Its inhabitants call it Druk Yul, the land of the Dragon. A Himalayan kingdom long sheltered from the turmoil of the world, Bhutan is gradually opening up to outside eyes, between its two giant neighbours, India and China. Visitors usually bring back three images of it: a people said to live in perfect harmony thanks to Gross National Happiness, phalluses painted on walls in memory of Drukpa Kunley, an eccentric yogi said to have converted the country to Buddhism through rather unorthodox practices, and, in the far east, the refuge of the yeti. From the streets of Thimphu to the remote valleys of Merak and Sakteng, these myths, ancient or still alive, rub up against the people who inhabit them.
For more than a century, the Wangchuck family has ruled Bhutan. The fourth king said he was more interested in Gross National Happiness than in Gross National Product; in 2008, the kingdom became a parliamentary democracy, and Jigme Thinley, who had cut his teeth as minister of Happiness, became Prime Minister. The fifth king married a commoner. In Thimphu, a capital of barely 100,000 inhabitants, 4x4s and magazines nonetheless arrived before the visitors. At the foot of the country’s largest chorten, an old man considers Gross National Happiness “a political invention”: he finds peace only by praying in the mountains. Another disagrees: the government does everything, he says, to make people happy. Mister Bhutan, the brawniest man in the country, puts bodybuilding at the service of national happiness; city people, he laments, chase after money. At night, a young woman speaks of her happiness at going out and dancing, since the king introduced television and the internet, at the beginning of the 1990s according to her. The country’s only graffiti artist, for his part, has painted a sick man on a drip of Gross National Happiness, and tagged on a wall: “Be yourself.”
A king who sets the direction, a Prime Minister who carries it out, and the Buddha as “master builder” of an economy founded on spiritual values.
With or without a government, the elders pray for a happy future; the young, meanwhile, play golf behind barbed wire.Heading east, towards Chandana, the valleys are peaceful, and phalluses stand at the entrances of houses, encircled by a dragon or with hairy balls. Perched on his scaffolding, surrounded by children, a professional painter, Rinchen Namgyel, explains to them that this is what babies are made with: the phallus wards off the evil eye, ensures the prosperity and fertility of the family, and as long as you have it on your mind, he says, you do not think about making war. This protective role is owed to Drukpa Kunley, a yogi who lived in Tibet in the 15th century. A woman clad in fire ordered him in a dream to shoot an arrow and carry the word of the Buddha wherever it fell. On the way, he subdued a demon by exposing his penis to it, then found his arrow stuck in the ladder of a house in Bhutan; he seduced the lady of the house, tied the knife the husband was brandishing into a knot, and the astonished couple converted. His descendants, a brother and a sister, still live there. He prays to Drukpa Kunley, thanks to whom his rice points straight at the sun, but has no children: “a source of problems and a sign of selfishness”. She does not know whether she would agree to sleep with Kunley, if he came back.
When a house was being built, it was not unusual for its owner to walk around it with a wooden phallus on her shoulder, against the evil eye.
The glans, the painter insists, is the most interesting part to draw, and the one that most amuses young girls, and grandmothers too.
In Sopsokha, Rinchen Namgyel paints a big, bright red phallus to order, the colour of desire transformed into wisdom. Along the way, he points out a rock whitened, he says, by the magic urine of Drukpa Kunley, who, turned into an otter, pacified a demoness turned into a fish there. Here, he insists, people do not talk about sex, they practise it: in the evening, the boys wait beneath the windows, and if the door stays shut, they go in through the window. Further east, at the Dochula pass, at more than 3,000 metres, 108 stupas celebrate the stability and spirituality of the country, and the monastery of Chime Lhakhang keeps the memory of another demoness whom Kunley, pretending to be dead, took by surprise and killed. Thousands of pilgrims come here every year, from Bhutan, the United States, Japan or China, in the hope of a child; a monk places a wooden penis on their heads, then another made of ivory. A man, married for nine years without children, comes back to ask for a boy. Further on, two men climb the cliffs barefoot for shilajit, a highly coveted aphrodisiac: 3,500 rupees a kilo, a special permit, a contract with the local hospital, and the surplus sold under the counter to India and China.
Westerners come all the way here, the lama insists, and the monastery receives “lots of photos of babies born at the other end of the world”.
The Bhutanese call it the migoe. A descendant of Gigantopithecus for some, one of the last survivors of Neanderthal man for others, a bear or a legend for the sceptics, the yeti is said to live in the east of the country. At the ministry of parks and forests, casts of its footprints have been kept since 1993. In Trashigang, where the tarmac ends, one of the country’s leading specialists describes it as twice the height of a man, with a pouch on its back to carry off those it catches. Then the expedition sets off on a ten-day walk towards the valleys of Merak and Sakteng, closed to Westerners until recently, with some fifteen horses and as many men. At its head is Kandu Gyalpo, tasked by the king for twenty years with bringing back proof of the existence of the yeti: he has found only one footprint, three years ago, thirty centimetres long, with four toes. In Merak, all the children in the school put their hands up when asked whether they are afraid of the yeti; the teacher, for his part, sees it only as a way of frightening them, one that is fading as the valley opens up to the world. After the Nakchung La pass, at 4,000 metres, Changpe Youndoup, a nomadic herder, first talks about his cows, “like our mothers”, before laughing at the yeti stories.
“The day you have a doubt, you don’t climb. But above all, the day you are no longer afraid, you stop climbing.”A shilajit gatherer