Ancient Futures Helena Norberg-Hodge

ANCIENT FUTURES HELENA NORBERG-HODGE Ancient Futures raises important questions about the whole notion of progress, and explores the root causes of the malaise of industrial society. At the same time, the story of Ladakh serves as a source of inspiration for our own future. Ladakh, or ‘Little Tibet’ is a place of few resources and an extreme climate. Yet, for more than a thousand years, it has been home to a thriving culture. Traditions of frugality and co-operation, coupled with an intimate and location-specific knowledge of the environment, enabled the Ladakhis not only to survive, but to prosper. Then came ‘modernization’, ostensibly a means to ‘progress’ and ‘real’ prosperity. Now in the modem sector one finds pollution and divisiveness, intolerance and greed. Centuries of ecological balance and social harmony are under threat from the pressures of Western consumerism. ‘A sensitive, thought-provoking account.’ New York Review of Books ‘Everyone who cares about the future of this planet, about their children’s future, and about the deterioration in the quality of our own society, should read this book,’ The Guardian Helena Norberg-Hodge, a linguist by training, was the first Westerner in modern times to master the Ladakhi language. For the last seventeen years, she has spent half of every year in Ladakh, working with the Ladakhi people to protect their culture and environment from the effects of rapid modernization. For this work, Norberg-Hodge was awarded the 1986 Right to Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. She is currently Director of the Ladakh Project, which she founded in 1978 and its parent organization, the International Society for Ecology and Culture. This edition is for sale only in India. Nepal, Bangladesh. Burma and Sri Lanka Foreword by H. H. The Dalai Lama Helena Norberg-Hodge has long been a friend of Ladakh and its people. In this book she expresses her deep appreciation for the traditional Ladakhi way of life, as well as some concern for its future. Like Tibet and the rest of the Himalayan region, Ladakh lived a self-contained existence, largely undisturbed for centuries. Despite the rigorous climate and the harsh environment, the people are by and large happy and contented. This is no doubt due partly to the frugality that comes of self-reliance and partly to the predominantly Buddhist culture. The author is right to highlight the humane values of Ladakhi society, a deep-rooted respect for each other’s fundamental human needs and an acceptance of the natural limitations of the environment. This kind of responsible attitude is something we can all admire and learn from. The abrupt changes that have taken place in Ladakh in recent decades are a reflection of a global trend. As our world grows smaller, previously isolated peoples are inevitably being brought into the greater human family. Naturally, adjustment takes time, in the course of which there is bound to be change. I share the author’s concern for the threatened ecology of our planet and admire the work she has done in promoting alternative solutions to many of the problems of modem development. If the Ladakhis’ enduring treasure, their natural sense of responsibility for each other and their environment, can be maintained and reapplied to new situations, then I think we can be optimistic about Ladakh’s future. There are young Ladakhis who have completed a modern education and are prepared to help their own people. At the same time traditional education has been strengthened in the monastic system through the restoration of links with Tibetan monasteries reestablished in exile. Finally, Ladakh has an abundance of sympathetic friends from abroad, who, like the author, are ready to offer support and encouragement. No matter how attractive a traditional rural society may seem, its people cannot be denied the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of modem development. However, as this book suggests, development and learning should not take place in one direction only. Amongst the people of traditional societies such as Ladakh’s there is often an inner development, a sense of warm-heartedness and contentment, that we would all do well to emulate. February 26, 1991 INTRODUCTION by Peter Matthiessen Ladakh, under Karakoram, in the trans-Himalayan region of Kashmir, is a remote region of broad arid valleys set about with peaks that rise to 20,000 feet. It lies in the great rain shadow north of the Himalayan watershed, in a sere land of wind, high desert, and remorseless sun. It is easier to travel north into Tibet than south across the Himalayas to the subcontinent, and the people speak a dialect of the Tibetan tongue. Like Assam, Bhutan, the Mustang and Dolpo regions of northern Nepal, and other mountainous regions of the great Himalayan frontier, Ladakh for the past one thousand years has been an enclave of Tibetan Buddhism. Politically, La dags, the Land, is a semi-autonomous district divided {by the British- administered partition of 1947) between Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India. Culturally, it is far more ancient, a two-thousand-year-old kingdom of Tatar herders who have learned how to grow barley and a few other hardy crops—peas, turnips, potatoes—in the brief growing season at these high altitudes. Black walnut trees and apricots are maintained at the lower elevations. The doughty way of Ladakhi life is made possible by skillful use of the thin soil and scarce water, and by hardy domestic animals—sheep, goats, a few donkeys and small shaggy horses, and in particular the dzo, a governable hybrid of archaic Asian cattle with the cantankerous semi-wild black ox known as the yak. These animals furnish a resourceful folk with meat and milk, butter and cheese, draft labor and transport, wool, and fuel. In a treeless land, the dried dung cakes of the cattle, gathered all year, are a precious resource, supplying not only cooking fuel but meager heat in the long winters in which temperatures may fall to -4o°F Until recent years, essential needs of the Ladakhis—housing, clothes, and food—were produced locally, by hand, and so a precious resource is communal labor, which is given generously for house construction (stones and mud, whitewashed with lime) or in harvest season, or for tending herds. The high altitudes are greener than the valley floor, and the herds, taken to high pastures in the summer, are thereby kept away from the small barley fields and vegetable gardens. Livestock manure is gathered for cooking fuel and winter heating, and human waste, mixed with ash and earth, is spread upon the gardens; there is no pollution. Thus nothing is wasted and nothing thrown away; a use is found for everything. In the very grain of Ladakhi life are the Buddhist teachings, which decry waste, and encourage the efficient husbanding of land and water—a frugality, as Helena Norberg- Hodge points out, that has nothing to do with stinginess (also decried in Buddhist teachings) but arises, rather, from respect and gratitude for the limited resources of the land. Water is drawn carefully from glacial brooks—one stream may be reserved for drinking, the next for washing. Indeed, it is pains-taking attention to each object and each moment that makes possible this self-sustaining culture that nonetheless provides La- dakhis with much leisure time. Watching a mother and her two daughters watering, I saw them open small channels and, when the ground was saturated, block them with a spade full of earth. They managed to spread the water remarkably evenly, knowing just where it would now easily and where it would need encouragement. A spade full dug out here, put back there; a rock shifted just enough to open a channel. All this with the most delicate sense of timing. From time to time they would lean on their spades and chat with their neighbors, with one eye on the water’s progress. Like the Hopi and other Amerindian peoples (now thought to have come from the same regions near Lake Baikal and the Gobi Desert as the Tatar peoples who came later to this Himalayan region), the Ladakhis share the Tibetan perception of a circular reality, with life and death as “two aspects of an ever-returning process,” and even in certain details of material culture, comparisons with Amerindian ways are very interesting. The barley farina known in Ladakh as ngamphe is called tsampa in Tibetan; a very similar corn farina made in America by Algonkian peoples is called samp. Even if samp-tsampa were mere coincidence, other parallels are not easily dismissed, such as the custom that a habitation should face east toward the sunrise, the prohibition against telling tales in winter, certain healing techniques mysterious to Westerners, and the profound respect for old people and children, who are welcomed to each activity of every day. In Amerindian tribes of the Amazonian basin, one may be banished into the surrounding forest for displaying anger; schon chan (one who angers easily) is one of the worst insults in the Ladakhi language. Rather than fume when put upon, as Westerners might do, the Ladakhi says, Chi choen—— What’s the point? “Lack of pride” is a virtue, for pride, born of ego, has nothing to do with self-respect among these Buddhist people; I witnessed this repeatedly in Himalayan travels with Sherpas (in Tibetan, “easterners”) and the folk of Dolpo, who like the Ladakhis live a pure Tibetan Buddhist culture. Though I have never found the opportunity to travel to Ladakh since the author first invited me ten years ago, the aesthetic and spiritual correspondences between this land and Dolpo are very obvious in her account.

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