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grounds of an isolated school repeatedly attacked by militants. The man had fled with his family to the security of a nearby village. Moral support was what he needed, but the government official, retelling the story in front of the hapless, crestfallen headmaster, suddenly turned on him and began to cluck—“Cawk! Cawk! Cawk! Cawk!”—like an enormous chicken. The painfully insecure headmaster had just served us all cookies and tea at a castoff table in his abandoned house, trying his best to show he was still in charge of the burned-out, stripped-down school. Across a vacant field, a few brave teachers huddled in the still-standing classrooms with groups of little children, most of them Bhutanese Nepalis so poor they had to be given their tiny regulation ghos and kiras by the government.
    As all of these problems boil over at once, Bhutan’s loyal friends fear not only for this imperiled society but also for the loss the world will incur if Durk Yul, the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon, slides toward disintegration or extinction.
    What to keep? What to give up? And how much time to make the choice? On such questions, there is no consensus in Bhutan. There is only a vague fear, spreading like an inkblot, that an era has ended and no one knows what the next age will bring. The future, unlike the past, holds no hope of fantasy, no expectation of miraculous intervention by deities in times of trouble. No magic dances or Tantric rituals can chase away the new demons that stalk the Bhutanese hills.
    Trapped between India and China, two giant nations wary of eachother; under relentless regional demographic pressures; and confused by their own uncertainties about how to deal with the secular outside world and its alien cultures, the Bhutanese are not optimistic. They have seen Ladakh, Tibet, and Sikkim vanish as independent Himalayan Buddhist realms, to be absorbed and altered by India or China. They derive only bleak hope from the knowledge that the Tibetan Buddhism that shaped their nation has found a new following in the West. Westerners take only what is relevant to them, usually the practice of meditation and aspects of traditional medicine. Himalayan Buddhism is much more than that; in Bhutan it is a rich stew of theology spiced by legend, superstition, astrological interpretation, and the worship of natural phenomena. Bhutanese Buddhism is Bhutanese Buddhism only in Bhutan.
    At a time when the protection of minority rights and the spread of democracy have become high priorities worldwide, the Buddhists of Bhutan, followers of an arcane theology, are at a possibly fatal disadvantage. Nepali-Bhutanese rebels have set up shop in Kathmandu to spread the word that the panicked Drukpas—the Dragon People—are oppressors led by an evil king. In Thimphu, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck says ruefully that he knows how hard it is to defend monarchy at this point in history. One of his ministers was more direct: “If we were spotted owls, the world would care about us,” he said. “Can’t you see we are an endangered species, too?”
    “The rich and splendorous culture of the Great Wheel of Buddhism, which once flourished in Sikkim, Tibet, Ladakh, Lahaul, and Spiti, is well on the path to extinction,” Jigmi Thinley, a Bhutanese government official, told a 1993 conference of scholars at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. “Today, Bhutan, the last bastion of this cultural heritage, is in a state of siege.”



Chapter 2

THE DRUK GYALPO
    T HE P RECIOUS R ULER of the Dragon People waits for visitors in his silk-lined lair at the top of a very steep flight of monastic ladder-steps in Tashichodzong, the fortress in Thimphu that houses the royal Bhutanese government and the head abbot of the Buddhist clergy, the
je khenpo.
Actually, there are several flights of punishing wooden steps from the austere stone gateway of the dzong to the upper reaches of the offices of the king, which are in a tower at the