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| Yartsa Gunbu - Caterpillar fungus |
Earlier
this summer, reports emerged about intra-Tibetan clashes in Rebkong over
caterpillar fungus. Photos showed people armed with a dagger
and Chinese police intervening. Subsequently the Dalai Lama and the Sakya Trizin, appealed directly to these
communities, asking them to stop the fighting. On separate occasions, the two
religious leaders vehemently invoked the Buddhist concept of las 'bras,
or the law of cause and effect, to bring the quarreling parties back to their
senses. They reminded the Tibetans that they create heavy negative karma, which
will eventually fall back on them.
Although
both appeals stopped short of offering more practical guidance on what people
should do rather than just urging them what not to do, listening to their
messages made me realise that on a deeper level these "worm wars"
speak volumes about a core challenge the Tibetans are facing as they come head
to head with Chinese-style modernisation. They are slowly forgetting the
fundamental Buddhist teaching I assumed all Tibetans sucked up as babies with
their mother's milk and which over the centuries became part of our national DNA:
That you reap what you sow.
When
we go to the bottom of what specifically makes us Tibetan, it's probably
this acceptance, this natural and whole-hearted belief in the law of cause and
effect. The insight has helped us put our problems, big and small, into
perspective. It has prevented us from committing the worst errors, sensitised
us for the needs of others and kept us motivated to work through our troubles
in a positive spirit – always as a means to improve future situations.
I used
to believe language, culture and biology are our most distinctive features but
actually these are rather superficial when we try to penetrate what makes us
Tibetan. My conclusion boils down to this belief in las 'bras
appropriated over generations. That’s what distinguishes us in addition to language,
culture and biology. That's what lies at the heart of our Tibetanness. A
separate language and ethnicity become meaningless without content. When we
think about it properly, living our lives in accordance with the law of cause
and effect – whether consciously or automatically - has really been our
distinct way of relating to the world and the universe around us.
If
some now don’t give a damn about las’bras
any longer what is there to give them their humanity? What is there to preserve
as "Tibetan heritage"? Once the mentality becomes alien we can
totally forget about issues like safe-guarding language or striving for a
political solution because we will have become just like them: Reckless
materialists whose thoughts and actions are fueled by the three Samsaric
poisons rooted in ignorance and driven by greed and hatred. There is nothing
distinctive left to cherish.
The
reasons for the worm wars are well known: Essentially they are clashes over
access to the mountains where these prized worms are found. Without any
education, the options for traditional Tibetan farmers and nomads to earn cash
and participate in the fast-paced mainstream economy are limited. Possessing no
professional qualifications, more and more rural Tibetans go after these worms
leading to increased competition. We only have to ask around a bit to notice
that stories of violent clashes involving shooting, stabbing and thrashing
abound.
Caterpillar
fungus or Ophiocordyceps Sinensis is of course not a "worm". It's a
larva of some moth that is eaten up alive by a fungus and mummified in the
process. I don't know whether that makes it any better. The proper Tibetan
designation, Yar-tsa Gun-bu, is
a contraction standing for "in the summer it’s a plant, in the winter
it’s an insect". But in my hometown people simply call the thing bu
– or exactly as I say: Worm.
Spring
is the main season for the worm harvest. As soon as the Tibetan New Year is
over, the craze starts. The market crashed a few years ago but now it's back.
To get a sense, 100 grams are currently worth around USD 1,500. The rule of
thumb is, the smaller the worms that make up a batch, the higher the price it
fetches. At these pecuniary prospects, it
doesn't matter anymore whether it looks pathetic or is stultifying: A grown
person can spend entire days in prone position over a two or three square-meter
surface, microscopically searching the soil millimeter for millimeter for
caterpillar fungi.
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No one lost a contact lense; not a collective fit of high altitude sickness either. Merely looking for you-know-what.
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The
target market for the worms is the superstitious Chinese who see it is an
aphrodisiac. They use it as medicine; sell it bottled and soaked in Arrak;
sprinkle it over their stir fry; toss it into their soup or simply enjoy the
worms à la nature: Once I received a handful, light as a feather, for a gift.
When the visitors realised I didn't know what to do with them, they said,
"Oh, you can eat it just like this, it's very good for your health!” and
there you have it, one of them popped a maggot-mummy into his mouth as if it
were a potato chip.
The
cash earned from selling handpicked worms however, is usually not invested in
the education of the next generation, as we would hope. Rather it is spent on
short-lived consumer goods such as a car, motorcycles, fancy TV-sets and the
like.
The
other lucrative trade for rural Tibetans - illegal and carried out in secret by
entire communities - is timber. Logging in Eastern Tibet has been banned since
the occurrence of severe flooding further down in China, but it's an open
secret that there is a black market with Tibetans on the ground fully drawn to
the business. Suffice it to say: People invent all kinds of tricks in order to
outsmart the system. In my hometown, villagers are allowed to cut trees in the
communally owned forests for self-consumption. Now some build themselves a new
house every other year just so they can pull down the old one and sell the wood
used for its construction. Miraculously, houses also tend to become bigger each
time, while traditional family size is shrinking.
Running
after worms, timber and also seasonal gourmet mushrooms have become a top
priority for some rural Tibetans. Thinking neither left nor right to the extent
where their minds are so deluded that they are capable of killing one another,
communal and family lives based on farming and herding often come to a
standstill. Positive Buddhist values such as ethical behaviour, consideration
and non-attachment which have held communities together for centuries, are
threatening to fall apart over short-term material gains.
There
is the bride, whose parents are not present at their daughter's big day because
lured by cash they prefer to go worm-digging; there is the empty monastery
during worm season with no monks to be found for funeral rites - don't ask me
what business a Buddhist monk has, digging around in the earth on all fours;
and there is the valley, where little children roam around all day without
supervision and sometimes get run over by cars because parents and grandparents
are all in the mountains digging for you-know-what.
The
real problem is that Tibetans in some regions have been spoilt rotten by easy
money made from Mother Nature. They may vaguely remember that there is
something called las 'bras, which they fear will eventually take care of
everything. But their negative habits are stronger. They have become lazy. They
don't study and don't learn even when there are schools. The Tibetan language
may not be taught in all of them, which sometimes serves as excuse to keep
children from receiving an education. But what's the point of being a
"pure" Tibetan, when the options for a livelihood are limited to
fighting over stupid worms?
An
education in a foreign language is still a thousand times better than no
education at all. Our schooling in the West is not in Tibetan either but it
works. We also face issues of language and identity loss but we deal with them
and somehow we muddle through. There is no reason why people in Tibet cannot do
the same especially when they have home-turf advantage.
It's
not sufficient to be able to speak only your own language, just as it's hardly
enough to only be able to do basic math. Rural Tibetans should leave the
evolutionary stage of hunters and gatherers to which they have been degraded.
How else can they expect to contribute to social progress? How can they defy
the Chinese mainstream that looks down on them as culturally and intellectually
inferior citizens? Education is the root of a civilisation. If we don't know
how to cherish that, will there be a noteworthy future for our people?
China’s
large scale destruction of Tibetan nature by studding it with mines, hydropower
plants, damming rivers, cutting down all the trees and polluting the soil or
forcibly resettling people, is well documented. But it's more on the quiet that
at the grassroots level, Tibetans themselves are contributing to environmental
degradation by imitating the materialistic Chinese style with their predatory
exploitation of nature. Actually it’s not surprising: When you’re so consumed
by greed that you are capable of killing your neigbour, you couldn’t care less
about what’s happening in the process to something as ridiculous as “the
environment”.
Tibetans
are victims of the Chinese but to be honest they are also perpetrators. They
have become accomplices as they get engulfed with barbarous greed coming from
the Chinese mentality that surrounds them. Through this materialistic, alien
habit some Tibetans have become capable of betraying their own valued
traditions. In a shortsighted Faustian twist of fate they even betray
themselves doubly: First accelerating their own demise by destroying each other
and their environment and second by selling the yield to the very people who
menace their culture. Oh the sarcasm! Pecunia non olet.
From
this point of view, the persistent calls for the return of His Holiness the
Dalai Lama suddenly look perplexing. How can people invite the person revered
all over the country as the personification of Buddha Avalokitesvara, the
purest being, to come to them, when they don’t make an effort to keep their
livelihoods and minds pure? Can this work as ground for the Dalai Lama’s vision
of Tibet as a zone of peace?
It
is sometimes forgotten that Tibetans living under China are not completely
powerless. Generally speaking rural communities do have power over communally
owned lands. They are important guardians of our civilisation. In the face of
the rapid pace of development in China, which is eroding people’s ethical
fundament, they are perhaps also the most vulnerable. The way to go is to
remind people to think long-term through the lens of las’bras and also to urge them to start sending children to school
without exception. We must help each other to the best of our abilities.
These
worm wars are symptomatic for a monumentally larger and existential battle the
Tibetans are waging. We are put before the choice between an ethical life in
accordance with the Buddhadharma based on personal effort and learning, and a
shortsighted mundane life based on an insatiably greedy culture that knows no
tomorrow. All Lamas who we look up to as our traditional leaders and basically
anyone with influence should be at the forefront to help our people make the
right decision. How we respond to the socio-economic pressure on the communal
and individual levels may well determine the future of our civilisation.
Mountain Phoenix
