The History of Bhutan

Karma Phuntsho

• Verlag: Haus Publishing
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781908323590
• Thema: History
• Thema: World History

In 2008, Bhutan triumphantly took the stage as the world's youngest democracy. But despite its growing prominence—and rising scholarly interest in the country—Bhutan remains one of the least studied, and least well-known places on the planet.Karma Phuntsho's The History of Bhutan is the first book to offer a comprehensive history of Bhutan in English. Along with a detailed social and political analysis, it offers substantive discussions of Bhutan's geography and culture; the result is the clearest, richest account of this nation and its history ever published for general readers.A 2015 Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title Award Winner

The Country and Its Names

THE BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHER DHARMAKĪRTI observed that names are like sticks. A stick does not hit an object on its own. It follows the person who wields it. Names do not apply themselves to their referents; they only follow the wishes of their user. Dharmakirti’s point is that names are purely conventional designations. We cannot give them any objectivity and significance beyond their function as mere nomenclature. They are labels and they change. Druk, now the local name for Bhutan, was once the name of a small establishment in central Tibet, while ‘Bhutan’, with variations in spelling, was also used for the whole or part of the stretch of highlands north of Bengal. There is no inherent link between a name and its referent. Hence, to understand a place by studying its name may seem misplaced, even ludicrous, like studying the finger pointing at the moon in order to understand the moon. Yet, for the sake of communication, a finger can show the moon. Similarly, studying a place name can reveal the underlying intentions and purposes for giving the name. A toponym can help us understand people’s perception of a place, of themselves and their neighbours.

The Bhutanese have etymologies for nearly all their place names. Throughout Bhutan, one can even today find a rich tradition of using toponyms to tell historical and religious narratives. Many stories of people’s origin and local cultures are told by stringing together place names. When one listens to such a narration, the whole landscape comes back to life as a stage for legendary and historical events. Through the toponyms, we get glimpses of the elusive past and the names serve as mnemonic tools to remember local legends and histories. Unfortunately, the many names for the country itself do not string together to provide a fabulous national narrative but they do provide us some specific insights into how the Bhutanese and their neighbours perceived the country, which today we call Bhutan.

Mon

Bhutan was called by different names and not all of them were used for the same place and at the same time. Unravelling the origins and significances of these names can be exciting as well as challenging. According to traditional Bhutanese historians, the earliest name for the area roughly covering modernday Bhutan is Mon, Monyul (Mon country) or Lhomon (Southern Mon). Mon, they explained, is a derivative of mun, a Tibetan word for darkness. The inhabitants of the southern borderlands were known to the central Tibetans as mon pa or dark people because they were considered to live in a state of socio-spiritual darkness. Unlike central Tibet, where Buddhist civilization had reached its peak by the middle of the eighth century, the people in the borderlands, in the eyes of a central Tibetan, were groping in darkness without the light of the Buddha’s wisdom.

The application of the term Mon to areas of Bhutan is attested in many ancient texts written by both Tibetan and Bhutanese authors. However, any suggestion that Mon and Monyul were used as formal or established nomenclature for one area or ethnic group is highly debatable. Scholars are still at a loss as to what the term mon exactly meant or is derived from. It may be related to the Chinese word ‘mán’, which designates barbarians and was also applied by the Chinese, according to some scholars, to Tibetan groups. Michael Aris, the first Western historian on Bhutan, speculated that the use of the term for central Bhutan may have a direct link to mán and mong used in eastern Tibet along the Sino-Tibetan frontiers.¹ Interestingly, even as early as the seventh century, Xuanzang, the great Chinese traveller, noted that the people in the frontiers north of Kamarupa kingdom (modern Assam) were akin to the mán people of China’s southwestern borderlands.²

It is further intriguing that the name Mon was used in many parts of the Himalayas stretching from the Karakoram ranges in the west to Arunachal Pradesh in the east. Even today, one can find groups of people called Mon in Pakistan, Bhutan, Tibet and eastern India. It is possible that these groups have a common origin and the term mon designated a people who initially inhabited the fertile valleys but were gradually pushed out to remote and rugged areas by dominant groups. Scholars have also speculated that the Mon in Burma and Thailand may be distantly related to the Mon in the Himalayas and that both may have initially started from western China and spread along the sides of the Himalayan watershed. Only further linguistic, archaeological and anthropological study can shed more light on this.

In the case of the name being used for Bhutan, it is more plausible that the term was used loosely to describe the primitive and rural people from the borderlands than as a strict ethnonym. This can be inferred from the use of the term through the centuries. If the Chinese called some Tibetans ‘mán’ or barbarians, the Tibetans certainly used Mon to refer to people from their border areas who they considered ‘dark’ and uncivilized. The use of the term Mon for the ethnic groups in India and Tibet even today carries a connotation of provincialism, and the Bhutanese still use the term to refer to a small group of people in a remote part of central Bhutan. To put it simply, Mon and Monpa are names used with no fixed referent. The Tibetans called the people from the borderland Monpa and these in turn called some other rural minorities Monpa. It even comes down to using Monpa as a pejorative nickname for a simpleton in a village.

Read in this context of malleable application with shifting referents, the use of the name Mon for ancient Bhutan and its etymology are based on a very Tibet-centric worldview. Tibet is assumed to be the centre of Buddhist civilization, and Bhutan and other Himalayan hinterlands are assumed to be on the periphery of this civilized world. Applied in this manner, the term also carries a derogatory connotation; it is not surprising that a big country describes its smaller neighbours condescendingly. What is interesting is that with persistent use and repetition over time, even the population to whom the pejorative name was applied appropriated the name for themselves. Traditional Bhutanese historians, themselves being largely products of Tibetan monastic education, accepted the Tibetan application without questioning. They even went so far as to justify the ancient name by providing an etymology; although the etymology they provided may have been be a very arbitrary and recent effort to explain the ancient term.

Today, we see the same scenario in the use of the name Mon for the groups of people in central Bhutan and eastern India. These groups have generally adopted the name in spite of its derogatory connotation and sometimes even perceive themselves inferior to those who refer to them with this name. However, since the Chinese occupation of Tibet, along with a growing respect for ethnic diversity, the term is now increasingly used as a neutral ethnonym. An intelligent and convincing alternative to the popular etymology of the name may be found in what some Monpa elders in central Bhutan have to say. They claim to be the earliest inhabitants of the country and argue the word Monpa comes from man pa, the word for ‘old’ in some central and eastern Bhutanese languages.

Lhomonkhazhi— the Mon of four approaches

Another name by which Bhutan was known for many centuries is Lhomonkhazhi —the southern Mon of four approaches. This name also appears in other variations such as Lhokhazhi (southern land of four approaches) and Monkhazhi (Mon with four approaches/four Mon approaches) and was used to refer to Bhutan or parts of it long before the unification of the country in the seventeenth century. According to the most well-known enumeration, the four approaches are Dungsamkha to the east, Pasakha to the south, Dalingkha to the west and Taktsherkha to the north— places located in the four corners of the country and roughly corresponding to the current state boundary of Bhutan.

However, this enumeration of four approaches in order to explain the ancient name Lhokhazhi presents a problem, as it suggests a territorial unity long before the country was formally united into one state. Could the ancient Bhutanese and their neighbours have perceived the area of modern Bhutan as a geographic unit to be approached via the four approaches even before the country was politically unified? It is very unlikely that they did so given the natural division of the country into many parts by mountain ranges, leading to very pronounced linguistic and cultural differences. It is hard to imagine that valleys in Bhutan shared a striking resemblance, which they did not share with their neighbours in Sikkim and Tawang, before their unification in the seventeenth century. Besides, human mobility in ancient Bhutan was more commonly of a north−south orientation, between Tibet and India and the valleys, rather than laterally among the valleys themselves. Thus, the identification of the four approaches with the four coordinates located at four corners of Bhutan is historically problematic.

To explain this anachronistic appellation, historian John Ardussi argues that the name Lhokhazhi was ‘applied originally only to an eleventh-century clan appanage in far western Bhutan, and by stages emerged from the religiopolitical struggles of the tenth−seventeenth centuries as a Drukpa metaphor for the state of Bhutan as a whole’.³ He presents a very persuasive explanation for the name, weaving it with the gradual expansion of the unitary political domain for which the name is used. In the order of words, the name was first used to refer to a small area around Paro, then for much of western Bhutan and finally to the whole of modern Bhutan by the middle of the seventeenth century.

Ardussi’s theory that the term had an expanding range of reference certainly helps us resolve much of the problem of anachronism. Yet, it is possible that some Bhutanese may have attributed a vague sense of congruity and unity to the areas which constitute modern Bhutan even before the seventeenth century. There is at least one record in which the name Lhokhazhi is used to refer to a country with its loose domain extending as far as Khaling to the east, Chumbi to the west, India to the south and Phari to the north.⁴ We shall return to this at the end of the chapter on ancient history. Another interpretation of the name Lhomonkhazhi is found in a local oral tradition.⁵ According to this oral enumeration, Lhomonkhazhi is not understood as the southern Mon of four approaches but as the four southern Mon approaches. The name does not imply a unitary land with four approaches but refers to four individual places which lie south of Tibet and also served as significant approaches/doors to Tibet in ancient times. The four approaches are the four main Mon valleys of Paro, Bumthang, Kurtoe and Tawang. Although this is not how the name is commonly understood, it is a viable interpretation and may have been the original purport of the term Monkhazhi. While Lhokhazhi referred to the appanage in western Bhutan with fairly defined boundaries, Monkhazhi may have designated the four valleys.

It seems highly plausible, then, that the early names Lhokhazhi, which initially referred to a clan appanage, and Monkhazhi, which perhaps referred to four Mon valleys south of Tibet, got compounded to form the later designation Lhomonkhazhi. This conveniently combined both the reference to the southern Mon area and the notion of a geographic and territorial unity, and may have suited the purpose of the people, who used the name for the emerging state of Bhutan in the seventeenth century. The final act in this process of naming would have been the identification of the four coordinates at the frontiers with names ending in kha or approach. This not only made the name etymologically sound but would have also helped secure and strengthen the territorial integrity of the young nation through even its name.

Whatever its origins and the processes through which it was appropriated, the name got deeply embedded in the Bhutanese historical consciousness. It was commonly used to refer to Bhutan and, even today, the name is frequently used in its modern variation: the Dragon Country of Four Approaches. Viewed against the changes in the political boundaries of Bhutan’s large neighbours since the seventeenth century, it is a matter of no small achievement that the small country of Lhomonkhazhi has retained more or less the same national boundaries, corresponding to the four approaches. The name Lhomonkhazhi certainly must have played an important part in this by providing a distinct, geographically centred identity.

Menjong— the medicinal country

Another name used for Bhutan, which the Bhutanese invoke frequently in literary speech, is Menjong, ‘the land of medicinal herbs’, a name which must certainly strike a chord for those familiar with Bhutan’s botanical diversity. This name was used to refer to the Paro valley even as early as the thirteenth century.⁶ Being located on the southern slopes of the Himalayan watershed, Bhutan enjoyed immense botanical richness compared to the relatively arid Tibetan plateau. The country was largely forested and even today about 72.5 per cent of the country is under forest cover, much of it pristine and dense. It is for this reason that the Bhutanese hierarch and historian Gedun Rinchen called Bhutan ‘the southern land of forests’ in the title of his religious history of the country.

Once again, our point of comparison is Tibet, Bhutan’s northern and most important neighbour until 1959, and the significance of the name Menjong can be only properly appreciated with reference to the Tibetan medical tradition. Tibet has an ancient and sophisticated medical system, which is a synthesized amalgam primarily of Indian Ayurvedic, Chinese and Central Asian ideas of health and healing but heavily imbued with the Buddhist theories of the mind− body relationship. It is primarily based on the theory of the three humours of vital energy, bile and phlegm, and the maintenance and restitution of their balance through medical, dietary, lifestyle and behavioural intervention. The locus classicus of the tradition is the corpus of four medical texts called Four Tantras which the tradition believes was taught by the historical Buddha in his manifestation as the Medicine Buddha. Thus, this medical system is considered to be Buddhist and referred to, particularly in Bhutan, as ‘Buddhist medicine’ (nangpai men) in contrast to biomedicine, often referred to as ‘Indian medicine’ because it was first introduced from there.

Unlike biomedicine, the traditional medical system uses very little or no chemical medications but places great importance on remedies made from herbs and minerals. It is for this important role of herbs in health and healing and their abundant growth in Bhutan that the country got its laudatory name ‘the country of medicinal herbs’, although, as noted earlier, it seems the appellation was first applied to Paro and only later to the whole country. It is clear, however, that herbs, like paper (another Bhutanese produce from the local environment), was highly valued across the border in Tibet. Throughout ages, Bhutanese sent freight loads of herbs and paper to Tibet as both gifts and trade items. The 2nd Desi ruler of Bhutan, for instance, made mass distribution of herbs to all doctors of Tibet twice during his reign. Even today, the use of this natural resource continues through the Royal Institute of Traditional Medicine, which promotes indigenous herbal treatment alongside biomedicine throughout the country.

As for most other things, the old Bhutanese provide an interesting explanation for the herbal richness. Long ago, when Princess Wencheng, known to the Bhutanese as Ashe Jaza (Chinese Princess), came to Tibet as a bride for the great seventh-century King Songtsen Gampo, the story goes that she brought with her the science of geomancy and medicine from the court of China. She also carried with her a pouch of medicinal seeds, which he cast into the sky upon her arrival in Tibet with prayers that they may spread across the land. A few seeds landed on Chagpori while the rest were carried by the north wind to the southern mountains of Lhomon. Chagpori later became a renowned centre for medical and astral studies in Tibet and the southern land a rich country for medicinal herbs.⁷ As for the story itself, it is perhaps of a Tibetan origin as it betrays the later Tibetan nostalgia with which they trace back all good and great things to the Yarlung dynastic period of Tibet from the mid-seventh to mid-ninth century. Even the botanical richness of the borderland is considered somehow as a work of the great Tibetan dynastic period. Such Tibetan superciliousness no doubt vexed the Bhutanese, leading to neighbourly distaste and even serious conflicts between the two countries. A new contest over a medicinal plant is today taking place along the high mountainous border in the form of competition and confrontation between the Tibetan/Chinese and Bhutanese collectors of the expensive fungi cordyceps sinensis, which is said to have helped three Chinese athletes to break world records in running.

Country bestrewn with Tsanden

Bhutan has another botanical epithet: Tsanden Köpaijong — the country bestrewn with Tsanden. This was never used as a name of the country as such but the country is often described with this epithet. Perhaps the earliest use of this epithet for the area of modern Bhutan is in homiletic letters of the Tibetan saint Dorji Lingpa (1346−405) sent to his Bhutanese students and patrons in 1381.⁸ Today, the national anthem of Bhutan begins with this epithet. The Himalayan word tsanden is a mispronunciation of the Indian word candan for sandalwood. The Sanskritic candan and Tibetan tsanden are pronounced differently but still retain identical spelling when written in Tibetan characters. However, the tsanden we are talking about in the Bhutanese context is not sandalwood as all Tibetan dictionaries may have us believe. Sandalwood hardly grows in Bhutan and its role is not significant. Instead in Bhutan, tsanden refers to the cypress, particularly the species which now goes by the name Bhutan cypress (Cupressus corneyana). It is quite possible that the gigantic cypresses of Bhutan got the name of the aromatic sandalwood as the wood from very mature cypresses produces a similar fragrance. The wood from mature cypress is commonly used in incenses as a major ingredient.

This coniferous tree is now Bhutan’s national tree and is commonly seen across the country. The cypress, one can say, holds the highest place in the Bhutanese botanical hierarchy. It is viewed as a special tree, some even ascribing to it a quality of sacredness. Its growth in most unlikely places, to awesome heights rising to over 80 m, an impressive girth of up to 14 m and the large bulbous trunk it accumulates with age all help inspire such numinous feelings about the tree. To this, then, are added religious stories about the tree’s origins. One can find cypresses which are considered to have grown from the walking staff used by holy persons, like the large cypress next to the famous Kurjey temple which is believed to have grown from Padmasambhava ’s staff. It is not uncommon to see a gigantic cypress growing next to an old religious or secular establishment, which confirms the important status given to the cypress in Bhutanese cultural surroundings. For social historians today, these cypress trees are good markers of historically significant places.

Drukyul —the Land of the Thunder Dragon

The names discussed above have generally ceased to be used today as names for Bhutan. Even those that are s...