Frances is at home in the Canadian Rockies and the Himalaya. After a degree in biology, she worked for the Canadian Parks Service and first went to Nepal to trek, but the people and cultures of this diverse land became her reason for staying, much of the time in the Everest and Makalu areas.
All of this work has utilized her skills in writing, photography, and interviewing for oral history, and her knowledge of natural history and Himalayan cultures.
From 1983 to 89, Frances lived in the Khumbu to create a museum of Sherpa culture at Tengboche Monastery. She also worked with a project in the Makalu area until 1998, when she started a publishing company, Mera Publications.
Frances has had several exhibitions of her photographs on Sherpa culture. The Nepal edition of her book, Gaiety of Spirit: The Sherpas of Everest was released in 2009, and a Canadian edition in 2010.
She has worked extensively for a variety of development organizations, mostly documenting the good practices and results of programs. During the work for development projects and fund-raising for various worthy causes, she started wondering how to help those left out from conventional assistance. In 2005, she co-founded a non-profit organization, CORE International to pursue this quest.
www.core-international.org
A letter arrives saying that a friend in Canada was killed in an accident. It asks me to arrange to have some prayers done for Nina.
The monks at Tengboche are busy, but someone suggests the anis (nuns) at Devuche, the little nunnery twenty minutes’ walk away. Devuche sits in a meadow at the edge of the rhododendron forest in a quiet, peaceful place.
At Devuche, I arrange for the anis to say some prayers the next day. However, in the morning, only the abbess and one elderly nun are present in the kitchen.
The abbess hands me some of the 50-rupee notes I had given her the day before. “Take this to the blind ani who can’t come do the puja (prayers) in the gonda but can say prayers. Take this to the ani in this house right here who is in retreat.”
I knock on the door of the ani in retreat. An elderly person wearing robes and a traditional winged yellow hat opens the door. I ask, “Would you please say some prayers for a friend of mine who died 49 days ago?”
She gestures for me to enter. Her small home is clean and tidy. I sit on a wide bench stretching across the end of the room while she prepares tea on the little clay-lined, one-pot burner. She asks the name of my friend who has died. “Ni-na,” she repeats as she notes it down in Tibetan script on an envelope.
“How long have you been in retreat?” I ask.
“Twenty years,” she pauses, “and thirteen years. For this time, I have not left this little compound.
“I am from Nauche. My family did business in Tibet. When I was eight years old, I first went to Rongbuk. There I received a blessing from Zatul Rinpoche and took my first vows to become an ani with Tulshi Rinpoche.
“When I was twenty, I was here in Devuche and had been an ani for several years. A rich man from Solu wanted another wife after his first passed away. He first sent one and then two men from Solu to Nauche to ask my mother in Nauche while my father was in Tibet trading. She sent them away.
“Then, he got several men together — about 11 of them just to come get one woman. They surrounded my house here in Devuche. I went to bed but could not sleep. Finally, I escaped out a window late at night and hid in the river gorge.
“They looked in the woods and all the houses. I hid by the river for two days and on the second night wondered what to do. I had no food, no shoes, just the robe I grabbed as I crawled out of bed.
“Finally, I worked my way along the river and up through the forest to Tengboche. Rinpoche could not hide me there, because monastery rules do not allow women to stay.
“A man who had just come from Tibet a year before agreed to help me. We hid in the day and travelled at night through Thame and over the pass to Tibet. In those days it took four days to walk across the Nangpa La (pass) to the first village in Tibet, then ten days to Shigatse and ten more to Lhasa. I stayed there for ten years until I was thirty.
“When the Chinese became really strong in Tibet, I was studying at a nunnery higher in a valley. Rinpoche and his half-brothers were at a monastery nearby. They came to see me. We decided it was time to return to Nepal. I came to Devuche and started my retreat.
“For six weeks after I arrived here in Devuche, we did not know if the Dalai Lama was alive or dead. Then finally one day I heard that he was in Kalimpong. What a relief.” As I stand up to leave, I pull another 50-rupee note from my wallet. “Would you also please do some prayers for the book I’m working on?”
Ani-la holds the bill thoughtfully for a moment before setting it on the windowsill among her papers.
“People always come and ask me to say prayers for this and for that. So their son will get into this school or that this business venture will be successful. They do not understand that when these prayers bring about general good fortune or merit, it comes from within, from within themselves.”
She hands me a paper and a pen.
“I want you to write down these prayers so you can say them yourself for good things to happen. Om Ah Hung Betza Guru Padme Siti Hung is to Guru Rinpoche. The next is Om Mani Padme Hung to Chenresig. Om Ah Mi De Wa Hri to Opagme.”
I obediently write down the mantras as she hovers above me in her winged cap. “Say 108 of each mantra. Say them every day if you can. As you say them, always think of going to the place of the gods, but always remember…”
She reaches out and touches my chest. “Always remember that the gods are right here within you.”
Regardless of your beliefs, prayer flags inspire spiritual significance. The five colours represent each of the five essential elements of life: yellow for earth, green for wood, red for fire, white for iron, and blue for water.
These prayer flags are placed on high points of land and structures all over the Himalaya to harmonize our energy with that of the world around us. On special Buddhist days of the year, the locals replace them with new ones in life’s endless circle of renewal.
The patterns on them are prayers or symbols of good luck or positive energy. One design is the ‘wind horse,’ the word for wind also means ‘life force’ – both in ourselves and the environment.
Thus, on an outer level, the prayer is sent skyward by the wind, but on an inner level, the galloping steed amplifies our life force. The horse is often accompanied by protective animals, either real or mythical – a bird, the garuda (representing wisdom), a dragon (power), a snow lion (fearless joy) and a tiger (confidence). These four creatures represent some of the qualities of a human being with a strong life force.
The beliefs embrace tiers of explanations with deeper and deeper meanings, but all these rituals and objects of everyday life — ceremonies, prayer flags, and mani stones — acknowledge some greater power.
To quote Tibetan writer Thubten Jigme Norbu:1
“You find prayer flags on hills, mountains, by lakes and always on the crest of passes. It does not really matter whether these spirits exist. What matters is that through these stories we have come to believe that everywhere, all around us, at all times, there is some power that is greater than ourselves.”
1 Thubten Jigme Norbu and Colin Turnbull, Tibet: Its History, Religion, and People, Penguin Books, 1968. Pg. 32.
Prayer flags, Nammo BuddhaUpper MustangLhamogang ritual, changing prayer flags, Tengboche MonasteryTengboche Ama Dablam near Khumjung
Most everyone has heard of the Sherpas through the literature of mountaineering. This awesome reputation however, focuses on a single vocation rather than on the Sherpas’ rich cultural heritage.
The Sherpas originated as several families who migrated from eastern Tibet and settled uninhabited valleys in the Himalaya about 400 years ago. Their name “Sher-pa” reflects those origins: “east-people”. This small group of families brought with them the rich traditions, religion and literature of Tibetan Buddhism.
The Sherpas built their houses on any landform flat enough for agriculture, such as the ancient hanging terrace of Phortse, the glacial trough of Khunde and Khumjung, and the bowl-like valley of Namche. Their villages face south for more favorable growing conditions, and lie between 7,000 and 15,000 feet above sea level. Most Sherpas have a home in one of the main villages of Khumjung, Khunde, Thamechok, Namche, Pangboche, and Phortse, but often stay seasonally in huts at the high pastures.
Hard Livelihoods
Here, the cold climate allows the Sherpas to cultivate only one harvest a year from their rock-strewn fields. To survive in this formidable environment, the Sherpas have always engaged in another livelihood whether trading across the Himalaya or migrating in search of employment.
For much of the late 1800s and early 1900s, Sherpas migrated in search of employment to British-ruled Darjeeling. Sherpa men first worked as high altitude porters on British attempts to scale the great peaks of Sikkim in 1907, and have worked on every major Himalayan mountaineering expedition since then. Mountaineers praised the Sherpas’ friendliness, loyalty and dependability. Eric Shipton was a British “explorer” of the Himalaya in the 1930s-1950s. He described the Sherpas:
“It is the temperament and character of the Sherpas that have justified their renown and won them such a large place in the hearts of the Western travelers and explorers who have known them. Their most enduring characteristic is their extraordinary gaiety of spirit. More than any other people I know they have the gift of laughter.”
Sherpa Village Life
Surviving in these mountain settlements requires community effort
Community norms and rules traditionally regulated everything from the collection of fuel wood and leaf-litter, to the movement of the yak herds, to the performance of cultural rituals and festivals. Members of the community are still elected to three positions that manage agriculture and grazing, forest use, and cultural life. They have the authority to impose fines on villagers who break the traditional rules, called the “dhi.”
Sherpas raise yaks and grow potatoes as their staple products
In the valleys of Khumbu, the summer monsoon lasts from June to September. During this quiet but productive season people carry out their chores of herding and farming. Farming is not easy on these mountains, but all, including businessmen, own plots of land on which they grow potatoes, buckwheat or barley to feed their families.
Most fields for cultivating food crops are at relatively lower elevations of about 3300 meters near the main Sherpa villages. During the cool winter, herds of yaks are grazed on nearby hillsides; when the summer comes, the yaks are taken up to high valleys where the rains have changed the dry mountainsides to rich, green pastures.
Sherpa families use these valleys as summer pastures for their yak (male) and nak (female) herds. Pheriche, Dingboche, Lobuche, and Gokyo were established as their summer huts and hay fields. The shaggy bovines provide dairy products, wool, and transportation. Sherpas call the male crossbreeds dzopchioks; they are sterile and are used as pack animals, especially on trips down to the warmer elevations that the high-altitude yaks can’t tolerate. Female crosses are called dzooms. They produce milk that is almost as rich as a nak’s, and in greater amounts.
Changes in Sherpa Livelihoods
From Trading across the Himalaya to Global Tourism
As a people, the Sherpas have historically responded and adapted to changes brought by the outside world. In the mid-1800s, the Nepali government granted the Sherpas a trade monopoly by prohibiting anyone but a Khumbu Sherpa from crossing the Nangpa La, the 19,000 ft pass into Tibet. Many Sherpa families benefited to some degree from the bartering that took place in either Tibet or the border towns of India.
Namche was been the main trading centre since 1905. Prior to that, it was simply a place where traders from Khumjung stored their trading goods between the seasons when they could cross the pass to Tibet and when they could travel to the lowlands. The trade to Tibet was drastically reduced after it was taken over by the People’s Republic of China in the late 1950s.
At present a few Tibetan and Sherpa traders cross the pass in both directions. They can be seen at the weekly market along with lowland Nepali traders. The weekly market is not a Sherpa tradition; it was started in the mid-1960s by an army officer stationed in Namche to meet the needs of the growing population of Nepali civil servants.
The Sacred Valley
For centuries, the Khumbu Valley has been a sanctuary
To the first Sherpas, the Khumbu Valley was unique and special as a “beyul”, a sacred valley that was set aside by Guru Rinpoche, the founder of Buddhism, to be a refuge in times of trouble.
When the Sherpas came here about 400 years ago, they were escaping political changes in eastern Tibet. They may also have been migrating at a time of climate change. The Abbot of Tengboche monastery tells of the Sherpas coming at a time when “the glaciers were much bigger, and Khumbu was covered with snow.
Hence, their first settlements were down near Lukla. As the snow and ice gradually melted, people gradually founded villages at Khumjung and Pangboche.”
At that time, the rivers had no bridges, the cliffs had no steps; there were no footpaths, no dwellings, no fields of grain, no woven cloth, no cows to milk. These first settlers transformed the landscape into agricultural fields and pastures for cattle.
However, people may have been visiting the valley well before the arrival of the Sherpa people. In fact, oral traditions hint that Rai shepherds may have been using the Khumbu’s high pastures well before the Sherpa, and old ruins in the valley are said to the remains of Rai shepherd’s huts.
Prayer Flags Over Tin Roofs
The Sherpa religion came through the oldest sect of Tibetan Buddhism, the Nyingmapa, which was established about 1,240 years ago. The Sherpa history and teachings are recorded in Tibetan script and their language is a dialect derived from Buddhist books. Traditionally, these books were stored in each village’s temple where lay ministers, lamas, would conduct ceremonies and teach religion to the local people.
The power of nature is embodied in protective gods. For example, Jomolungma resides on Mt. Everest. Qualities such as wisdom and compassion are also visualized as deities to help one concentrate while meditating. Prayers to them may influence important events and daily activities. Weddings, funerals and births are accompanied by pujahs of offerings and prayers.
Anyone may build a religious monument or object and so gain spiritual merit. The thoughtful offerings of those who made them are multiplied by each flutter of the prayer flag in the breeze, each turn of the wheel, each traveler’s respectful gesture.
MANI STONES are found near paths, temples, villages and homes. They may be carved with a single mantra (chant) or a complete prayers to the god of compassion.
PRAYERS FLAGS are on roofs or mountain passes, strung across rivers and paths, or on tall poles. The five colours of prayer flags signify the elements; yellow, earth; red, fire; green, wood; blue, sky and water; and white, iron.
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Sagarmatha – Jomolungma – Everest
This mountain of many names has always attracted pilgrims, whether Tibetans honoring a peak they believe is the abode of a deity, or climbers and trekkers fascinated by the highest point on earth. Sagarmatha is the name given by the Nepali government in the 1970s and the name Everest was given by the British in India.
“Jomolungma is the name of the mountain. Jomo Miyo Lang Sangma is the name of the resident female deity. She is a mother goddess and one of the five sisters of long life, so many pilgrims used to go to see her in Tibet. Now, people, from all over the world, come to see Jomolungma, from Khumbu.”
“Jomo Miyo Lang Sangma rides on a red tiger. This goddess is very pretty; she is orange and bright looking. She wears a garland of flowers around her head and robes of many colors. In Jomo Miyo Lang Sangma’s right hand is a long bowl of food and in her left a mongoose that spits wealth.” – The Abbot and Reincarnate Lama of Tengboche Monastery
Tengboche Monastery has been the heart of Sherpa culture since 1916
The Sherpas only started to establish celibate monasteries in the early 1900s. Tengboche was the first celibate monastery in Solu-Khumbu and is a community of about 30 tawas (monks) under the leadership of the Abbot, Tengboche Rinpoche (Reincarnate Lama).
Construction of the monastery’s gompa (temple) started in 1916 and lasted three years. The gompa has been destroyed twice, by an earthquake and a fire. The 1990s reconstruction of the gompa attracted the support of Sherpa and international communities to this once isolated monastery
Tengboche is also known for the masked dances that celebrate the completion of ten days of prayers for the good of all beings. For the Sherpas who come from many villages to attend, Mani Rimdu is a relatively recent tradition that started at the opening of Tengboche monastery in 1919.
It is performed at Tengboche monastery in the ninth month of the Sherpa calendar, which usually falls in November and at the Thame monastery in the fourth month.
There are 16 dances performed at Mani Rimdu. Tengboche Rinpoche explained the dances: “Certain movements, sounds, smells, and sight can awaken our psyche and stimulate the states of awareness we describe as gods. The dances are meditations that portray the gods and generate merit for everyone.”
Outer Changes and Inner Stability
The coming of tourists to the Khumbu Valley has brought outside changes and opportunities
Since the Nepali government first allowed westerners to visit the kingdom in the 1950s, the coming of tourists from around the world to see the highest mountain has brought a variety of changes both enhancing the livelihoods of the Sherpa people and affecting other cultural and natural aspects of Khumbu.
Tourism has grown to be the main source of livelihood for the Sherpas. Since 1983 to 2019, the number of trekkers coming each year grew from 4,000 to 55,000. The number of hotels in Namche grew from 5 to 100. It was only since 1995, that families started constructing buildings to be used as hotels on the north facing area of the village.
Certain families and communities have had opportunities for education, loans, travel, and prosperity. Others struggle with the inflation created by the growing demand for food brought by the annual increase in tourists. Yet, the tourism economy of Khumbu sustains households as far away as ten-days-walk to the south east.
In Sherpa agriculture, potatoes are still dug by hand, and the traditional rules still regulate the annual herding of yaks.
Changes in the Khumbu Valley include the bridges and trails. Infrastructure growth has occurred in villages along major trekking routes with changes in traditional building materials. The Lukla airstrip was built in 1964 to facilitate the construction of the hospital in Khunde by the Himalayan Trust. In 2019, over 55,000 passengers flew in or out of Lukla, and hotels and services have been developed to serve them. Benefits include the places where the national park plantations have transformed bare hillsides to small forests.
While contact with outsiders has brought modern amenities, the Abbot of Tengboche monastery considers the changes in Khumbu: “There are outward changes in our dress, houses, occupations and opportunities. However, contact with westerners has not necessarily changed the Sherpa culture in terms of ‘inside’ culture – in what they believe and celebrate. Sherpas, young and old, all do pujahs for naming children, weddings and funerals. We celebrate Dumje, the Sherpa new year, and other festivals. What is most important to us remains.”Part 3: The Wheel of Life
Sherpa religious and cultural rituals are generally unchanged for the important events of life: birth, marriage and death
The “inside culture” of the Sherpas – how they mark life’s and the year’s important passages – remain relatively unchanged despite the obvious changes to “outside” aspects such as houses, clothes, and educational and economic opportunities.
Many households and communities will schedule important activities whether travel, rituals, weddings, and funeral rites on auspicious days of the week, lunar month, and year.
The genealogy of the Sherpa follows clans that descend through one’s father. Tradition stipulates that one cannot marry within one’s own clan. Marriage with someone from one’s mother’s clan is permissible, if the couple is not related within three generations. Sherpas still strictly adhere to these proscriptions.
Sherpa Weddings
Wedding traditions are still followed very strictly in Khumbu and with minor modifications among Sherpas living in Kathmandu or even abroad. There are several stages to a Sherpa wedding. Sodene is the asking or the engagement. Demchang is the establishment of a proper agreement. Trichang sets the year and month of the final ceremony; Pechang is the consultation that sets the actual date. Zendi is the final ceremony where the woman comes to live with the man. The bride’s family gives presents and property that is her inheritance from them.
Sherpa Funerals
The Sherpa funeral rituals are strictly adhered to whether the deceased resided in Khumbu or Kathmandu. When a person dies, lamas are called immediately to perform rituals to try to generate good, positive energy for the deceased. There are many different customs, but, usually, the body is kept for three days then cremated. The remnants of the fire mixed with clay and are made into tsatsa that are left in a chorten or under a large rock at the end of 49 days.
Every seven days after the death, special prayers are offered in the home of the deceased. Within three or four weeks, the prayers called Shitro are done for three to fifteen days, depending on the finances of the family. Every evening the family places an offering of tsampa on the fire’s hot coals for the spirit of the deceased. The Bar-do for 49 days after the death is the time and space between lives, by the end of which the person’s next life is determined and they may be reborn.
Special rituals are performed for high lamas and rinpoches, and the body is cremated in a special chamber.
These photographs are of the cremation of Dhui Rinpoche, a very important teacher who passed away in 1989 at the age of 86. On the day of his cremation, his body was carried up the mountainside to a prominent ridge.
His funeral was a celebration of an accomplished lifetime. Over seven hundred people came from as far away as six days walk. His body was placed in the stone monument to be cremated as an offering.
Dumje Festival – A celebration of community spirit
The Sherpa year revolves around the main festival of Dumje celebrated in each village at the beginning of the monsoon in late June or early July. Dumje began as a way to unite the newly settled villages after the Sherpas arrived in Khumbu.
Each year, eight households in a village have a turn, which comes about every sixteen years, to sponsor the festival. Each sponsor provides food for the festivities according to their means. Though this huge financial obligation may cause less affluent families to borrow substantial sums of money from lenders, most families see Dumje sponsorship as a worthy community involvement.
While in the past men from the village who had some religious training would prepare for the rituals, now the village invites and hires specialists, monks from the monastery to come and help prepare for the celebration. Also whereas in the old days, the most learned of the lay lamas (ministers) would officiate and lead the prayers, now the heads of the local monasteries would come to a village.
“We pray together, we dance together and we eat together. What is important now, at Dumje, is that we are all here cooperating together”
The men of the village gather for prayers to Khumbila start the festival. They put up new prayer flags, share chang (rice beer), do traditional Sherpa line dances, and throw tsampa (barley flour) for good luck.
The cowboy hats were adopted as fashionable wear by Tibetans and Sherpas after members of a 1905 British expedition to Tibet wore Stetsons.)
Looking at both science and religion or mythology as our way at explaining the universe around us ….
It all becomes relative to time and new observations. In the early 1980s, when I worked in Yoho National Park, we were just beginning to find more about the Burgess Shale fossils high in the Canadian Rockies in beds of shale once laid down as mud on the floor of an ancient ocean.
To introduce these explanations, I would tell the people who came on the guided hides the creation myth of the world by the Blackfoot nation.[1]
In the story, the legendary “old man” is on a raft on the great water or ocean. With him are a loon, a muskrat, and a beaver. He asked each animal to drive down to get some mud from the floor of the ocean. The loon tried but could not dive deep enough. The muskrat tried and tried but also failed. Then the beaver tried. He was gone for a very long time. The old man was about to give up hope when off in the distance, he saw the beaver floating on his back. The old man paddled over the raft to the beaver. There clutched in the beavers paw was a piece of mud. The old man took the mud and rolled it in his hand and created the earth. He spread it out to make the plains. He piled it up to build the mountains. Then, he made the people and the buffalo. Such was how the indigenous people described the creation of their world.2
The story was useful, especially when the students of an evangelical college would come to see the place where they believed that God had touched the earth to stop the great flood. The commonality of water covering the earth in both the creation myth and the biblical story helped introduce the scientific explanation. I would mention that science, religion, and myth are the ways that us humans explain or try to create an explanation at the world around us.
The geological story of the movement of the continental plates on the earth’s surface, of how once 300-500 million years ago, North America was a barren sandy land that slopped off to an ocean a lay its western edge, about where the rocky mountains run today. Eons worth of sand and water layer accumulate at base of an underwater cliff. Layer upon layer, sometimes sand or clay or mud flowed off the cliff to bury the rich diversity of sea creatures. Like on land had not yet evolved. As the Pacific Ocean plate inlet eastwards towards North America these sea sediments this mud from the bottom of the sea.
Meanwhile, the explanations of the creatures themselves are fascinating stories. In the early 1980s, the interpretation of two specimens was that they were a small crayfish and the base of a jellyfish. Teams of scientists from the Royal Ontario Museum worked relentlessly examining the shale beds each summer on a mountain side. Those at us working for the national park relayed their interpretation to the public – explaining the trilobites, crayfish, jellyfish, etcetera, in the rich biodiversity of the ancient Cambrian era seas.
In the early 1990s, I returned to living in Canada and began guiding interpretive hikes to the Burgess Shales.
But, the story had completely changed.
The ‘crayfish’ was found to be the pincer-like arms of a huge fossil 18 inches long. The creature, called Anomalocaris, used these arms to sweep smaller creatures from the seafloor and into its round sucking mouth – which was the fossil previously thought to be the base of the jellyfish.
The ancient crayfish and jellyfish ceased to exist. The scientific explanation had changed.
Stephen Jay Gould described the story of Anomalocaris in his 1989 book Wonderful Life, as “a tale of humor, error, struggle, frustration, and more error, culminating in an extraordinary resolution that brought together bits and pieces of three ‘phyla’ in a singe reconstructed creature, the largest and fiercest of Cambrian organisms.”
Many of the Cambrian animals present had strange body parts and little resemblance to other known animals. Opabinia had five eyes and a snout like a vacuum cleaner hose. Hallucigenia was originally interpreted upside down, walking on its bilaterally symmetrical spines. In 1991, reinterpretations described Hallucigenia as a legged worm-like creature. The tentacles were reinterpreted as walking structures and the spines as protective armor.
The story keeps changing and evolving with discoveries of new outcrops of Burgess Shales and reexamination of the strange and wonderful fossils within. Scientists reconstruct and reinterpret and keep looking at all the possibilities.
While compiling information for the Sherpa museum, conversations had often encompassed aspects of philosophy, psychology, and spirituality, then wandered to the questions we seek to answer with religion or science: How did the earth begin? What happens after death? What is our relationship to nature?
I saw an acceptance of mystery and of questions we just cannot answer. Soon, I realized that one layer of meaning reveals more queries within. The more one starts to understand, the more one realizes all there is to question and explore.
Myths and religion may change with retelling or stay unchanged despite changing times. It is all in our interpretation whether science, religion, or myth.
* Featured image: In 1909, while in the Canadian Rockies near Field, British Columbia, Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850-1927) discovered what has come to be known as the Burgess Shale. Named after Burgess Pass near the location of his discovery, the shale Walcott collected contained carbonized organisms of such abundance and age that they subsequently provided the foundation for study of the Cambrian Period in Western North America. Walcott, fourth Secretary of the Smithsonian, often took his entire family on collecting trips. According to the Smithsonian institution, this image shows Walcott, his son Sidney Stevens Walcott (1892-1977), and his daughter Helen Breese Walcott (1894-1965) working in the Burgess Shale Fossil Quarry, c. 1913.
The heavy wooden door creaks open on to a small verandah encircled by potted orange marigolds. Inside a small house, the Rinpoche of Tengboche sits cross legged on a wide bench at the end of a room full of photographs and books.
Wrapped in a heavy maroon robe, Rinpoche gestures for me to take a seat next to an elderly Sherpa man on a bench beneath large windows.
The Sherpas are renowned through the literature of adventure, for their work as high-altitude porters and guides on mountaineering expeditions. However, this reputation focuses on one occupation, rather than on the Sherpas’ rich cultural heritage.
The museum was mostly about what the Abbot of Tengboche calls the Sherpas’ “inner culture” and the importance of ceremonies that link their spiritual and physical lives. The preparation of the museum took time because it was essential to first know the people and the many dimensions of their culture in order to accurately and concisely depict it.
Rinpoche is the Abbot of Tengboche monastery in the Khumbu valley. The Sherpas regard him as the reincarnate of the monastery’s founder. Everyone calls him by his title, Tengboche Rinpoche, and rarely by his given name, Ngawang Tenzing Zangbu. Tibetan Buddhists reserve the title Rinpoche for special teachers and their reincarnates. The Buddhist people of the Himalaya revere thousands of rinpoches in Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, and India.
Rinpoche realized that there were many misinterpretations and misunderstandings about Sherpa culture. To promote understanding of the culture, he has built a museum to first inform foreign visitors. However, his more crucial audience is young Sherpas, who will see visitors taking an “interest in our culture, and then take pride in our heritage.”
My work is to interpret his discussions to offer explanations of Sherpa culture to which people can relate. The work involves researching the information, taking photographs, planning the displays, coordinating translations of texts into Nepali or Tibetan, fabricating the displays, and then putting it all together in the museum building.
Rinpoche’s guest is a village elder, Khonjo Chombi, who is renowned for his knowledge of old Sherpa stories, songs, and traditions. Sherpas acknowledge him as a guardian of their culture.
The late Khonju Chombi Sherpa, 1985
“Please, show Khonjo Chombi through the museum,” he asks.
Khonjo Chombi has provided much of the information and inspiration for the museum’s display texts. He has also advised most foreign researchers of the Sherpas, the first and best known of whom was the anthropologist Christoph von Furer- Haimendorf, who first came to Khumbu in the mid-1950s.
Cultural Centre and Tengboche Monastery, 1988
Inside the museum, Khonjo Chombi inspects the historical photographs Haimendorf donated. He names each person in the photographs. “Here is Ngawang Dorje, Thakto Kalden, Passang Rinchen; they have all passed away. There I am thirty years ago; Haimendorf took that photo. There I am last year; you took that photo.” He smiles.
The panel text introducing the Sherpas has generated controversy. It reads: “The Sherpas started migrating from Tibet to these secluded valleys 600 years ago.” A couple of foreign anthropologists insist that the Sherpas’ entry into Khumbu from Tibet was about 450 years ago and that 600 years ago is wrong.
Rinpoche and Khonjo Chombi say these modern interpretations do not consider the first Sherpa, Phachhen, who discovered Khumbu 600 years ago. We used the 600- year date, since the purpose of the museum is to tell the Sherpas’ story from their own point of view.
A mural in Tibetan script outlining the Sherpa clans covers the end wall of the museum. The position of each name shows when the clan either arrived from Tibet or separated from a larger group. Khonjo Chombi points out his clan name, Thakdopa.
The father’s lineage determines one’s clan membership. Four main clans originally came from Kham, in eastern Tibet, to Solu-Khumbu. Each clan gave rise to several brother clans. Continuous migration has brought many new clans into the area.
Other displays describe traditional clothing, household goods, jewelry, and crafts using looms and spindles. One panel shows monks printing prayer flags on a wooden block and a stone carver chiseling a prayer stone.
Khonjo Chombi asks, “You have a photo of Au’Kinzum chipping away to make mani stones. Why isn’t there a photo of old Phurwa carving a wood block?”
“For three years I tried to persuade Phurwa to let me photograph him working, but he would not even describe how he makes the blocks. So all that we have is photographs of monks printing prayer flags on the blocks.
“Last month, Phurwa was at Tengboche doing carpentry work while we were setting up the museum. He visited the museum every day to see the new displays. The day this display with the stone carver went up, Phurwa asked why I had not photographed him carving the wood blocks. I told him how I’d tried many times. The next day he brought that huge old wooden tea cup as a gift for the museum.”
Carver of prayers into stone
Khonjo Chombi laughs, and then grows serious. “No matter how much you explained, it was hard for many people to imagine what the ‘museum’ would be. This is the first museum old Phurwa has ever seen. But, we have a bigger problem. These craftsmen’s sons have not learned to carve wooden blocks or mani stones. When these men are gone, no one in Khumbu will make these religious things.”
“Can only sons learn these crafts?”
“No, anyone could learn their crafts, but before we followed our father’s occupation. I learned trading and politics from my father. My sons run a trekking business. Our occupations are changing, but I hope someone will keep making wood blocks and mani stones.”
The second floor has displays about Sherpa religion. Balancing the many levels of explanation was a challenge when writing the display texts. Spirituality, metaphysics, and pragmatism all have a place in layers of meanings in the Sherpas’ practice of Mahayana Buddhism.
While compiling information for the museum, I often found that conversations encompassed aspects of philosophy, psychology, and spirituality. Often the subjects we discussed wandered to the questions we seek to answer with religion or science: What happens after death? What is our relationship to nature? To our symbols in the environment?
Over the years, my questions turned from the intellectual to the intuitive. I experienced the culture rather than question it. Life with the Sherpas revealed different ways of seeing the world. It peeled away my preconceived notions so that I appreciated the significance of rituals, traditions, and symbols.
On the display about Tengboche monastery, Khonjo Chombi inspects photographs of Rinpoche through the years, beginning as a teenager when the first Westerners explored the southern approach to Everest. Other photographs show him in present day activities. He remarks, “Rinpoche has worked hard to uphold our traditions.”
Khonjo Chombi examines a mannequin dressed as a traditional village lama. “Some lamas are married and some are celibate thawas [monks]. Not all monks are lamas. The married lama in this photo has a family. He studied with his father and other teachers so that he can perform the village ceremonies.”
Khonjo Chombi in completed museum, 1988
He sees a bone trumpet, a kagling, in the mannequin’s hand. I explain, “We did not have an old kagling; had only a new copper one. Two weeks ago, a monk returned from the post office in Nauche with a battered envelope. The address was to ‘Tengboche Monastery, near Mount Everest, Nepal’. There was no letter or return address but the stamp was from Germany. Inside was this old-style kagling made of bone. We’ll never know where it came from, but it came just in time for the museum opening.”
Khonjo Chombi continues around the museum. Suddenly he sings an old Sherpa folk song and dancing. Soon an audience of monks and foreign trekkers surrounds Khonjo Chombi. As we applaud, he smiles. His songs and dance become the museum’s real opening celebration.
I will always be grateful to Tengboche Rinpoche for the opportunity to work with him on the Sherpa Cultural Center for several years. Sherpa friends introduced me to a new way of seeing the world through everyday life. Whether monk or shepherd, they know who they are and what they believe as “Sherpa people”.
Living in another culture forced me to think about how it works, to confront the ironies and inconsistencies of a different way of being. Soon, I realized that one layer of meaning reveals more queries within. The more one understands, the more one realizes all there is to question and explore.
Looking at other cultures as different from our own, we split the whole into parts. We analyze what we see happening and ask why. For people of the other culture, it is their way of life. We examine the oddity of different traditions and customs rather than the inner purposes that might bring us into an understanding of the culture. We end up looking at how the “other” culture differs from our culture rather than at our commonness in the wholeness of humankind.
While working on the museum, I saw and questioned the ironies of my own culture and gained a new way of looking at myself and at my own way of life. I was moved by what I saw and experienced. I became a believer in the value of inner culture that manifests itself in everything we do — in small actions in everyday life, in our interactions with everyone we meet, and in what we think and say.
I came to see that while outside cultures divide us, inner cultures, the core of all religions and beliefs, can bring us together.
This opportunity enriched my life, for which I will always be grateful.
The Khumbu valley, with Jomolungma (Everest), Khunde and Khumjung villages, and Ama Dablam
“This valley is sacred to us Sherpa,” says Tengboche Rinpoche. “The only way to come or leave here is to climb over a very high pass or to trudge up the steep gorge of the Dudh Kosi river. We live in a protected place.”
Rinpoche then recites Sherpa narratives describing how special spiritual powers were used twice to create a beyul, a sacred sanctuary, in the Khumbu valley — first to sanctify it and then to open it as a sanctuary.
“One of our religious texts foretold that in the future … the religious people would have to run away to secluded mountain valleys described in religious texts.”
When helping to establish Buddhism in Tibet, Guru Rinpoche (founder of Himalayan-Tibetan Budddhism) predicted that there would be times of trouble when some people in the Tibetan region would have to flee their homes. He also sanctified and hid many valleys in the Himalaya to serve as sanctuaries.
Guru Rinpoche instructed some of his pupils to write guidebooks which hid in the rocks and earth. These hidden teachings would offer directions on how to get to the sanctuaries. In times of trouble, various inspired lamas and their devout followers would be able to find these places by following the directions in the books.
Guru Rinpoche painting on a cliff face.
The Khumbu valley is one of these hidden sacred sanctuaries, these beyuls.
“When there were troubles hundreds of years ago, we know that the ancestors of the present-day Sherpas left Kham in far eastern Tibet because it was against their religious belief to fight. They moved westward along the north side of the Himalaya.
“They were looking for a beyul, a sanctuary, because the lamas leading them were follow- ing the directions recorded in a religious text. The lamas needed not only the skills to read and understand the book, but also the spiritual power to recognize clues in the landscape, in order to discover the beyul.”
The Sherpa ancestors crossed the Himalaya through a pass to the west of Khumbu. They started small homesteads lower down near present-day Lukla. The first Sherpa to enter the beyul, Phachhen, struggled to walk up the wild canyon, clambering up and down around cliffs, boulders, and trees. Eventually, several families settled on the warm slopes below the present villages in the upper valley, the Khumbu beyul.
The first Sherpa to enter Khumbu walked up the rugged canyon.
“When Phachhen, the first Sherpa, arrived in Khumbu around five or six hundred years ago, the valley was covered by snow and the glaciers were much bigger than they are now. Gradually the snow and ice melted.”
Khumbu is not the first or last beyul to serve as a sanctuary in the Himalaya. Others have been located across the high Himalaya of Nepal, Tibet, China, India, Bhutan, and Pakistan. To the southeast of Khumbu, the beyul of Khenpalung has yet to be opened for the devout.
I ask Rinpoche about an American scholar who organized an expedition that succeeded in crossing several high passes to enter Khenpalung. Rinpoche responds:
“He found the way into Khenpalung, the physical place, but did not see the real inside place. Our friend was not the right person, it was not the right time, and the team did not have the spiritual preparation to see all that was there. For a beyul to be revealed, the directions to find it must be followed by the right group of people with strong faith and pure motives.
“So it is with the beyul: we see and hear part of what is there, but we miss certain things be- cause we aren’t ready or able to perceive them. The inside of the mandala was invisible to them.”
I wonder how to interpret Rinpoche’s remarks. Perhaps being spiritually unprepared is like being tone-deaf; certain notes just do not register. The fact that the Khenpalung beyul has been physically entered but not spiritually found suggests that it is not a place where we must go on foot.
Is a true beyul a place that we find in our minds? We need spiritual power, like Phachhen, to thwart the demons of greed, ignorance, and desire that will obstruct our path. But the path is there. It takes only determination and courage to follow it.
The beyul is an inside place, a spiritual sanctuary. “The most important beyul is in our minds,” says Rinpoche.
Sherpas use the high mountainsides of the beyul as pastures.
To think that in a rundown area of mud huts and struggling farmers there was once an empire of wealthy kings, for millennia, the first three Buddhas and then the historical Buddha of 2500 years ago were born near here.
These were civilizations that could mill a massive stone pillar to such a smooth even surface. These pillars commemorate the births of ordinary humans who came to live in an enlightened state to inspire others. Here were born individuals whose teachings could change the world, here in these districts of rundown roads, houses, and families in mud huts.
Here was a time and a place and a young man who turned his back on the princely comfort of his life to find a way to seek a more universal truth. That we will all go old if we are lucky, we all will suffer and we all will die.
In the Kapilvastu ruins is the west gate from where he departed the palace and princely comfort. Now it is ruins of walls in the dust. A big tree and then acres of ruins. I wonder what conditions the ordinary people lived in.
Were they in mud huts or brick houses? What was the society where he lived and the way of life for the ordinary person?
Lumbini is now a place so sacred to Buddhists from so many countries that have built temples here.
Copyright on all photographs (c)Frances Klatzel 2022
So many questions. This intangible source of fear.
News of COVID-19 started slowly for a couple of months and then burst out in March 2020. COVID-19 arrived with uncertain and unknown risks and predictions.
This intangible virus that brought so much panic. I’ve wondered: what if everyone in the world had sheltered in place for a month in March 2020? Would the world be in the ‘situation’ it is now?
What if we had accepted the uncertainty before us?
Many of us underestimated it assuming that ‘it’ would be all be over within a few weeks. Weeks became months and more months, as 2020 went by.
After a while I stopped watching the data every day. Could it be manipulated or incomplete? For several months, the basic numbers of cases reported, did not include that key question of cases per capita.
I wonder how many people have had a mild case or no symptoms and are not one of the numbers. What do we know about them? How many people have been sick at home to the despair of family unable to find help and medical care for them? How many have died at home, trying to get home, or in a rented room?
Some writers ask if these times are a portal to a new beginning? Or a “sacred time”?
A new beginning depending on how we emerge and how our lifestyles might change? Do we really want to change? Or is part of the fear of COVID-19 a fear of changes to our lifestyle? Questions.
If these are so-called “sacred times”, how do we begin to reconcile with the immense suffering of so many in the pandemic on two fronts?
This intangible source of fear.
Fear of crowded places, sending children to school, or visiting and hugging family and friends.
Fear worldwide and some saying that we are all in this storm together.
Those in Western countries, or with the affluence elsewhere, have sturdy boats in which to weather the storm. With all this waiting, I find myself becoming more content with my own company thinking about life, people, ideas more thoroughly. There is time so my decisions are less hasty. To be honest, I’ve not found the lock down as a time of unhappiness. Rather, a fear that we really don’t know how this will all emerge.
For so many in developing countries without social safety nets, the pandemic and lock-downs have brought more fear of starvation than of the virus. They cling to pieces of driftwood in the storm. Humans are more important than the economy but how do we sustain basic livelihoods for the poor? So many questions.
For those of us adequate money and resources, it could be a sacrosanct time when we have had the luxury of staying in our nice homes and letting our creative fires burn with interesting thoughts and commitment to our inner voices and growth.
So long as we could avoid the virus… How has this time been for the front line health workers in long and difficult conditions, seeing patients suffer and die so isolated from their loved ones. Is it a sacred time for them in constant proximity to death?
Is the virus symbolic of what we have done to the earth? Is it a reprisal from Mother Earth?
Curbing our wanderlust, our drive to socialize, our thirst for adventure. What is this time? Is it sacred? Or is profound better word? It is a thought-provoking time to question where we’ve been and where we’re going.
It is the opposite of the earthquake that plunged me into the moment. Realizing that the earthquake in Nepal rattled our very basic survival instincts and enlivened that reptilian brain to survive.
The pandemic is less reptilian in its mode of working. It requires an intellectual understanding of this unseen, unheard, untasted, un-felt danger that can make you seriously ill or kill you. Its outcome, the disease is very palpable to its survivors and those who cared for them. But, to those of us who have not contracted it, the virus is the indescribable. How do you describe it but in scientific intellectual ways?? How to make it real for so many, especially so that they will take precautions?
How will we look back at this time?
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
“We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” Arundhati Roy[1]
This letter on my desk sits shining with the embossed gold lettering and logo of the State Counsellor of Myanmar. Complete in gold embossed folder and envelope. Delivered with great intent by an earnest young embassy official in late January 2021.
Our latest fan mail but no ordinary fan mail… it is from a head of state. A woman so cherished by her countrymen and once by the world, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a woman who stood up to the generals and endured years of solitude in house arrest. Winning two elections, now after the second victory, arrested. Where is Aung San Suu Kyi and how is she?
The signature on the page… did the world expect too much of her. She pursued the dream of democracy but equity for all Burma’s citizens seemed to be beyond her interest and reach.
Ironic how she as a Buddhist could not comprehend the urgency of compassion for all in a crowded world with shifts of people and movements.
The Rohingyas must be part of a people living along that southern coastline, moving, trading, being brought back and forth by the shifts of power and the powerful as they played their games for more power and prestige.
The envelope on the table, thanking me for books on her mentor, Dhammawati Guruma. How excited I would have been to have received the letter when I sent the books with a friend moving to Myanmar four years before. Instead, the little package sat forgotten on a shelf until my friend was packing to leave Myanmar. She was kind to take the time to send the books through her office connections to the head of state. A woman who had lived in Nepal and volunteered at the nunnery to teach the young women English.
How this woman soared into a global role, leaving her husband and two sons, leaving a life of comfort in British academia, to stay in Burma to fight for democracy… for elections. It is such a complicated country, Burma, with layers of ethnicity, discrimination, power, guilt, denial. She had one goal, to bring a voice to her supporters.
Buddhist in name and ‘religion’ but in spirit… we might wonder. Or are they like so many countries where a few wield power, keeping their heads down, watching the track in front of them, not looking at those to the side.
What is democracy if it is not for all? Can we criticise when blacks in the USA or indigenous people in Canada and Australia face discrimination, hardship, and often oppression. The persecution of the Rohingya was an overarching brutal reaction to slings and arrows from the insurgent group.
Wrote my friend: “Myanmar is a complex country with a painful history and not one person even Aung San Su Kyi could resolve the deep fractures of that society and decades of prejudice, we all misunderstood her and thought she could help end of the suffering of the Rohingyas .. still she has tried her way to make progress for her country , it’s just a more difficult journey and she is not as perfect as the West portrayed her .”
Derek Mitchell, former US Ambassador to Myanmar told the BBC: “The story of Aung San Suu Kyi is as much about us as it is about her. She may not have changed. She may have been consistent and we just didn’t know the full complexity of who she is. We have to be mindful that we shouldn’t endow people with some iconic image beyond which is human.”
Sending prayers for safety and well being of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and all the people of Myanmar (Burma).
Living in Nepal for several years, you sort of get used to the little tremors… you get jolted awake in the middle of the night, or your desk does a quick shake.
My first earthquake was in the monastery kitchen at Tengboche when the tea ladles hanging on the wall began to sway. It was confusing – just a mild sense of motion – but the two Buddhist lamas sat calmly.
The first sense of the 2015 earthquake might have been ten days before when we were planning a work field trip to the mountains in Manang. We knew that the road was bad with ice and snow left over from the winter… but I had this ominous feeling.
I was able to change the field schedule to do a shorter trip first and arrive back in Kathmandu on the Thursday before… but having no idea of what would happen on Saturday. Otherwise, on the originally planned date we would have been driving on a road across several cliffs at the time of the earthquake only 50 kms from the epicentre.
It was a muggy but chilled out late morning waiting for a friend to have coffee.
The main earthquake started as several little quakes that kept building in intensity over five minutes that felt like fifty.
That afternoon as I knelt under a table and the shakes grew and grew, it was as if there was no past and no future. It was as if I was totally in the ‘now, the present moment.’
That moment of being alive but connected to all those experiencing the horrendous destruction and death happening with each shake.
The power of the quakes… 7.9, 6.9, 7.3 brought huge devastation to some districts of central Nepal. Old style houses made of rocks and mortar collapsed killing about 9,000 people.
Over the next 48 hours especially, the ground kept on moving. We later counted on the government seismic website that there had been 108 aftershocks in 48 hours that were over 4 in magnitude, earthquakes in their own right if it had not been for the big one.
The weeks and months that followed were filled with the immediacy of connecting people and places and groups… always in the moment.
The frequent aftershocks drove a very tangible fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong moment.
It was a very moving to see people come together, to see how young people organised to help those in need. Helped me to sense our common humanity and the importance of helping others. A very tangible response to the tangible fear.
franceslk 