To help prepare for my travels in India in a couple of months, I've been sent a short list of suggested books to read. One of those books is William Dalrymple's City of Djinns (1993), which I read three years ago and discussed in this blog. Another was his 2009 book Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. I eagerly bought and have been reading this work.
Dalrymple has apparently matured since City of Djinns, as well as since his first work, In Xanadu (1989) (also discussed in this blog). In Xanadu was a lively account of an adventurous trek -- by a university boy from Scotland -- across Asia in search of the "stately pleasure dome" of Kubla Khan. City of Djinns presented, seriously, in a scholarly yet still rather lighthearted manner, the history of Delhi, filtered through his own experiences while he and his wife lived in that city.
Nine Lives is different. By the time it was published, Dalrymple already had six published books under his belt, all but the first about India. As I wrote in my review of City of Djinns
We learn Delhi's history as a by-product of Dalrymple's adventures in the modern city, the people he meets, the weather that appalls him and his wife, the foods they eat, the disturbing sights that he happens upon. Dalrymple's book is presented as "the cool year my wife and I spent in Delhi"; the history is the medicine we swallow -- always willingly -- along with the sweet syrup.
It was a formula that worked. But in Nine Lives, he chooses to talk extensively with nine people in nine religious traditions, letting them tell their stories with a minimal amount of editorial comment from himself.
I have tried not to judge, and though my choices and arrangement no doubt reveal something of my views and preferences, I have tried to show rather than tell, and let the characters speak for themselves.
The result lacks the humor of his earlier works, but shows great empathy and ability to listen. The book affords us the opportunity to appreciate how seriously nine individuals take their own, often very strange (to us) belief systems, and to consider how their beliefs affect their choices in how to live their lives.
The nine lives include a Jain nun, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, a female Sufi devotee called "the Red Fairy," and a Hindu follower of the goddess Tara. They also include men and women intensely devoted to local or more obscure religious traditions, who in many ways are as interesting or more interesting than those devoted to more mainline traditions.
But because I'm visiting Kashmir and Punjab in March, with Dharamsala as our first stop after arrival in Delhi -- and, I suppose, because his spiritual journey is one of the easier ones for a Westerner to understand -- I paid special attention to the chapter devoted to a Buddhist monk who had fled from his home in Tibet and ended up in his old age in Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama's "residence in exile."
Dalrymple interviewed Tashi Passang for several days, as the old monk went about his daily schedule, surrounded by hordes of Tibetan pilgrims. They would sit "in the winter sunlight of the temple tea stall, high above the cork-screwing mountain paths of Dharamsala," -- "high above the Kangra Valley and the dusty plains of the Punjab," talking as Passang twirled his prayer beads.
Passang recalled his happy childhood in Tibet, herding the family cattle up in the mountain pastures. Without telling his parents in advance, he joined the local monastery at the age of 12, convinced that his life's aim should be a rebirth to a "better" life next time, with the ultimate goal of attaining Nirvana. He seems to have been naturally religious in his thoughts and instincts, even as a child, and he recalls being very happy in the monastery.
After three years, new monks were sent to live alone in a cave for four months -- rising every morning at 1 a.m., attending to devotions (which were physically as well as spiritually strenuous) all day, and going to bed at 8 p.m.
I discovered a capacity for solitude I hadn't known I had, even in my days in the mountains. My mind became clear, and I felt my sins were being washed away with the austerity of the hermit's life; that I was being purified.
But then, after he returned to the monastery, the Chinese arrived.
At first apparently friendly, the Chinese became more and more aggressive, and finally demanded all the monastery's guns and other weapons. Passang and most of the other monks asked to be released from their vows so they could fight -- Buddhism permits violence if necessary to defend the dharma (the Buddhist belief system). Passang escaped into the hills with his gun, saved from back in his days herding cattle.
The Chinese came looking for him, and demanded that his parents reveal where he was. Although the parents didn't know their son's location, they tortured his mother physically, day after day. She later died from internal injuries.
Eventually, Passang and others were recruited to escort the Dalai Lama across the mountains to India. The Chinese made great efforts to prevent the escape, and Passang was one of the few escorts who survived. He later was recruited by India to fight in the 1971 war in Bangladesh. Passang had no option but to fight, but was conscience-stricken because the killings had no relationship to saving Buddhism. As soon as he was released from the Indian Army, he moved to Dharamsala. He decided to spend the rest of his life making prayer flags of the highest possible quality as reparation for his sinful murders in the Army.
After many years, he decided to become a monk again, and was accepted again with no difficulty by the Dalai Lama. His years since have been the happiest in his life. He fought successfully against hatred of the Chinese, for having tortured his mother, by forcing himself to order Chinese food in a Chinese restaurant.
His Holiness is always preaching that it is not the Chinese, but hate itself that is our biggest enemy.
He still hopes for Tibetan freedom, but with a certain detachment. He muses that maybe, now that China has essentially renounced Communism, Tibet will convert China rather than China dominating Tibet..
After a life of much hardship and tragedy, he has attained a peace and happiness that many of us could envy. He finds the world to be interesting -- he seems well informed and intelligent -- but he is not "attached" to it. He quotes Lord Buddha:
The world is on fire and every solution short of Nirvana is like trying to whitewash a burning house.
Something to think about.
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