Living in the Waterfall

Living in the Waterfall

It’s been so long since I had the space of mind to write anything for this blog and it’s hard to believe that in a couple of days, I will have only one month remaining in this country I have come to love so much. Outside my window the rain comes down through the mountain valley in long white sheets that blanket us in continuous waterfalls of sound. The rain thunders over the tin roofs and breaks down through thousands of leaves. The rivers swell and roar on either side of our small apartment so that finally I feel we are living inside of a world of falling water and green leaflight. Something there is in such a rush of sound and water that steals away my sense of purpose until I find myself watching those long veils of water from a distance. I am deeply saddened by the reality of having leave Bhutan and even more saddened that I did not keep up my postings to remind myself of the adventures that have carried me along this journey. But, it is not too late.

Today began as usual with the birds beginning to sing at about 4:30am. By the time I arose, the clouds had parted above the highest peaks and a blue sky, ragged with strips of white capped the dark green slopes. Within the hour, the clouds had closed back in and by the time I was ready to begin my daily drive down the mountain to Thimphu to continue translating Drukpa Kunley’s biography, the rain was beginning again. Before I had even left the driveway, my phone rang. Chris, who had left to “invigilate” for the first day of exams at Royal Thimphu College, was on the line. He informed me that exams had been cancelled due to the suicide of a student during the night. I turned off the engine and sat stunned in the car.

According to what could be determined, the student, a young man, killed himself after hearing that he would not be allowed to sit for his exams due to his lack of class attendance. But the truth is that no one will ever really know just why this person no longer felt capable of bearing his own existence. And the terribly sad fact is that he obviously felt he had nowhere to turn to, or no one to turn to, for help. In a society that appears to be so tightly interwoven, to the extent that even kinship terms lose the kind of solid and definitive meanings assigned to them in other cultures, it is provocative to realize that there are perhaps many people who feel deeply and painfully alone. Even more thought provoking is to consider this fact together with the basic truth that we are all deeply and powerfully alone, no matter how many friends or lovers or connections we may appear to have on the surface. Suicide is a rare event in Bhutan, where most people are Buddhist and where extended family relationships seem to ensure that almost no one becomes isolated within their own suffering to such a powerful extent.

Buddhism itself considers the act of suicide to be the deliberate rejection of the most precious of births in the cycle of samsara. To attain a human body is to be placed in the position of being able to achieve enlightenment. One’s suffering and pleasure are balanced to the exact degree necessary to incite the disciple to renounce both desire and aversion and to work to attain the stability and equanimity of mind necessary to experience a reality beyond conceptual thought. But the question arises, in a country that has been catapulted from medieval times straight into the twenty-first century within a sixty to seventy year period, how much did Buddhist values influence this young man’s life? Nominally? Profoundly? How can anyone predict the kinds of transformations that will take place on every level of human experience—emotional, psychological, physical, etc., when modernization occurs so quickly and powerfully.

While this young man never knew a world that did not include television and internet, Facebook and UTube, his grandparents watched the building of the first roads, the advent of the first motorized vehicles, of electricity, of running water, of airplanes, of cell phones and computers. They saw journeys that took them four days by foot and on horseback shortened to a few hours drive over winding roads. They saw the advent of an entire educational system. But can these kinds of larger cultural, historical, and political movements gain any traction in helping to make sense of a young person’s decision to take his own life? Or can his decision be attributed to the enormous pressure faced by the youthful population of Bhutan to “make it” in this life? We will never know.

From the earliest days of their education, Bhutanese students embark on a series of examinations that determine who proceeds and how. Straight up to the final civil service exam taken about eight months after graduation from college, students face test after test. Some make it through to that final examination and perhaps to the attainment of the coveted goal of the civil service job, complete with perks. Others do not. But the pressure to succeed in this one way is indelibly inscribed into the hearts and minds of every student. As more and more young people enter the higher educational system, the number of civil service jobs available cannot keep up. With the private sector just beginning to take root here, there are still few alternatives, although this will likely and hopefully change with time.
But, ultimately, it is impossible to say how many of these factors may or may not have influenced the student to take his life. Young people commit suicide in countries all over the world every day for reasons that we all continue to try to understand. It was perhaps no more and no less than a moment in time of intense suffering in which a decision is made that cannot be revoked, in which one intensification of pain for one person multiplies exponentially into thousands of broken shards of pain for all those who loved and befriended him. Today’s veils of falling rain seem deeply appropriate as we all pray that some peace has come to this young man.