Here's the thing. I really want to write about a certain book, written by a very knowledgeable scholar I deeply respect, that details his three years in one of the world's most isolated countries. But I fear that the moment I mention the name of the country is the moment I lose almost everyone that might take interest, because the country was something of a cause-celebre a few years back. Everyone talked about it and everyone has already formed an opinion, which they still remember but no longer care for. So I'll taboo the name of the country, and other compromising information, until the very end.
The author is a religious authority, someone not unlike Saint Simeon the Stylite. His dedication comes from a source not of this world, and he clearly plays a different game than most of us. He’s less than stellar player at this game; although he is a man of truly astounding mercy, charity and wisdom, at around page 300 (or, a year into the journey) he finally breaks down and from then on freely calls most people around him unwashed savages.
This is his main quarrel with them, the lack of washing. He seems to me to be someone who truly enjoys hygiene, and tidiness in general. You know, the type of person who is very satisfied when everything is in its place, who watches railwaymen working on the tracks to help the traffic flow smoothly and feels like this is the very height of human battle against entropy. But he happens to be around a people whose faces glitter with mud:
"In the course of the twelve months that I lived there, I only twice saw a person wash himself, the washing being confined even then to the face and neck. Such being the case, the native’s skin all over the body has on it a peculiarly repulsive shine of polished dirt, so to say."
A year later and he still hasn't gotten over it:
"[They] are not at all inclined to be diligent—indeed they are as a rule as lazy as they can be. The fact that they are very dirty in their habits seems to come from this their national weakness of being extremely and eternally idle."
And:
"It is a sickening sight! Why do they not wash their bodies? Because they have a superstitious belief that it wipes off happiness to wash the body."
This is the prose of a man whose suffering is more physical than mental. The sometimes intense disgust has a tendency to overshadow his exposition on the natives, so be warned if you like your anthropologists to sanitize such details or at least feel guilty about not enjoying them, like Daniel Everett in his book about the Piraha people. It might all be a bit too much.
So what else does he have to say?
He mostly just talks about what he did there, which maybe is the only honest way of relating such voyages. His entry into the inaccessible country involves a few months' journey alone through dried out, desertous mountain plateau. There are a few highlights, of which I will mention one.
So one day, he had no water or food, and there was a snowstorm about. Because of starvation, he moved only very slowly, being constantly pushed to the ground by the wind. There was no one alive in sight. The world around him was just snow. (Maybe this is how noclip feels like?) He has realized that he is in a place where there is no one in a twenty kilometers' radius to contact, and he will probably die there. He had his two sheep to keep company. He resolved to spend his last days (and it will take days – starvation does not do overtime) praying, for which he sat with his two sheep on his side. He felt deeply. He was curled up in the snow with his sheep, who have obviously realized the gravity of their situation, but were too worried and cold to move. They all clinged to each other to keep warm. It was getting darker.
"My poor sheep! They crept close to me and lay there in the snow, emitting occasionally their gentle cry, which I thought had never sounded sadder. Nor had I ever felt so lonely as I did then. [...] I began to feel that my power of sensation was gradually deserting me."
What I want to convey, but will fail, is that I think this is the very height of human experience, something completely irreplicable, something that will take your bones and push them against the wall like a ragdoll, and you won't feel a thing. This is not your ayahuasca-at-Burning Man kind of night. It was so excellent that it wasn't even transformative; after that night, he was more or less the same person, just glad to have stayed alive. I won't say more; I believe those first sections of the book are a masterpiece of performance, far too good to be thrown about and paraded by my lazy, inaccurate words.
Eventually he manages to get into something like a city, where he's recognized by the natives as a priest of their religion, much surpassing them in his dedication to the Lord, and treated accordingly. Throughout, he has been lying to them that he is of a different nationality, one that is legally permitted in contact with them, and no one ever called him out because no one knows enough foreign languages to test him.
"The [pastor] was apparently interested by my explanation, and asked me where I had come from. I said I was a [Canadian] priest. The [pastor] thereupon spoke to me in [English], which he seemed to understand a little. I told him that his [Canadian] was the [English] dialect, which I could not understand, and so our conversation was held in [Inuit]. He then produced some [prayers] and made me read them, and until I had satisfied him in this connexion he did not believe in my being a [Canadian]."
I changed the context, of course, but that's the gist of it.
His situation would probably be more difficult had he only his religion to offer; but he is also a bit of a doctor, having briefly studied medicine in his native land, and so becomes the best doctor in the land. After some more cruising, he gets enrolled at a monastery in the country's capital as a novice, and also builds up a medical practice. It turns out wildly successful, to the point where he becomes a minor celebrity, and has an audience with the [Chief] of [Inuitland], the--
I'm getting tired of this charade. He has an audience with Thubten Gyatso, the 13th Dalai Lama. Our author describes him thusly:
"The Dalai Lama looks very brave. His eye-brows are very high, and he is very keen-eyed. Once a Chinese phrenologist remarked that the Tibetan Pope would bring about war one day, to the great disturbance of the country, for though brave-looking, he had an unlucky face. Whether the prophesy comes true or not, he really looks the very man of whose face a phrenologist would be sure to say something."
See if you agree:
Our author is quite impressed by the Dalai Lama, who he acknowledges is in a bit of a pickle -- five Dalai Lamas before him have been murdered as children -- and so has had to develop a cautious, shrewd personality, to handle his scheming subjects. And everyone who is anyone in Tibet schemes. Gone are the lofty ideals of Buddhism. Mostly everyone has gotten into this job just to get paid, and if you manage to become a landed priest (usually done by inheritance along patron-client lines) you do your best to oppress the """free"""-men you have a hold over, motivating everyone to try and get an education in the sacred doctrines of the Dharma so they have a better chance at avoiding crippling debt.
The reality Kawaguchi Ekai (our author) describes is nothing short of dystopic. It is worse than anything the left thinks Jeff Bezos wants. Yes, everyone is dirty, unhealthy, illiterate etc., as you expect in a pre-modern society, but they also literally eat shit:
"The mere mention of the real nature of this second series of so-called medicines, would, instead of curing the people of other countries, infallibly make them sick, as the essential ingredients are nothing less than the excreta, both liquid and solid, of the Grand Lama or other high priests. These are mixed with other substances and are made into pills, which are gilded over and sometimes colored red. These pills, known under the name of Tsa Chen-norpu (precious balls) are not on sale, they being accessible to ordinary people only through some powerful influence, and even then only by paying for them a large sum of money. The Tibetan is glad, however, to procure these pills at any cost, for he is under a fond delusion that they possess a most effective curative power. They are kept as something like a family treasure, and are used as the last resort, when all other means of treatment have failed. When, by some accident, a patient despaired of by doctors recovers after he has been dosed with a few of the ‘precious pills,’ the people of course extol their merit to the skies; while if he dies, his case is regarded as having been beyond cure, and the pills remain therefore the object of undiminished faith. To do justice to this superstition, I ought to add that the common Tibetans are kept entirely in the dark as to the ingredients of the pills; they are taken as medicines prepared by the Grand Lama himself according to a certain secret formula, and the shocking secret is known only to a select few, who are entitled to attend the Dalai Lama’s court."
What this fun (which we're having; I think Kawaguchi is just coping) might overshadow, is his coverage of the inner workings of Tibetan administration, a scheme that is maximal in its dysfunction. As I said before, most people strive to become monks, because staying on land reduces to waiting for the first natural disaster that will leave you indebted for life, all the while reaping the fruits of an agriculture whose yield per hectare is 5% that of contemporaneous India and 2% of France (Kawaguchi's figures, if I haven’t made any mistakes in unit conversions). But almost all monks end up poor as well; to get promoted is to get a good spot in an informal patronage network, which usually requires high birth and in that case is almost guaranteed anyway. In the end, everyone is poor, and no one is working the fields.
It is near impossible to investigate such a private society, but Kawaguchi manages, because of two factors. One is an extremely effective Schelling point he shares with the Tibetans, his Buddhist faith. The other is his sheer force of personality, as well as intelligence; he learns modern Tibetan, then Classical Tibetan furiously, with a zeal we in the 21st century find nowhere. (He still judges himself to be only half as dilligent as expat monks from Mongolia.) Note that the first one only works because of the second one. Kawaguchi comes from the Obaku school of Japanese Zen, which is not completely orthogonal to Tibetan Buddhism, but can be only shown similar by someone whose understanding of both is foundational and effortless. It is like a mathematician who bridges Bayesian statistics and algebraic topology. If you're unconvinced, consider that he's also done the English translation of his book mostly himself (with help from two Japanese friends). I wouldn’t have guessed it on my own.
By way of example, witness Kawaguchi on one of the anthropological staples, the wedding ceremony:
"The people who have come to see the bride off and those who have come to receive her all go on horseback, and on their way to the bridegroom’s house six banquets altogether are given by the relatives of the bride and of the bridegroom. Those who have come to see the bride off give three banquets at three different points on the road, and those who have come to welcome her give three similar banquets. Sometimes the banquets are given at places two miles apart, and sometimes three, as the case may be, and after the sixth banquet has duly taken place, the gate of the bridegroom’s house is at last reached by the wedding procession. In these banquets, however nobody drinks anything to excess, because every one is impressed with the fact that he has been entrusted with the very important duty of taking the bride in safety to the house of the bridegroom, and so the others, recognising the situation, never press any one to drink to excess. As a rule, it is customary in Tibet to press one’s guests to eat the dainties which have been set before them, while for the guests it is considered very impolite to taste such dainties immediately; to do so without a great deal of pressure is to be as vulgar as a Chinaman. The banquets are given by the friends of the bride and bridegroom at the houses of their friends or at their own, but on the whole it is more usual to have tents erected at convenient places in fields on the way to the bridegroom’s house, and to entertain the wedding procession there."
We have only recently came -- after years of post-structuralist malaise -- to return in our ethnography to this kind of clarity, and this turn couldn't have come sooner.
In the end, Kawaguchi had to run away from Lhasa, incognito, as his identity as a Japanese was finally discovered. At that time, Japan didn't have a negative reputation in Tibet -- it didn't have a reputation there at all -- but Tibetans pursued a policy of complete isolation, and were probably humiliated by being duped for so long, so he had to go.
Some of his friends got in trouble for this, and he closes off his book summarizing his attempts to stop them being tortured in Tibetan jail. He did it by getting the king of Nepal (a major player in the region) to intervene of their behalf. The kind of charisma he pulls off is something probably little known to most of us who never got acquainted with eg. the art of bargaining at a market, but it is so wildly successful that it made me wonder if I'm not leaving out half of the human experience by refusing to learn it. It's probably true.
There's definitely an antiquarian flavor to the book, particularly when discussing minutiae of Tibetan foreign policy circa 1890s, which I don't think would matter even to his English readers of the time, most of which were probably of a more mystical bent than Kawaguchi himself. (This was published by the Theosophical Society, after all.) But it is far more modern than it could be, and it is modern because it is direct. Here I come to what, for me, is the biggest reason to read this thing.
There's a trope, on Scott's blog, about charismatic adventurers who bend the world to their will; see eg. his review of Herbert Hoover's biography. The implication is that most of us are not like that; we would only get lost in these situations, and would probably act by acting out, dumbly. Kawaguchi also constantly does awe-inspiring feats, but he is not imposing. On the contrary, he is essentially weak and alone. He constantly evades trouble by inviting it; for example, when being robbed:
"It is a rule among the robbers of Tibet that, having taken all they want, they should give their victim enough food for some three days, provided that the latter read the Texts and ask for food. I thought I would follow this custom, and I said that I possessed in my breast-cloth a silver pagoda, containing relics of Buḍḍha, which Mr. Ḍhammapāla of India had asked me to present to the Dalai Lama, and which I did not wish to lose. The highwaymen at once wanted to know if I could not give it to them, and I replied that if they wanted it I would give it, but that as a layman could not keep it properly, they must expect some misfortune as a punishment for their sacrilege.
So saying, I produced the pagoda and invited them to open it. This was probably more than they expected. They would not even touch it, but asked me to place it upon their heads with my benediction. I held the pagoda over their heads and, reciting the three Refuges and Five Commandments of Buḍḍha, prayed that their sins might be extinguished by the merit of Ḍharma."
Such 'weak methods' require us to pay attention constantly, unconsciously, to never be disconnected from the world, but always catch the slightest twitch of the muscle on your assailant's face. Only then do you have enough information to make courageous split-second decisions. Then you can just go to Nepal and hustle your way to the King to make him run your private errands. It takes hard work to learn to act like this. Maybe it's not worth it for you, or maybe it is. Myself, I have not been very good at attaining this ability.
You can get “Three Years in Tibet” for free from Project Gutenberg.
