Ursula Le Guin's "The Telling": Book Review

This was inspired by the suppression by the communists of the Taoists in China. Le Guin in her introduction to the 2017 Library of America edition of her collected Hainish works admits that her knowledge of this cultural obliteration came relatively recently. She fits this into her system, with an emissary from Terra, of Asian Indian origins, living in Vancouver. Terra is in tumult too; fanatics try to impose a one-god regime upon the disparate peoples in the tellingly named Sutty's multicultural land. She is sent as an anthropologist to Akan to investigate that world's parallel descent into control.

The control is exerted by a relentless hatred of the old. The peons are remade into "producer-consumers," and the state itself, influenced by the same fanatics earlier, seems to have learned their dark lessons well. Le Guin sharply depicts the soulless situation of the inhabitants who toil mirthlessly. Redolent of not only China under Mao or North Korea under its dictators, Akan is bleak. 

Sutty finds her mission to observe on behalf of the Ekumen, and to report back, compromised by a minder called by her The Monitor. Their fates will intersect as Sutty travels north from the megapolis into rural areas where she learns that not all of the old learning and forbidden ways have vanished. 

At this stage in her long career, Ursula Le Guin incorporated feminist themes and fluid sexuality into her characters. Sutty's lesbianism puts her further apart from those seeking complete domination over the private as well as public life. Technology has advanced, too, and the parallels to our age are there.

This story moves slowly. Especially at first, Le Guin channeled through her protagonist parcels out facts we need to know sparingly. But there is a fascination with the way that Akan plays off our Earth. Totalitarian dystopia in the name of progress, unity and conformity isn't only "science fiction." 

It also wraps up very suddenly. Sutty's summoning is brought about in a paragraph halfway, with seemingly no foreshadowing. This may reflect life's surprises, but it threw me off. The conclusion follows rapidly after some earnest negotiation. It's not a tidy ending, either. But it may be more real. (Amazon US 9/24/17) 

Mary Ginsberg's "Communist Posters": Book Review

North Korea menaces again as a foe of the United States. Cuba waits as if eager for reconciliation. Regimes against which American expended much manpower and munitions fifty years ago now trade with their neighbors in Asia, the largest of which, China, is capitalist in fact if not theory. Headlines and Wiki-Leaks pepper the news and feeds with allegations of Russia, echoing those of the Cold War.

This range of reactions by the U.S. government and media to Communist nations makes this collection of posters from these and allied nations under red flags relevant. On the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mary Ginsberg edits and introduces the most comprehensive presentation in print of often vivid propaganda, that for a less screen-focused century, captured the eyes and the minds of hundreds of millions. They celebrated, endured, or hated the heydays of Fidel or Mao, Lenin and Stalin, and the various apparatchiks who tried to implement their theories and schemes.

A representative example appears early on. Red Loudspeakers Are Sounding Through Every Home (1972), as Ginsberg observes, documents the use of images to instill obedience. In a Chinese village, slogans, songs and lectures emanate from speakers installed on the streets. Their indoctrination may have seemed inescapable. For such broadcasts cannot be shut off. Other means further the deification of the leader as well as his dictates. The home shown on the poster has only a framed portrait of The Chairman, surrounded by small banners with sayings and little red books. Outside, a family gathers.

Over 330 illustrations demonstrate the range and the scope beyond the U.S.S.R. and the P.R.C. Korean, Mongolian, Eastern European, Vietnamese and Cuban chapters provide essays by scholars. These cross-reference the pictures, providing a narrated guided tour that alerts readers to the themes.

These depend heavily on Constructivism and photomontage. Art as function and promotion through photography combine to sell the peasants and workers on these products of the intellectuals. What they peddle are exhortations to produce more, fight harder and act braver. The verbosity of the caption can weigh down the impact of the 1937 image. Sergei Igumnov's red fist emerging from the rolled-up sleeve showing off a worker's clenched and muscular arm strangles a snake with swastika eyes. What this depicts is: "We'll Uproot Spies and Deviationists of the Trotsky-Bukharin Agents of Fascism." Given the relentless purges under the Man of Steel, such creations linger longer for their visual force rather than the ever-changing explanations linking the art to the enemy of the moment.

As dynasties bore down, the masses viewed ideals. Aleksei Lavrov's The People's Dreams Have Come True (1950) has a grandfather resembling Lenin. He clasps a Young Pioneer's shoulder. The old man's smile encourages the slightly wistful, perhaps hesitant, fantasies of the boy, looking up from his book, penned by "a critic of urban social conditions." Pravda sits on the table of their ship's cabin. Behind their sofa a reproduction of "the famous Repin painting Barge Haulers on the Volga" is a bit blurred, but "confirming how terrible things used to be." Outside, ships sail past factories that gleam.

The last Soviet poster blurs into patterns mirroring 1920s abstractions. Other lands drew on their own artistic legacies. Mongolian folk art and calligraphy enter many of its first efforts, while later ones mimic the Chinese Communist preference for red banners, gesticulating vanguards, rosy cheeks and marching masses. Polish aesthetics, as evocatively shown on film posters, also grace political ones. Silhouettes, shadows, stark typefaces and surreal figures shunted aside the Soviet template. Czech and Hungarian designers likewise incorporated pop art and psychedelic patterns into silkscreen and montage takes on opera, a new television model or Allende's brief Chilean victory. Anti-Americanism also heightens for Western audiences a Chinese imitation of an anti-Vietnam war mural, with placards with English-language denunciations of the war machine. North Korea dutifully perpetuates this type.

The appeal of stylized "characters in primary colors, along with shrill slogans, dotted with exclamation marks" predates the reign of Kim Il Sung. But the "visual recognizability and readability" sustain themselves for two-thirds of a century due to the simple, even atrophied graphics. As Koen de Cuester explains in this section, campaigns prove unrelenting under the Kims, and so the shelf life of a given poster is limited: "the message prevails over the package." He also asks a necessary question: "Where does art end and propaganda begin?" For the D.P.R.K., art theory combines ideological with artistic equality through a unified concept. Agitprop exhorts the Koreans to work diligently against an Uncle Sam whose competing tanks, bombers and missiles always loom.
What distinguishes Korean versions is a frequent inclusion of a mythical horse flying over smoking chimneys and rice paddies. Eyes also lead the way as they flare up and as fingers point the way on.

Vietnam takes French and Indochinese influences, hand-drawn lettering, indigenous themes and guerrilla poses from street art for some of its varied products. They stand out as more awkward and more original than the Soviet, Maoist or Korean contributions. They perpetuate the raw, eyewitness sensibility of not an imagined but a real struggle against an imperialist invader, or more than one.

Another rich array of approaches results in Cuban artifacts. International influences entered into the island's art long before 1959. Capitalizing on tourism and a worldwide market, its posters were sold as commercial items. Diminishing the Socialist Realism quotient, they increase the use of stencils, hand-cut and silkscreened. Disparate objects may juxtapose; so may "humour and visual wit." Not to mention Castro's 1977 proclamation: "Our enemy is imperialism, not abstract art." Contrasting the sophistication of the Cuban propaganda against the simplicity of Mongolian, for instance, reminds viewers and readers of the connections one Communist enclave may enjoy, as opposed to another.

One closes this collection wondering what the future holds for political posters. Capitalist systems appeal to the watcher of a screen far more than the passerby of a placard. Scholars in this current century may have to hope that our soon-outmoded digital technology records the catchphrases and memes generated by the political spectrum today as carefully as archivists have these bold posters. (Spectrum Culture) 432 pages 04-22-17 Reaktion Books

Donald S. Lopez, Jr.'s "Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol": Book Review

Look around an Eastern-themed gift shop or Asian-inspired garden and you may see a benevolent, rotund and inevitably smiling Buddha. Imported into Western culture, the familiar icon enters popular culture as a good luck symbol and a self-satisfied sage. What today's viewers of such images forget is that, less than two centuries ago, whatever was known or rumored about this wisdom teacher emanated more often from demonic or pagan connotations, rather than cheerful or chubby depictions.

This shift in representation has taken nearly two thousand years to spread, far from the homeland near the Himalayan foothills and Indian plains of the historical Buddha. An expert scholar on Buddhist culture at the University of Michigan provides readers with a compendium excerpting over eighty accounts of what the Buddha meant to the forebears of Christians (and, now and then, Muslims and Jews) who attempted to fit this acclaimed personage into their worldviews. Donald S. Lopez, Jr.'s {Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol: An Anthology of Early European Portrayals of the Buddha} takes up the conversion of the Buddha "from stone to flesh." That is, the statues and the portraits of this venerable personage filtered into the imagination of travelers and scholars. They might be mystified or terrified of what they heard or guessed about this fabled or feared entity, and they regarded him or it with "profound suspicion." Simply put, until 1801, the Buddha was not recognized as the founder of what the West invented as Buddhism. For previous tale-tellers, he was known only as an idol.

Lopez records over three hundred names for the Buddha between 200 and 1850. The litany stretches back to Clement of Alexandria around that first date. This Church Father distinguishes the Hindu Brahmin priests from non-Hindu followers of the "Boutta, whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours." Not bad for the first attempt at defining the change from Gautama to Sakyamuni, from a pampered prince to a wise deity bestowing favors on his worshipers.

The professor's introduction sums up the intricate patterns of information about the Buddha as they were transmitted from the Indian subcontinent into the Middle East and across the many Christian and Islamic empires. Tellingly, for nearly a millennium, few reports of the Buddha found their way west. Marco Polo's celebrated chronicle ranks sixth among eighty-odd entries, for instance. After this report, however, versions multiplied along the trade routes set up by Christian missionaries and traders with China. Emissaries at the Great Khan's court linked with Armenian, Persian and papal contacts visiting Mongol rulers. These East-West ties tightened in the 1600s after the Reformation.

Among these, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci epitomizes the ambition of the Catholic Church to win over the Chinese. Fr. Ricci also speaks for the dismissal of the Buddhist teachings brought to China from India as a "disaster." Neither a "genuine record of the history of this religion" nor "any real principle upon which one can rely" exists within this faith. For it "lacks the arts of civilization and has no standards of moral conduct to bequeath to posterity." Ricci credits the lack of knowledge of Buddhism abroad with a rationale for denigrating its doctrines. The Jesuits may have adapted Chinese customs as their own to win over the rulers, but they persisted, as with Ippolito Desideri in Tibet, to oppose Buddhism

Other Westerners added their own reactions. These tended to be negative. They offered many adaptations of the Buddha, often without recognizing the true roots of the idol in a historical figure. Yet, Lopez cautions, no single Buddha biography is accepted across Asia. No canonical text exists.

Rather than posit a true Asian vs. false Western dichotomy, Lopez asks "whether the Buddha, then and now, here and there, is the product of a more complex and interesting process of influence." Therefore, Lopez allows many texts to nestle and jostle against each other, refusing to rate them. This approach fits into Lopez' career, spent producing learned works demystifying Buddhist tropes. While the collection of polyglot voices may daunt, he offers cogent introductions for each diverse inclusion.

For then as now, knowledge of languages varied. Motivations multiplied. Conversion of the "pagans" led to negative attitudes, such as Ricci articulates. Catholics encountering monasteries eerily like their own recoiled as if they walked into the haunts of devils. Gradually, spurred by archaeological, linguistic and military exponents, interest in what became defined as Buddhism supplanted a terror of its teachings. Ethnographic enthusiasm grew in the 1700s and 1800s. This anthology concludes, fittingly, with the 1844 monograph of Eugène Burnouf. This scholar of Old Persian and Sanskrit pioneered the presentation of a human Buddha, rather than a stone idol. And from that juncture, Western sympathy began for the founding figure of a world religion and/or an appealing philosophy.

"The myriad idols coalesced into a single figure, who then became a historical figure, a founder of a religion, and a superstition became a philosophy." So Lopez sums up the transformation. Textually-based Buddhism remains dominant in the West, parallel to the quest in the 19th century for an historical Jesus. Whether such pursuits have resulted in reform or regression is left up to the adept. (Spectrum Culture 4/4/17; Amazon US with slight changes 4/20/17)

Tsering Woeser's "Tibet on Fire": Book Review

 

Since the Tibetan uprising of 2008, nearly 150 monks, nuns and laypeople have set themselves on fire to protest Chinese domination. Poet-activist Tsering Woeser argues that this defiant act of self-immolation is not an act of despair but “a positive symbol of action, national identity, and spiritual strength." Woeser’s short book explores the context and the fate of these bold dissidents.

The author is a dissident "under close surveillance" in the Chinese capital, and speaks out for those silenced in their decimated and deracinated homeland. Woeser explains that there is no tradition of this fiery act in her native Tibet. She tracks its sudden and recent escalation to the month of March, a period full of holidays celebrating the Himalayan realm that has become a time for national and cultural pride and resistance to Communist suppression. Rather than judge self-immolation by Buddhist principles, Woeser regards this act as "ignited by ethnic oppression."

Woeser lists five reasons for Tibet's fierce opposition to Chinese domination. First, the forced "patriotic education" given monastics. Next, the damage done to the Tibetan plateau, destroyed by exploitation and global warming hastened by Chinese capitalism. Third, the discouragement of the Tibetan language. Fourth, the massive immigration of lowland Han into the region. Finally, top-down control of the region by "nets in the sky and traps on the ground." Data secured by aerial footage and on land by cameras or spies capture many who are fighting for Tibet's survival. Postcard scenes of Lhasa romantics admire disguise a venal economy and a police state.

Analyzing nearly 50 statements left behind by those who have set themselves on fire, Woeser and her husband Wang Lixiong determine two central concerns. The protesters emphasize the restoration of the Tibetan language, proscribed and disdained by the Party and its native collaborators. The Tibetans also promote the independence of the Land of Snows. This tactic separates these restive rebels from those such as the present Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile, which has adopted a less confrontational and more diplomatic set of negotiations presented to the People's Republic of China.

As only Chinese-approved journalists can operate openly in Tibet, videos and testimonies by native sympathizers are difficult to obtain and dangerous to transmit. Woeser changes identifying names and places, and narrates the stories of those who have set themselves on fire, including the disturbing cases of those who survived and were spirited away by Chinese authorities, never to resurface.

These acts are considered not only religious protest but political protest. With the completion of the first rail line to Lhasa in 2012, the Chinese Han majority enter the former Tibetan capital with greater ease, while Woeser and Lhasa natives are corralled and interrogated by Chinese police before they can enter. Limits to Tibetan freedom are only increasing, not only by bureaucratic obstacles but by closed circuit television monitoring, collective punishments for families of protesters and rewards for informants. Due to restrictions and caution, Woeser can only report limited evidence. Journalists who are not in favor with the PRC occupation are forced to smuggle out firsthand reports from those trapped inside a militarized crackdown. Yet this book is as thoroughly documented as possible, with current websites and interviews appended or elaborated in end-notes. Tibet on Fire may be a concise volume, but it conveys rare voices that would otherwise be hushed.

After the failed rebellion in 2008, Woeser regards non-violence as the only solution. Recalling  Thích Quảng Đức’s  iconic self-immolation in Saigon in 1963, Woeser points to the Buddhist presence of a "lamp offering" as a congenial image. Using their bodies as candles, Tibetan protesters radicalize their uprising. They turn themselves into light. This harms no others, Woeser concludes, and by this horror, the attention of the world may be held.

Another dissident, the artist Ai Weiwei, memorably portrays this struggle. His cover design for Tibet on Fire reveals a hidden message under a logo of swirling flames: the names of these human "lamp offerings" are embossed into the background. May their impact widen among those who fight for freedom against an empire. (Spectrum Culture  )

Ryan Pyle's "Chinese Turkestan": Book Review

Ryan Pyle, an award-winning Canadian photographer who travels around and beyond his adapted Chinese home, presents a look at Xinjiang, for which he favors the old Chinese Turkestan title as better suited to its cultural diversity. In his short preface, he notes he does not want to "pontificate," but to present the modernization of this land by the Chinese with minimal commentary. That he does, in spare captions.

The paucity of background beyond the helpful introduction makes the reader turn viewer. Pyle places the captions a few pages away from the black and white photos. This has the advantage of allowing you to sink deeper into them, but the small red typeface (as well as the bright red binding and trim) do jolt you a bit.

Some photos benefit from the two-page layout, but this book is smaller in size than the coffee-table format I anticipated. (I was asked to review it.) Many, over half, document  the fast-changing main city of Kashgar, some in Khotan, and then they roam to the borderlands and wilder places. Fields and desert take over.

I expected more on the desolate Tian Shan mountains, but there is little coverage of the higher places. Most of Pyle's spare images show people, in factories, mills, streets, on paths, and among farms. He keeps the focus on them rather than natural landscapes, as he tries to give us a sense of its inhabitants.

This is welcome for its depiction of a place few of us may know beyond its ancient Silk Road aura. The reality as the Chinese regime changes this place and exploits its resources and imports its Han into a traditionally Muslim and Buddhist enclave must be interpreted. For, these are often minimalist portrayals. Author's site. 
Amazon US 2-6-15

Yangzom Brauen's "Across Many Mountains": Book Review

Probably the first Swiss-Tibetan ever, at least as a writer, actress, and activist, this granddaughter of a Buddhist nun who fled the Chinese invasion of her homeland, with her little child in tow, tells her family's story over three generations. Efficiently conveyed, without sentiment or romantic reverie, Brauen narrates how Kunsang, her grandmother, married in the Nyingma order, which tolerated if not encouraged such liaisons, her father, a monk. This period, of course, takes place in the pre-Chinese decades, when Tibet remained remote and its class structure and traditions firmly endured. Even now, Brauen admits, her "mola" affirms many of the old ways, despite a life which has pulled her away, first to refugee camp in India, then asylum in Switzerland, and now visiting her daughter, Yangzom's "amala," who resides as an artist in New York City's affluent enclave of cosmopolitan Chelsea.

The author compares herself to the bottom of a sandwich; between the tsampa dough of her grandmother and Sonam, her mother's "juicy filling" partaking of both ends but remaining intact and flavorful, Yangzom represents wholesome wheat bread. She tells the saga of half a century and more directly. Her highly educated grandparents did not feel, she insists, part of a backward society, nor did those under them feel that they resented the traditional ways. All was seen in thrall to a higher order. People did not question their place in a stratified and long-settled society.

With the Chinese refusing to let Tibet, then or now, develop in its own way and time to reform and modernity, it's sobering to find that Lhasa has been reduced to a garish, polluted Chinese city, and that the ancestral settlement of Pang, visited in a poignant journey back home, survives but part in ruins, as the monks resist the spies planted in such places by the PRC to ensure conformity. Brauen as an activist has been arrested for her part in demonstrating in Moscow against this regime when it held the 2008 Summer Olympics, and her path, from Bern to Berlin to Los Angeles, all bear symbolic territory, she observes, reveals her steadfast commitment to gaining if not independence then autonomy for her familial homeland. Since her birth in Switzerland in 1970, she has a unique p-o-v.

She reveals small tidbits which enrich her tale. I've read a few Tibetan accounts, but hers stands out for its natural and welcome portrayal of a rare combination of monastic and lay outlooks on Buddhism and Tibetan society within the same living lineage, its focus on women, and its European and American perspectives from one rarely and well-placed to make such a perspective come alive. For instance, we learn that meat was divided up among eaters as widely as possible to diffuse the negative karmic impact of its consumption in a harsh land; the wheel was known to Tibetans, but rather than revealing them as primitive for not using it, they preferred to keep it holy by not putting it into action. The result was that beasts of burden, animal and human, had to labor instead at raw toil.

Brauen presents fairly Tibet as it was, and she does not sensationalize or preach. Still, we see in Sonam's coming of age as a refugee and then immigrant to Swiss Germany the considerable challenge she and her mother faced, let alone the determination of her "pala," her father from another distinguished family, descended from an earlier religious exile, John Calvin. Martin Brauen's work as an ethnographer, sparked by youthful encounters with the first Tibetans who settled in 1961, led to his embrace of the culture, and his own curatorial career and friendship with the Dalai Lama. (See my review of his fascinating study into Western and Tibetan depictions of this land, Dreamworld Tibet.)

Translated from German in 2011 by Katy Derbyshire, this reads as if it originated in English, and flows. Brauen is not a fancy writer, and it's not often that we get such passages as simply describing the setting of the labor camp where Tibetans had to toil breaking boulders into gravel for roads: "The endless rains transformed the paths into raging torrents, the forest floor into a damp sponge, and the grand roads into washed-out, impassable tracks." But choosing to downplay the prose may be wise. The calm precision of her language and its modest focus prevent this from digressing, even if the pace and tone remain largely muted after the Tibetan sections, with naturally more drama and tension.

What she seeks is noteworthy. "I am determined never to stop standing up for human rights and far-reaching autonomy, so that my people do not face the same destiny as the Native Americans or the Australian Aborigines--leading a tragic life as dying races of insignificant and landless folklore performers." Given my own study of how Bhutan has faced its own pressures, caught in its own Buddhist redoubt between Indian expansion, Nepalese incursion, and Tibetan-PRC threat, and my own identity as a "native Irish" student of its ancestral language and cultural remnants, I can relate.

Bernard Fauré's "The Red Thread": Book Review

From this French post-modernist professor, it's no surprise that this collection of essays (more than a seamlessly argued or tightly assembled study) roams over not only the map but the territory into his "own private" excursions and byways. Bernard Fauré warns as he introduces "The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality" that it's not systematic, and that he favors Japanese sources for their own historiographical contexts over those of India and China, unlike many Buddhist or Asian scholars who try to cover this ideological and cultural realm. The result, as he promises, is more his "own private" record of what he finds, often in the nooks and crannies of monastic proscriptions, tall tales of mystics, and transgressive parables by Zen masters (male, at least).

This does drift into engaging moments. The "two truths" theory that ultimate revelation may necessarily override fidelity to the here-and-now conventions allows wiggle room for monks (for better or worse, this book focuses on male and monastic contexts as these tend to survive down to our times as obsessing most over violations of the precepts, sacred and profane). This underlying direction--it bobs up and down, submerged by hundreds of notes which appear to have been built into a chain of associated examples more than a tight thesis--does not prevent Fauré from digressions. These may be underwhelming--much more on Bhutan's Drukpa Kinley appears to be relevant to Fauré's study than the snippet he sums up meagerly. Or, as in the Japanese poet Ikkyu, emotion emerges as we read spare verse to share his bold vision.

Ultimately, after chapters on homosexual behavior in Japanese monasteries, and tales that promote a subversive (or maybe not) male archetype, Fauré's accounts end with more a whimper than a bang. Dutiful research offers few surprises: the yin/yang oscillates as do the Two Truths. Marginal nods to Martin Luther, Alison Lurie, Borges, the classics, and clerical casuists from the Catholic tradition demonstrate his broad learning as fun or sly asides.

However, his "Afterthoughts" allude if in haste to his most intriguing interpretations. He rejects any "'pure,' atemporal, and changeless doctrine." Flexibility rules. As he anticipated in his denial of the easy trope of anticlericalism and decadent monasteries as a reliable genre for East or West, he later opens up for scrutiny a preconception of a normative Buddhism. Given the Middle Way's path between desire and non-desire, interdiction and transgression, Fauré tracks it as itself "double tracked and double edged: maintaining in principle a precarious balance between the the two extremes, yet constantly torn in practice between these two centrifugal tendencies." (279)

Feminists offer a bold alternative. Instead of awakening "as a rupture, a reversal, a social drama" as in hagiographical treatments, feminine practices "tend to insist on the progressive, nondramatic, intimate character of their religious experience." (282) He promises a follow-up volume on this subject.

Finally, what of another direction? Earlier he quotes Georges Bataille's "Eroticism" (1947, p. 42; cited p. 98): "The knowledge of eroticism, or of religion, requires a personal experience equal and contradictory, of taboo and transgression." He muses perhaps both aspects may remain in a fuller consideration of religious impact upon the realms of the red thread which connects us all by blood. (Amazon US 4-7-13)

Bill Porter's "Zen Baggage: A Pilgrimage to China": Book Review

A skilled translator under the name Red Pine, as Bill Porter, he wanders ten weeks in early 2006, with a bottle of port, Snickers fun bars, tea, and pumpkin cookies. He travels north to south, pursued by the yellow dust, into the world of "red dust," the real realm as opposed to that Zen monks pursue. That realm strives to plunge the practitioner into language so as "to make us let go of language." (16)

He makes a great analogy when he visits a Choukoutian site for "Peking Man." "Early humans lived in a sea of sound. It took a long time before language and music pulled us out of that ocean and we had to start using religion to find our way back to its shores." (26) There's not a lot of fancy prose here, but Porter's a patient guide.

He stresses Zen as "just a way of living" (182): the simple admonition reverberates in the monasteries trying to expand after being crushed by Mao and the Cultural Revolution. The monks stopped between 1960-1980; today, the monasteries fill, but you don't get much sense of how monks suffered or why Zen appeals to younger cadres today. People don't appear to open up much to Porter, or he chooses not to probe--it may be caution on both sides in what in a rare aside he notes is still a "brutalizing" regime.

Porter argues for a Zen model based in communal living and self-sufficient farming. Few monasteries can live like this now, but some try to return to this ideal. As for Zen's origins in China, he differs with the academic interpretation of Chinese Zen as a fusion of indigenous Daoism and Indian Buddhism, favoring Zen's persistence as an "invisible tradition" not recorded in orally-based India but which by private transmission emerged into China, "affecting everything from art to gardening." (308)

Porter writes genially. He hints at his past and these brief interludes prove intriguing. Avoiding being sent to Vietnam by going AWOL; studying Intensive Chinese under a "Dragon Lady" at Columbia; working as a Taiwan-based journalist; stumbling into a 1989 PRC pro-democracy rally; meeting a hobo with a tale to tell: Porter conveys these few paragraphs of each scenario with verve. Yet by comparison to his previous book "Road to Heaven," about Chinese hermits, "Zen" revealed more about Porter's colorful life.

As for his main tale, not much happens. Lots of names and dates pass, and while Porter meticulously transfers his journal notes (what he paid is related diligently for every taxi ride or dessert treat) and his dutiful itinerary, this content will slow the pace to that of Porter's own. His bad back gets massaged and he welcomes sweets. He records his every move south, and you do find yourself witnessing what he does, even if it's not that exciting. Which may be the quiet lesson: how to make your life useful, if not flashy. This version of a pilgrimage may offer verisimilitude, but you don't come away with as much of a vivid sense of what it's like to meditate as a Zen adept or dramatic insights into monastic life today; you do feel you are with Porter each step of his long, patient, subtle way, on the other hand. (Amazon US 6-7-13)

Bill Porter's "Road to Heaven": Book Review

Porter, who translates Chinese poetry under the name of Red Pine, travels into the Chungnan range dividing the wheat from the rice, the north from the south. His visit is either well or badly timed, the late spring of 1989. He gets caught up in a pro-democracy demonstration, but departs for the hills in search of hermits before the Tiananmen Square crackdown in early June. He and his photographer partner decide to return that August. Perhaps the chill in the political air permeated those he meets, for there's less told here that delves into the fate of hermits under Mao and the PRC.

In a sort-of sequel to this account, "Zen Baggage" (reviewed 6/2013), Bill Porter relates this demonstration to a CIA operative, who wryly notes that the Agency noted Porter's spontaneous involvement. Like "Zen," "Road to Heaven" carries a wandering sensibility. Porter reveals less than in the other book about himself (not that he tells much) but lots about the dates, names, and history of the contexts for the shrines, temples, and hermitages he visits. While accessible to the non-specialist reader such as me, this material can slow the pace. Porter favors lots of detail and the result feels like a guidebook's commentary rather than a vividly conveyed, personal, rendering of sights.

However, he intersperses conversations, often terse, with often no-nonsense Taoist (and a few Buddhist, or hybrid) monks and nuns who've managed despite persecution during the Cultural Revolution to survive, on and off for some, steadily for a few, in the remote regions traditionally sought by those dropping out from the pressures of society to pursue the precepts of the Dao and the simple but demanding solitude that for them leads to wisdom, and if Taoists, to try to attain entry into immortality.

Like the Dao, this concept's pretty fuzzy even when hermits try to articulate this famously allusive ideal. I like Lao-Tzu's notebook remark, after he passed royal graves: "we can see the loss of desire/the cost of what we keep" (40). An abbot sums up the pursuit of Pure Land Buddhism or Zen as basically two paths to one goal. "Practice is like candy. People like different kinds. But it's just candy. The Dharma is empty." (96)

Not much happens during the travels Porter shares. He's off on less beaten paths, he does not have many extraordinary encounters to enliven these pages. Grounded more in historical narration and brief, sometimes stolid, interviews, there's far less of the itemized, step-by-step, price-by-price pace of his later travelogue from 2006 when he sought out Zen practitioners. But there's a similar reticence among those he talks to to reveal what life was like during their privations under Communism or during WWII. The recovery of the Zen monasteries after decades of persecution ties into the regime's wish to cash in on tourism. For Daoists, the same profit motive via the Party's control as a trade-off for monastic survival, as on fabled Huashan, appears to threaten the hard-kept and hard-won isolation that few monks or nuns can find today.

As Porter concludes after a visit to the splendid vistas of Taipaishan: "Those who follow the Tao cannot divorce themselves from others, yet to find the Tao they must retire from society, at least temporarily, to practice self-cultivation and concentration of mind." (199) Porter fittingly tries to capture what he knows he cannot, the message of the Tao that can be found by practice, and meditation, not by study or books. But, a few hermits try to explain; so must Porter. This little book may not succeed more than any other in that attempt, but it avoids the wry aphorisms or exotic packaging that commonly makes this challenging self-scrutiny too tidy for us. (6-16-13 Amazon US)

"The Gary Snyder Reader": Book Review

Over six hundred pages, two-thirds of these essays, articles, journals, and interviews, the rest original poetry and Asian translations, this anthology 1999 offers a deep introduction and thorough investigation of a writer I regard as a thinker but also as a worker. As a poem about Japanese loggers ends: "the pain/ of the work/ of wrecking the world" infuses his perspective. He's freer of the usual academic traps, even though he lectures at UC Davis, and his residence in the Sierras and his forestry, logging, and Zen monk training provide richer material for him to excavate, sift, ponder, and return to for half a century.

Early on, he stayed wary of temptation: "(Beware of anything that promises freedom or enlightenment-- traps for eager and clever fools-- a dog has a keener nose-- every creature in a cave can justify itself. Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.)" [24:X (1956, Kyoto) p. 29]

This may let off of a whiff of an air that many well-schooled and meditatively "cool" Beats to me possessed, a dash at least of reverse snobbery by a 1951 graduate of Reed, as in a revealing 1977 East-West Journal interview. "I can pride myself on the fact I've worked nine months on a tanker at sea and nobody once ever guessed I had been to college." (105) Still, on the hundred acres he and Allen Ginsberg bought around 1969 and he named Kitkitdizze after the Nisenan word for an aromatic shrub, Snyder reified his back-to-nature convictions. He never explains why he chose to build on open space (if logged generations before) rather than, say, settle on already occupied land in his native Northwest, but he surely provides better care for his Shasta Nation Yuba River watershed than those who, attracted as he and then early-1970s hippies to the same terrain nearby, have torn it up for golf courses, tract homes, and retirement communities. The tension between development and sustainability underlies many essays here, as Snyder labors to improve the quality of his residence and to educate his neighbors on this small ridge of Turtle Island.

In it for the long haul, as a native Californian I understand Snyder's appeal to all of us who live here. No matter where we've come from, or our ancestors, he encourages us to recognize this fragile series of bioregions as a wonderful and lovely new home. The price paid for this settling (no matter how ecologically educated or real-estate flipping?) is very apparent. He cites a "friend who still gets emotional when he recalls how the avocado orchards of his southern Californian youth landscape were transformed into hillside after hillside of suburbs." (184) He avers that between the ages of about six and ten, a childhood place enters us. For me, it was between eight and eleven, and lemons instead of avocados, but I suffer the same enduring impact as a local witness to what replaced my memories.

These excerpts from 1990's The Practice of the Wild alert one to the sensitivity needed to hear our locale's presence. Rocks as well as trees can speak if the imprint of humans is not too heavy, even for those of us who live in the city. Bioregionalism, for those in the "flat crowded lowlands" as well as the fewer lucky enough to make a living in the less hectic highlands or on the cooler, pricier coasts, can recognize how our political and social structures fight against the place we wish to settle down in. Digging in, for Snyder in the Sierra Nevada foothills, represents a stand. True republicanism, he reminds us, means not distancing squabbles to be arbitrated by monied or judicial entities. It means working out differences with adversaries.

This ties to the "Buddhism and the Possibilities of a Planetary Culture" principles, the 1969 version reprinted here of his 1961 manifesto for a principled anarcho-pacifism. Utopian as it may sound then or now, it remains a prescient call for resisting, anticipating what the Occupy Movement tried to replace forty/fifty years later. As he expands his stance in The Practice of the Wild: "People fear the small society and the critique of the State. It is difficult to see, when one has been raised under it, that it is the State itself which is inherently greedy, destabilizing, entropic, disorderly, and illegitimate." (195) Critics throw back "parochialism, regional strife, 'unacceptable' expressions of cultural diversity," but Snyder ripostes: "Our philosophies, world religions, and histories are biased towards uniformity, universality, and centralization-- in a word, the ideology of monotheism." (195) As a Buddhist, Snyder counters with small-scale economics of a householder, eco-activist, and cultivator.

He finds this "earth house hold" in the swoop from Big Sur up through his place of birth on a dairy farm north of Seattle that came up against second-growth woods, and then into British Columbia, and over Alaska down to Hokkaido across the Japanese islands where he studied as a monk, and over to China. This, his chosen Pacific Rim regional affiliation, draws him in many journals and essays excerpted here into its past (he evokes the largest city of medieval times, Hang-chou, marvelously as he shows us its archived chronicles down to where to find the tastiest pig roasted in coals) and its present traces of its ancient, indigenous mindset.

Alert to contradictions beneath the surface we see and tread, Snyder's earth never sleeps. "Life in the wild is not just eating berries in sunlight," he warns. (209) Depth ecology demands scrutiny of what's fermenting and digesting in the dark. This may require him to open up his Sierra home to bugs and deer, squirrels and ticks. In threat, decay, and migration, life's rhythms also pulse. Insights may emerge for those bold enough to look inside. "The other side of the 'sacred' is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots." (210) In this spirit world, he seeks communication. Poetry, myth, lore amassed to be critiqued not only in seminars but in the field: Snyder takes the reader out into the wilderness, and unlike all but a few scholars, he practices what he preaches as he leaves trails behind, and literally crawls where bears do to figure out what they do do.

In one such lair, where the rock art left thousands of years ago in caves of the Dordogne and the Pyrenees beckons, Snyder demonstrates the wonder of what our ancestors knew and left even as their language faded. He quotes T.S. Eliot on the Magdalenian discoveries of his own decade: "art never improves." (393) Instead of assuming progress, Snyder counters that primitive creators already had found their truths.  "The deep past confounds the future by suggesting how little we are agreed upon on what is good." The humans were not depicted; aurochs were. Men and women did not need to paint themselves into their environment, not long after they emerged to portray it 35,000 years ago.

Similarly, the verses Snyder follows his prose with, opening with seven strong selections from Riprap (1959), depict his self-assurance as he climbs mountains and looks down on his own traces there. The first one, "Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout," returns to the first pages, with his 1952 journal as a Forestry Surface lookout for fires (before he fell foul of McCarthyism and had to take the side of the loggers to make his living). It scans the space he has chosen to explore ever since his teens: "I cannot remember things I once read/ A few friends, but they are in cities./ Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup/ Looking down for miles/ Through high still air." (399)

Two hundred-plus pages follow but already the path is clear in his poems. That first inclusion as lodestar or compass directs us. He aligns the precise suggestion of Asian approaches, which diverge from the symbolic weight of Western contemporary verse, while he lengthens the suggestive lines of simpler spoken predecessors such as Williams. (See more on this in the letters with Allen Ginsberg here reviewed by me.) Snyder edges past the natural settings of the Golden State familiar if made more looming and ominous to Jeffers, and skates over the gnomic density of Pound, Yet he shares Pound's knack for dangling the reader within a suddenly visual suspension. Analyzing natural (are any truly inorganic?) components within the environs he passes through, Snyder reveals by his long crunchy or mulchy march across the world's surface its gaps and its seams. He distances himself from his own footfall; he waits for us to join him--as he listens to the echoes. (Amazon US 4-24-13)

"Just Walk Into That Cloud:" Bhutan in Books & Film

North of India, south of Tibet, with fewer than a million people, this landlocked Swiss-sized monarchy, “sandwiched between Methuselahs,” Russ and Blyth Carpenter aver in a memorable if odd metaphor, “seems like a printer’s error.”  Most accounts nod to its historical impenetrability, its vast vistas, and its mix of colorful folk tradition and impassive sophistication. Its Buddhist ethos encourages the personal touch: there’s a lack of any “impersonal” stoplights in its capital, Thimphu, even as it exceeds a hundred thousand residents-- where Michel Peissel found in 1968 but three small buildings next to its dzong or monastery-fortress. No cities existed in Bhutan until recently. Rapidly modernizing while directing its Gross National Happiness strategy, the region’s last independent Buddhist enclave aims to balance economic opportunities and educational progress in what many Westerners mistake as still a semi-feudal, isolated Shangri-La. With diverse ecosystems and regional cultures, the nation hunkers in below the jagged Himalayas. A central expanse of rugged mountain valleys separate linguistically and culturally diverse Buddhists, who have evolved to farm and herd two miles or more high. They are unsuited to live in the tropical lowlands, where Nepali and Hindu-dominant peoples raise crops on terraces and fields.

It will be expensive to explore: a daily tariff imposed of $250 keeps tourism low and requires guides and itineraries approved in advance. However, lodging and food will be covered; a third of this fee funds sustainable development.  The fear of becoming another Nepal, with a degraded ecology and sullied infrastructure, impels Bhutan to enforce “high value, low volume” on its visitors, by jeep or on trek. It discourages settlement by foreigners and it commands national dress to be worn by guides, those in schools and public service, and those visiting the center of any district, the dzong, on official business. 

For those who have not seen Bhutan firsthand, this review article surveys the books and media available. I compiled this after not finding an equivalent resource on the Internet or in print. The reading lists in guidebooks, while helpful, left me wondering what else lay on the shelves. By investigating histories, travel narratives, novels, photo-journalism, film, and guidebooks, you can learn a lot from an armchair—which will likely encourage you to begin to save up and plan your own excursion.

Histories:

The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama, and the First British Expedition to Tibet by Kate Teltscher (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)

Bhutan, through the middle of the last century, had only received thirteen Western expeditions. George Bogle reports on the first, in 1774-1775. He wished to connect the East India Company with China, via Tibet. In between lay Bhutan. In The High Road to China, Kate Teltscher retells in 2006 the young Scotsman Bogle’s journey. Out of cleverly chosen samples of British-made and Indian-exported goods, this first trade mission lobbied to sway the Panchen Lama. "How else to seduce a nation than with a tempting display of luxury goods, scientific instruments and mechanical toys?"

Views of Medieval Bhutan by Michael Aris (London: Serindia and Washington: Smithsonian, 1982)

However, Bhutan managed to dissuade the eager empires, Chinese, Tibetan, or British. Most Westerners further comparisons to "feudal" dzongs and "medieval" customs such as archery (the national sport, originally to repel Tibetan invaders) or unquestioned fealty when they encounter Bhutan. Its never-colonized, semi-feudal period under an absolute monarch lasted past when men landed on the moon. A handsome 1982 edition of Views of Medieval Bhutan features an introduction by Michael Aris, who tutored the Wangchuck royal family for six years when the nation was opening up to modernization. Aris (who would marry Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi) presents the meticulous observations of Samuel Davis. A surveyor and draftsman for the Bengal Army, he accompanied the second British embassy, in 1783, to Druk Yul, the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon.

These elegant depictions attest to the only foreign artist "of distinction" to show Bhutan, and the first outsider to paint scenes from these mountains. Aris notes that his fellow Englishman's "legacy played no part in the development of those imaginary utopias which the west continues to locate in the trans-Himalayan region." Aris annotates and excerpts Davis' journal, and nods to its secular, and largely un-Romantic tone, also a part of the naturalistic art Davis brings to the plates reproduced here. "If sublime and romantic qualities are sometimes found expressed in his art this is surely because Davis, like most of us, was constitutionally incapable of reacting otherwise to certain combinations of mountains, light, fortresses and forests."

Travel Narratives:

Lands of the Thunderbolt: Sikhim, Chumbi & Bhutan by the Earl of Ronaldshay (1923; Berkeley: Snow Lion Graphics, 1987)

The thunderbolt is the "dorje," the bell-like scepter wielded by lamas in the Vajrayana Tibetan tradition, the lands those of Sikkim, Chumbi, and Bhutan, the time, 1920. The Earl of Ronaldshay’s 1923 account, Lands of the Thunderbolt, while not free of its era’s imperial tone, given this "practicing Presbyterian" author, remains lively. In the footsteps of Bogle and Davis, the Earl shares their enthusiasm for leaving the humid plains of Bengal behind. He begins his ascent at Darjeeling into what at that time was a series of Buddhist-ruled principalities separate from the rest of patchwork British India's jurisdictions. One of the first visitors to the Eastern Himalayas who articulates a modern Western understanding of the unusual mindsets he analyzes, he combines wit with wonder, drollery with description.

Lords and Lamas: A Solitary Expedition across the Secret Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan by Michel Peissel (London: Heinemann, 1970)

Subtitled "A Solitary Expedition across the Secret Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan," Michel Peissel’s 1970 account, Lords and Lamas, of his September 1968 trek over four hundred miles of footpaths reveals a crucial moment of transition from a feudal, medieval fastness to a nation finishing the first span of an east-west highway that will change Bhutan irrevocably. India's fear, in the Cold War, of Chinese threats south of Tibet spurred them to fund a paved road to connect the shorter ones coming up steep valleys from the Gangetic Plain. Peissel, after six failed attempts to get royal and bureaucratic approval, finally is allowed in the country. Bhutan admits its first traveler to carry in foreign currency, and he resolves once inside to follow Captain Robert Boileau Pemberton's 1838 route across the six ranges and passes dividing the core of the corrugated and unstable realm.

Treasures of the Thunder Dragon: A Portrait of Bhutan by Ashi Dorje Wangmo Wangchuck (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006) 

One of four sisters married to the fourth Dragon King, Ashi (an honorific for a royal woman) Dorje Wangmo Wangchuck takes us down paths Peissel yearned to follow, in what is now a constitutional monarchy. Treasures of the Thunder Dragon deftly introduces facts about its people; topography in the three zones (humid foothills, temperate valleys, and alpine highlands) as one follows the main lateral road west to east; history; monarchy, and modernity, all in twenty pages. This prefaces a necessarily "elevated" perspective, but a cogent 2006 overview. She then blends her family’s history with tales from treks to care for those neglected in its remote hamlets (see: Tarayana Foundation).

So Close to Heaven: the Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas by Barbara Crossette (New York: Vintage, 1996)

So Close to Heaven: the Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas focuses on the Wangchuck dynasty in its Bhutanese coverage. As a New York Times journalist based in India, Crossette favors a style akin to the Gray Lady. The 1996 book unfolds as if feature articles in a tone mixing personal encounters with interviews with diplomats, royalty, and, via translators at times, everyday folks. There's a distance between her and her interlocutors which is expected, given her position and strategy.

Dreams of the Peaceful Dragon: A Journey through Bhutan by Katie Hickman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988)

One of the first accounts by a Westerner who visited (as of the mid-1980s, although this is not specified) the then-less accessible eastern reaches, Katie Hickman's Dreams of the Peaceful  Dragon proceeds in expected fashion. That is, she's a competent travel writer and her integration of the remarks of earlier visitors helps give background for her own Raj-reminiscent trek by horseback. Oxford-educated, from a diplomatic family, with an international upbringing and dynastic sponsorship to cut red tape, she exudes the air of privilege.

Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan by Jamie Zeppa (New York: Riverhead-Penguin, 2000)

Under the Holy Lake: A Memoir of Eastern Bhutan by Ken Haigh (Edmonton: U. of Alberta P, 2008)

For longer tales from about the same relatively "early-modern" (the road paved, but not yet electricity, TV, phones, or the internet) period in the eastern region, the most popular remains Jamie Zeppa's Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan . Ken Haigh's Under the Holy Lake: A Memoir of Eastern Bhutan complements it well and deserves equal acclaim.   Both teachers of English from Canada, Zeppa and Haigh nearly overlap in place and time with Hickman, but their extended stints allow them a deeper insight into these districts. Their honest, unadorned reflections better the brief glimpses of many Westerners, on limited budgets and itineraries. Enriched by hindsight, Haigh and Zeppa apply literary sensibilities with precision to evoke wisdom and ponder lessons.

After Easter Sunday Mass in Khaling (despite the Buddhist state religion, teachers often come from India and Catholic regions), Haigh looks back over the scene. "There were bright green highlights on the pasture, almost yellow, and deeper green in the pastures of the ravines. A lone white cow ambled down the hillside and onto the road where it was struck by a passing truck."

What Haigh shares with Zeppa is a determination to avoid the soft-focus, combined with an acknowledgement of the love-hate feelings that may come once the initial confusion or infatuation wears off and the reality of separation from Canadian comfort sinks in.

Radio Shangri-La: What I Discovered on My Journey to the Happiest Kingdom on Earth by Lisa Napoli (New York: Random House, 2011)

The Blessings of Bhutan by Russ and Blyth Carpenter (Honolulu: U. of Hawai'i P., 1999)

A decade or two later, Western narratives feature consultants who land in Thimphu and remain for assigned periods, as the royal civil service expands and foreign aid flows in to assist the Gross National Happiness program. Just before the introduction of television, The Blessings of Bhutan features rural Oregonians Russ and Blyth Carpenter. They arrived in the late 1990s to become freelance advisers and eloquent if agnostic analysts of its GNH mindset. Brooklyn-born L.A. transplant Lisa Napoli’s 2011 Radio Shangri-La presents a media-savvy journalist’s efforts to jumpstart a fledgling station in the capital. Her big-city hustle and mid-life ennui meet a slowdown, and impel reorientation. Yet, most memoirs arrive from guests chosen to work from outside the United States; Bhutan favors European, Canadian, or Down Under expertise.

Hidden Bhutan: Entering the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon by Martin Uitz (2006; London: Haus, 2008)

In a hundred pages of Hidden Bhutan, Austrian ex-pat Martin Uitz explores its off-road, off-beat side. Although he works in its Ministry of Finance, one of a hundred foreigners in its booming capital, Thimphu, he nods to the bureaucratic morass and civil service's perks only in the opening chapter. Rather, about the same time in the same place-- halfway through the past decade-- as Lisa Napoli’s radio endeavor, Uitz roams out of the city to explore scenery as close as a few hours walk up slopes to yak herders and a takin reserve.

Episodes on the Snowman Trek comprise a fast-paced chapter. Finding three recent accounts of “the toughest trek in the world” over twenty-five days and crossing many Himalayan passes over three miles high, I welcomed Trish Nicholson's Journey in Bhutan: Himalayan Trek in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon by Trish Nicholson (Collca e-books, 2012). She traveled there long before the other two writers I read--although she does not reveal this until an afterword. While Nicholson did not take the full Snowman Trek reported in diary form by Mark Horrell (Yakking with the Thunder Dragon: Walking Bhutan's Snowmen Trek, 2011 e-book), or at book length by Kevin Grange as Beneath Blossom Rain: Discovering Bhutan on the Toughest Trek in the World  (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 2009), this New Zealand-based anthropologist in her shorter, 100-mile expedition (with other Westerners and a few guides, ponies, and yaks) allows more coverage of the less secluded countryside seen before and after the trek than that witnessed by her two male counterparts twenty-odd years later.

For those not wanting to read a whole book about a two-hundred mile trek, Uitz’s chapter conveys the gist of this difficult journey. Uitz loves the "tsachu" hot springs which entice the traveler to Gasa and ease the burdens of a summer trek--the exception to the narrative rule as the three accounts above take place in the fall, hastening before the snows set in.

Dragon Bones: Two Years Beneath the Skin of a Himalayan Kingdom by Murray Gunn (Hong Kong: Blacksmith, 2011)

Seasons matter. Summers plague trekkers and hikers with leeches and monsoons. Winters close mountain passes. Spring has less rain, but more visitors. Likewise with autumn, but the roads may not be repaired from the landslides that constantly threaten to close off the lone lateral highway. Meanwhile, experts keep trying to assist Bhutan with its logistical challenges. In Dragon Bones (2011), Australian IT engineer Murray Gunn accompanies his new French wife to Bhutan for an extended consultancy, where she's hired to advise its dairy industry's agronomists.

Like his compatriot Launsell Taudevin's "With a Dzong in My Heart" (1994; CreateSpace e-book 2011) memoir set in 1988, Murray Gunn finds that advising the locals about Western methods clashes with rank-pulling bureaucrats, a more lackadaisical work ethic than he expected, and a series of culture clashes mixed with awe at the kingdom's beauty, Buddhist traditions, and courtly atmosphere. While Gunn repeats many of the trekking adventures others do in his account, unique to what I've read in other versions, he listens to his guide: "This is our life. We have to come up here no matter what the weather's like and we do the same trails over and over until our feet are sore. And we can never go anywhere else. There's no holiday for us."

So You Are Thinking of Going to Bhutan by James W. Gould (Amazon Kindle, 2012)

Reports by Gunn or Uitz should be chosen over the holiday taken in James W. Gould’s So You Are Thinking of Going to Bhutan. At 8400 words, this 2012 e-book relates too casually the history, religion, and culture of a bit of Bhutan as seen by the author over a week. Even if this duration must endure as most likely for a less affluent traveler, given the per diem tariff increase, choose longer books by those lucky enough to stay longer in Bhutan. I have not covered two popular, New Age-filtered, memoirs in print, all the same; both of their authors achieved a permanence few Westerners can, by marrying Bhutanese men so as to stay there forever.

Novels:

Cressida's Bed by Desmond Barry (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004)

Almost all who enter Bhutan must leave. Based on a 1931 British expedition to award a knighthood to the King of Bhutan, Desmond Barry’s 2004 novel Cressida’s Bed features as its protagonist a character taken from a real-life doctor’s expedition, that of half-Irish expatriate Christina Devenish. In her early thirties in Calcutta, a free-love advocate, a Theosophist who finds no contradiction with the practice of medicine, she possesses her spirituality and her sexuality confidently. While Barry's depiction of her entry into a Bhutan divided between monarchy and theocracy lacks the sensual and visual evocations of many other writers who've visited this kingdom, it's refreshing to have a more physically rendered, less enraptured presence embarking there. "She set foot on the soil of Bhutan, Alice through the looking glass racked with menstrual cramps, the sweat cooling on her forehead and her back under her sticky frock, and she was desperate to empty her bladder in the shadows of the luxuriant rainforest."

The Circle of Karma by Kunzang Choden (New Delhi: Penguin, 2005)

Kunzang Choden’s 2005 novel The Circle of Karma, the first in English by a Bhutanese woman, tells over forty years the story of Tsomo. At fifteen, in the remote region of Kurtai, she soon falls in love with another woman's husband. This leads soon to pregnancy, but the results spur her not to a happy marriage, but family strife. She flees to pound stones to pave the first roads across the kingdom, putting this section somewhere about ten years after the Chinese suppression of Tibet. Years aren't mentioned; the novel unfolds in an indirect narration by Tsomo, who finds unhappiness often, and exiles herself to India.

The Heart of the Buddha: A Novel by Elsie Sze (Austin: Emerald, 2009)

Hong Kong-born, Toronto-based Elsie Sze integrates information into The Heart of the Buddha (2009) to situate Marian and Ruthie within the admittedly challenging scenario they find as their paths intersect in Bhutan. Sisters and twins, the two protagonists reflect upon their Chinese Catholic upbringing, their Canadian identity, and their position in a realm where Buddhism is the state religion, where a benign monarchy and compliant press rule.

Photojournalism + Film: 

The Dragon Kingdom: Images of Bhutan by Blanche Christine Olschak with photography by Ursula Markus-Gansser and Augusto Gansser (Boston: Shambhala, 1984)

Since Tantric Buddhism dominates, until very recently as the state religion, it merits attention. A Swiss-based trio of scholars in The Dragon Kingdom reports from nascent stages of the kingdom's connections with the West. The Buddhist-based analysis is therefore very light on modernization, which had just begun in the period they visited in the early 1980s. It can be perused in a sitting, as a quick introduction to Bhutan’s traditions and panoramas.

Bhutan: Mountain Fortress of the Gods by Christian Schicklgruber and Françoise Pommaret (Boston: Shambhala, 1998)

A folio-format study, Bhutan: Mountain Fortress of the Gods commemorates a Viennese exhibition at the Museum für Völkerkunde in 1997-1998. While scholarly, and hefty in size and substance, it endures as a corrective to romance or brevity in Western accounts. As co-editor Christian Schicklgruber introduces the collection, it mirrors how a visitor would approach Bhutan. Visual impressions, "the lay of the land," flora and fauna, architecture, history, art, politics, and regional peoples and their distinctive dress unfold.

Not an exhibition catalogue in the usual sense, Bhutan: Mountain Fortress of the Gods instead presents an in-depth examination of the nation. While very factual in tone and heavily academic, the contributors serve as a cross-section of native and European scholars best able to explain this kingdom seriously to an audience for which fantasy and effusion seem to suffice given its dominant portrayal in certain media as a happy hideaway. (This book reincarnated as an award-winning 2001 Austrian website, but that's long defunct.)

Bhutan: Kingdom of the Dragon by Robert Dompnier (Hong Kong: Living Colour, 1999)

Robert Dompnier in Bhutan: Kingdom of the Dragon offers photography taken in the 1990s, emphasizing tradition, “tsechu” dances which enliven vivid rituals through the year at many a dzong, and crafts such as weaving, costumes, and intricate architecture which persist not as folklore for tourists but as organic expressions of Buddhist perceptions in everyday settings. While short on text, the presentation is handsomely arranged. The bright textiles, dresses, and painted facades leap out. The size allows a map far larger than in most books on Bhutan--but a tiny caption warns: "The borders as shown on this map are neither authentic or [sic] correct."

Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom by Michael Hawley (Cambridge MA: Friendly Planet, 2004) fact sheet from MIT and Friendly Planet

As for size, "Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom" as the younger sibling to the world's biggest book continued raising funds for medical and educational projects. Friendly Planet, Friendly Planet, a charity spinoff of M.I.T., generated income in an innovative fashion, as digital photography and bookbinding skill combined with high-tech expertise under a team led by Professor Michael Hawley, who ran the campus Media Lab's special projects division. The big brother book, 5' by 7' and weighing 150 lbs., dwarfed the two Bhutanese schoolchildren the team "adopted" on their initial November 2001 visit, when displayed at Harry Winston's gallery in Manhattan. This 2003 book symbolized the meeting of high rollers with a worthy cause, and demonstrated how a $15,000 volume could support other schoolchildren and families in the remote areas of this region, reached only by trails, far from the touristy areas the book documents.

For the smaller companion, itself considerable at a foot by two feet and 15 lbs., this expands the original. It reproduces the immense photos and doubles their number, if in less stupendous manner, by explaining how the original was assembled, and how the team returned to Bhutan in 2003 to bring aid to villages and schools from the moneys raised by the big book. Now out-of-print, this follow-up 2004 volume also contributed its profits to Friendly Planet, and Hawley's text and captions, garnered from a cooperative of eleven photographers, conveys the appeal—if in rather soft-focus moods despite the digital accuracy--of the Buddhist kingdom and people.

Bhutan Heartland  by Libby Lloyd and Robert van Koesveld (Fremantle, Western Australia: Fremantle, 2010)

Libby Lloyd and Robert van Koesveld report in 2010 from spring times on the Lateral Road, the east-west connection across the vertiginous valleys and high passes that furrow between the Himalayas and the subtropical plantations. As these Australian-based photographers and social workers explain early on in Bhutan Heartland, the choice they faced, to move from west to east, is repeated, if perhaps in reverse, by the natives of this kingdom daily. That road, and increasingly the feeder routes paved along what have been yak trails and footpaths, represents for this constitutional monarchy's Gross National Happiness plan a way to increase access to within a day's hike of most of its still largely rural citizens.

The authors efficiently intersperse a lot of background (a glossary and too-short reading list are appended, and a link to van Koesveld's photo archive website) that some earlier authors have struggled to include. It's the right amount for a newcomer: less footnoted and less weighty than the Fortress study but more in-depth than Dompnier, and less-dated than Dragon Kingdom. For handsomely reproduced photographs and accessible text, it’s a great place to begin a virtual visit.

Dreaming Bhutan: Journey in the Land of the Thunder Dragon  by Nicole Grace (Santa Fe: Mani Press, 2011)

Nicole Grace’s Dreaming Bhutan presents in "a brief glimpse" over forty photos on the right side, and a spare text which could fit on a postcard on the left, leaving lots of blank space. Perhaps the slightly blurred resolution of some of the photographs fits the title, as she in promotional material for this 2011 book explains how she wants to show "dreaming" not "of" but "Bhutan" itself--as a portal to enlightenment. A romanticized approach directs Grace's gaze. It prefers "a world of enchantment, ancient rituals and dress that seems not to have changed in hundreds of years."

Bhutan: Between Heaven and Earth by Mary Peck (Santa Fe: Merlin Press, 2011)

From visits totaling seven months from 1999 to 2005 to this Himalayan kingdom, Mary Peck's fifty-six black-and-white photographs in Bhutan: Between Heaven and Earth, each on its own right-hand page facing a blank left, command attention. Many have captions as endnotes; a few do not. This 2011 removal of words from image (except four brief poems, one by Gary Snyder, another by W.S. Merwin, and a pair of his translations from Muso Soseki) allows the reader to look at the landscapes, people, ceremonies, and architecture as if witnessed first-hand. Grace’s captions inspire curiosity as to their short length; Peck’s pages suggest a trust in unpredictability ahead.

In her afterword, "Bhutan's Curve of Time," Peck relates how directions were given by Bhutanese. Each of her inquiries led to a local range of instructions--by a resident. "Just walk into that cloud." one man told her. Beyond circumscribed limits, hemmed in by gorges or peaks, paths or landmarks, the estimates faded, and new ones emerged with the next encounter, the next person down the trail.

Karma Ura situates his nation within these same furrowed contours. As a distinguished leader of  the monarchy’s think tank implementing the nation's evolving Gross National Happiness policy, Ura explains in his thoughtful forward the scope of GNH. He sums up the country, full of micro-climates dividing one valley from the next. He notes how "the food chain is more or less completed within one's own valley." Therefore, the mythology, community, and the land are integrated over generations to support the people in an intimate, in-depth knowledge-- differing from the fragmented skills promoted today as a solution to education and modernization.

Bhutan: Hidden Lands of Happiness by John Wehrheim (Chicago: Serindia, 2nd ed. 2011)

John Wehrheim’s Bhutan: Hidden Lands of Happiness gazes, through words and via a camera. While limited of course to his choice, the combination invites the reader to become a viewer. This Chicago-born, Kaua’i-based hydrologist who mingles narrative journeys with black-and-white silver gelatin photography between 1991 and 2006 in his afterword warns: "The words and events are true but not always in the order and sequence implied."

Bhutan: Taking the Middle Path to Happiness (DVD Vendetti Productions, directed by Tom Vendetti, produced by Robert C. Stone and John Wehrheim, 2009)

Under the direction of its fifth king and such experts as Karma Ura, "Gross National Happiness" increasingly grows familiar as a catchphrase to sum up Bhutan's ambitions to orient itself within harmonious precepts as taught by Buddhism and shared equitably among its peoples to assure mutual comfort, educational advancement, and spiritual progress. Bhutan: Taking the Middle Path to Happiness, a one-hour 2009 video produced by Thomas Vendetti and John Wehrheim, introduces GNH. This kingdom's initiative under its watchful monarchy seeks to promote wise globalization while nourishing traditional lifestyles, as Bhutan perches between a covetous China and a teeming India.

Bhutan: Land of Serenity by Matthieu Ricard (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008)

Unlike some photo-narratives on this often-mythologized kingdom, Matthieu Ricard’s Bhutan: Land of Serenity takes a sober, almost detached approach that reveals this monk’s calm. After a decade in the company of the Dalai Lama's tutor there (Tibetan refugee Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche), and now the Dalai Lama's French translator himself, French-born Ricard brings the same considered evaluation of Buddhist practice and culture that his sponsorship and appearance in the films Brilliant Moon and The Spirit of Tibet demonstrate about his devotion to his exiled mentors. What this has to do with Bhutan as a larger entity comes across more gradually. Three pages introducing each of these eight sections of his brilliantly reproduced color photography, 1980-2007, convey this more vividly than the miniscule font (too small, let alone the captions even smaller) do in this admittedly handsome, compact text, translated by Ruth Sharman.

Travellers and Magicians (feature film directed by Khyentse Norbu, 2003. DVD Zeitgeist Films, 2005)

As the first feature-length film from Bhutan, reincarnate lama-director Khyentse Norbu's 2003 follow-up to his festival success of soccer-mad Tibetan monks in 1999’s The Cup generates attention-- by that statement alone.

Travelers and Magicians nestles in a familiar frame: the varied cast hiking or hitching on the road hears a story along the way. The plot unfolds genially and gently. It's not fast-paced, and reflects the steady, shrewd sensibility of its makers and actors. Norbu wishes to offer the world and his own homeland a reflection of how Buddhist themes might enrich people, as if painting a traditional tapestry by the light of cinema. The bonus feature elucidates this philosophy as it underlies the film. For more backstory on the director, consult Lesley Ann Patten's nearly concurrent (if unevenly directed) documentary "Words of My Perfect Teacher" (2003, Festival Media 2008 DVD) about Norbu, under his Buddhist name, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche.


(To link more interdependence in a small kingdom, while the cast of Travelers and Magicians--the first film in Dzongkha, the native language taught in schools there along with English--is billed as non-professionals, I understand that the lead character of Dondup is the exception. Played by Tshewang Dendup, a Thimphu-based radio actor, he appears in Jamie Zeppa's memoir, for Dondup in real life was the genial student with whom she as a young Canadian teacher fell in love. In turn, Martin Uitz discusses the reception of this and more low-budget films in Dzongkha during the past decade.)

Guidebooks:

The Rough Guide to First-Time Asia by Leslie Reader and Lucy Ridout (London: Rough Guide-Penguin, 5th ed. 2010){This is helpful for planning, checklists, advice, warnings, websites, and reading lists, even if Bhutan gets the same rapid coverage as two-dozen of its continental neighbors.}

Bhutan: Himalayan Mountain Kingdom (Odyssey Guide) by Françoise Pommaret (Hong Kong: Airphoto, 6th ed. 2009)

Bhutan Handbook (Footprint) by Gyurme Dorje (Bath: Footprint, 2nd ed. 2010)

Bhutan (Country Travel Guide) by Bradley Mayhew, Lindsay Brown, and Anirban Mahapatra  (Oakland: Lonely Planet, 4th ed. 2011)

For those who want to see more of Bhutan than a film depicts, three guidebooks mediate between the armchair and the adventure. Gyurme Dorje, as a Himalayan expert, offers in Footprint’s Bhutan Handbook practicalities similar to Lonely Planet's Bhutan (Country Travel Guide) by Bradley Mayhew, Lindsay Brown, and Anirban Mahapatra. The Footprint guidebook in format and layout resembles Lonely Planet, but Dorje’s background coverage in a separate chapter of religious, artistic, and literary contexts does not match the scope of Odyssey’s Bhutan: Himalayan Mountain Kingdom by fellow Tibetologist (and Bhutan-based scholar) Françoise Pommaret, who authored the first such guidebook, and co-edited Fortress. Rather, like Lonely Planet, Footprint provides a concise introduction; both in turn examine the capital Thimphu, followed by the western, central, and eastern regions.

Lonely Planet tallies nearly 300 pages; Footprint adds about 80 pages in a slightly larger font. Color photos are about equal; seven (blue-hued) Lonely Planet and nine (pink-shaded) Footprint chapters can be downloaded separately or together. I've sampled both guides in their PDF versions--they did not convert legibly to my Kindle Touch. Also, even kept as PDFs, a Kindle font cannot be matched to their format neatly or very legibly. On a PC, in color, the PDF files scan better; the maps hang together with the text, sidebars, and illustrations.

Footprint lacks Lonely Planet's verve and Odyssey's anthropological bent, but it instructs. Its background chapter delves into Buddhist contexts such as the auspicious symbols and prayer flags. Dorje explains: "The sparse population, the slow, measured pace of daily life and, in some sectors, an almost anarchical disdain for political involvement have encouraged the spiritual cultivation of Buddhism to such an extent that it has come to permeate the entire culture."

Bhutan: A Trekker's Guide by Bart Jordans (Milnthorpe, Cumbria: Cicerone, 2nd. rev. ed. 2012)

For those leaving its lateral highway behind, Bart Jordan’s Bhutan: A Trekker’s Guide (Cicerone; 2nd. rev. ed. 2012) details twenty-seven yak trails and footpaths across this vertically-biased kingdom. Jordans' "Dutch-English" describes affectionately and carefully (one drawback, if minor: a few glitches remain in his idiom, or the proofreading) many remote sights and dramatically situated sacred landscapes infused by belief. This same guidebook was taken along on the Snowman Trek by Kevin Grange; the practical itineraries and mythical lore it shares will reward anybody planning a few days--or weeks--in the unpaved northern or central regions.

Wrapping It Up

Leaving this short shelf, I wonder how Bhutan can welcome those of us who peer or edge in—through books, through videos, the authors and filmmakers introduce change-- without too many gatecrashers. Few Bhutanese deny themselves their new television, internet, or cellphones. The New York Times featured the kingdom as one of this year’s top destinations: luxury eco-resorts proliferate. Pico Iyer surmises how Bhutanese with formidable etiquette mingled with skillful deference-- inherited over centuries of civil service, monastic preferment, and feudal hierarchies--enforce customs which admit visitors at a polite distance. Traversing the east-west highway, one follows the ancient routes past the formidable dzong guarding each district. Housing monks and officials, these monastery-fortresses force any approaching along a single path through the vertiginous terrain of steep slopes and sudden ravines to reveal themselves. Travelers have to trudge through or ride by the dzong. Passes can be patrolled, and roads checked to monitor jeeps and tourists-- just as trails have always been, to protect princesses or to patrol among pilgrims.

Perhaps Bhutan will survive so both visitors and natives will coexist happily. In John Wehrheim's last chapter, at a bar in Thimphu, he tells an ambitious Indian who wishes to push Bhutan twenty years forward that such a jolt will leave it like Sikkim: invaded by immigrants, overrun by India. Forty years behind its neighboring fellow (ex-)Buddhist principality Bhutan may lag, but better that than the fate of tiny Sikkim--let alone giant Tibet during the past half-century. In a parallel conversation with a Tibetan-descended man, whose family in part escaped Chinese decimation, Wehrheim sums up his subject slyly. "Happy peasants in bountiful fields. A King who's too good to be true. The usual. I'm making photos, shooting video and collecting stories. Everybody in Bhutan's got a story--some of them might even be true."


(P.S. My budget and the limits of my local libraries narrowed what I could evaluate. Detailed reviews of each title above appear on my blog and Amazon US. This article in slightly edited form, different headings, and without hyperlinks appeared in Pop Matters as Just Walk Into That Cloud: Bhutan in Books & Film on March 19, 2013.)

P.P.S. For assistance, thanks to: Cathie Crooks (Alberta); Eliza Ferrier (Footprint); Harry Hall (Haus); Steve Hirashima (Hawai'i); Leah Koontz (Norton); Claire Miller (Fremantle) and Meaghan Miller (IPG); Patrick Rosca (Mani); Sarah Spencer (Cicerone); Pete Spurrier (Blacksmith); Britney VanBurkleo (Lonely Planet); Naomi Weinstein (Penguin). Veteran travelers to Bhutan, Kai von Hirschfeld and John Wehrheim, suggested superb selections. (Photo: #48 of 50 by John Wehrheim from the Bhutan book via Serindia.)