On Ladakh, Buddhism & Demons
statues of Buddhas, deities, personifications, guardian spirits, Bodhisattvas.
The guide conscientiously explained these representations’ various functions and positions within the Buddhist cosmology. It was all very fascinating and I tried hard to commit the essentials to memory. But the complicated iconography strained my powers of comprehension to the limit. The thin air didn’t help, and every day I was distracted, perhaps for the same reason, by the insistent promptings of chronic flatulence. There are at least five Buddhist denominations, if I might put it like that, which can be divided for simplicity’s sake into “red hats” or “yellow hats”. This useful fact I managed to retain. But what interested me more than anything else were the many hideous representations in these temples of malign spirits.
Before Buddhism came to Ladakh and Tibet, everybody adhered to the Bon religion, which was essentially devil worship. Later, a Buddhist missionary called Padmasambhava personally subjugated these demons and set them to work in the service of the Buddha. After that they became known as “the Guardians of the Law”. There are nine demons: Yama, Yamantaka, Kubera, Hayagriva, Brahma, Begtse, Mahakali and Palden Lhamo.
Take Palden Lhamo, for example. She killed her son, the story goes, then skinned him, drank his blood from his skull, ate the flesh, then rode away on a horse using her son’s flayed skin as a saddle. Reborn in hell, she stole a sword and a bag of diseases and fought her way back to earth, where Lord Buddha forgave her and gave her the job of protecting the polity of Tibet.
Given China’s suppression of Buddhism in Tibet since 1962, Palden Lhamo, I would suggest, seriously needs to have a word with herself and step up to the plate.
One afternoon, instead of us visiting a monastery, a Buddhist monk came to the house for a cup of tea and a chat. Thupstan Paldan is 73 years old. A monk since the age of 13, Thupstan was sent for training at the famous Drepung monastery at Lhasa.
“You can say anything you like to me, even insult me, but I won’t get angry,” he promised me, raising his teacup carefully to his lips and slurping his tea.
He immediately bridled with indignation, however, when I asked him whether he had attained enlightenment. “Who can say!” he spluttered. “Who can know it, either of himself or of others!” Then he calmed down and said quietly, “I don’t think so. No. It’s terribly difficult being a monk. You’ve no idea.”
“But you have no God?” I said. “No. No God,” he said, placidly. “We know only four things. Suffering is truth. The origin of suffering is truth. Cessation of ignorance, hatred and desire is truth. The Path is truth.”
With his help, I wrote these four things down in my notebook and since that day I have revisited them from time to time. The first I totally get. Maybe the second, too. Half a tick. The rest I’m still working on. By arrangement with the Spectator