Last week, I spent time with some American friends who were visiting Bhutan. I took them around Thimphu, and we went to Kuenselphodrang above the city to see the Buddha Dordenma—the enormous golden statue that watches over the valley like the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. All-knowing and all-seeing and also, in the case of the Buddha, very serene. There’s a beautiful temple inside, and that’s where we headed.
The Je Khenpo, the spiritual leader of the Drukpa Kagyu lineage of Vajrayana Buddhism, has been giving teachings for 33 days at the site this summer, and more than 30,000 people come every day to receive them. A good chunk of Thimphu attends, plus people who have traveled from other parts of the country, making huge sacrifices and defying logistics.
My husband Namgay was there. He awakens every morning at about four and drives to the Changlemethang parade ground, then boards a bus that takes him to the Big Buddha. He returns home at about seven in the evening exhausted, resolved, and happy to be making this life-changing effort. He marvels at the energy and stamina of the now 70-ish Je Khenpo, who provides this transmission for hours on end each day.
I told my friends that most of Thimphu would be up at the statue receiving the transmission. They looked a little alarmed—the way Americans do when you mention a crowd that size. I told them not to worry. They’re Buddhists. They’re not mad at anybody.
I wasn’t sure what to expect but it was fine. We were up on one level at the base of the statue looking down on several massive tents with tidy rows of practitioners—seated on plastic chairs if they were old or infirm, the rest seated on the ground. From numerous loud speakers we heard the Je Khenpo speaking, reading from the texts. I told my friends we might be receiving some good karma just from being there and they were pleased.
There are few people more content than a Buddhist receiving an important teaching on a sunny summer day in Thimphu. Thousands had gathered on the hillside, and the overwhelming feeling in the air was one of patience and equanimity. People had brought their own cushions and their own bags of snacks, even though the Dratshang, the monastic body and and an army of volunteers feed them breakfast, lunch, and tea every day. The toilets are clean and operational. You can go to one of several medical stations and have your blood pressure checked or receive a dose of blood pressure medicine if you forgot yours. If the world was run like a Buddhist ceremony in Bhutan, it would be a much more efficient, beautiful, and enlightened place.
I struck up a conversation with a monk while my friends listened. “Where are you from?” I asked him. “I am from Bhutan,” he said, and we all laughed. I was so pleased he had given me a silly answer.
“Really, I come from Tango,” he said. I explained to my American friends that Tango is the oldest Buddhist university in Bhutan, about 30 minutes north of Thimphu. It’s built into the side of a cliff shaped like a horse’s head, which has some auspicious meaning. The 45-minute hike up is magical. It has been a meditation retreat since the 13th century, and is now officially the Institute of Advanced Vajrayana Studies. If you halfway pay attention while you’re there, you can feel some sort of energy. Magic is afoot. If you don’t feel it I can’t help you.
Life here is so insulated and rarified. But lately the world encroaches.
Massive hillside teachings aside, current global events have been reaching in and shaking things up. I don’t have to list for you here the myriad geopolitical messes to which our flesh is heir. This war in the Middle East, though, has been felt on grocery store shelves, and the cost of petrol has doubled. We used to buy Skippy peanut butter from distributors in the UAE, along with other treasures from the US. But for the past few months no ships have sailed from the UAE to Kolkata (or anywhere else in India) full of Skippy to be offloaded onto dirty trucks and driven overland to Phuentsholing and then up to Thimphu. Shipping costs, fuel costs, whatever the actual mechanism, has failed. The result has been empty shelves.
This gives me an unsettled feeling as I’m walking with our friends at the Big Buddha. I can’t bear the thought of this geopolitical creep encroaching on our lovely life. And, like so many people in the world, I’ve been wondering how this crazy, greed-driven, megalomaniacal trip we’re taking will end.
In retrospect, it seemed like I was focusing quite a bit of negative energy about the world and change and uncertainty into a sort of obsession about our lack of familiar, overpriced American peanut butter.
Someone told me that a shop near the vegetable market still had a few jars of Skippy in stock. So after I sent our friends off to visit Punakha, the next valley over from Thimphu, I did what I imagine very few enlightened beings would do, which was to walk from shop to shop in Thimphu on a hot and dusty and somewhat undignified hunt for American peanut butter. Meanwhile, a few kilometers away, 30,000 of my neighbors sat in equanimity receiving the Dharma.
I visited eight shops. Nothing. I stood in the street for a moment, slightly out of breath after running across the road to avoid being run over by a truck, and had what I can only describe as a small private Dharma epiphany of my own: “You don’t need peanut butter,” I told myself. “You rarely eat peanut butter. It’s just a habit to have it on the shelf. You can absolutely live without Skippy. Now eat what you already have in the kitchen or go buy some seeds and grow your own peanuts.”
I believed myself completely. I want that on the record. It was a real moment of letting go—the point that Namgay’s teachers and my own years here have been trying to instill in me: that wanting less is not a deprivation but a kind of relief.
Then, as I turned around to head home, there, in the front of Dolkar shop, were four jars of Skippy peanut butter, gleaming as if in a dream.
Reader, I bought it. Well, I bought a jar.
The epiphany, the teaching I received wasn’t really about peanut butter; it was about noticing the wanting. I noticed it. I watched myself let go of it completely and sincerely, and I watched it not matter even slightly when desire showed up again in a shop that had some Skippy. My desire was for continuity and stability and peace, not for peanut butter. These things are elusive and out of our control, and so we have to realize that one pounding desire can really be about something else entirely.
When Namgay returned home that evening I made him a peanut butter sandwich. He didn’t know it was a small act of grief and resistance against something familiar disappearing because of forces entirely outside of our control—a war on the other side of the world reaching all the way to a grocery store in Thimphu. A sort of craving, I suppose. But impermanence is the same in a sandwich or in a teaching.
Related features from BDG
Bhutan: Where the Tigers Found Refuge
Temporal Rules: Bergson, the Buddha, and My Husband’s Missing Birthday
Remember Mr. White
