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BHUTAN
Shangri-La:
The Demon’s Stomach; The Mother’s Womb
By
Jheri St. James 
 The Kingdom of Bhutan
is a small landlocked country in South Asia, located
at the eastern end of
the Himalayas and bordered to the south, east and west
by the Republic of India and to the north by the People’s
Republic of China. Bhutan is separated from the nearby
country of Nepal to the west by the Indian state of
Sikkim, and from Bangladesh to the south by West Bengal.
In 2006, Business
Week magazine rated Bhutan the happiest
country in Asia and the 8th happiest in the world,
based on a global survey. Two years later Bhutan held
its first democratic elections after centuries of absolute
monarchy.
The landscape ranges from subtropical plains in the
south to the Sub-alpine Himalayan heights in the north,
with some peaks exceeding 23,000 ft. Vajrayana Buddhism
is the predominant religion with Hinduism following.
The capital and largest city is Thimphu.
The term “Shangri-la” is often used much
as the “Garden of Eden” might be used,
to represent a paradise hidden from modern man, an
analogy for a life-long quest or something elusive
that is much sought. It might also be used to represent
perfection that is sought by man in the form of love,
happiness or Utopian ideals, particularly a mythical
Himalayan utopia—a permanently happy land, isolated
from the outside world, where people are almost immortal
and only very slowly aging in appearance.
 The Nazis had an enthusiasm for Shangri-La,
where they hoped to find an ancient master race similar
to
the Nordic race, unspoiled by Buddhism. They sent one
expedition to Tibet in 1938, led by Ernst Schafer.
Many independent nations isolated from the West have
been termed Shanri-Las—Tibet, Nepal, Sikkim,
Tuva, Mongolia, the Tocharian Tushara Kingdom of the
Mahabharata and the Han Dynasty outpost Dunhuang. Bhutan
has been hailed as the last Shangri-La.
It is believed that the inspiration for the novel “Lost
Horizon” by British author James Hilton was the
Hunza Valley in Northern Pakistan, close to the Tibetan
border, which Hilton visited a few years before his
book was published in 1933. A film of the same name
was made in 1937.
Our collectors for Bhutanese soil were
Tashi Lhendup, Reva Gupta (US Embassy), Tshoki Choden
(Bhutanese Embassy)
stationed in New Delhi, India, and Larry Schwartz from
the US Embassy in India. Their sample came from the historical
site Simtokha Dzong, “the oldest Dzong in Bhutan
(built by Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal in 1629, he being
the Drukpa Kaygud religious leader who came to Bhutan
in 1616 and unified the country). This location is south
of Thimphu, the capital, approximately five kilometers
along the Paro Phuntsholing Highway. History says Zhabdrung
chose to build the Dzong here, where the area was inhabited
by many demons. The word Simtokha means: ‘sinmo’ (demon); ‘tog’ (stomach)
and ‘kha’ (on) – the Dzong on top of
the demon’s stomach.”
Author and American journalist Lisa
Napoli published Radio Shangri-La, her memoirs of
living for one year
in Bhutan in July of 2011. She says, “Foreigners
coming to Bhutan generally fall into 3 categories:
1) Those wearing rose tinted glasses, who never once
take them off and leave with the glasses very much
on; 2) Those who, by the time they are done, realize
they can see better without the glasses; and 3) Still
others who take off the rose tinted glasses only to
realize that Shangri-la is a poor country with real
life problems, then don another pair that makes things
more skewed than the first.” She had never traveled
to the Himalayas nor heard of Bhutan, except vaguely
in its relationship to Happiness. She went to Bhutan
to assist with Kuzoo FM, the only other radio station
in Bhutan other than the BBS, set up by His Majesty
the 5th King of Bhutan.
Then she crosses paths with Nawang, a young Bhutanese
woman who seems to cherish and want the very things
that Lisa is trying to run away from - the fast life
in a media and material-saturated world in the US:
“Everything in Nawang’s
line of sight conspired to make her feel that if
you could only get
your feet onto American soil, piles and piles of money
could be excavated from the streets or would fall from
the heavens. And that money would buy things, items
that were the keys to happiness. That message was conveyed
in television shows and movies, which Nawang watched
in a near-continual feed at home, enhanced by tales
of the few Bhutanese who made their way to the United
States and sent back stacks of cash. They managed not
to explain how hard they worked to earn that money,
at what kind of jobs, or the cramped dorm-room style
living conditions they endured to be able to save the
few dollars a month they wired back home. And how they
lived with the constant fear of being found out and
deported.”
Yoshiro Imaeda was born in 1947 in
Japan and worked as an Advisor to the National Library
of Bhutan from
1981 to 1990. He is currently the Director of Research
at the National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris.
He regularly visits Bhutan. Narrated in the first person,
the 211-page paperbound non-fiction was published by
KMT Printers and Publishers. When the fourth Druk Gyalpo,
Jigme Singye Wangchuck, announced his abdication of
the Throne in December 2006, the nation felt suddenly
orphaned. Yoshiro, who worked for Bhutan for a long
time, was one such person. For him, the ‘magic’ of
the end of an era of the fourth Druk Gyalpo opened
the floodgates. His memories of the leadership of the
fourth King and of his 34 years of life in Bhutan,
beginning in 1978, spurred him to record them in the
form of a book, “Enchanted by Bhutan.” This
author succeeds in sketching many aspects of Bhutanese
life in minute details--politics, treaties, beliefs,
medicines, environment, culture, Gross National Happiness
and touches upon the issues of migrants in the south.
The author does not even spare the famous night-hunting
culture.
The Takin is Bhutan's national animal.
 
Night hunting is a total misnomer for
the traditional culture of nightly courtship and
romance that was practiced
mostly in eastern and central rural Bhutan. There is
neither the word 'night' nor the word 'hunting' in
the original terms. The original words can be best
rendered as 'Prowling for Girls,’ the rural equivalent
of a date. The book “Love, Courtship and Marriage
in Rural Bhutan” (2009), is about night hunting.
According to the author, Bomena, a “custom whereby
a boy stealthily enters a girl’s house at night
for courtship or coitus with or without prior consultation”,
is commonly misunderstood in Bhutan as ‘night
hunting’. The use of a vernacular word ‘bomena,’ not ‘night
hunting’, is a term loaded with ignorance of
the custom, and tells a lot about this original village
activity. The current understanding of bomena, according
to the author, is naïve, biased and misrepresented,
heavily influenced by changing values especially among
the urban societies. One common notion is that any
rural culture is ‘inferior’ and all urban
cultures are ‘superior’, and replacing
the rural culture with urban ‘superior’ culture
is seen as a way of emancipating the Bhutanese farmers
from their ‘primitive’ culture, and advancing
the country.
* * * So the soil of Bhutan came from the location of the
stomach of the demon. The night hunters are being forestalled.
Books are being written to describe life in Bhutan,
the last Shangri-La, and once the Happiest Place on
Earth. At this time of dramatic change, some believe
that Mother Earth has started her ascension birthing
process and will soon be moving into the new Earth
energy. Earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes represent
the crust of the Earth opening up in various forms
of rupture. This could be like her cervix opening,
her water breaking and the tidal wave of the birth
process. Mother Earth is now free to merge with a higher
dimension reality just like we do when we connect with
our higher selves. And even though the part on which
mankind lives is only 30% of the planet, under all
the 70% water is more soil, more common ground.
There exists a history / mythology
/ folklore that our earth has a hollow center, a
mystical and physical
place of great mystery and wonder, a womb. The hollow
earth theory is represented in the history of many
diverse cultures throughout the world. The Avalon of
Camelot, the Garden of Eden, Paradise Lost, Shangri-La
and Valhalla are names assigned to a mystical and physical
place thought by some to house prehistoric animals
and plants and by others to hide alien beings bent
on conquering the outer Earth. (“UVOTV Presents:
Journey to the Hollow Earth”) Only time will
tell and in the interim, we must strive to live good
lives on the surface, perhaps on the demon’s
stomach, perhaps on the Mother’s womb where: “The
world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily
prayers are delivered on the lips of the bucking waves,
the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.” Terry
Tempest Williams. Thanks to our collectors. The word
for peace in Bhutan is zhidye.
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