in the land of snows

[ailiet]

Just finished Barbara Demick’s Eat the Buddha, a nonfiction account of life in Tibet over the last century, with a focus on the town of Ngaba- the site of a large number of self-immolations. It was a well-written book and the timing for reading it turned out to be a little on the nose. A week afterwards, I watched a short series of documentaries about traditional Chinese dancing. I enjoyed the series overall (Yang Liping’s peacock dance, and the troupe of deaf/hoh dancers were highlights), but the episode about Tibet felt like standing on the other side of a mirror.

Two particular bits from the book that I found interesting, the first about flexible households:

Polygamy and polyandry were acceptable among rural Tibetans, particularly when it was a matter of practicality rather than lust. In Meruma, two brothers shared a wife, an arrangement that prevented the family’s property from being divided and allowed one man to earn money trading while the other maintained the family’s land and herds. Unmarried women frequently had children of their own; in fact, one anthropologist who studied a Tibetan village found that half of the unmarried women had given birth. Unlike Chinese women similarly situated, they […] were treated as heads of households in their own right.

And the second, about monastery life:

The young monks engaged in a ritualized form of debating, as integral to their studies as it is among Talmudic scholars. One group of monks would be assigned to defend a thesis, and the others to challenge it- punctuating the question with a sharp clap of the hands. If one took too long to answer a question, the other monks would protest with a round of three claps, indicating disapproval. A successful defence of a thesis would be approved with a vigorous round of stomping on the pavement, the monastic equivalent of a high five.