it is a separate school or simply an extension of the Mahayana tradition.
Hinayana Buddhism, known as Theravada by the Thais, Sri Lankans, Burmese, and others who follow it, consolidated the first of Buddhism’s great theological systems, codifying the basic teachings. The Mahayana school followed a few centuries later. With considerable oversimplification, one may say that Mahayana gives greater emphasis to service to humanity and less to the self-centered search for individual perfection. The bodhisattvas, compassionate could-be buddhas who chose to stayand serve in the imperfect world rather than enter heaven, became important figures to be emulated and worshipped. Coincidental or not, this underlying social-service philosophy seems to be reflected in the absence in Himalayan towns of begging monks making their formal early-morning rounds through poor villages, as they do in Thailand or in other Theravada communities. Ordained Tantric Buddhist monks or lamas (masters who are not necessarily in holy orders) are always on hand to teach, counsel, cure, and pray over important milestones in a person’s life. Traffic in and out of the monasteries by monks and laypeople is constant, not limited to ritual occasions. Some families with money and large homes may maintain a resident monk. That lamas and monks are often paid, sometimes lavishly, for their services does not, ideally, diminish their sense of vocation. (“The best wheel is the Greater Wheel,” says a Bhutanese dashboard sticker.)
Alone in the Himalayas, the Buddhist Bhutanese government feels free to press monks into public service projects, and is urging state-supported monastic communities to take a more active part in health or sanitation drives and other village development. One of these projects, backed by UNICEF, would also help monks improve their own living quarters as a way of setting an example. They might well start at Punakha, the ancient capital and seat for half the year of Bhutan’s chief abbot, the je khenpo. There the stench of latrines nearly made my aristocratic Bhutanese traveling companion vomit as we searched for an exit in a little-trafficked corner of the monastery. The three-sided cloister of monks’ quarters was teeming with unkempt novices, who tossed refuse, spat, and generally sullied the piece of muddy ground below them, over which hung the pungent smell of urine and feces that emanated from an unseen corner. We had also encountered human waste in a dark corner of the dzong itself, along a passageway to the grandest of monastic assembly halls. Chaucer would have enjoyed this.
Himalayan Buddhism developed a complex theology of birth and rebirth to govern the fate of ordinary believers as well as the reincarnations of great lamas and monastic abbots. The rebirth of religious leaders as infant reincarnates known as
tulkus
became entrenched as a system by the fourteenth or fifteenth century and persists into the present day, modified only by the fact that some reincarnates are now born abroad, as far afield as Europe or the Americas. A lot of politics and fund-raising considerations have crept into the otherwise miraculous appearance of incarnates,as monasteries look for well-connected tulkus as insurance against powerlessness or penury.
Sometimes, international geopolitics complicates the issue. Years of wrangling between rival claimants to the leadership of the Kagyupa Karmapa, a sect of the Kagyupa order based at Sikkim’s Rumtek monastery, aroused such passion that Indian troops were called in at one point to break up rioting. The schism, during which charges of Chinese influence were traded liberally, led to the investitures of two Karmapa abbots, one in Tibet and one in India. At the latter ceremony, in 1994, uniformed police carrying automatic weapons stood between the little tulku on his throne of peace and the unpredictable congregation, which everyone assumed was laced with spies and agents provocateurs and armed with rocks
Hinayana Buddhism, known as Theravada by the Thais, Sri Lankans, Burmese, and others who follow it, consolidated the first of Buddhism’s great theological systems, codifying the basic teachings. The Mahayana school followed a few centuries later. With considerable oversimplification, one may say that Mahayana gives greater emphasis to service to humanity and less to the self-centered search for individual perfection. The bodhisattvas, compassionate could-be buddhas who chose to stayand serve in the imperfect world rather than enter heaven, became important figures to be emulated and worshipped. Coincidental or not, this underlying social-service philosophy seems to be reflected in the absence in Himalayan towns of begging monks making their formal early-morning rounds through poor villages, as they do in Thailand or in other Theravada communities. Ordained Tantric Buddhist monks or lamas (masters who are not necessarily in holy orders) are always on hand to teach, counsel, cure, and pray over important milestones in a person’s life. Traffic in and out of the monasteries by monks and laypeople is constant, not limited to ritual occasions. Some families with money and large homes may maintain a resident monk. That lamas and monks are often paid, sometimes lavishly, for their services does not, ideally, diminish their sense of vocation. (“The best wheel is the Greater Wheel,” says a Bhutanese dashboard sticker.)
Alone in the Himalayas, the Buddhist Bhutanese government feels free to press monks into public service projects, and is urging state-supported monastic communities to take a more active part in health or sanitation drives and other village development. One of these projects, backed by UNICEF, would also help monks improve their own living quarters as a way of setting an example. They might well start at Punakha, the ancient capital and seat for half the year of Bhutan’s chief abbot, the je khenpo. There the stench of latrines nearly made my aristocratic Bhutanese traveling companion vomit as we searched for an exit in a little-trafficked corner of the monastery. The three-sided cloister of monks’ quarters was teeming with unkempt novices, who tossed refuse, spat, and generally sullied the piece of muddy ground below them, over which hung the pungent smell of urine and feces that emanated from an unseen corner. We had also encountered human waste in a dark corner of the dzong itself, along a passageway to the grandest of monastic assembly halls. Chaucer would have enjoyed this.
Himalayan Buddhism developed a complex theology of birth and rebirth to govern the fate of ordinary believers as well as the reincarnations of great lamas and monastic abbots. The rebirth of religious leaders as infant reincarnates known as
tulkus
became entrenched as a system by the fourteenth or fifteenth century and persists into the present day, modified only by the fact that some reincarnates are now born abroad, as far afield as Europe or the Americas. A lot of politics and fund-raising considerations have crept into the otherwise miraculous appearance of incarnates,as monasteries look for well-connected tulkus as insurance against powerlessness or penury.
Sometimes, international geopolitics complicates the issue. Years of wrangling between rival claimants to the leadership of the Kagyupa Karmapa, a sect of the Kagyupa order based at Sikkim’s Rumtek monastery, aroused such passion that Indian troops were called in at one point to break up rioting. The schism, during which charges of Chinese influence were traded liberally, led to the investitures of two Karmapa abbots, one in Tibet and one in India. At the latter ceremony, in 1994, uniformed police carrying automatic weapons stood between the little tulku on his throne of peace and the unpredictable congregation, which everyone assumed was laced with spies and agents provocateurs and armed with rocks
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