Right-Side Up
An Encounter with Bhutan
by
Silver Donald Cameron
(adapted from The Walrus, April, 2010)
In the chilly mist at the mountain pass called Dochu-la, 3140 meters high, stand 108 memorial shrines, also known as chortens. They were erected by the Fourth King of Bhutan in 2005, in memory of battle losses two years earlier. I gaze at these chortens with a mixture of awe and astonishment
An Assamese separatist force had been raiding India from refuges in southern Bhutan, and India was pressing Bhutan to eject them – or face the possibility that Indian troops might do it themselves. The king and his emissaries made numerous attempts to persuade the Assamese to leave, but they refused. So the king added several hundred volunteers to his untested 9000-man army, and personally led his inexperienced forces into battle. His army prevailed, with a loss of about 10 Bhutanese and numerous Assamese.
Far from being jubilant, the king was so appalled at the loss of life that he forbade any victory celebration. Instead, he caused 108 chortens to be erected at the high pass of Dochu-la to honour the dead on both sides, and speed them on their way to their next lives.
The compassion and sensitivity of that gesture – the sheer spiritual maturity of it – make every other war memorial I've ever seen look like infantile bravado. Inherent in military victory is a terrible failure of negotiation, paid for with death and sorrow. This is not a triumph, and the king solemnly commemorates the tragedy it represents.
This is the same king, the Fourth King, who declared nearly 40 years ago that “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product,” bravely setting his tiny nation on a unique path to development. In 2006 he abdicated in favour of his 27-year-old son. In 2008, ancient Bhutan became the world's youngest democracy, its commitment to Gross National Happiness intact.
Gross National Happiness sounds like wide-eyed California mind-mush, but it's as rigorous as most economic measurements – and far more useful. GNH rests on “four pillars” of value that almost everyone accepts. The first pillar is environmental conservation, caring for nature and others. Second is cultural promotion, preserving the wisdom of an ancient and cherished culture. Third is sustainable and equitable development that benefits all citizens, past and future as well as present. Fourth is “good governance,” the inculcation of active and responsible citizenship.
These “pillars” are divided into nine “domains,” which in turn are broken down to 72 measurable variables. One variable reflects Bhutan's commitment to maintain at least 60% forest cover -- forever. In actual fact, 72% of Bhutan is forested, 52% is protected, and Bhutan presently absorbs three times as much carbon as it produces. It won the United Nations Environment Program's Champion of the Earth award for placing the environment at the centre of all its development policies. Similarly, between 1984 and 1994, life expectancy rose from 48 to 66 years, while infant mortality was cut in half. The country now has universal health care and universal free education.
That's solid data, showing GNH in action. And once again, I'm stunned by the wisdom and insight of the Fourth King. In the West, “economic growth” is almost a religion, and nobody asks about its purposes. But if an economy does not serve human happiness, what on earth is it for? Side-stepping abstractions and distractions, the king goes straight to the point. The appropriate goal for business and government is to improve human well-being – to increase Gross National Happiness. And so it is.
A nation just two-thirds the size of Nova Scotia, Bhutan is a steep-sided Camelot ruled for a century by a benevolent dynasty of absolute monarchs. It is a treasure in itself.
A rocky shelf chopped into the mountainside carries the nation's only highway, a one-lane track that hairpins through forests of rhododendron, magnolia, bamboo. The right-of-way is disputed by yaks and monkeys as well as by absurdly decorated dump trucks and minuscule taxis. The road drops 7,000 feet from a mountain pass to a river junction dominated by a huge white dzong, a fortress-cum-monastery which serves as a district administrative centre.
Strings of vivid prayer flags – crimson, indigo, tender green – flutter over the roads, along the fences, high in the mountain forests. The hills are dotted with temples, shrines, stupas, meditation huts, monasteries. Prayer wheels dominate the terrace of a motel. Rising from flags, spinning from wheels, constant flights of prayers seek the welfare of all sentient beings in their vast cycles of reincarnation – aphids, bears, car salesmen. Dogs may be just one incarnation away from human life. Wandering dogs thrive in Bhutan.
In this landscape, saturated with life and vibrant with meaning, facts vanish into faith and legend, and then re-appear, still burning. Clear-cutting affronts mountain gods. If you do it, landslides ensue. The river gods, people say, forbid the use of boats – and white-water experts confirm the gods' opinions, deeming Bhutanese rivers too shallow, fast and rough for safety. Terma preserve religion from rigidity and dogma. Fundamentalism withers when the fundamental texts keep evolving.
Bhutan embodies a distinctive way of being human – but today it agonizes over change. Its problems include tensions with its Nepali minority, an exodus of rural youth to Thimphu, the capital, and – most important – the consumerism and materialism fostered by TV and the internet, introduced just a decade ago. What profiteth a nation if its Gross National Product riseth, but it loseth its own soul?
It is customary to describe Bhutan, as one recent visitor said, as “an upside-down place,” where 13 is a lucky number, children greet you with “bye-bye,” and an absolute monarch decreed a transition to democracy. Here marijuana is fed to the pigs; it gives them the munchies, and they fatten. The national sport is archery. Tobacco sales, billboards, plastic bags and non-traditional architecture are prohibited, but polygamy is acceptable; the Fourth Kind has four wives, all sisters. Bhutan has more monks than soldiers, and much of its liquor, including Red Panda beer and Dragon rum, is produced by the army. The city of Thimphu is the only capital city in the world without a single traffic light. The most popular good-luck charm is a carving or a mural of a penis. Erect.
GNH brought me to Bhutan last December. To help entrench GNH values in Bhutan's civic consciousness, Prime Minister Jigme Thinley turned to GPI Atlantic of St. Margaret's Bay, Nova Scotia, the creators of Nova Scotia's own Genuine Progress Index. Assembling educators and others from 16 countries, GPI convened a workshop in Thimphu, the capital, in early December, on “Educating for Gross National Happiness.” The result was a sparkling five-day debate on education attended by both the Prime Minister and the Education Minister.
The Bhutanese are trying to do something fresh and unique in education, something that will infuse an ancient culture's deepest values into a sustainable way of living in the modern world. If Bhutan can do that, it will have found new ways to analyze and resolve the multi-faceted crisis – ecological, economic, political, spiritual – of our time.
As the workshop ended, I asked the Prime Minister how Bhutan would be different in 10 years, if the GNH education program succeeded.
“I would like to see an educational system quite different from the conventional factory, where children are just turned out to become economic animals, thinking only for themselves,” he said. “I would like to see graduates that are more human beings, with human values, that give importance to relationships, that are eco-literate, contemplative, analytical.
“I would like graduates who know that success in life is a state of being when you can come home at the end of the day satisfied with what you have done, realizing that you are a happy individual not only because you have found happiness for yourself, but because you have given happiness, in this one day's work, to your spouse, to your family, to your neighbours – and to the world at large.”
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