In the supermarket of
spirituality By Tsering Namgyal
Every spring, thousands of spiritual
tourists from all over the world would throng the
streets of Dharamsala, a town in the Indian
Himalayas, to listen to the Dalai Lama teach on a
poetic masterpiece by an 8th-century Indian guru.
For Tibetans living there, the festival is
a sight to behold. Buddhists, atheists, agnostics,
yoga teachers, Hollywood actors and Chinese nuns
rub shoulders on the narrow streets of this
one-time summer resort of the British Raj. The
town is standing room
only.
And if you stand long enough in McLeod Gunj, where
the Dalai Lama resides, it seems as if the whole
world will pass by you.
The good news is
that you do not need to go to the town. The
teachings on The Guide to the Bodhisattava's
Way of Life by Shantideva will beam to you
live from the Himalayas via the Internet. All you
need to do is to download the RealPlayer on your
computer. If it is not enough, the fantastic
Buddhist teachings at the Library of Tibetan Works
and Archives in Dharamsala are also broadcast live
on the Internet.
Indeed, Dharamsala has
become not just a capital of exiled Tibetans but a
Mecca of modern-day spirituality. India's
then-prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had suggested
that the Tibetan spiritual leader move to
Dharamsala from Mussoorie, a bigger town in the
Himalayas, with the hope that the former would
provide a location peripheral enough for an exile
government.
When they came to live there,
Tibetans did not know that the town had religious
roots dating back 1,700 years. In 635 AD, the
Chinese monk-pilgrim Hsuan Tsang recorded 50
monasteries with about 2,000 monks in the region.
But a century later, Buddhism and all its sites
were eliminated during an upsurge of Brahiminical
revivalism.
In 1905, a severe earthquake
changed the face of Dharamsala. Many buildings
collapsed and the whole settlement was never
reoccupied. And the town never recovered until the
Tibetans moved there in the 1960s.
For
many, Dharamsala has now come to mimic the Tibetan
capital Lhasa in its spiritual symbolism. Just as
Tibetan pilgrims from as far as Chengdu and Amdo
go on their pilgrimage to Lhasa, the tourists of
the modern world rush to its alter ego in India's
Kangra Valley. It is not for nothing that McLeod
Gunj has earned a moniker of "Little Lhasa".
If Nehru had known the historical
significance of the place, he had failed to
predict its future fame. Dharamsala can be
literarily translated as "an abode of Dharma". The
town had indeed lived up to the promise of its
daringly prophetic name. Just as Lhasa is a small
city for its fame, McLeod Gunj is an incredibly
small town for its reputation. One newcomer from
Tibet once told me: "When I first arrived here, I
could not believe the size of it. I thought we
were just on a transit here and the real
Dharamsala lay ahead of us."
And just as
the real Lhasa is increasingly inundated with
Chinese immigrants, its population now six times
larger than it was in 1950, Dharamsala is now
crowded with capitalists of the pilgrim route.
Guest houses, supermarkets and restaurants are
opened with alarming speed, often built
precariously on the vertiginous bends of the hill
station. Small new hotels now dot the verdant
valley. "Business here," one relatively new
hotelier once told me, "is too good to be true."
This widespread interest in Tibetan
religion is positive. Many Tibetans, however, find
it hard to reconcile the gap between the
popularity of their religion and the tragedy
unfolding in their homeland. Tibetan Buddhism, at
the end of the day, is not about high spiritual
achievements and idealism but of low practicality.
It is not about erecting boundaries through
accumulating ecstatic experiences but of
dismantling the very idea of the ego. The Tibetan
lama Chogyam Trungpa coined a phrase for the trend
as early as in 1960s: "Spiritual materialism."
The question many Tibetans ask is whether
theirs' is not as a nation composed of human
beings but a repository of spiritual energy.
Tibetan massage, Tibetan retreat, Tibetan yoga,
Tibetan meditation are on sale. Foreigners in
Dharamsala, who may have gone there to slow down
and investigate their inner lives, end up keeping
a highly hectic and stressful spiritual itinerary.
Everything has been reduced to a commodity with a
Tibetan tag on it. In the supermarket of
spirituality, Tibet has become a high-end brand
name.
Yet the real Lhasa continues to
languish under a hostile regime. Official Chinese
estimates say that its population is expected to
double now that the city has become connected with
air-conditioned trains. Needless to say, many of
them will be ethnic Chinese immigrants.
Last year, a well-known Chinese television
station held a special program to commemorate the
arrival of trains in Tibet. After nearly an hour
of discussion, the commentators concluded that
China's ability to connect Tibet with a high-speed
train is a direct assault on Tibetan spirituality,
its way of life, most importantly, the Tibetan
concept of time. The host ended the talk with the
following obituary in Mandarin, delivered with a
smile: "We could actually say that today is the
day the Tibetan spirit, the Tibet of mythology and
magic, ended."
He could not have been
farther from truth. He simply failed to see how
the Tibetan spirituality lives on in exile, and on
the Internet and in the supermarkets, and how it
transcends boundaries, both manmade and
geographical. The turn-of-the-century Times
correspondent Percaval Landon once wrote: "Lamaism
has inspired the stones and gold of Lhasa. Nothing
but Lamaism could have done this thing."
After nearly a century, the same could be
said of Dharamsala. Nothing but the Tibetan
arrival there and the Tibetan Buddhism could have
done it to the place, of turning it from a sleepy
Indian village into the spiritual capital of the
Internet world.
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