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L I F E S T Y L E Kawaguchi in Nepal By Scott Berry This month’s Hindsight is about an unusual historical character, the Japanese Buddhist monk named Ekai Kawaguchi. The author tells us that Kawaguchi visited Nepal in 1899, 1903 and 1905, and that while most British and American travelers saw Nepal from an elite point of view, his experiences were more varied. Kawaguchi’s time in Tibet is perhaps best known to modern readers, but his sojourns in Nepal are equally fascinating, as this account tells us.  In
1899 an unusual young man who was about to embark on a remarkable
and harrowing jour ney through Tibet, visited the Boudhanath stupa.
He was a celibate, vegetarian Zen monk who never ate after noon,
and who travelled mostly on his own in search of the Tibetan translations
of the lost Sanskrit Mahayana and Vajrayana scriptures. The first
Japanese to come to Nepal, he stayed for several weeks at the home
of the Chiniya Lama where today a plaque in three languages commemorates
his visit. This was the first of four trips he would make to Nepal,
and unlike other foreign travellers over the previous century Kawaguchi
became intimately acquainted not with the life of the elite or the
tiny foreign community, but with the everyday life of the ordinary
people, not only at Boudhanath but in the Thak Khola Valley, Upper
Mustang and Dolpo.Kawaguchi was only in Nepal at all because he wanted to go to Tibet. He had just spent a year in Darjeeling learning Tibetan and was too well known there to try the nearby passes. He therefore decided to go underground and try his luck in Nepal. From Calcutta, where he donned the maroon robes of a Tibetan monk, Kawaguchi took a train to Sagauli, not far from the Nepal border. While in Calcutta, he had also become acquainted with a Nepali gentleman, a close friend of the abbot of Boudhanath, the second Chiniya Lama, who wrote Kawaguchi a letter of introduction to his friend. In Sagauli, Kawaguchi saw three Tibetan-looking monks and decided to try out his disguise. Not yet fully confident of his Tibetan, he introduced himself as a Chinese monk from Lhasa. And here his trip almost ended, for he found himself addressed in Chinese, and could not understand a word. But he could write, and claiming to be able to speak “only in the common Foshee tongue”, he bowled the monks over with his knowledge of the written language. The reason that he had been asked to prove himself in Chinese is that here on the plains of northern India, he had quite remarkably stumbled upon the Chiniya Lama, the one man in Nepal to whom he had an introduction. The two hit it off, Kawaguchi was invited to stay at the lama’s house, and they made the trip to Kathmandu together. Two nights later at Bichagori, a place mentioned in all the old travellers’ tales but now bypassed by the road, he heard the roar of a tiger and rather than being frightened, he paused to write a poem about it. His stay in Boudha coincided with the annual Tibetan migration, when pilgrims and traders from Tibet passed through on their way to the pilgrimage sites of India, as they do to this day. Kawaguchi was looking for a way to sneak himself past the border. Even in those days you had to be in possession of a pass to be able to go in and out of Tibet, so since Kawaguchi had none, he sought information from the poorest of the pilgrims who had neither pass nor money to bribe the guards. The information he got was that the least guarded entry into Tibet was via upper Mustang. So off he went in March, 1899 on a white horse, a gift from the Chiniya Lama, and accompanied by three servants, two men and a woman, the most elaborate entourage of his entire trip. On the way to Pokhara he found the caste system so rigidly enforced that he was forced to sleep outside, but like visitors today, he was charmed by Pokhara itself: “In all my travels in the Himalayas, I saw no scenery so enchanting.” Kawaguchi was one of the most absent-minded travellers of all time, and somewhere near Ghorapani he was so lost in thought, that he rode right into a branch, was thrown from his horse and “… narrowly escaped from rolling a thousand fathoms down a craggy precipice, to reach the bottom a mangled carcass.” But this was the least of his problems, for the old woman among his servants (presumably a Tibetan speaker), “made a revelation to me, and it was not of a very reassuring kind; for according to her, I was doomed to be killed,” by the other two servants once they had reached the plains of Western Tibet.  The four of them proceeded up the old Jomsom Trek to Tukche in the Thak Khola Valley. The Chiniya Lama had given him a letter of introduction to the local headman, or Subba, Harkaman Sherchan, and he was invited to stay in the chapel of the house that was the center of the salt trade, where salt from the Tibetan plains was traded for grain from the lowlands, a perfect place to pick up rumors. In this barren windswept river valley surrounded by snowy mountains, he must have felt he was getting somewhere. Here he also divested himself of his murderous servants. One night they got drunk, and “each accused the other of the somewhat cheerless intention of making short work of me …. I could not have had a better opportunity, and I there and then dismissed them both, after having paid them off rather liberally.” While staying at Harkaman Sherchan’s, he learned that the way he had hoped to use to enter Tibet had been recently reinforced, but he also met the man who was to be his companion for the next year, a learned Mongolian Lama named Serab Gyaltsen “who had yielded to feminine temptation” in Lhasa and was now “ … compelled to pass his life in obscure seclusion.” Though strict to the point of prudishness in his own life, Kawaguchi loved jovial company. He and Serab Gyaltsen became fast friends, and the Mongolian invited him to stay with him in Tsarong where they would exchange lessons in Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism and share the task of doctoring the village. In the end he stayed in Tsarong for a year, debating so vigorously with his friend, that they sometimes came to blows. He also successfully cured many villagers of their ailments by forbidding alcohol and tobacco, which he claims they used to excess. In his free time, he got himself into shape for the arduous journey ahead by running up and down the mountainsides with a load of rocks on his back, an exercise which he passed off as a religious penance. Kawaguchi did not altogether approve of the way of life in Mustang, claiming that when there was no agricultural work to be done, the inhabitants thought of “nothing but eating, drinking and sleeping, their minds being otherwise filled with thoughts pertaining to sensual love.” And the standards of cleanliness left him appalled. “I have no courage to dwell here on their many … doings, which are altogether beyond imagination for those who have not seen them done, and are too loathsome, even unto sickening, to recall to mind …” And so when Serab Gyaltsen, completely misjudging his celibate friend, proposed that he marry one of the headman’s pretty daughters, he beat a hasty retreat all the way back to Marpha. “Had I yielded then, Tsarong would have today one more dirt-covered and grease-shining priest among it’s apathetic population, and that is all.” In Marpha his secret was almost revealed, and he took off quickly through Dolpo, crossing into Tibet by a route no one is entirely sure of even now. Kawaguchi’s adventures in Tibet belong to a different story, but two years later, when he had secretly left Tibet just before his identity was revealed, he learned that a number of his Tibetan friends had been arrested, and hoping that the rulers of Nepal might be of assistance in getting them released, he sneaked back into Nepal and made such a nuisance of himself at a royal hunting party that Chandra Shamsher, the Rana Prime Minister, was finally forced to notice him, and eventually gave him a passport to Kathmandu. Along the way he was disappointed this time to find no tiger at Bichagori. The same as once before the moonlight sleeps On Bichagori fair; but whence is heard Upon the stream the savage tiger’s roar? In Kathmandu, Kawaguchi again stayed with his old friend, the Chiniya Lama at Boudhanath. There were plenty of Tibetans passing through, and the rumors he heard of the sufferings of his friends caused him a great deal of concern. He also had several interviews with Chandra Shamsher, probably at the Thapathali Durbar since Singha Durbar was still under construction. The picture Kawaguchi gives of Chandra Shamsher and the king, Prithvi Bir Bikram Shah, together is revealing. The king seemed cowed and never said a word, so that it was some time before Kawaguchi even realised who he was. The interviews did not always go smoothly, but eventually the monk convinced the Prime Minister that he was not a spy, and that his only concerns were to collect Buddhist scriptures and to try and help his friends in Tibet. Once Chandra Shamsher was convinced, he accepted Kawaguchi’s petitions to the Tibetan government (They did get to Lhasa, though it would be twelve years till Kawaguchi learned this). He also promised to collect some Sanskrit scriptures for the monk, and promised him more on a planned return trip in exchange for a set of Japanese scriptures. While they were being collected, Kawaguchi retreated to Nagarjun where he meditated for two months. Kawaguchi was a tough, brave and persistent traveller, but no one has ever accused him of being a competent geographer. When riding back to Boudhanath from Thapathali one day, he caught sight of Mt Gauri Shankar which dominates the mountains to the east of the Valley and called it “the highest peak in the world … the famous Gaurishankara, or Chomo Lhari, often called Mt Everest,” naming three quite separate mountains, one of which is in Bhutan. Having delivered his petitions, Kawaguchi felt free to return to Japan after an absence of five years. It was not a particularly happy homecoming. He found himself an outsider whose exploits were sometimes doubted and derided, and it was with relief that he returned to India in October, 1904 after only a year and a half in his own country. After a few days in Calcutta, he returned to Nepal with his Japanese scriptures. The promised scriptures had, of course, been forgotten, but a member of the Rana family was soon delegated to look for them. While the search for his manuscripts went on, Kawaguchi stayed at Boudhanath and studied Sanskrit, much as Tibetan monks had done in an earlier age. He also wrote a 58 page “Memorial” in English to Chandra Shamsher on how to develop Nepal along Japanese lines. This curious document was discovered in a Rana palace in Patan by Kamalmani Dixit as it was about to be thrown away. Dixit, who had studied about Kawaguchi’s journeys at Kathmandu’s Durbar School in the 1940s was fascinated by this original document. He has kept it in pristine condition at the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, and published a Nepali translation in 1992. When all his manuscripts had been collected, Kawaguchi left Kathmandu for the last time in December, 1905. The only time he returned to Nepal was a brief visit to Lumbini in 1911. Leading a group of Japanese Buddhists, the man who had crossed numerous borders in disguise forgot about visas, and got the whole group arrested. Though mainly remembered for his adventures in Tibet, Kawaguchi spent well over a year in Nepal, and his descriptions of Boudhanath, Thak Khola and Upper Mustang as well as of Chandra Shamsher’s court, give us a unique view of Nepal a century ago. More about Kawaguchi’s adventures can be found in A Stranger in Tibet by Scott Berry (London: HarperCollins, 1990; recently reissued by Vajra Publications, Kathmandu, as A Stranger in Nepal and Tibet), Three Years in Tibet by Ekai Kawaguchi (Kathmandu, Bibliotheca Himalayica, 1995), and Ekai Kawaguchi: The Trespassing Insider by Abhi Subedi (Kathmandu: Mandala Book Point, 1999). Scott Berry is associated with the Center for Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS), Tribhuvan University. His most recent book, written with former Kumari Rashmila Shakya, is From Goddess to Mortal: The True Life |
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