After the palace, we drove out to the countryside and saw
something I could never, not in my wildest drug-addled dreams, have ever
imagined.
A “sky burial.”
Suffice to say, we weren’t scheduled to see it; it wasn’t on
our itinerary; we were to visit a temple nearby, but, on the drive over, from
the van, we saw a small procession dragging a corpse up a rocky hill, and we
asked the guide about it. Once he responded that it was a sky burial, we
hounded him to pull over, to let us see, and he begrudgingly obliged, parked on
the side of the road and we rushed out to view the unfolding spectacle.
The corpse was a plump, brown-skinned old man. His naked,
lifeless body was being dragged by three men, two of them youngish, one of them
middle-aged. At the top of the earthy hill, the men, accompanied by 5 chanting
monks, lay the corpse down. From off their shoulders, the men threw down and
opened backpacks, then fished out what looked like small axes, chopping
tools.
Flanked by the chanting, bald-headed monks, the men, in
floppy orange clothing, were smiling and nonchalantly chatting, and then the
men suddenly raised their axes high in the air and began hacking apart the
corpse, chopping the body into pieces.
My stomach shifted, watching it. The others retched. The
Welshman didn’t, though. He’d served in the army so he’d seen way more gruesome
scenes. Still, he was speechless, awed by it, watching the men laugh, not
callously, but so normally, so casually, as they broke the body apart.
Our tour guide was unmoved. But when he noticed how affected
we were, he explained to us that in Tibetan Buddhism, it’s believed the soul
passes out of the body, after death, so that body is not a person anymore, it’s
just an empty vessel, a shell. The remains of the shell, he said, would be fed
back to the Earth, be food for vultures.
Hearing him discuss the sky burial was the first time I’d
heard any emotion, passion in his voice. Not a lot of emotion, mind you, but
certainly a trace…
He said the monks’ chanting was part of a ritual to summon
vultures to eat the corpse, that the monks would sprinkle sugar over the corpse
to sweeten it for the birds.
The men chopping up, separating the body were a “Todken” a
sky burial master, and his assistants, who specialized in these burials. Most
Tibetans, the tour guide told us, believe that if they didn’t have a sky
burial, they’d become a ghost, wandering the Earth, unable to pass on to the
next life.
I asked the tour guide if he’d have a sky burial, and he
nodded, reluctantly, not making eye contact. His head cocked back, his eyes
were solemnly locked on the scene at the top of the hill, where the men were
pulling the corpse’s limp limbs off as if picking apart a crab.
Then I asked the guide if he believed that he’d be a ghost
if he didn’t receive a sky burial, and he didn’t reply to my question. An
awkward silence hung heavy in the frigid mountain air.
He went on to say that the ground in Tibet is too hard,
cold, and rocky to bury bodies, so sky burials were of a practical nature, but
also it fit Buddhist beliefs that humans are a part of something greater, a
part of the universe, and the body, being empty of a soul, could be made
beneficial, could be made a form of merit, being fed to the wild like this.
“Excarnation,” exclaimed the Welshman, smoothing back his
scraggly blond hair that’d been flapping in the increasingly bitter, cold and
dry wind.
The icy Himalayan air kicking up, to a man, we were a
shivering mass, our jaws twitching, teeth chattering.
“It’s not always a ceremony like this one. Often the family
will bring the body out, leave it by the temple, leave it for the vultures…”
mentioned the tour guide, shifting his gaze and walking with heavy feet towards
the van, and we followed him, like a V of swan, back over to the vehicle.
I wanted to quip to Welshman about being dead, left out like
that, on a hill in the Himalayas sure saves a lot of money on a funeral. Is
nice to the birds, too, feeding them dinner.
But then I remembered how it’s possible that your brain
remains alive, possibly, for days after you die, and you’d maybe experience
that... The corpse up there perhaps had just suffered the torture of being
hacked apart with axes and would now endure the horrific ordeal of being eaten,
picked apart like a Thanksgiving turkey by fucking vultures... Cremation, a big
smoky final session in the sauna sounded a whole lot better to me…
We continued onward, drove up to a nearby temple that stood
on a mountain spur. It was another white stone, red wood, and gold-trimmed
complex and was nestled at the foot of a jagged, rocky hill, overlooking a
crystal blue, surging river. Bands of multi-colored prayer flags hung from its
front rafters and a gargantuan golden stupa spiraled from its center.
The temple had tall, whitewashed walls, topped by bands of
red ochre and golden circles. There were massive entry doors, made of wood and
iron, and high, sloping walls. Like the palace and Jokhang Temple, the walls
were decorated in Buddhist-themed motifs, like the ashtamangala.
Strolling the temple grounds, we kept tripping and stumbling
over raised steps in the doorways, which we found amusing, in a
self-deprecating way, laughing at one another’s follies. However, the tour
guide maintained his poker face and told us in a deadpan voice that the thresholds
were intentionally built high, to block wayward spirits.
In one of the winding halls, the Londoner swung his red face
to me, his thin lips barely moving as he spoke, and he mumbled about how he had
met a Tibetan girl working at the hostel and was trying to bang her. He then
stopped to hand a few small bills to a monk at the temple for a blessing,
whispering to me afterward that “I’m doing it for luck, so I can ‘shag’ that
Tibetan girl. If this doesn’t work, I can assure you, I am done with Buddhism…”
Though this temple was smaller in scale, inside, it had a
curious vastness. Walking about its corridors, I had an uneasy feeling.
Glancing around at the lifelike Buddha sculptures and busts in every corner,
many of them appeared to be glaring, and it was as if the weight of a thousand
eyes were baring down on me. I was experiencing a creeping omen, an anxiety,
like perhaps spirits in the temple’s vicinity were trying to warn us about
something…
After touring the temple, we returned to Lhasa. We had an
early dinner, without our guide, at a Nepalese restaurant near our hostel.
(The tour guide was with us during the day, but at night
he’d departed in his minivan to go back wherever it was that he went, and we
were left to our own devices…)
Staggering out of the restaurant, our bellies stuffed with
curry, jasmine rice and nan breads, we went wandering through the city center,
then decided to check out a nearby bar. On our way, we must have passed by a
police booth at every intersection. Seemingly, on every street, there was a
small white and blue police booth, manned by one or two cops. Atop each booth,
and installed at every intersection, and all around the city, were a panopticon
of security cameras, the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party. Man, I was getting
the feeling like the CCP could see more than God…
The heavy security presence, cameras, abundance of police
were noticeable to us upon arrival at the airport, and throughout our stay.
We’d also passed by numerous roving Chinese police squads, usually consisting
of about 10 men, 10 sour-faced coppers, in phalanxes, marching in lockstep, all
fitted with fire extinguishers.
And now was when we’d understand why most of the cops in
Lhasa wielded fire extinguishers instead of just the traditional police accoutrements…
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