Photos

When my wife and I visited Bhutan, our guide and driver were non-professionals, Foreign Ministry workers who had taken time off from their jobs to show us around. This was lucrative for them, because Bhutan maintains a minimum daily rate for tourists which is much higher than the actual cost of accommodation and food, with a good part of the difference going to the tour operator or guide. In the Foreign Ministry their boss had a certain quota of visitors he could sponsor, and he allowed our two hosts to use his quota to make money showing us around as, technically, guests of the Foreign Ministry. So our tour was a bit more "personal" than most, and when we reached Bumthang, our guide invited us to a celebration at the home of relatives, at which their house would be blessed for the year by the local monks.

It was very much a typical party--lots of food and liquor, friends and neighbors dropping by, groups on the large deck of the house, talking and laughing. All the while, though, in one bedroom, an altar stacked with food offerings had been set up, and a group of monks--senior ones and boys in training--played horns and drums and recited prayers in guttural tones. What was amazing to us was that the party guests totally ignored this activity! It was as if, say, a pipe had sprung a leak during a party at your house, and you called in a plumber, who proceeded to do his work, with no interaction with party guests, until he was done and he departed. And it wasn't that guests were supposed to stay out during the blessing--it was fine for us to go in, watch, and take pictures.

When the monks did leave the bedroom, they were treated with reverence by those who saw and greeted them in passing on their way out. The whole experience symbolized the great difference in how average people relate to religion and religious leaders under Buddhism, compared to Judeo-Christian-Moslem traditions. In Bhutanese Buddhist culture, the intellectual and philosophical aspects of the religion--the stages of life and rebirth, the right way to live, the path to Nirvana, and so on--are almost exclusively the domain of the monks, who are not concerned with conveying them to the average person. The average person deals instead with ritual--spinning prayer wheels, making offerings, and the like. Of course moral behavior is essential, but it isn't tied, for the average person, to Buddhist philosophy such as the Eightfold Way and the Four Noble Truths. There are no sermons or other mechanisms for the monks to convey such ideas to the populace, anyway!