Provocative Tibet
Can we create a culture that balances the joys of Earth and heaven?
I was in love with Tibet for years before I actually saw her. As a student of comparative spirituality, my attention was first drawn to Tibet by exotic stories of remote monasteries and spiritual masters who combined deep realization with pronounced psychic abilities. Like many described in David Lopez's excellent book, Prisoners of Shangri-La, I did my fair share of projecting onto Tibet. How could one not? Sheltered from the modern world's triumphs and craziness by the tallest mountains in the world, Tibet seemed to be all that we are not—not industrial, not secular, not commercial, and not militarized.
As I learned more about Tibet's history, philosophy, and art, the projections weakened and the relationship deepened. I began to see her distinctive spiritual genius, and it spoke to me. About six years ago, I became a practitioner, connecting to a lineage of teachers who had left Tibet with the Dalai Lama in 1959. Somewhere along the way, I fell in love, but it was an incomplete and immature love. I had been touched by Tibet's mind, by her descriptions of refined states of consciousness and the detailed methods for actualizing them, but I knew little of her body. I did not truly know her people, her sounds, or her smells.
So when the opportunity came to guide a Cross Cultural Journeys trip to Tibet last summer, I jumped at the chance. With sixteen hardy souls, I spent two weeks in Tibet, visiting temples, monasteries, and sacred sites. As I sort through my memories of these all-too-brief weeks, I am flooded with impressions.
Daily Spirituality
The first thing that stands out for me is the religious devotion of the Tibetan people. Tibetans live in a world suffused with spirit, where not to take into account the feelings and presence of spirit is considered to be downright tasteless, a fundamental failure of education or civilization. Here, to live is to pray, and prayer spills from the Tibetan people unselfconsciously.
Tibetans cultivate their mindfulness of spirit in many simple ways. They print prayers on pieces of cloth, string them on ropes, and drape them from high points on hillsides and rooftops. They print sutras (scriptures) on strips of paper placed inside prayer wheels that they spin incessantly. On the roof of every home is a small stove for morning ceremonial offerings. Everywhere you go, you see people fingering their malas (prayer beads), reciting mantras as they walk or sit or ride.
At first, my academic mind recoiled from such rote and "mechanical" prayers. What deity, I thought, wants a prayer that is "said" every time a prayer flag flaps in the wind or a sutra scroll spins on a stick? Although I sympathized with this level of faith, it seemed a bit too simple. Yet I wondered: "What's so special about my highly educated faith, which sometimes leaves me feeling cool at the end of the day, when these people seem so warm by comparison?" Over time, it gradually sank in that simple or not, these people pray with a fervor and devotion that I don't possess. For them, the world of spirit, the invisible domain that gives birth to us and catches us when we die, is not an abstract concept or a hypothesis requiring investigation. It is, instead, a living reality that everywhere reaches out to them, begging them to notice it and enter more deeply into communion with it. My intellectual arrogance was repeatedly humbled by their simple but constant piety.
For example, we visited a courtyard in Lhasa, outside a small temple where old folks gather to pray together everyday. "They are too old to do anything else," I was told, "so they come here to pray." Under makeshift plastic tarps constructed to shield themselves from the summer sun, which can be fierce at 12,000 feet above sea level, they sit for hours chanting mantras and spinning their prayer wheels. The hum of whispered prayers and spinning wheels created a soft buzzing sound in the courtyard that reminded me of the sound of bees flying around a hive. The place was literally buzzing with prayer. At the end of the day a monk came around, and every person in the courtyard told him exactly how many mantras they recited that day, giving a precise count of the number of prayers offered. In Tibetan Buddhism, as in other spiritual traditions, repetition matters. Repetition of prayer reshapes our habitual patterns of attention, and reshaped attention guides one's future destiny.
Or take the full prostrations that the pilgrims perform outside the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, the holiest ecclesiastical site in Tibet, sort of like St Peter's Basilica in Rome for Catholics. In the West, we tend to pray with our minds, but Tibetans pray with their entire body. A prostration is a full-out bow that leaves one lying on the ground, spread out before that which one reveres above oneself. In addition to humbling the ego, doing prostrations for hours makes the body stronger and more flexible, shaping it into a more supple vessel for spirit. The goal of prostrations for the beginning practitioner, and the goal of tantric exercises for the more advanced student, is to draw the intensity of spirit into the human body through prayer and exercise, fusing it into one's cells. Or perhaps it is better thought of as bringing forward and activating the latent divine "sleeping" inside one's body. Either way, prayer is physical in Tibet.
Tibet's widespread, unselfconscious displays of devotion made me acutely aware of how thoroughly secularized and unspiritual our culture is in comparison. I already knew this intellectually, of course, but Tibet drove the point home. In the United States, we periodically acknowledge spirit, but we do not live in its presence or celebrate it so conscientiously. In Western industrialized society, we do not have a spirituality of place. Three hundred years after the scientific revolution, we tend to be habitually insensitive to anything that cannot be weighed or measured, and we place our hope for a better life in Wall Street or Home Depot rather than in transformative practice and moral development. I know that much good has been realized from this strong focus on the physical world through science and technology, but Tibet made me feel how much has also been lost along the way. I kept asking myself, "Can't we have both? Can't we create a culture that better balances the joys of Earth and heaven?"
Singing to Enlightenment
My second lingering memory of Tibet is her sounds, especially the sounds of prayer. I brought a camera on the trip, but I should have brought a tape recorder as well. In several of the monasteries we visited, we encountered monks gathered in practice halls chanting scriptures. Sitting underneath brilliant columns of multicolored fabric, wearing the light robes of summer, the monks chant sutras for hours each day. Slipping into the back row, it was easy to settle into the rhythm of the room. One didn't need to know the texts to feel the energy carried by the sounds. The steady rumble of voices was punctuated by an occasional drum or cymbal.
In Tibet, one sings one's way to enlightenment. Because songs are more easily memorized than texts, Tibet has put most of its spiritual practices to music. When practitioners gather to pray, they gather to sing.
As beautiful as the monks' chanting was, however, it was the singing of nuns that captivated me most, and I think, most of our group also. High in the mountains, far away from any city, we came upon seventy nuns gathered inside the practice hall of the Terdrom nunnery to undergo a special day-long initiation. Seated in long rows on low red benches, they had been chanting prayers for hours when we showed up, on our way to sacred caves still higher up the mountain. With a silent wave they invited us to join them.
Perhaps it was the picturesque setting of the nunnery perched high above the valley below, perhaps it was the altitude, but the sound of these women chanting is one I'll not soon forget—so different from the sound of the monks, lighter, sweeter, but just as strong. It struck me that this feminine voice has been missing for so long from the world's patriarchal traditions, the often unheard voice of half the planet's people. Did these women know how much pressure was building in history to bring their collective voice forward? Was their contemplative practice in this mountain retreat possibly contributing to this pressure in hidden ways that we cannot yet trace?
After spending some time with the nuns, we continued our hike to our destination, the practice cave of Padmasambhava and his consort, Lady Yeshe Tsogyal. Padmasambhava, "the lotus-enlightened one," is the most revered figure in Tibetan history, the man who brought Buddhism from India to Tibet in the eighth century. Often called "The Second Buddha," his accomplishments are legendary, as is his relationship with Yeshe Tsogyal. They lived and practiced together in this small cave for seven years.
Five days later we climbed Mount Chimpu, one of the most sacred mountains of Tibet, to visit the cave where Padmasambhava had lived in retreat for twelve years, which brings me to my third impression of Tibet—the depth of commitment to spiritual realization that one finds in this culture.
Sustained Practice
In Tibet, the standard course of monastic training culminates in a three-year solitary retreat. On her sacred mountains, one still finds hermits who have chosen to spend their lives in solitude, letting the distractions of "civilization" fall away from their minds, exposing the underlying, ever-present "essential nature" that is so highly prized here. Standing on these peaks, far away from cable networks, newspapers, Palm Pilots, and even electricity, the silence was deafening. It was not hard to imagine the effect of living in this silence for years, though few of us were ready or willing to undertake such a discipline. And that's my point. How ready are we to undertake the discipline of sustained spiritual practice?
I'm not suggesting that long-term solitude is a necessary part of spiritual practice, but seeing the cave in which Padmasambhava spent twelve years made me re-examine my level of commitment to my own awakening. As students of spirituality, we often feel that the problem we face is primarily one of finding the right method. We read book after book, or go to workshop after workshop, searching for that special teaching that we hope will unlock the door to our soul. But there is no shortage of authentic, reliable methods of spiritual transformation today. Over the last thirty years, the West has been flooded with an influx of potent spiritual practices. I don't mean to minimize the issues that surround the challenge of "finding one's path," but I think that the root problem we face is not a lack of methods but a lack of deep commitment to extended practice.
It was sobering and clarifying to be reminded that the paths of transformation and liberation are well marked in the spiritual traditions of the world. The tools are present. The only question is whether we will pick them up and use them.
Exceptional Capacities
The next impression of Tibet I'd like to share relates to IONS' commitment to exploring exceptional human capacities. Before I took this trip, I'd been told that outside some of the caves used by practitioners for centuries, one sometimes finds impressions of handprints and footprints in stone. It is said that practitioners leave these anonymous impressions as a sign of the realization that they achieved during their retreat. They are taken as indications of a particularly deep level of spiritual realization, a level so deep that mind and matter become porous to each other in ways that appear to warp the laws of physics.
In some of the temples we visited in Tibet, there were stones on display bearing impressions believed to be left behind by specific saints. These stones push our credulity to its limits, and challenge some of our deepest convictions. It is easier to believe that these handprints and footprints were faked for the religious edification of the masses than to believe that it is actually possible for human beings to be able to "melt" stone by their touch, however realized they may be. What are we to make of these artifacts?
I don't want to pass judgment on them or recommend a conclusion, but as we scratch our heads and ponder the possibilities, it is worth remembering that twenty years ago it was heretical in the West to believe that our minds could actually influence the health of our bodies. Today, thanks in part to research supported by IONS, we accept this notion, and psychoneuroimmunology is a component in the curriculum of many medical schools. If our minds can be trained to positively influence our bodies in this manner, we can reasonably ask what else might be possible for mind to accomplish given enough time and training. When we ask this, we should remember that from the Tibetan perspective, the amount of time we have to train our minds is open-ended, given their belief in reincarnation. According to their tradition, when we see such displays of exceptional human capacity, we are witnessing the culmination of training that extends over many lifetimes, not just one lifetime. Something to ponder.
Lesson in Impermanence
This brings me to the last impression of Tibet I would like to share. On a mountaintop in southeastern central Tibet, above the Drigung Monastery, our group witnessed the "sky burial" of three bodies. In a land where the ground is rock-hard and there are few trees, the means of burial that we are familiar with in the West—interment and cremation—are not practical. In Tibet the preferred means of disposing of a corpse is through sky burial, in which the body is returned to nature by being chopped up and fed to vultures. Drigung Monastery is a center of such burials. Tibetans go to much trouble to bring the bodies of their loved ones here, where it is considered a great blessing to be buried.
I will not describe the ceremony we witnessed other than to say that we watched three bodies returned to nature in just two hours. From one perspective, it was a brutal, revolting sight. From another, it was the most powerful teaching I received the entire trip. On that rainy mountaintop, life was ripped opened to the core to expose the most basic existential questions in the rawest form possible. What are we? Are we this pile of flesh that we identify with so deeply, or are we something more? If something more, how can we realize this "more" while still in our bodies?
Tibet does not hide from death, but looks it squarely in the face, even celebrates it. She drapes her deities with necklaces made of human skulls, and fashions ritual objects from human bones. The head monk, whose job it was to send these bodies back to nature, laughed at death, and Tibet laughs with him. What is death to the awakened?
While we watched, three bodies were given back to the Great Mother who had fashioned them. From her, every tissue, and every cell and atom originally came, and back to her they must be returned. Every form we adopt in this world we have on loan. This is the brutal and liberating truth of impermanence. How precious the opportunity to take birth in this marvelous body, and how sad to get so lost here that we come to fear death.
Chris Bache was IONS' director of transformative learning for two years. He is currently a professor of Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, Ohio, and an adjunct professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is the author of Lifecycles and Dark Night, Early Dawn.
