I looked closely to figure out the deity
depicted on the front of the amulet box: Was it Jetsun Dolma? - Hard to tell
with only the head showing.
The Ga'u was probably as old as the hills
with the holy image yellowed and weather-beaten. But Arya Tara would make sense.
Placing your faith in her, and especially so in her green version, is said to
effectively protect one from all kinds of obstacles and that's the whole
purpose of a Tibetan protective amulet box after all.
While holding up the amulet box as I dusted my
altar, fragments of an old conversation came to mind:
"What's this, Pala?"
"It's a Ga'u. I wore it for protection during
the escape from Tibet."
"How did it protect you?"
"It has a holy content that protects the wearer
against any harm. But Girls mustn't touch it."
"Why mustn't girls touch it?"
"Girls just mustn't touch it," was the
laconic answer.
I must have been around seven or eight years
old, just about starting to realise that humans come in two forms. An amulet
box that loses its protective power when touched by a girl? Are girls so mighty
they can disempower a Ga'u just at a touch? Innocent thoughts.
One day when no one was around I quietly approached
the altar. The idea was too tempting. So I opened the glass cupboard and clandestinely
poked the Ga'u sitting in a corner with one finger. After I had done what was
forbidden, I expected something terrible to happen. But nothing happened for
the longest time, neither to my dad whose protector was now wrecked, nor to me
as some kind of divine punishment. Eventually, I concluded that the Ga'u must have
been damaged. Soon I forgot about it and didn't think of "girls mustn't
touch it" until much later when I stepped into a monastery in Tibet as an
adult.
Many monasteries have a side-chapel housing
so-called Dharmapalas or protector deities. Above the entrance are signs
saying: "Ladies not allowed". Tibetans say it's because women are
unclean and their presence would displease the Dharmapalas - or their jealous
consorts to be precise. Only Tibetans can think of such an explanation. But
most of the time there is no explanation at all. You just have to go with the
flow, meaning you have to wait outside.
I was concerned what foreign tourists would
think. "Women not allowed" could quickly slide into the same category
as "Blacks not allowed" or "Jews not allowed". It could
share the disdainful company with Apartheid and Anti-Semitism. Once in bad
odour, it's hard to get rid of.
"Akhaa," I sighed, "I came
from so far and now I am not allowed to go inside, adzeee, phanga-la!"
The caretaker monk heard me. He had pity on me but still wouldn't let me enter.
Instead he gave me the following word of advice: "Bumo, the Dharmapalas
off limits in this monastery are on open display at the next monastery down the
road. Just go there."
It was a well-meant insider's tip. It was also
when I began to suspect that it's the monasteries which decide who displeases
the Dharmapalas. My suspicion was reinforced during another occasion when I traveled
in a group led by a Lama who "exceptionally authorised" women to
enter a forbidden protector chapel. He simply overruled. All this seemed to suggest
that barring women from entering certain parts of a monastery is probably just
about putting on an air of great importance: "We have something so
important here, that you cannot see it."
And there isn't anything to marvel that would
justify the fuss in the first place. To all the ladies who have never seen a
protector chapel from the inside and have been dying to see one: You haven't
missed a thing! All you'd be able to find after stepping into what is usually a
moldy, dark room are furiously looking statues drowned in loads of Khatas
wrapped around them. Any ride through a tunnel of horror is more interesting.
It's best not to even care about not being let in. It is most definitely
specific monasteries in Tibet creating a fuss because in Tibetan monasteries
abroad everyone can view Dharmapalas if they wanted to.
Only recently I learned the legendary Tibetan freedom
fighters held similar superstitions about women's malignant and destructive
powers. As they resisted the Chinese invader,
many wore protective amulets. Stories of their lifesaving, bulletproof capacity
abound. In "Histories Arrested", Carol McGrannahan writes that some
Chinese soldiers deliberately dipped their bullets in women's menstrual blood to
“override” the omnipotent armour. - No wonder we lost the war.
Behind my cousin's farm in the valley where my
dad was born, rises a soft, forested hill. I always wanted to build a little
house on its slopes. In the beginning my relatives smiled at the idea. I
thought they were happy that I intended to come back and live with them. But
with the years I learned that the hill was the home of a Shidag or local
protector deity. Nobody in his right mind would build a house there, disturb
the Shidag's peace and bring misfortune over oneself and the community. I bid
farewell to the idea.
But when I was getting ready to join the others
for a smoke offering at the very hill, my cousin pre-informed me that girls
could only go up to a certain point and that the peak was off-limits. - Phew,
what a busu dokpo
Princess-And-The-Pea Shidag they had living behind their farm! But again I gave
in out of considerations for local beliefs. After all I was an outsider. The
last thing I wanted was for my relatives to get tired of that niece from abroad
who keeps arguing with them about their outdated habits. And I had to grant
them that in their eyes, there was no misogyny involved. They thought it's for
the girls' own good.
There is something raw and wild about protector
deities that strangely enough, I find fascinating I must say. Whereas the
sophisticated construct of Buddhism for which Tibet has become a synonymous the
world over, is an Indian import, protector deities are an autochthonous
creation. Through Buddhism Tibetans were able to transcend the small, the
local, the isolated and the strange. It has ennobled their culture by making it
internationally compatible and respectable. Protector deities on the other hand
are superstitious local relics of an ancient past. While Buddhism is the monks’
religion, making offerings to protector deities is the people’s religion. This
is the Tibetan contribution grown under their own steam free from external
influences. In other words, if anyone is unhappy with protector deities, we
have no one to blame but our own genius!
I still see the five slightly haggard-looking
Austrian climbers before me. They had dinner next to our table and my cousin
whispered: "See those yang ren over there?" pointing at them
discretely in Tibetan-style by pursing his lips and shoving forth the lower
lip, "They're the ones who vanished at the sacred mountain!"
What had happened?
During a trek, these greenhorns disappeared from
sight in plain daylight. That's what had happened.
The Chinese flew in a military helicopter
and soldiers to search for them, but the Austrians remained lost for several
days. When they miraculously reemerged by themselves, all they were able to
explain was that the path between them and the rest of the group suddenly
disappeared from view and then just as suddenly reappeared. To them it hadn't
felt like days but hours. My cousin like other locals at our table, were convinced
that the mountain Shidag had abducted the foreigners for intruding into his
domain.
"Ré,ré,ré," I joked, "but after
two nights, our Shidag discovered these guys didn’t understand Tibetan, so he
kicks them out!" The Austrians had no clue why the people next to them
were so jolly that evening. Yet humour couldn't disguise that something in us
said protector deities are a force to reckon with. Even I felt a trace of doubt
in the back of my head.
Girls are not supposed to touch it and here I am
inheriting this thing, which now takes a seat on my altar. Eyeing the amulet
box in my hands now, I'm actually all smiles. I wish my father could see me as
a grown woman, with a profession, in an egalitarian relationship with a man I
love, and two children we are raising together. I don't mind him anymore saying
I mustn't touch it. It was the time. All these biased Tibetan stories used to
bother the hell out of me. I used to be vocal about it and didn't leave out any
opportunity to fight and argue against this kind of discrimination. But now it
seems as if these are stories from another world. Because having to argue with
someone over alleged female inferiority now feels as awkward as having to argue
in all seriousness that the earth is flat: snows of yesteryear. But even when
it seems like bygones, the question remains: How do you convince people of
something they aren’t aware of, but they badly need?
A young man once asked the Lama how he could influence
his non-Buddhist farming parents to stop making a living from raising animals
for slaughter. What could he do so the parents avoid accumulating unwholesome
karma? The Lama advised the young man not to mention
"unwholesome karma. He said since the concept of the law of cause and
effect was alien to his parents, their first reaction could well be disbelief
followed by rejection - a dead-end in other words. Instead, he recommended the
young man turn himself into a shining role model of a Buddhist so that the
parents realise all by themselves what they do for a living is not good.
Perhaps this is also a valid approach for us
Tibetan girls and our well-wishers? From my early experience with Tibetan youth
and women's groups, girls who push too hard for women’s rights are quickly
perceived as feisty and dogmatic to people caught unprepared. Once this
unfortunate impression is created, we have the dead-end situation. In the
Tibetan case, feminism is the alien concept provoking disbelief and rejection
and society is the ignorant parents. Rather than debating then, perhaps we
ladies could try to transform ourselves in to a peach of a girl: Outwardly
non-threatening and gentle, inwardly dedicated to work towards change. How
could it cross someone’s mind to slight such people?
Factually speaking, the situation of Tibetan
women today is already fundamentally different from fifty years ago. More and
more are overcoming their "bad" karma of being born into an allegedly
inferior female body, even in Tibet. There is no longer any compelling reason
to be born as a male when one can accomplish the same in a female body. More
and more girls can afford to ignore the nonsense because they have an education
and with it come choices. Not everyone is in this fortunate situation yet, but
the trend is irreversible: girls are getting on track and sooner or later
society will find itself before a fait accompli.
Sometimes when I look at myself however, I
wonder whether the cultural prejudice sits deeper than I prefer and perhaps is
also unintentionally internalized. Because after all these years, I am somehow still
impressed with not being allowed touch it. I had to gather all my courage to
open the amulet box in order to take a look at the so holy content forbidden to
girls. What came to light were a tiny, well-preserved peacock's feather and a
small heap of what I took to be soil crumbs wrapped in a piece of cloth.
From the Mind Training text "Peacock in the
Poison Grove" which the Lama taught a while back, I deducted the feather
stands for protection against all kinds of poison and dangers. The text uses
the symbolism of the peacock, which is said to be immune against bites from
poisonous snakes. I don't know how zoologically accurate that is but in a
transferred Buddhist sense one's delusions rooted in egoism are the "poison".
The peacock represents the power of Emptiness and Universal Compassion, which
cuts through the delusions and destroy them.
What I naïvely mistook for soil crumbs were
parts of a disintegrating Tsatsa, a small clay image of a Buddha or a
saint. The Tibetan government handed them out to Tulkus and government
officials on the eve of the Chinese invasion. And how did this exclusive gift
end up in a regular guy's G'au and now sits on my altar in the West? It turned
out the amulet box belonged to my uncle, my dad's Tulku-brother. He gave it to
my father for protection amidst the turmoil. Lhasa was under heavy fire when
they escaped. Those must have been crazy times. If only the Ga'u could speak!
Still unclear is the deity depicted at the front
of the amulet box. Could it really be Jetsun Dolma? My little one refers to her
as bumo sangye, that's "girl-Buddha". That would beat
everything. Have a girl-Buddha on an amulet box that girls are not supposed to
touch, hilarious!
Mountain Phoenix Over Tibet
Related essays
