PART 2 - Dru Deng

Dru Deng sits at 3,000 meters and is the place where seeds thrown by a Lama in a monastery hundreds of kilometres away grew during a winter snow storm, and where three goddesses once came. The monastery is on a north eastern shelf of a long, steep sided alpine valley. Rich forests in the bottom and brown grasslands above, connecting mountain ranges with high meadows that eventually die out at scree and snow covered peaks.
This section of the valley is a concentration of settlement. All nine villages each with less than fifty homes can be seen from many points above Dru Deng. Other than a few small stores, several run by the monks, everyone here eats what they grow and sells what little they can. (Minority areas in China have some of the lowest incomes and highest rates of illiteracy.) There is a police station and Chinese school that goes up to grade 4, and mini vans and blue transport trucks that pass through the main village several times a day. This valley is the only access between two main roads, two main towns, and two grassland basins to the north and south. It hardly has any through traffic as the hardpack road is usually blocked by a rockslide somewhere in the middle. And anyway, there aren’t many people to connect.
I spent my days hiking up the sides of the valley and visiting with folks in the villages. Qing Zhu and I taught each other basic phrases in each other’s mother tongue, and got to know each other in our common language, Mandarin. We were each a valley into the other’s culture and perceptions. One day driving in the car with the highest Lama at Dru Deng we all had a conversation about Buddhism and Canada. Does the river there have fish, I ask?

“This big!” says the Lama, with arms stretched open wide. He asks me why we don’t eat beef in Canada. I clarify that it isn’t everybody, and for me at the time, just a personal choice. Most people in Canada – love - to eat beef.

“Do Canadians eat chicken and mutton and fish,” he asks?

Yep.

“Hmmm. We don’t eat chicken and mutton and fish,” he says, “I never have. I eat only yak and pork.”

Why is that? What’s the difference between eating yak, and mutton, and chicken, and fish, I ask him?

“Fish are so small. In one meal you can eat so many fish and kill so many lives. Yaks are so big that if you kill one, a person can eat it for a year. But killing an animal is not the same as eating one. If you eat meat you just have to pray, and you’ll be fine.” The Lama mimes flipping prayer beads in his hand. “If you kill an animal, in the next life it will kill you.”

I tell him that ten years ago I worked on a commercial fishing boat and killed many many thousands of fish. He listened carefully, sucked in sharp air through his teeth and said, “that is the worst job you can do in this life.”

Lacking an adequate argument at that moment, I tried to introduce them to my basic understanding of First Nations beliefs at home, “use what you can use and be respectful of the source.” I tell them that at home many people believe that everything has a spirit, everything from animals to trees to water.

“That’s Jewish!” says Qing Zhu with utter confidence. It’s not Buddhist, says the Lama, “only animals with hearts have life. There’s nothing wrong with cutting down a tree.”

During the month with Qing Zhu, I also spent a week up the monastery in another good friend’s house. Tiny versions of the family homes in the village, these small buildings hold the wood stoves, kettles, beds, and water barrels for the monks and Lamas who live up there. Most of the youngest monks still live with their families in the surrounding villages.
Two pit-sawyers moved in with me for a few days, since one of them is related to my friend and they had a small job up at the monastery. They were there sawing logs all day with a long pull saw making planks for a new place being built. At night we talked about “standards of living” and perceptions of wealth. While apologizing for the dusty floors (in a house without glass in the window frames) one said that there was a landslide illiteracy rate among the adults there accompanied by about a ten percent success rate among the grade 4 grads finding job alternatives to farming or herding yaks.
I asked them what could possibly be done to improve this fact? One of the men, the guy on the top end of the saw who has to follow the line, said that if he could have anything, he would have a TV, “having a TV increases your standard of living because it lets you see everything that is going on.” Did he just say participatory development through the boobtube? Who knew it could be so straight forward?