~
Kunzang Choden is one of Bhutan’s most legendary authors. We meet in Bhutan in the Tang Valley, where Kunzang’s family has lived since the 15th century, land that is tied to the Tibetan yogic master Longchenpa and treasure revealer Dorji Linga. This is part one of two.
Ogyen Choling https://www.oling.bt
~
Time notes:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:41 Lineage land and Kings
00:03:47 Treasure revealer Dorji Lingpa
00:10:18 Intense childhood recollections
00:15:00 Intergenerational homelife
00:19:50 Seasonality
00:28:42 Kunzang’s way of writing
00:30:00 Recording dreams
00:32:00 Kuzang’s new memoir
~
Rough Transcript (please excuse all errors)
[00:00:00] My name is Olivia Clementine, and this is Love and Liberation. Today our guest is Kunzang. Choden Kunzang is one of Bhutan’s most legendary authors. – We meet in Bhutan in the Tang Valley
where Kunzang’s family has lived since the 15th century land that is tied to the Tibetan Yogic Master Longchenpa and Treasure Revealer Dorje Lingpa. This is part one of a two part series.
Kunzang: Well, to begin with, Kunzang Choden, thank you so much for taking the time out of your.
Full world to sit down with me let’s speak about where we are first, the land itself. And, and when did this [00:01:00] land become connected to your family?
We trace our ancestries to ancestry to a teacher. In the 13 hundreds and, uh, counting from then until now, we are actually 20 generations, and it goes over almost 600 years. And, uh, this land and beyond, actually in those days we had a lot of land because, um. throughout history, the elite or the aristocracy or the nobility, they just carved out their own empires and they had the entire land.
And for many generations, this land and beyond and mountains and valleys, everything belonged to us. So, but over the centuries, things have changed. Now we have just what we is within the, compound where the house is built and some cultivation lands far out. But all these changes came only in the mid 1950s of, uh, [00:02:00] land ceiling, which was introduced, which was a really, a fair, good system initiated and, uh, implemented by the third King who we refer to as the
father of modern Bhutan, the grandfather of the present king, and the kings they were what we call dharma kings religious kings, you know, and they were not there to grab power and empower themselves, but to really look after they felt it was their duty to look after the welfare of the people. They were concerned more about the welfare of the people, and because of their concern, they introduced these changes, which was beneficial to all. So land was shared with everybody. And so now everyone who’s in the village, many of them who were here probably as long as us, uh, they are here sharing and cultivating and [00:03:00] owning, which is most important.
The land that was, uh, given to them through this, uh, reform. Yeah.
do we wanna speak at all about Dorji Lingpa? ’cause that’s who you’re referring to As this 14th century. lineage
Anyone who has some knowledge of Varjayana Buddhism and
buddhism that we know here and live by here. Uh, we always look to guru Padmasambhava, as the second Buddha. And according to our tradition, we believed that, Guru Padmasambhava said that he would appear over the, over time to continue the teachings over the centuries that they will be his incarnations who will come and continue his teachings. And Dorji Lingpa is considered among the five inner great Terchens. They were the treasure discoverers who, uh. [00:04:00] Discovered text and ritual implements and statues.
And then from that they started, uh, you know, continuing what Guru Rinpoche taught. Of course, Guru Rinpoche had many, many, many incarnations, but among all the hundreds of incarnations, the five great tertons or the treasure discovers, and, um, Dorji Lingpa is considered among the great five. So he, he’s called Terchen, which is a great treasure discover.
what we believe is that, um, Dorji had a son who started this genealogical lineage. So he, he’s the first known person, somebody called Sonam who settled and the family space was here and starting from there until now, we are supposed to be the keepers [00:05:00] of this legacy and, uh, the genealogical descendants of Dorji Lingpa.
he was known as prolific in his revealing mm-hmm. . That you’d call him a bit mad because he produced so much.
Uh,
yeah, yeah, yeah.
Treasures.
by all accounts, he seems to have been very prolific to use your term, and almost like, uh, very restless.
You, he was traveling back and forth and, uh, going into Tibet, coming down, you know, across the mountains and. There are also instance of when he got snow blindness because he was going when there was heavy snow on the mountains, and he was also a person who was all the time a really, a thoughtful person, a person full of ideas, and there’s a very nice, uh, account of him.
In those days, they had no lighting except a natural light, and he couldn’t sleep. Till the daylight came [00:06:00] on to be able to write. So he’d be roaming around and writing, waiting for when is it going to be light enough to start writing. He wrote many, many, many texts but somehow they got somehow scattered.
So it was in the 1980s. My uncle, my father’s younger brother who was a monk, he started collecting the text to compliment what we had. We had some text here and he collected from all the Dorji Lingpa centers what he could get. And he, had a good fortune to meet with, American Congress Library and they helped him to publish the books.
And I think, uh, in that collection there were about 31 text volumes. it was, through this effort that we could have the 31 complete sets. [00:07:00] And of course they disappeared like hotcakes because everybody wanted these texts. So we gave away. I think we might just have one or two text and some of the originals, but the, there was such a big demand because, in the eighties, nineties, right into, now, even now, people are looking for text that Dorji Lingpa may have written.
there is another Dorji Lingpa center in – Valley. I dunno if you have chance when you, are you going to mm-hmm. On the way you should go to stop at Buli Lhakhang. And in the recent years, a monk who was a real follower of a young monk who was a real follower and devouted, disciple, I guess of Dorji Lingpa, has expanded and, uh, renovated the house and the house and the temple.
And he’s even started the monastery there. he also found. Two or three or even four additional texts that he has printed and has added to [00:08:00] what we had done. and I think most interestingly, Dorji Lingpa came from the Bon tradition. and came into Buddhism.
But he all never separated. That’s why before he took on the name of Dorji Lingpa, his name was Yungdrung, is the symbol of the swastika, the Buddhist swastika, and that is the symbol of the Bon religion. So he was, Yungdrung Lingpa, most people know him by Dorji Lingpa.
Previously, his name was Yungdrung
Olivia: Lingpa.
Kunzang: so interesting actually. Speaking of the Bon, speaking of his Bon heritage, sometimes when people speak about Dorji Lingpa, they say that his texts, there were some that were like a bit, uh, risky, some of his texts. Is it because it was connected to the Bon tradition? Yes, I think so.
I think so.
And of course, I dunno what scholars say, but from what I’ve heard of the, I think he was one of the early [00:09:00] nons sectarianism, what we call the Rime tradition, where he didn’t discourage the other traditions, but brought them all together. So maybe that’s why they say it’s risky if you want to follow one path.
One school, one tradition, he was sort of taking in, all the traditions and, and I think, uh, for me, I feel very comfortable with that because i’m not a scholar, I’m not a full practitioner to be able to, you know, separate and say, this is this tradition, this is this scholar, this is that.
I like it. It’s just Buddhism and we all, it all leads back to Gautama Buddha. Mm-hmm.
It would be really interesting to hear about your childhood growing up here cause you grew up here at least until the age of nine.
Yes.
So this is my home. This is where I was, uh, born. This was, uh, even though I was for 14 years in India, studying from kindergarten right up to my college, this is where I came back to whenever [00:10:00] it was possible. Of course, it was not easy because at that time, especially in the early years, in the early sixties, right into the seventies, the road was not connected, so we had to walk.
It was a big adventure walking from the border. Until here and just staying here a few days because that’s all the holidays that we got. But I have very intense, recollections of being a child here, living here with my parents, and both my parents died very young. So I think I kept thinking about them and thinking about them and what I missed and what, it was with them that.
It’s still now very, very intense. And I, I think of them, every time I go to a room, I see their image. I see them, I almost hear them. And also it was natural that after I’d been traveling and living in other parts of the world, that I find it decided that this was [00:11:00] the home that I wanted to come to.
Life is very different and I feel even now, I feel I, I was a lucky survivor because in those days, in the fifties when we were children, there was no medicine. the child mortality was so high, you know, every little epidemic would kill off a whole population. You know, there was no way that you could, get medical attention,
services were introduced only in the seventies and eighties. So those of us, we all lucky survivors. And even when I talk to my age group, people of the women who go around, they remember siblings dying. They also remember how many children they had. Oh, I had nine and now I have only three living. At the time when you live, you don’t think of it.
Because, because that’s how it was. There was nothing to compare to. Now we see what modern medicine interventions have meant, women who are a little [00:12:00] older than me and my age who say we had 12 children, or I had so many children, and now we’ve come to a stage when people are saying children are expensive.
And we, it’s almost guaranteed that my children will outlive all the childhood diseases. So the children in numbers in the families are becoming very, very small. At that time, we didn’t have schools. The only school we had was the homeschool, , which my father had opened for us and the village children.
And, uh, what we learned was just, to the scriptures. And, um, I think when I think of that, I said I was the only girl in that school, and so they were all boys who were very ambitious, very competitive, and I was just laid back and said, what use is this all? To me? That was my, but I’m glad that things changed and I had the opportunity to go out.
although we were privileged, my, my siblings and I, [00:13:00] we were privileged, my parents. Either deliberately or because that’s how it was. They, didn’t make us feel very special. We were just like the village children, interacting with them, playing with them, and always bare feet. Not a lot of change clothes, no candies, no sugar, no nothing, and we just finding sweet berries or scraping the box of pine blue pine to get some little sugar and like this.
Until we were, till I think I must have been eight, seven or eight when we first dated, tasted candies and things like this. So it was a very, very different childhood. It was a childhood that, in a way very rich because we had to find our own ways to play, to occupy, to learn. We had no gadgets, we had no books.
We had no radio. We had no television. So it was just what our parents told us, what we saw our parents [00:14:00] doing, what we saw the elders doing, that we sort of just grew up learning what was happening and now it’s completely within less than 50 years. the young mothers here don’t know how to bring up their child without a smartphone.
That’s how much change that has come on in the last 50, 60 years. If I look at the village house now, thanks to modernization and access to resources and availability of material, that is very simple, but they were intergenerational, you know, about four generations would be living there, and the grandmother, who was considered very old, was about 60.
Then she had her daughter and her daughter and they all lived together. So there was, it was not joint family in the way you understand that people married in English. It was just the inter generation of family living together, sharing the little that they had, you know, because resources weren’t so easily ible available and sharing the task.[00:15:00]
The children were also looking after the younger siblings, minding the sheep, going with a -, weeding, working the fields and grandparents until they couldn’t do anything, they were still helping. So it was very united and focused generations of people living together, helping everybody contributing.
I think that is no more. We are inclined to be more nuclear family, especially in the urban areas. Here, still we have about two, three generations in some houses living together. Grandmother, daughter, and, the, the children. But this is soon going away. And where are your daughters? Or they live there or they have built a new house here and things like this.
So with the economic changes. Availability of resources come, the changes of how you use space and when your space spacial imagination, [00:16:00] is changed. Even your, relationships also changing. And then of course, with all these changes, what’s happening is also the family properties are getting split now. Smaller, smaller
When you think of growing up, I know you were so young, so I don’t know if you, if you remember this aspect, but do you think your family was able to deal with conflict more and just to maintain long-term relationships? ’cause it sounds like, you know, as you’re saying now, the land is being divided, people are having smaller, land holdings and then also staying closer in, in the nuclear family context. Do you think. People were more flexible then and, and more willing to work through things, more resilient in that way. And
they had no choice. , As long as my father was alive and he inherited the position of the patriarch, the head of the family.
And he also had an influence, of course, within the village, but even in the valley. And we didn’t have access to the court and we didn’t have [00:17:00] court, you know, we. There wasn’t a place that you could turn to for resolving conflicts and all. So they had for many generations, taken on the responsibility of resolving conflicts.
And we still have a lot of documents here how, uh, land division, if there was a fight, how it was resolved and it was resolved here. How if there was a divorce. If there was extra marital problems. All these, it’s very interesting ones one day, if you can read all the documents very interesting, and these were all kind of the powers that my father and his fathers, they, they had, it’s only in cases of if there was a murder or if there was an accident, the legal action had to come from the district.
administration. in my own life, I, I experienced, uh, you know, somebody accidentally killing somebody and this, my father couldn’t [00:18:00] resolve except to take the responsibility of saying, reporting it to the district
it was only lead later on that we had the court system and the judges and the legal people who did all these kind of things. But now, even here now, because there’s nobody here in my family to intervene and do things like this, that.
People, even for a small thing with a border, dispute even with, marriage and divorce, they have to go to there. But I think now there are moves to mediate and encourage people to negotiate among themselves or some body from the
district court will come and, approve it or disapprove it, but they should resolve their problems themselves
Well, you also talk about the seasonal life. Like I, what’s really amazing here is you grow a lot of your food still. Mm-hmm. You’ve maintained that. I imagine growing up a [00:19:00] lot of the food, you grew yourself, your family grew.
Will you talk about. The main crops you would grow. Mm-hmm. Growing, growing up. And anything, just the seasonality, things that happened mm-hmm. Over the seasons.
Seasonality was very important. We, we lived with the seasons. So for instance, in the old days, around this time of the year, they would be no vegetables.
It would just be, you know, the first greens at the garden. We would just come in. take them and eat them. And we of course enjoyed vegetables and fruits during the season, but off season we had really nothing and the only, and we had no refrigeration. So the only way you could, make sure that you had something to eat was by sun drying.
So we sun dried a lot of our vegetables, Even the onion leaves were, cut and cut and preserved. We would go into the wild to collect some of the [00:20:00] plants that were there, which we also sun dried the tops of radishes, the leaves of the radis and turnips would be sun dried. These radish and turnips would be, grated and dried. So we were living on dried. That was really wonderful because you appreciated everything and you are so grateful for everything. Now all of us are eating, off season things. You know, I go and go to the market next valley and I’m eating fresh apples imported from China or fruits from South Africa, you know?
We think that’s how it’s always been and that we should have it. As long as we can buy it, we should have it. But there’s no appreciation. I mean, you think of the carbon footprint and all the chemicals and preservatives that have been used on these things, but there’s plenty. Everything is there every day for us.
I describe in my book, Chili and Cheese, food and [00:21:00] Society. I describe how New Year the Losar of the Lunar New Year for us was the day when you could eat everything, and we looked forward to that for a whole year, bringing together everything. And we would have as ma, many as 20 or 21 different things to eat.
And that had to be brought in the mutton, which was wind dried in Tibet, there carried across the mountains and we could eat it on New Year. The chili that was brought from the east and dried here and everything was there just for the auspiciousness of the occasion. Now on the lunar New Year, you see people roaming around and you ask them, what are you doing on New Year?
This is just roaming around. It’s so boring. Every day is like New Year. You can get everything you eat on New Year. The older people and my parents and grandparents, we eat every day. So what’s so special out after New Year? [00:22:00] In fact, even the term for celebrating the new year Losar, we didn’t say celebrate or observe.
We said eating New Year. ’cause that was the time when you were eating all the wonderful things that you could possibly have . So it has changed. Now seasonality is completely gone and together with that. What I think what we are growing here now is, thanks to global warming, we can grow so many things that we couldn’t grow in these, in the old days, in the sixties, in the fifties and sixties because we’re almost had 3000 meters.
And, and. In the fifties and sixties, my parents had a garden down in the valley because you could get some of the things like cucumbers and early beans and things like, it’s too high.
So now, even rice, you couldn’t imagine rice growing here because it was so cold. The temperatures were so [00:23:00] low, and rice body needs a certain temperature for it to grow and thrive. The only way we could get rice was to go travel across this very high path for a journey of three days and carry back every, because we had a estate, we had a similar house and a estate in the subtropics, so in the winter we would go there.
Bring all the, things that you couldn’t grow and eat here and bring the rice from here. And the people here at mostly what they just grew themselves, which was wheat, barley, different kind of buckwheat, mustard, you know, whatever they had. So rice was really the most desired and coveted grain. And now it’s the easiest, the cheapest, and the most dangerous one because.
We import most of our rice from India, which is highly polished. We don’t know how they grow it, and it’s cheap and it’s convenient to cook rice. Do you know that, every household here, even the way we [00:24:00] cook rice, is different. in the old days, we would cook the rice, throw out the starch and almost bake it in the heat of the hearth.
Everybody plucks on the rice cooker So the ri, everything stays starch, everything stays there. And then while the rice is cooked in the rice cooker, we cook our rice also in the rice cooker. Then you have time to make your vegetables and do whatever. So the convenience, you, mm-hmm. You know, and these foods, because they can be cooked so easily.
And, uh, with the help of modern gadgets, it’s very seductive. You don’t want to cook the old fashioned way and but it’s healthier if you throw out the starch. they would cook it to a certain level and you knew when you had to stop cooking it in water because you could test, each grain, you could put it between your thumb and your forefinger and press it and you knew.
How far it had been cooked then at that time you threw out the starch. [00:25:00] Of course. We didn’t throw it out in waste it, it gave it to our animals, and then we just would let it cook in its own heat and steam by keeping it next to the, heat You know, the way we eat rice is not with the spoon. And for, and also not the way the rest of South Asia eats. By just doing this and eating, we had to make them into fistfuls.
So to have the perfect consistency, you had to have the rice that. Could be made into rice, fistfuls, and then eat it as lumps.
you said you had, we barley, mustard, greens, buckwheat, buckwheat,
two kind of buckwheat. the buckwheat was almost, disappearing because, it’s difficult to cultivate it because the soil has to be worked in a different way and there’s so many steps of how you can, enrich the soil, which is very tedious.
Uh, it has been replaced now by potato. Potato because it’s the big cash crop, all the fields you see around here [00:26:00] are potatoes, and we eat potatoes, but we export most And this is something new. That came only in the mid and late 1970s when the roads became accessible, then you could transfer.
But now there is a new awareness and realization that buckwheat is much more nutritious and good for your health So now people are beginning to, you know, reevaluate their old crop, which they had to cast away and bringing it back
Olivia: Here
your meals, they’re mainly from the gardens .
Kunzang: When we started the guest house, we decided that there is nothing, I mean, it is a traditional house.
It is a home that we’ve opened the guest, but we also wanted to, uh, show that we care and that we are proud of what we can produce and we said we will try to keep our [00:27:00] meals based on what we have in the garden.
So my husband works very hard throughout the winter, even in the coldest time we had salad and we had greens and broccoli we don’t use any chemicals or fertilizers. we only use natural farm yard manure and no chemicals.
In the times when we get worm, you know, and worm infestations, he picks out And doesn’t want to kill them and take them away. So we don’t use any pesticides also. Mm.
I’m really grateful. I mean, I could do a certain amount of gardening, but he’s very thorough and his Swiss. He’s very precise. He’s very disciplined and you’ve seen how hard he worked. Yeah.
He’s always out there
winter, winter time now. I mean, he’s so grateful that it rained last night and night before he, I don’t have water, but every day.
Otherwise he’s watering all these plants and the garden and Yeah. Yeah.
Well [00:28:00] one more question before we kind of wander to these other spaces. So you are a writer. Mm-hmm. You’ve written at least seven books. Yeah.
Some things like
that. Yeah.
Okay. it’s interesting actually, ’cause when we started this conversation, you were talking about Dorji Lingpa and how he just wanted to write all the time. Mm-hmm. And so do you feel like you’re, you have a lineage of writers. Do you feel like your inspiration might root back many generations before?
Right. No,
I don’t look that far. Yeah. I thinking about when did I learn to, you know, have this, connection to reading and writing? I think it was mostly the school I went to. in the schools that I went to in India, which were at that time, convent schools run by Irish nuns, and reading and writing was for them, very important.
And I think we learned to connect ourselves to books, to read. ’cause we had a lot of quiet time. Mm-hmm. [00:29:00] We didn’t have, you know, we didn’t have the mobile, we didn’t have the computers and everything. All your assignments, you had to write by hand we were always encouraged to read and discuss the books at whatever level, you know, the nuns.
Who were in the schools, they always made sure that our libraries were very well stocked and every week we had to, take a new book. And there were occasions when we had to discuss it, it was really like a book review And because we had no other distractions.
I can remember even already in grade six or seven, you know, group of girls sitting and discussing a book or do a character analysis just for fun of it. And I think that’s where my reading and writing came, but maybe it is also the blessing of Dorji Lingpa, who was such a prolific and restless writer.
Yeah.
Are you a restless [00:30:00] writer?
I have long rest, so I’m not really his, um, in the true way that, in fact, I’m not disciplined at all because I’m distracted to so many other things that I’m doing. So I write, but if I have an idea, I want to get it over if I have an idea and if I don’t write it. Then I get restless and I write, everywhere.
I write, I have so many notebooks because I’m still, I like, um, writing by hand, you know, anyway, I always carry wherever I go, I carry a notebook and just write a and I, one of the things that is very, um, important for me is I’m a believer in dreams. So I record, my dreams. And there are days when every night I have a dream.
But there are days when, you know, there are no dreams at all. And I always try to look for the significance of these dreams and, you know, of course, I kept journals also. I start, certain age, but dreams I still record.
And what do you do with the [00:31:00] dreams? Do they enter your books?
No. Yeah. No, no. Little bit here and there. If I thought there was a big significance. But otherwise, it’s just that they’re so lucid, so clear, and so much of me is in the dreams, so I feel I have to write, write them down.
You were saying in the beginning that you still have such a strong connection to your parents. Do they enter your dreams?
Oh yeah. You know, I, the funny thing is of people who have died. You don’t really see them, or at least in my experience, but their presence is there. You know, your father is here and he’s telling you this, or your mother has just passed by and that you feel the presence. But the person that has been my experience with all the people I’ve known who have died, they never come back in person.
Just their presence or something that they said or something that they did is there and real.
Are you working on any books right now? Yeah, I’m
just, um, [00:32:00] going through the first edits of my memoir.
Which has, been accepted by a publisher in India. And, uh, they’ve sent back my first, edits and I’m just incorporating, rethinking and correcting it.
It’s really about my childhood. I really didn’t want to go beyond my childhood. there are some reflections, but not a real running narrative of my life after I came out of school. And I think, when you write a memoir, which is includes lot of lives and lot of people, I at least feel outta respect for many people. I don’t want to write about them.
Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, of course I write about memories of something that stayed alive and that comes back to me. I write about them as children, the kind of games we played about, the accidents that we had, big panics in the village but I don’t want to [00:33:00] write about this was a bad man. He did this, or she was a bad woman and she did this to her family. These kind of vindictive, malicious things. I, keep it, but, life is not all clean. There is a lot of good things. There’s a lot of bad things, but I don’t want to dwell on the bad things.
I want to honor the memory of everybody and not put them, put them down. And it’s not necessary to write your memoir and, you know, take, take the stand of pushing down somebody or saying that this was a bad man or this was a bad woman. No. Yeah.
We’re all very much looking forward to reading it.
No. Yeah. When it, when it arrives. Yeah.
It’s um. Just now the working title is telling me my stories. ‘ cause it’s my stories I’ve been telling again and again. And finally I said I have to write them down. So this is what it is yeah.,
[00:34:00]