For Buddhist lama, reincarnate saint and acclaimed director Khyentse Norbu, making films has become a special calling
BY SUSAN JAKES/CHENDEBJI
Bhutan’s only highway is three-and-a-half meters wide. Meandering at a rate of 17 curves per kilometer through the valleys and mountains of the tiny Himalayan kingdom, the road may be better acquainted with cattle than automobiles. At dawn and long after dusk, its rutted asphalt rings with the chatter of schoolchildren traveling hours by foot for their daily lessons. By noon, the highway is a playground for rambunctious monkeys, a drying rack for chilies, and—by the grace of an occasional car or truck—an ingenious tool for flattening bamboo. Waters from holy streams course alongside it, and towering stands of prayer flags cover it with a tracery of spiny shadows in the low light of early evening.
On a bright, chilly day in early November, a stretch of this humble road near the tiny hamlet of Chendebji bears witness to an unprecedented event: the shooting of Bhutan’s first-ever homegrown feature film. Its writer and director, Khyentse Norbu, bundled against the wind in a thick, maroon turtleneck and pale lavender muffler, pulls his baseball cap low over his eyes and instructs the cameraman to focus on four actors by the side of the road. “Again,” he says into a walkie-talkie, and a red tractor emerges from around the bend to collect two of the actors—one dressed as a monk, the other carrying a suitcase and a boom box. Then, just as Khyentse Norbu calls “cut,” a van speeds toward the set, forcing the tractor to lurch off the narrow road. The van stops, only inches from the camera, and discharges a monk in a yellow parka. “Career change,” mutters Khyentse Norbu in mock fatigue, then strides purposefully toward the van to exchange greetings with the visitor. The monk rushes up to meet him, and bows low. Khyentse Norbu touches him lightly on the head and nods, and the monk drives away contentedly. Seconds later the director has reclaimed his radio and is telling an actor how to wave: “She shouldn’t be melancholy. For her, this is just a game.”
For most directors, shooting a film is a chance to be treated like a deity. For Khyentse Norbu, better known as Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, the reincarnation of a 19th century Tibetan saint and one of Himalayan Buddhism’s most revered lamas, it’s just the opposite. “Mostly when I come to Bhutan I’m supposed to play God,” explains the youthful 41-year-old, “which has been such a frustration for me for so many years.” What he craves, he says, is the chance to “climb down from my throne and speak to ordinary people. I wish I could go with them and talk with them, to a bar, a disco, dancing, whatever. But I still don’t have that courage to do it.” Here on the set, though, except for the occasional unannounced visits by devotees seeking his blessing, Khyentse Norbu can act almost like an ordinary man. And that, he says, “is so, so good.”
This is not the first time the rinpoche (meaning “precious one,” as reincarnate lamas are called) has broadened the scope of what he wryly terms his “usual sort of profession.” In 1992, after meeting director Bernardo Bertolucci through friends in London, he served as an adviser on Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, parts of which were shot in Bhutan. Then in 1998 he brought a small crew that included several of his longtime Western students to a Tibetan monastery in Bir, India, to shoot The Cup, a film based on the true story of the young resident monks’ impious obsession with World Cup football. “Buddhism is their philosophy,” read the posters. “Soccer is their religion.” The Cup employed not a single professional actor. Most of the characters played themselves, and Khyentse Norbu shot the whole piece without ever fully explaining to the cast members that they were re-enacting their own story. “Everyone knew me at the monastery. Everyone was comfortable with me,” he says. “And that made it relatively easy to do what I wanted.” He consulted mo, an ancient divination system involving dice and beads, to make decisions about casting and shooting schedules and was careful to assure his lay Tibetan actors that they wouldn’t suffer karmic retribution if the script called for them to rough up a monk for making too much noise during France vs. Brazil. The Cup picked up awards at the Pusan, Munich and Toronto film festivals and, according to the New York Times, established Khyentse Norbu as “a born filmmaker.”
But shooting in Bhutan is more complicated. Despite its breathtakingly cinematic scenery, the long-isolated kingdom couldn’t be less suited to the mechanics of moviemaking. Cameras must be lugged up treacherous footpaths, electricity is scarce, and film must be flown out on one of the country’s only two planes for processing in Bangkok. Television came to Bhutan in 1999. And, says Khyentse Norbu, those Bhutanese who know what movies are regard them as purveyances of violence and sex—hardly an appropriate hobby for a reincarnate saint. Gaining permission to bring the 16 foreigners in his crew of 108 to Bhutan, Khyentse Norbu knew, wouldn’t be simple. The $1.8 million budget for his film, tentatively entitled Travelers and Magicians, wasn’t sufficient to pay the $200 daily tariffs Bhutan imposes on tourists. But Khyentse Norbu proved a persuasive negotiator. In a country where 20% of the population are monks or nuns, karma is taken seriously and no one likes to refuse a request made by a rinpoche of Khyentse Norbu’s rank. His American and Australian production unit received permission to enter the country for free, and shooting proceeded from September until late November.
But if Khyentse Norbu’s status as a beloved spiritual leader opens doors, it is also a potential obstacle. When he began selecting the all-Bhutanese cast last summer, several of those chosen to audition were so awed to be in his presence that they became speechless. Khyentse Norbu worried that his script, which includes several fairly racy romantic bits, might be impossible to execute if he were the one in the director’s chair. But these worries were mostly unfounded. The cast he ultimately assembled includes a folklore scholar who plays a monk, a monk trained in pure mathematics who plays a tractor driver, an official from Bhutan’s Royal Monetary Authority who is also a former member of the national football team, a lieutenant colonel in the King’s bodyguard and a charismatic TV reporter with a journalism degree from the University of California, Berkeley. They’re a devout but cosmopolitan bunch, and they’ve taken their director’s special standing in stride. After two months of shooting, they treat him with casual affection and a deference that seems to owe as much to his incisive wit and encyclopedic knowledge of film as to his exalted position or Buddhist training.
Khyentse Norbu’s script, like the process of shooting it, confronts questions of what it means for Bhutan to modernize. The movie opens with a traditional archery tournament in which Dondup, a self-absorbed young village official who wears white high-top sneakers and an I LOVE NEW YORK T shirt under his traditional Bhutanese dress, scoffs at the simplicity of his hamlet and dreams of quitting Bhutan for America where he has heard he can get rich from picking grapes. When he receives a letter offering him a chance to leave Bhutan if he can make it to the capital, Thimpu, within two days, he lies to his boss, packs his bags and walks to the highway—arriving just too late to catch the only bus for days. Forced to hitchhike, he is joined by various travelers who grant him fresh glimpses of the beautiful land he is determined to leave. Among those he meets is an irritatingly perceptive monk (“The truth,” says Khyentse Norbu, “should always be a little irritating”) who tells him a traditional Buddhist fable about a sorcerer drawn into a deadly love affair with a married woman. Woven together, the stories of Dondup and the sorcerer constitute a gently mocking and distinctly Buddhist lesson on the perils of human desire. The film’s alternative title, says Khyentse Norbu, is The Bitter and the Sweet of Temporary Things.
Another character Dondup comes across along the highway is an 81-year-old apple-seller, played appropriately by an 81-year-old apple-seller whom Khyentse Norbu found in a market in Thimpu. The apple man in the film—and on the set—is a perfect representative of the innocence of old Bhutan that Dondup initially finds so unattractive. Despite the crew’s genuine efforts to make him understand that he’s an actor, the apple-seller thinks everything about the shoot is real. For three weeks, each time he is asked to board a vehicle bound in the story for Thimpu, he believes he’s actually going home. When a scene calls for him to fall asleep by a campfire, he does just that. When he’s offered a cup of butter tea with the cameras rolling, he complains that it’s not salty enough. By his last day of shooting he’s thoroughly confused. He’s just played a scene in which he cheerfully bids farewell to the other travelers and steps onto a bus. When it stops seconds later and backs up to let him off for the next take, he stomps his foot in bewildered frustration. “It only took me four hours to get here from Thimpu,” he says to Khyentse Norbu with a slight hint of reproach. “I can’t figure out why it’s taking me so many days to get back.” The director pats him softly on the back. “I don’t know what to say to him anymore,” he confides. “He’s like Chauncey Gardner, the Peter Sellers character in Being There.” Later that night, when it finally does come time for the apple man to leave, he gives half of his salary back to the rinpoche, asking that it be saved so he can have a proper cremation when he dies.
Khyentse Norbu was born in 1961 in eastern Bhutan to a Bhutanese mother and a Tibetan high lama father. His paternal grandfather had also been a lama. So no one in the family was too surprised when, at the age of seven, Khyentse Norbu was approached at his Jesuit elementary school by a group of Tibetan monks. They informed him that he had been identified as the third reincarnation of Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, a lama and theologian who presided over Dzongsar Monastery in eastern Tibet in the 19th century. The monks took the young rinpoche to Sikkim, now in modern-day India, where he spent the next six years in secluded monastic tuition. He then moved to Rajpur to study at Sakya College where an American friend (now one of his producers) gave him his first lesson in photography. He later attended London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, adopting the pseudonym “Larry Newcastle” there to avoid being mobbed by Tibetan and Bhutanese emigrants living in the capital. It was in London that Khyentse Norbu met Bertolucci and began to consider making films of his own.
These days, the rinpoche’s life is a unique blend of worldly involvement and ethereal detachment. He runs a foundation that teaches computer literacy in New Delhi, a Tibetan art school in Sichuan province in western China and a Buddhist retreat center in Vancouver. He presides over his traditional seat, the Dzongsar Monastery in Tibet, as well as several monasteries, colleges and retreat centers in Bhutan and India. But he also spends months at a time in isolated meditation. While he embraces the role dictated by his Buddhist lineage, he’s no knee-jerk traditionalist: he views the ossified rituals and hierarchical structure of the clergy as threats to Buddhism’s survival. Buddhism ought to be treated as a philosophy, he explains. “It’s about how you look at your life. But sadly, (it) has become a religious theistic thing—a faith. And the young people are beginning to ask questions, ‘Why should we circumambulate stupas? Why prayer flags?'” The message, he suggests, has been garbled by the very rites designed to promulgate it, and it may become lost unless it can be communicated afresh.
The rinpoche is renowned for his ability to do just that, deftly distilling esoteric concepts even for the uninitiated. His facility with self-deprecating humor and deliberately mundane metaphors makes him a mesmerizing teacher. At a packed lecture in Hong Kong’s Convention and Exhibition Center last summer, he told his audience that they could go to sleep if they wanted because the sutra he was about to teach was “very, very long and rather boring”; he then held them rapt for more than three hours. Film, Khyentse Norbu argues, is an ideal vehicle for transmitting Buddhist wisdom with freshness in the 21st century: “(For a long time) Buddhism has the tradition of using all kinds of mediums: statues, paintings, monasteries. And although it’s difficult for people to accept, I see film as a modern-day tanka (a kind of Buddhist painting). Film has so much power because we’re conditioned primarily by what we see and hear.” Someday, the rinpoche hopes, he’ll make a movie based on the life of Siddhartha, as seen through the eyes of an imprisoned Tibetan monk, but until he can achieve the recognition—and amass the funds—necessary for such an ambitious project, he’ll continue to build his résumé with smaller, independent movies like this one.
Khyentse Norbu’s provocative take on Himalayan Buddhist convention is also evident in the way he interacts with his cast and crew. On set, he’s the least formal of lamas, sipping water out of a Sesame Street cup and expertly indulging his typically Bhutanese penchant for obscenely dirty jokes. “Most so-called rinpoches like myself are too perfect,” he says, sitting outside the bamboo shack that has served as his home for the final month of shooting. “And when you have someone who’s perfect up there, when you’re looking at a so-called perfect being, it doesn’t make you happy yourself. You think, ‘Oh, I’m imperfect. He’s perfect. I can never be like him.’ And that’s totally and absolutely nothing to do with Buddhism. It’s completely a cultural habit. And this is something we have to break.” In the evenings, with shooting complete, his foreign crew members—mostly Buddhist students of his—hold workshops for aspiring Bhutanese filmmakers in a woodstove-heated tent. Here the revered teacher sheds his usual air of pensive authority and becomes a fellow student, raising his hand to ask questions and carefully taking notes.
In the end, though, he can’t escape being a teacher. Taking a few minutes off from a particularly tricky horseback-riding scene in the dazzling Phobjika Valley, Khyentse Norbu explains his attempts to realize a Buddhist teaching that calls for blending elegant behavior and outrageousness. “You have to be a little outrageous,” he says, “or else you become enslaved to society. But at the same time, if you eschew society altogether you can have no connection to other people. And then you can’t be an effective teacher.” As he speaks, the crew bickers heatedly about how to deal with a recalcitrant horse. It’s supposed to run away with an actor on its back, but it refuses to budge. As if to prove his point, Khyentse Norbu bursts in with a seemingly ridiculous non sequitur. “This horse’s bum isn’t at all sexy,” he exclaims. “Usually they have such sexy bums.” There is a moment of abashed laughter, and the crew quickly forgets the squabble. The rinpoche is back behind the camera and shooting resumes.
