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. 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.12
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.13
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.’14
The great 13th 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’.15 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’.16
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