death. The vulture only eats dead things. We cannot let it go hungry while we bury or cremate our dead. That would be cruel.’ Whether or not the soul is going to a better place, sky burial does seem to me like a natural, and ecological, way to go.

THREE Journey to the Next Life (#ulink_ee95f334-ac9b-57d0-9f4d-c3406de6fc95)

TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS after the death of his mother, Tseten calls again. The family is preparing for a special fire ritual, the most elaborate they have performed so far. Do we want to film it?

‘Are you sure?’ I ask, cautiously. I am keen to film it, but I do not want to intrude. In the time since she passed away, I have often found myself thinking of Tseten's mother. Despite my own beliefs, I seem in some curious way to be growing concerned about the passage of her soul.

But Tseten assures me it will be all right.‘Mila has invited you,’ he says.

We set off immediately. As we approach the house, we see villagers arriving, carrying baskets of food or large jars of chang. One man struggles under the weight of a huge sack full of cowpats. Coming up the stairs by the stable, we find the Rikzins' upper courtyard packed; half the village seems to have turned up. Three shaven-headed nuns in maroon robes are arranging food on a long table: barley and barley flour, butter, sugar, tea, mustard seeds, rice, Chinese dates, spices, and quite a few other things that I don't recognise. Two more nuns are cleaning two five-foot long ceremonial horns. In a far corner of the yard, a couple of men are mixing a vast heap of tsampa with brown sugar to make tso (#litres_trial_promo), small cones of offerings. The heap gets bigger all the time, as new visitors add tsampa, sugar, and raisins they have brought with them. I watch a little girl who quietly waits her turn behind the adults. She holds a small bowl of tsampa in both hands, with a piece of yellow paper — a prayer for the dead, perhaps — tucked into the middle of it; when her turn comes, she tips it onto the heap.

Mila is standing in the centre of the courtyard. He looks calm and serene, like the rest of the family. Had I not known, I would not have suspected that he had just lost his wife. The only difference I notice is that he seems rather shabby, even dirty, his chin unshaven, the collar and the sleeves of his shirt shiny with grease. I have been told it is the custom for the family not to wash for forty-nine days after a death. He greets us warmly. He is wearing his usual outfit — a crimson sweater and brown vest — and his eyes are crinkling behind the pink plastic rims of his spectacles in the bright sun. He is watching as Tseten bends over a couple of pillow-sized mud bricks. Dondan is pouring sand from a sack. I ask Mila what they are doing. ‘We are making a mandala (#litres_trial_promo) for the ritual today,’ he says. He points to the small packets of coloured sand on the windowsill. I am surprised. I have seen the famous murals of mandalas in the Palkhor monastery — large, gorgeous murals meant to represent the cosmos. They are so intricate, so vivid, and yet also so ingenious. Are we thinking of the same thing? I check with Tseten. ‘You just wait.’

Although it is late October the sun is very strong, and Mila invites us to rest in the prayer room. There he introduces us to a young man, Tseten's cousin, who is making torma (#litres_trial_promo). I have often seen Tseten making them — they are little blocks made of tsampa and butter, some painted red, intended to represent both the peaceful and wrathful deities. The good deities will be thanked, praised, and put on the altar for the protection of the family; the bad deities are pacified and then left on the rooftop, at crossroads, or on the outskirts of the village, supposedly taking away with them any bad influences that might trouble the family.

In the midst of the torma is a reclining human figurine in red, which I assume embodies the deceased woman. Mila carries it and the finished torma to the altar table. He stands and stares at the altar for quite a while. I wonder what he is thinking. I know Mila believes that grieving will distract his wife from her rebirth, so is he trying not to be sad? When he sits down with us, I ask him. ‘Imagine you are caught in a storm,’ he tells me. ‘That is what it is like for the souls of the dead. Our tears would be like a hurricane; our cries would be like thunder. They would frighten the soul. It is best to stay calm.’

I look at Mila long and hard. Perhaps the next life is so important and he is so engrossed in ensuring his wife will have a good rebirth, he simply has no time for grieving. Or does absorption in the ritual give him a natural tranquillity?

I am just about to ask him more questions when he is called to the courtyard to supervise the preparations. I take the opportunity to peek into the next room. There, two nuns are busily refilling empty butter lamps. A huge pot of melted butter is bubbling away on an electric stove, and rows and rows of lamps glow in front of a statue of the Buddha of Infinite Light. The amount of work required to fill and refill all the lamps is daunting, but the nuns seem very happy doing it, chanting while they work.

‘Why so many lamps?’ I ask them.

‘To guide the soul in the bardo,’ one of the nuns, who is tall and striking, replies.

I ask her to tell me more. She shakes her head, insisting that she is not knowledgeable enough, that she may mislead me. But when I plead with her, she relents. She lists ten functions of the butter lamp; among other things, a butter lamp can help the eyes to see more clearly, illuminate the difference between kindness and evil, dispel the darkness of ignorance, help us to be reborn into a higher state of being, and help us to escape quickly from sadness. Quite a lot for a humble lamp.

But they had a disaster last night, she tells me sadly. A large lump of butter brought by one of the visitors was fake, made of solidified oil, and quite a few of the lamps did not burn at all. ‘Even the butter that people offer to the Buddha is often fake these days,’ she grumbles. She tells me that even if the fake butter burns, it makes a lot of smoke. It pollutes the air and darkens the old murals and statues in the monasteries. ‘The saddest part is that the pilgrims who buy it know it is fake because it is so cheap. But they do not want to pay more for real butter. Money is eating at their hearts. May they not go to hell in their next life for cheating,’ she says, sighing.

I sit down to help them, and as I refill the cups with butter, I can't help wondering about the cost: the Rikzins will burn hundreds of lamps, day and night, for forty-nine days. How much butter is that? And butter is only a part of it. Monks and nuns who come to the service have to be fed and paid; food and drink must be served to the relatives and villagers; large quantities of tsampa are used to make offerings. Much of the elaborate ritual is repeated every seven days to guide the soul, since it is supposed to experience death seven times. After the forty-nine days, Tseten and the family will go on pilgrimages to the most famous monasteries and temples to make sure the deities there recognise their mother's reincarnation should it appear in their domain. A death can push families into debt.

We have always been lectured in China about the wastefulness of Buddhism. There are endless lists of figures to bolster the message: the old Tibetan government spent 90 per cent of its income on religious activities, while its people led miserable lives; at the time of the liberation of Tibet in 1951, as many as a quarter of all Tibetan men were in monasteries, the highest ratio to the general population of any country; in the two hundred years from the mid-eighteenth century to 1951, Tibet's population increased by just over 100,000, virtually a standstill.

(#litres_trial_promo)

No money to invest in the economy, too little manpower on the land, not enough young people to drive society forward. Buddhism drained Tibet's wealth and was a recipe for paralysis.

Strangely, this Communist critique reads almost exactly like that of Austin Waddell, a British medical officer in the early twentieth century; he was just as scathing of the lamas:

They have induced the people to lavish all their wealth upon building and beautifying scores of temples, and filling them with idols; and through their power over the latter, the priests, as the sole mediators between God and man, are supposed to be able to drive away the hordes of evil spirits that are ever on the outlook to inflict on the poor Tibetan and his family disease, accident, or other misfortune.

(#litres_trial_promo)

A hundred years later, the same view of the dominance of religion and its impact on the old Tibet was voiced again by British historian, Charles Allen, if more mildly worded: ‘When a nation's gross domestic product is expressed largely in terms of prayer, meditation, study, pilgrimage and religious art, and its productive population is small, scattered and static, the final outcome can never be in doubt.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

The great 13

Dalai Lama did try to shake Tibet out of its rut early in the twentieth century. He introduced an Englishstyle school for the children of the aristocracy, and sought to modernise the army and reduce the power of the unruly monks. The monasteries, and the lamas who made up half the government, rose in unison to prevent any reform. More authority for the army, modern and ‘atheistic’ ideas, and more representative government — these would dent the monasteries' coffers, and break their hold on society. They prevailed. The army commander-in-chief, a favourite of the Dalai Lama, was sacked. Later the leading reformer, Lungshar, was imprisoned and had his eyes gouged out; he died shortly after. The English school was shut down, with the monasteries even threatening ‘to send their fierce fighting monks to kidnap and sexually abuse the students’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Football, which had become popular in Lhasa, was banned because it generated too much passion, and was dangerous to social and cultural stability. ‘Ironically, by trying to protect Tibet's cherished Buddhist values,’ says Melvyn Goldstein, the pre-eminent historian of modern Tibet, the conservative monasteries themselves made Tibet ‘unable to defend and preserve those very religious values from the Chinese Communists’.

(#litres_trial_promo)

I emerge from the room full of lamps into the sunny courtyard, and find Mila and Tseten totally immersed in the making of the mandala. They sit, bent low, holding pointed iron tubes filled with coloured minerals. By gently tapping the tubes, they let the colours fill in the drawings on the floor. It is painstaking work — one small slip with the coloured sand can ruin the whole thing. Their design is much smaller and simpler than the versions I saw in the monastery, but it is beautiful nonetheless. At its centre is a six-pointed red star enclosed within a blue circle. Around this is a circle coloured black and filled with gold dorje, the thunderbolt symbolising the power of the dharma (#litres_trial_promo) to destroy ignorance. The last and outermost circle is made up of brightly coloured flames.

Tseten and Dondan clear the space around the mandala and Yangdron and some of the villagers lay carpets around it. Mila disappears into the house and then re-emerges wearing a maroon shawl and a crown-like hat of red and yellow silk. He sits down facing the mandala. A small settee is brought out and placed near him, and a long black dress — his wife's, presumably — is on the settee. Three nuns take their seats on the carpets to the right of the mandala — two of them hold the large ceremonial horns, and the third a smaller horn and a bell. The two nuns who were tending the lamps join the others on the carpet with sutras in their hands. Tseten sits down next to Mila, with his hand drum, a bigger drum on a stand, and a pair of cymbals. At this point, the huge sack full of cowpats I saw on my way in is dumped in front of the mandala.

Mila shuts his eyes and begins to pray, and Tseten and the nuns join in. Then the prayers stop abruptly, and the horns and trumpets burst out in the deepest baritone imaginable. The richness of the sound takes me by surprise — it is such a small band, and all women at that. It seems to come from the depths of space, like rolling thunder. Some Tibetans liken this music to the roaring of a tiger. To me it sounds very much as though the nuns are trying to communicate with another world. If the soul is listening, I think, it must hear this.

When the playing stops, the man who has been making the tso goes to the mandala and, much to my dismay, starts laying cowpats on it. Mere minutes have passed since Tseten and Dondan completed it! The cowpats look awful, like warts on the cheeks of a beautiful woman. The man sets the cowpats on fire and soon a huge red flame leaps into the air, lighting up his face. Butter is poured on the flames, and immediately I feel the heat from where I am crouching, some distance away. I wonder aloud at its intensity, and the man who has lit the fire takes a step back and reveals the secret: the cowpats are from the rare red yak, known to produce the fiercest flames, and therefore the most purifying power. ‘With the mandala at their base, these flames can reach the soul of the dead wherever it is, and purify any sins it might have,’ he tells me proudly.

But before the flames can work their magic power, there is something more mundane to be done. The soul of the dead must be fed. In the midst of the nuns' chanting and the crackling cowpats, plates of food are thrown into the flames one by one. Mila says a special prayer with every offering. ‘He is pleading for the soul to enjoy its favourite food,’ the fire-tender tells me. ‘They are giving her the best food because from today on, the soul can no longer taste anything from this world.’

‘But can the soul eat?’ I ask him, genuinely curious. For some reason, I can imagine the soul hearing the chanting, but not quite gulping down all these dishes, even if they are her favourites.

‘You are right,’ he says. ‘She can hear the chanting, but she can only smell the food being offered in her name, and the incense.’ He points to the clay pots hanging on the wall, with juniper twigs burning in them.

I find myself grappling with the gaps between these beliefs and my own. There has to be a soul there somewhere, otherwise what is the point of all this? I smile to myself as I remember a curious story. Hugh Richardson, another well-known British diplomat, stationed in Lhasa in the 1940s, went to offer condolences on the death of a Rinpoche, an incarnate lama. The abbot told him that the ‘Rinpoche’ would like to receive him in his cell. He wondered if he had made a mistake. He found the Rinpoche sitting in his usual seat. Before he could say anything, the abbot said: ‘The Rinpoche welcomes you and asks if you had a good journey, and are you in good health?’ It went on like this for some time. ‘Everything seemed to be as usual, so that the visitor almost began to doubt his own senses.’