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| Vol. 4, Issue 2 February 2012 |
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Journeys |
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Journeys |
Selling the Dragon
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| Another sect of Tibetan Buddhists campaigns for recognition |
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ALL PHOTOGRAPHS © DAVE BESSELING |
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| Prayers at the Druk Amitabha Temple.
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| W |
E'RE ON THE ROOF of the Naro Assembly Hall, looking north across the foothills, a series of spumeless humpbacks receding into whirls of dusk. Behind us, flags emblazoned with coiled dragons whip and snap in the wind, and I ask the Calvin Klein model come indie musician what he’s doing here, sipping a beer on a holy mountain in the |
Himalayas.
“We got an email from my mate Ned asking if we or any bands we knew wanted to come play a gig in Nepal, so we said yes,” explained Jamie Burke, the face of the 2009 Calvin Klein ck one campaign—who also penned the song for the fragrance line’s TV ads—leaning back on his elbow, surveying an ant-line of farmers zigzagging their way up the side of a hill. “You know when people ask you, ‘what was the weirdest show you’ve ever played?’ we figured this would be a good candidate for one of those.”
It was. When Burke and his band stepped onstage later in the evening, it was for the benefit and at the behest of the spiritual head of the Drukpa lineage of Tibetan Buddhists and his spiritual panel, celebrities in their own right: the baby- faced second-in-command, Kyabje Khamtrul Rinpoche; Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, the British-born nun who spent 12 years of solitude in a cave in Himachal Pradesh; Her Royal Highness Ashi Kesang, a Bhutanese princess; and Laki, an actress who had been introduced to me as “the winner of Bhutan’s Oscar.” (She’d giggly demurred, and I can’t find her online anywhere.)
Behind Jigme Pema Wangchen, His Holiness the 12th Gyalwang Drukpa’s front and centre throne-seat and his retinue sat special guests, VIPs and two flanks of several hundred monks and nuns. Burke said later that night, as we necked pints in a bar in Thamel, the high point of the show had been the congregation of shorn-headed monastics clapping along to a cover of Outkast’s ‘Hey ya.’
“We’re just trying to immerse ourselves in what’s going on here,” said Burke—who is perhaps more famous for the various starlets he’s bedded than his bone structure, certainly more famous for the paparazzi shots of him with a topless Sienna Miller than for his music.
Indeed. What was going on here?
Burke admitted he didn’t know anything about the sect—or even Buddhism—though “the mission statement is pretty awesome.” So he was, in a sense, here for the money. But so was I.
A couple of weeks previous I was at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Delhi slurping Blender’s Pride whisky, and somewhere between shouts for more ice a colleague asked if I wanted to go on a press junket: an all expenses paid trip to Nepal to cover the 2nd Annual Drukpa Council (ADC), which would involve an audience with His Holiness the 12th Gyalwang Drukpa, the ascension of a three-year-old reincarnated lama and a concert by Jamie Burke. “All expenses paid? I’m in,” I’d said; then asked myself, “What does an 800-year-old Tibetan Buddhist sect have to do with a Calvin Klein model’s band?”
I asked the same thing to Carrie Lee, the media liaison showing a group of journalists around the temple complex atop Druk Amitabha mountain, outside Kathmandu: “Don’t the two seem, I don’t know, kind of philosophically incongruous?”
We were walking through a throng of nuns outside the temple after sunset, what an American acquaintance, a former Tibetan Buddhist nun, had described to me before the trip as “one of the most decorated temples I’ve seen.”
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Tibetan thangka paintings are held during the 2nd Annual Drukpa Council flag-raising ceremony. |
It was, too. Drukpa means dragon, and the mythical beasts wrap the hall’s support columns, rising from polished wood floor to thangka-painted ceiling. The three walls squared from the main altar/stage are a grid of inset oblongs the size of shoeboxes, all glassed-in compartments, each housing a Buddha statue. In the soft ambience, the ring of light bulbs behind the main Buddha statue’s head shines a neon halo. It’s lavish—and very recently built.
“Incongruous? No, not at all,” said Carrie, “Anyone is welcome here. In fact, Tommy Lee was going to come and perform, but schedules wouldn’t allow it.”
Tommy Lee—of Motley Crue/Pamela Anderson fame— trumps even Jamie Burke when it comes to dilettante notches on the bedpost, and his music career today is perhaps even more mediocre given its scale.
“How did you get him to agree?” I asked.
“I used to be his lawyer in LA.”
| T |
IBETAN BUDDHISM is no stranger to celebrity support— the first time I heard about the ‘Free Tibet’ movement was through the Beastie Boys on a Lollapalooza tour in the mid-1990s, and before Jamie Burke played for the clapping crowds of monks and nuns at Amitabha, Richard Gere had long been the pretty-boy advocate for the Dalai Lama and his |
Gelugpa sect.
His Holiness the 12th Gyalwang Drukpa says once upon a time, half the population of Tibet was of his lineage. In Bhutan, he says they enjoy 85 percent loyalty in the land of Gross National Happiness, where one of the oldest sects in Tibetan Buddhism concerns themselves with “serving through practice,” not through politics (although Drukpa is the state-sanctioned religion of the isolated Himalayan Kingdom). To fund the 2nd ADC, according to a yearly expense report ending 31 March 2010, a million and a half Nepali rupees came ‘from Bhutan,’ where His Holiness credits the “great generosity of our followers” for this new drive to garner awareness for their clan, farther outside their Himalayan base than ever before. Large sums of money were coming in as ‘registration’ fees. One registration for an ‘honanery member [sic]’ cost 69,000 rupees, and the ‘registration for HH birthday’ appeared as 671,138 rupees inbound.
So you could buy access. This is nothing new. Even more telling than the in-column ‘donations’ were the out-column expenses. Invitations for the ADC on one day were sent to Ladakh, France, Taiwan, Malaysia, Darjeeling and Varanasi. Prominent Tibetan Buddhist scholars in the US received invitations on another. The Drukpas, long known for lying low, appeared to be on an international advertising blitz.
| T |
HE JEEPS RATTLED around the mountains’ turns— esses becoming hairpins the higher we went—on the way to His Holiness’ press conference. Every so often we passed foxholes dug into the hillsides, soldiers in blue camouflage never far from their Kalashnikovs. There were still Maoist rebels in these hills outside the Nepali capital. Watching the valley |
floor recede, I thought about the ambiguous donations and registrations—state and private— and decided I wouldn’t be able to write the advertorial I was flown here and put up at a nice hotel to write. I deduced there would be at least three puff pieces coming from our Delhi group, decided I should just be honest about my experience— guilt is for Catholics—and resigned myself to the fact I wouldn’t likely be invited back to cover the 3rd ADC.
Are the Drukpas’ efforts to herald a new age of monk/ nun equality admirable? Yes. Are His Holiness’ efforts to make Amitabha eco-friendly and carbon neutral worthwhile? Definitely. Is religion still a racket? Of course.
The first two questions for His Holiness at the press conference were as predictable as his answers: “Do you support a Free Tibet?” and “Where do your funds come from?”
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A tiered series of stairs leads to the Naro Assembly Hall. |
He stressed that Drukpas are not political, and the sect’s supporters are very generous. He was used to such questions. Somewhat deflated, knowing any of my inquiries about his spiritual status or the legitimacy of the three-year-old as a reincarnated lama would be deflected, I thought I’d just go for the obvious. “Your Holiness, with 800 years of lineage, why is this only the 2nd Annual Drukpa Council?” I asked.
“In those days [over 100 years ago], we didn’t have a media,” he answered. “There was nothing... We did do some big events…in Ladakh…in Nepal…but no one [outside] was really interested.” He’d laughed a bit before answering, and this caught me off guard—not because he laughed, but for how much his laugh sounded like that of the Dalai Lama when I’d heard him speak in Bangalore. Their speaking patterns were similar—candid, matter of fact, friendly, with liberal usage of the word ‘therefore.’ I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, for however much the Gyalwang Drukpa wants to stay away from politics, especially any Sino-Tibetan controversy (curious, therefore, his description of Amitabha’s buildings as adhering to the “ancient Chinese art” of Feng Shui), he was ordained as the Great Dragon by the Dalai Lama himself. “We are all his students,” he said.
Kyabje Khamtrul Rinpoche, sitting beside His Holiness, also stressed that with the advent of travel, means and modern communication, it makes more sense for the Drukpas to gather in one place instead of going missionary-style, and “Nepal is where Lord Buddha was born, so it’s a holy place for all Buddhists.”
Three years ago, the latest reincarnated lama was also born in Nepal—the new and improved Sengdrak Rinpoche, whose last somatic tour had ended in 2005. According to organiser Lynne Dipam, the Gyalwang Drukpa sent out Sengdrak Rinpoche’s students to find this child the dead master had chosen as his next vessel. They found him after “His Holiness [Gyalwang Drukpa] had a vision,” said Dipam.
The Gyalwang Drukpa admits when he was a toddler, and had been identified as number 12, his parents didn’t want to give him up and stole him away. They eventually came out of hiding and surrendered their baby son to the lineage. The reincarnated Sengdrak Rinpoche’s family, however, was much more accommodating.
“When the [former] Rimpoche was sick, he went to the hospital, and you know, the present Sengdrak Rinpoche’s grandfather and parents were in that same hospital. It can’t be a coincidence, right?” I nodded as Dipam spoke. “And this boy’s grandfather, who was in the same ward as the previous Rinpoche, has a daughter in law,” who, as it turns out, said Dipam, is on the side of the family who are some of the lineage’s biggest benefactors. “That can’t just be a coincidence, to be reborn in a family of our supporters.”
On this point, I’m also convinced. Just not in the way she is. | | | |
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