Dozens of American Buddhists prepare for 3 years-plus of silence to heighten inner awareness
BOWIE, Arizona - Deep in a remote desert valley, Stephane Dreyfus and several dozen other American Buddhists are preparing to undergo a mind-altering journey: three years, three months, and three days of silence.
There will be no word from the outside world during the Great Retreat, only the deafening quiet of sand, rock, and cactus, with seemingly endless time to ponder the emptiness [impersonal and therefore liberating nature] of life.
Dreyfus and his fellow adherents hope to find enlightenment in the silence, a gift they plan to share when they emerge from their long seclusion.
They know that outsiders might dismiss them as eccentrics, but their résumés suggest otherwise. Among them are an airline pilot, a dermatologist, a retired biochemist, and a former television editor.
They’re jettisoning the trappings of their lives to carry on a Tibetan Buddhist tradition that traces its lineage through the Dalai Lamas of Tibet. For many, that means leaving behind six-figure incomes, young children, or aging parents for the solitude of cramped cabins made of adobe, wood, and hay bales.
Prolonged silence, they believe, is the only way to reach the deep level of inner awareness required to bring true happiness to the world. “If I can get to the position of being perfectly free of suffering and develop high levels of mental clarity that cause enlightenment, I can show others how to get there perfectly, quickly,” says Dreyfus, 32, who left a job as an assistant editor on the prime-time show “The Bachelor” to teach yoga and prepare for his undertaking.
Dreyfus, a Berkeley native, will be joined by his fiancee, Jessica Kung, a Yale graduate and also a yoga teacher. When they start the retreat, they will be newlyweds, sharing a 500-square-foot cabin, communicating only through gestures and facial expressions and refraining from physical intimacy.
Such physical pleasure, they both say, would dissipate prana — [lit., "breath," chi, spiritus, invisible life force] inner energy — distracting from the important karmic work at hand.
“I feel a desire to have some serious Ph.D.-like study in yoga meditation,” says Kung, 27. “There is nothing better to do with my youth.”
Families bewildered, angry, skeptical
Padmasambhava Rinpoche,
Such talk provokes bewilderment, skepticism, and even anger from the family members of many of those who will join the retreat. Prof. Hubert Dreyfus, who teaches existential philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, worries that his son, Stephane, is wasting his talent for writing and filmmaking to pursue [spiritual] ideas he sees as irrational.
The elder Dreyfus admits his son is happier than ever. Still, he can’t understand why anyone would leave loved ones behind to disappear into the desert — in this case, for 1,190 days. “I’m just torn,” says Dreyfus, 79. “I want grandchildren.”
Each retreat participant will need $60,000 to $75,000 to build a cabin and pay for three years of food and supplies. Some already have set aside the money. A few are searching for sponsors at yoga and meditation seminars or relying on the generosity of others on the retreat.
Those on retreat will cook for themselves in cabins equipped with kitchens and bathrooms. Power will be supplied by solar panels or propane tanks, and members will probably have air horns to summon help if something goes wrong. Volunteer caretakers, fellow American Buddhists who live nearby, will help by growing or shopping for food and dropping it off twice a week.
David Stumpf, a retired plant biochemist from the University of Arizona who is planning to join the retreat, is in charge of installing a water supply system in the valley. Dr. Stumpf has nearly finished building the 600-square-foot cabin he and his wife, Susan, will share on a small patch of earth surrounded by paddle cactus and ocotillo plants.
Surveying the rolling landscape and cloud-streaked sky, the 56-year-old proclaims the setting ideal for deep meditation. “This place is stunning at sunrise,” he says. “The lighting on the hillside is just magical.”
To reach “retreat valley,” participants drive 107 miles east from Tucson on the Interstate 10 Freeway through stretches of desert to the small town of Bowie then head south on a narrow asphalt road.
From there, a rutted dirt road leads to Diamond Mountain University, a nonprofit Buddhist campus where footpaths connect an adobe temple, a tented student lounge, and round Mongolian-style yurts. Another short road from there to retreat valley is even more primitive, coursing through brush-covered hillsides once home to a cattle ranch.
In the heart of the valley is a single yurt within sight of several cabins under construction. This is the home of Geshe Michael Roach and Lama Christie McNally, the university’s founders. [What could go wrong? Certainly not Murphy's Law, which is unerring in these situations.] More
TREY the Explainer, 7/16/19; Pat Macpherson, Sheldon S., Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Who is Lilith? Adam’s first wife?
If the Patriarchs had their way...Barbie
Here is a video discussing the complex ancient history surrounding a biblical character named "Lilith." Let's answer the questions: Who was Lilith? Why is she forgotten? What did she mean to the Bible’s original authors? Get out your Dead Sea Scrolls for this detailed textual analysis of the biblical character. Please fact check what is said, as no expert, at the end of the day, is right all of the time, and Trey is not a bona fide "expert." He's just a guy who reads a lot, so check his sources. Look out for a Part II.
(Behind the Music) Documentary of 1997 Liltih Fair, women who rock
CITATIONS: Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible by Karel van der Toorn and Pieter Willem van der Horst
De-Demonising the Old Testament: An Investigation of Azazel, Lilith, Deber, Qeteb and Reshef in the Hebrew Bible by Judit M. Blair
The Early History of God by Mark S. Smith
The Exodus by Richard Elliot Friedman
Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliot Friedman
Yahweh and the gods and goddesses of Canaan by John Day
Covered in oil and ash with horns in San Martin Tilcajete, March 2011. The paint is used to ward off evil spirits before Lent instead of protective chants (Jorge Luis Plata/Reuters).
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VULTURE'S PEAK, ancient India - The Four Great Space Kingshaving set a guard over the four quarters of the Earth's sky, visited the
Buddha, saluted him, and sat down respectfully to one side with hosts of ogres (yakkhas).
King Vessavana
told the Buddha that the ogres did not, for the most part, believe in the
Buddha for the reason that they did not find it pleasant or agreeable to abstain
from the things which he declared to be "evil" -- such as the taking of life,
stealing, sexual misconduct, false speech, intoxication, and so on.
And in order that the Buddha's disciples, retreating to lonesome and remote
parts of the forest where the ogres dwell, might find protection from them,
King Vessavana suggested that the Buddha might learn the ātānātiya word-rune
(rakkha).
The "Four Great Kings" guard the skies of Earth as Sakka's regents in the deva world.
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The Buddha consenting by his silence, Vessavana proceeded to recite it. It opens with a salutation to the seven buddhas, beginning with
Vipassī Buddha. The remainder contains a list of the
devas and other superhuman beings, the Four Great Kings heading the list, who are described at length. Forty-one other devas are mentioned as a kind
of appendix or afterthought, all mentioned one after another with no attempt at
group division and without any details, in what are, apparently, mnemonic
doggerels.
A part of the Mahāsamaya Sutra
(Sections 10-20) appears to be an improved and enlarged edition of this
list of bare names.
The Buddha learned the word-rune (spell, mantra) and taught it to the monastics (wandering ascetics, recluses, hermits, Buddhist monks and nuns).
The Atānātiya Sutra is now regarded as a protective chant,
and its influence is said to pervade a hundred million world systems (VibhA.430). And DA.iii.969 gives a long description of the ritual followed when
reciting it.
In Buddhist Sri Lanka, for instance, it is recited with great fervor at the conclusion
of ceremonies, particularly in times of illness, in order to ward
off evil spirits.
It is included in the list of protections found in the Questions of King Milinda (p.151). On the importance
of this sutra in the history of India, see Rhys Davids, Buddhist India
(pp.219-37).
What must the devas think? The Golden pagoda at Aung Setkya Paya, Burma, is taller than the nearby standing Buddha at 430 feet above the surrounding jungle. It is a dramatic part of the Bodhi Tataung complex. It is hollow with corridors inside that climb up to the platform level (Flickr.com/Mckaysavage).
"We have plenty of evidence of a Bigfoot presence up here in the [Santa Cruz] mountains," curator Michael Rugg said: "vocalizations we've recorded, we have some video that we shot locally, and we have a number of eye witnesses who have reported sightings. In our testing, we've come up with more evidence to indicate it's true..."
Undated photo (Yeti Project Japan) alleged to be the footprint of a Yeti (left) measured on Dhaulagiri Mountain compared to human print (right). The Japanese team says they have discovered footprints they believe were made by the legendary Yeti said to roam the Himalayan regions of Nepal and Tibet (AFP/HO).
KATHMANDU (AFP, 10/20/08) – A team of Japanese adventurers say they have discovered footprints they believe were made by the legendary yeti said to roam the Himalayan regions of Nepal and Tibet.
"The footprints were about 20 centimeters (eight inches) long and looked like a human's," Yoshiteru Takahashi, the leader of the Yeti Project Japan, told AFP in Kathmandu on Monday. Takahashi was speaking after he returned with his seven-member team from their third attempt to track down the half-man-half-ape, tales of which have gripped the imaginations of Western adventurers and mountaineers for decades.
Despite spending 42 days on Dhaulagiri IV -- a 25,135-foot (7,661-meter) peak where they say they have seen traces of yetis in the past -- the team failed in their prime objective of capturing one on film.
But Takahashi said the footprints were proof enough. "Myself and other team members have been coming to the Himalayas for years and we can recognize bear, deer, wolf, and snow leopard prints and it was none of those," he said.
"We remain convinced it is real. The footprints and the stories the local tell make us sure that it is not imaginary," he added.
The team had set out nine motion-sensitive cameras in an area where Takahashi saw what he thought was a yeti during a previous expedition in 2003. "It was about 200 metres away in silhouette. It was walking on two legs like a human and looked about 150 centimetres tall," said Takahashi. Despite their lack of success this time, the team plans to continue the quest. "We will come back as soon as we can, and we will keep coming back until we get the yeti on film," said Takahashi.
Indian history is replete with mention of non- or semi-human beings. These beings have histories and seem to belong to larger societies. They were accepted and spoken of by mystics (e.g., rishis, yogis, the Buddha and accomplished disciples, who as a consequence of developing their meditation were able to see them at will).
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Is the recent Bigfoot body a hoax? (The famous Patterson footage seems sufficiently debunked and put to rest as a fraud). Is it simply an unknown primate? For most of Western history, no one believed in the mountain gorilla. Yet less than two weeks ago, an additional population of 125,000 was found (Reference). When the mountain gorilla was positively identified by Western scientists, the result in the culture was the making of King Kong to play up the fears and stereotypes surrounding the discovery. This apparently authentic footage of a Himalayan Yeti remains quite convincing:
YETI
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When the coelacanth is your poster child, as it is for Cryptozoology, people invest the poorly understood with their fears and fantasies. It's tragic xenophobia.
Of course, the reason people are so put off by Bigfoot ever being discovered is that there is a part of the brain where we put things like Bigfoot, UFOs, ghosts, the Loch Ness "monster," Chupacabra, and/or anything we dismiss as mere superstition, legend, or "conspiracy theory."
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These disparate things are confounded as all being of the same type -- nonsense and therefore to be dismissed out of hand. (We tend to forget that most people do not believe in Science, how much the less what even science does not agree on?)
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The tendency is to fear what we do not understand. And science, by claiming objective-understanding, gives us a sense of control that alleviates fear.
BIGFOOT
To admit that one thing is true uncomfortably opens the possibility that others are. And we will not stand for that. The conservative media will not stand for that. The system holds itself together regardless of what's true. War is good. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery. This is a simplified way of suggesting that fear is the problem not facts.
Let us encourage data, encourage investigation, open inquiries, analyze without preconception. In the meantime, WQ hopes to track more fantastic distractions in terms of the suspicious activities and whereabouts of scary Lindsay, Britney, Paris, and our national obsession with celebrity.
CELEBRITIES
There is no Bigfoot/Rudra ("howler"). Why do the indigenous people talk about these creatures -- the Native Americans with their Sasquatch, Sherpas with their Yeti [abominable snowman], Tibetans with their Yaksha (ogre), Indians with their Rudra (a.k.a., "roarer"), Pentecostals with their Daemon (evil spirit), Han Chinese and their magical Dragon, desert-dwelling Muslims with their Jinn (genie)... Hair samples with inconclusive DNA profiles? Sightings, histories, and footprint casts? Of course there are deliberately perpetrated hoaxes; is that all there is? Science, what are these recorded howls and roars in American forests?
CLARIFICATION: The purpose of Wisdom Quarterly is not only to find the truth but to understand and assimilate it. Buddhist cosmology already allows for nonhuman and semi-human beings coexisting with modern humans on earth, and beings beyond earth, and so many co-existing worlds so much older than can be comprehended...that it is simply exciting to see what our forebears were referring to when they mentioned them and accepted them when so few people at the time could see and directly verify their existence.
Tom Bascardi has inspected the corpse and other evidence and states it is the legendary creature -- a bipedal, ape-like creature covered in hair in the Georgian forest.
. ATLANTA -- Two men claim they've bagged Bigfoot [in Buddhist terms a rudra ("howler") or yaksha("ogre" or "nature spirit") or rakshasa (forest-dwelling "demon")], and they say they have the hairy corpse of the legendary creature stored away in a freezer.
Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer say they stumbled across the corpse in the woods of northern Georgia, across the country from the remote regions of the Northwest where people usually claim to see the man-ape.
Still, the Georgia men say DNA from the creature could prove once and for all that the frozen creature is Sasquatch. [Another creature was photographed alive, with features such ears and eyes distinguishable unlike most blurred images.]
At a news conference Friday in Palo Alto, Calif., Whitton, Dyer and Tom Biscardi, head of a group called Searching for Bigfoot, presented what they called evidence supporting the Bigfoot theory. It was an e-mail from a University of Minnesota entomologist, saying one of the DNA samples that the men said they took from the corpse was "inconclusive," which could mean it didn't come from a known species.
This photograph obtained 8/15/08 from www.searchingforbogfoot.com shows what is purported to be the body of "Bigfoot," the legendary ape-like creature that has been the subject of decades of hoaxes and dubious sightings. Two US men on Friday claimed to have found the body of "Bigfoot"(AFP/www.searchingforbigfoot.com).
They're not winning over any skeptics, though. "What I've seen so far is not compelling in the least, and I think the pictures cast grave doubts on their claim," Jeffrey Meldrum, a Bigfoot researcher and Idaho State University professor, told the Scientific American. "It just looks like a costume with some fake guts thrown on top for effect."
Whitton, an officer on medical leave from the Clayton County Police Department, and Dyer, a former corrections officer, announced the discovery in early July.
The picture they sent out in a news release and on their Web site - www.bigfoottracker.com - shows what appears to be a hairy corpse crammed into a chest freezer. The accompanying announcement describes the creature as a 7-foot-7 male, weighing 550 pounds with 16-inch human-like feet and reddish hair.
[Allegedly,] Whitton and Dyer have so far offered three different tales so far about how they came to find the creature:
In one, the animal was shot by a former felon, and the men followed it into the woods. In a second version, they found a "family of Bigfoot" in North Georgia mountains. In the third, the two were hiking and stumbled upon the corpse with open wounds.
Biscardi defended the pair at Friday's news conference among skeptical reporters.
"Do you think these fellows would come this far and put their reputations and their jobs on the line if they didn't have what they say they have?" he said.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Reserve spokesman Tom Mackenzie, however, said officers also are not taking the claim seriously and will not investigate Bigfoot because it not a federal priority.
"It's not on endangered species on any list that we've got," Mackenzie said.
Tom Biscardi, CEO and founder of BIGFOOT Inc., holds up a picture he claims is the mouth of Bigfoot in Palo Alto, California, August 15, 2008. Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, is a mythical ape-like creature said to live in forests of the Pacific northwest region of the United States(Kimberly White/Reuters).
"Bigfoot" fails DNA test
PALO ALTO, California (Reuters, 8/15/08) - Bigfoot remains as elusive as ever. Results from tests on genetic material from alleged remains of one of the mythical half-ape and half-human creatures -- made public at a news conference on Friday held after the claimed discovery swept the Internet -- failed to prove its existence.
Its spread was fueled by a photograph of a hairy heap, bearing a close resemblance to a shaggy full-body gorilla costume, stuffed into a container resembling a refrigerator.
One of the two samples of DNA said to prove the existence of the Bigfoot came from a human and the other was 96% from an opossum, according to Curt Nelson, a scientist at the University of Minnesota who performed the DNA analysis.
Bigfoot creatures are said to live in the forests of the U.S. Pacific Northwest. An opossum is a marsupial about the size of a house cat.
Results of the DNA tests were revealed in an e-mail from Nelson and distributed at the Palo Alto, California, news conference held by Tom Biscardi, host of a weekly online radio show about the Bigfoot.
Also present were Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, the two who say they discovered the Bigfoot corpse while hiking in the woods of northern Georgia. They also are co-owners of a company that offers Bigfoot merchandise.
Despite the dubious photo and the commercial interests of the alleged discoverers, the Bigfoot claim drew interest from Australia to Europe and even The New York Times.
Biscardi said the DNA samples may not have been taken correctly and may have been contaminated, and that he would proceed with an autopsy of the alleged Bigfoot remains, currently in a freezer at an undisclosed location.
(Reporting by Clare Baldwin in Palo Alto; writing by Jim Christie; editing by Mary Milliken and Peter Henderson)
Discovery Truth (SciFi Channel) will broadcast findings of recent expedition. (See Reuters)
Yeti (Himalayan Bigfoot)
By Rohit Sharma (gyandotcom.wordpress.com), edited by WQ
The Himalayan Mountain range, the highest on earth, is rightly referred to as the “roof of the world.” There is a mystery called the Yeti in our attic. The Tibetan word means “magical creature.” It is a supernatural enigma in the shape of a bipedal, hair covered, ape like man.
The Himalayas span the borders of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet (now part of China). They are remote and forbidding. Large stretches around its rough valleys and peaks are uninhabited. The highest mountain in the world at 29,028 ft., Everest stands half in Nepal, half in China. It is from Nepal, however, that most attempts to climb it and the surrounding mountains are made.
Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, is immersed in the Yeti lore. The legend is a commercialized money maker as part of the thriving tourist industry with religious elements and fantasy woven in for most of the Nepalese population.
Eyewitness
The first reliable report of the Yeti appeared in 1925 when N.A. Tombazi, a Greek photographer working with the British geological expedition in the Himalayas, was shown a creature moving in the distance across some lower slopes. The creature was almost a thousand feet away in an area at an altitude of roughly 15,000 ft.
“Unquestionably," Tombazi would later say, "the figure in outline was exactly like a human being, walking upright and stopping occasionally to uproot or pull at some dwarf rhododendron bushes. It showed up dark against the snow and, as far as I could make out wore no clothes.”
The creature disappeared before Tombazi could photograph it and was not seen again. As the group was descending, however, the photographer went out of his way to see the ground where he had spotted the creature.
Tombazi found footprints in the snow and later reported, “They were similar in shape to those of a man, but only six to seven inches long by four inches wide at the broadest part of the foot. The marks of five distinct toes and the instep were perfectly clear, but the trace of the heel was indistinct…”
There were 15 prints. Each was one and a half to two feet apart. Tombazi then lost the trail in thick brush. When the locals were asked to name the beast he’d seen, they told him it was a “Kanchenjunga demon.” Tombazi didn’t think he’d seen a demon, but neither could he figure out what the creature was. Perhaps he’d seen a wandering Buddhist or Hindu ascetic. As the years went by and other stories surfaced, Tombazi began to wonder if he’d seen a Yeti.
Further evidence suggestive of the existence and importance of Yetis is a Yeti Mandir (shrine), where locals leave gifts to appease its savagery and encourage its protection of nature. For Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and Bön lore state that Yetis, or yakshas, are generally benevolent non-human beings, sometimes classed as nature-spirits, who protect natural treasures. The term is used for a broad class of creatures, not a single specific species.
Reports Yeti reports usually come in the form of tracks, pelts, shapes seen at a distance, and rare face to face encounters with the creatures. These face to face encounters have never been experienced by researchers looking for the Yeti, but rather by locals who stumble onto the creature during their daily lives.
Tracks are a different story. Some of the best were found and photographed by British mountaineers Eric Shipton and Micheal Ward in 1951. They found them on the southwestern slopes of the Menlung Glacier, between Tibet and Nepal, at an altitude of 20,000 ft. Each print was thirteen inches wide and some eighteen inches long. The tracks appeared fresh, and Shipton and Ward followed the trail for a mile before it disappeared in hard ice.
Some scientists who viewed the photographs could not identify the tracks as being from any known creature. Others, however, felt it was probably the trail of a langur monkey or a red bear. They noted that tracks in snow that have melted in the sun can change shape and grow larger. Even so, the theory of a monkey or bear as a source seems unlikely because both of these animals normally move on four feet. The tracks were clearly that of a biped.
Shipton’s and Ward’s reputations argue against a hoax on their part, and the remoteness and altitude of the trail’s location argues against a hoax on the part of others.
Shipton’s footprints were neither the first nor by any means the last discovered by climbers in the Himalayas. Even Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide, Tenzing Norgay, on their record ascent of Everest in 1953, found giant footprints on their way up.
Amazing encounter
One of the more curious reports of a close encounter with a Yeti occurred in 1938. Captain d’Auvergue, the curator of the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, India, was traveling the Himalayas by himself when he became snow blind. As he neared death from exposure, he was rescued by a nine foot tall Yeti, who nursed him back to health until d’Auvergue was able to return home by himself.
In many other stories, however, the Yeti has not been quite as benign. One Sherpa girl, who was tending her yaks, described being surprised by a large ape-like creature with black and brown hair. It started to drag her off, but seemed to be startled by her screams and thus let her go. It then savagely killed two of her yaks. She escaped with her life, and the incident was reported to the police who managed to locate footprints.
Several expeditions have been organized to track down the Yeti, but none have found more than footprints and questionable artifacts such as scalps and hides. The London Daily Mail sent out an expedition in 1954. American oil men Tom Slick and F. Kirk Johnson financed trips in 1957, 1958, and 1959. Perhaps the most well known expedition went out in 1960.
Sir Edmund Hillary, who was the first Westerner to summit Everest (after his Sherpa guide) in 1953, lead the 1960 expedition in association with Desmond Doig. The search was sponsored by the World Book Encyclopedia and was well outfitted with trip-wire cameras, as well as timelapse and infrared photographic equipment. Despite a ten-month stay, the group failed to find any definitive evidence of the existence of Yetis. The artifacts they examined, two skins and a scalp, turned out to belong to two blue bears and a serow goat.
At the time both Hillary and Doig wrote off the Yeti as mere legend. Later, however, Doig decided that the expedition had been too big and clumsy. They didn’t see a Yeti, he agreed, but they also failed to observe such known animals as the snow leopard, which without a doubt exists.
Three Yetis After spending thirty years in the Himalayas, Doig believes that Yetis actually exist. There are three predatory animals in the Himalayas. The first is what the indigenous Sherpas call the dzu teh. These are large, shaggy animals that often attack cattle. Diog concludes that this is probably the Tibetan blue bear -- a creature so rare it is known in the West by a few pelts, bones, and a single skull.
The second predator is called thelma, which is probably a gibbon (a well known species of ape), which Diog thinks may live as far north as Nepal even though it has never been spotted passed the Brahmaputra River in India.
The third Yeti is called a mih teh, the true "Abominable Snowman" of legend. It is described as a savage ape-like creature covered with black or red hair who lives at altitudes of up to 20,000 ft.
Thus far there is no conclusive evidence to support the existence of this Yeti. There is, of course, no way to show or disprove that he exists either. If this snowman indeed lives in the frozen, barren, upper reaches of the Himalayas, areas so remote that few humans dare to tread, it may find its refuge safe for quite a long time to come.
Yeti in the distance (photos courtesy of Rohit Sharma, www.gyandotcom.wordpress.com) . Yeti footprint in the snow, pick axe for size comparison (gyandotcom)
SEE VIDEO BELOW
Losing the Yeti in forgotten nation of Bhutan By Tim Sullivan (AP, August 10, 2008)
SIGNYAR, Bhutan - He remembers the darkness of the pine forest, and the footprints, and his terror when the creature began to howl. He remembers the stories of his childhood, of a beast that stalked the upper reaches of the mountains, and how fear spread through the village every time it was spotted.
In a remote Himalayan kingdom that held out against the modern world for as long as it could, the old man remembers a time when the yeti was a normal part of life.
"The creature has always been out there, and it's out there still," says Sonam Dorji, 77, sitting on the pockmarked wooden floor of his small farmhouse (pictured below). It's a cold Himalayan morning, and he warms himself beside a wood stove. The smell of burning pine fills the room. "If you travel the ancient trails, even today, there's a good chance you'll meet him."
His son-in-law, listening to the old man's stories, laughs dismissively from across the room.
Tshering Sithar (pictured below) is 39, a bulldozer operator helping pave the road to this village, which until recently could only be reached on foot.
"What is there to say?" he asks. "There's nothing out there in the forest. Any educated person today knows this."
Yeti mandir (shrine) in the Himalayas with offerings to "abominable snowmen" (gyandotcom)
Many traditional beliefs remain deeply ingrained in Bhutan, from astrology to the worship of Buddhist priests. But the monster is now increasingly forgotten, and the link to an ancient past is more often seen as a sign of ignorance.
"We can't live today like we did in the 17th or 18th century. Our culture has to be dynamic," says Khandu Wangchuck, Bhutan's finance minister. "Within the last 40 years, we've jumped 300-400 years."
And the yeti? Wangchuck pauses. "I think most people today know this is just a story."
What does it mean, though, when accepted fact decays into mere folk tale? When a belief that helped tie a land together is relegated to myth, what happens to the culture that believed in it? And how can a country that entered the 20th century just a few years ago make its way in the globalized world of the 21st? ___
“Unquestionably, the figure in outline was exactly like a human being, walking upright and stopping occasionally to uproot or pull at some dwarf rhododendron bushes,” said Tombazi, “It showed up dark against the snow and, as far as I could make out wore no clothes.”...When the locals were asked to name the beast he’d seen they told him it was a “Kanchenjunga demon [in Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain lore a yakshaor rudra].”
In the West, yeti-like creatures long ago were reduced to myth. The Abominable Snowman is something from a "Scooby Doo" episode, or part of the latest installment in Hollywood's "Mummy" franchise. To mainstream science, the notion of Bigfoot is little more than a joke.
But across the Himalayas the beast was seen as real, known for generations in a half-dozen countries from Tibet to Pakistan. It was a region flush with wildlife, where tigers, bears and wild dogs roamed thick mountain forests and remote river valleys. Here, if nowhere else, the yeti was simply one more creature.
For Bhutan, a country barely noticed by much of the world, it became something even more.
In a nation stumbling nervously into modernity, the hulking mountain beast was publicly celebrated, becoming a 20th-century talisman against unbridled change and a link to ancient traditions. Stories of its travels were told by the king and top government officials. The Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, a large national park, was created in part as a place to protect it. Once Bhutan bothered to set up a postal system, in the early 1960s, it issued stamps honoring an animal that science insists does not exist.
"Everyone knew it was there," Dorji says. "It was like the bears or the leopards. Why would we question it?"
But change, a concept barely imaginable here just a few years ago, is accelerating quickly.
Until the early 1960s, Bhutan had sealed itself off for centuries, retreating behind the Himalayas to live as it always had — with life revolving around crop cycles, Buddhism, tiny feudal city-states and revered royalty. It had no roads, no electricity network, no currency. It had no postal system or telephones. Trade depended on barter. Tourists were barred.
Possible documented sighting of Yeti (inset) or yakkha (gyandotcom).
Only after China invaded Tibet in 1959 did the king decree his country would not be fully closed off. At first, change came slowly: there were no paved roads until 1963, no tourists until the 1970s and no international phone service until the 1980s.
In the 1990s, though, things accelerated: Television arrived in 1999, the road network grew, the electricity grid blossomed. While tourism remains highly restricted - visitors must pay $220 per day, in advance, to get a visa - there were still 20,000 tourists last year, nearly ten times as many as in 1991. In a nation where kings held absolute power, March democratic elections brought in a generation of ambitious politicians.
Bhutan is a place where almost everyone was born in a village but where few people see a future in farming — and where a minuscule modern economy means there are precious few other jobs.
Thimphu, Bhutan's increasingly crowded capital, has everything from majestic royal palaces to microscopic traffic jams of a few dozen cars. On weekend nights, bored, unemployed young people brawl outside dance bars.
Suddenly, Bhutan has reached an uncomfortable crossroads. This is a time when the dynamism of modernity regularly clashes with modernity's pitfalls. Child mortality rates are plummeting, crime is on the rise and a college education is no longer just a dream.
It is a time when the yeti is increasingly unwelcome. ___
No one is sure how far back the stories go.
In A.D. 79, the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder described immensely strong Himalayan animals with "human-like bodies." Chinese manuscripts from the 7th century mention hairy creatures similar to the yeti.
The tales change from region to region across Asia — yetis were man-eaters in some places, grass-eaters in others. In many places, the beast was seen as a harbinger of death, a combination of man, animal and demon.
Some things, though, were certain. It was tall, hairy and very strong. It lived mostly in the high mountains and avoided people. Only a handful of yak herders might report sightings with any regularity, but everyone knew it was out there, and feared it.
In Bhutan, most people call it the "migoi" — strong man — but it goes by any number of names across the Himalayas: glacier man, snow goblin, wild man.
To Westerners, though, it is known as the yeti — a name believed to come from a Tibetan word for bear — and it has gripped outsiders' imaginations since reports of a strange Himalayan creature began filtering out in the mid-20th century.
Mountaineers brought back many of the stories, telling of strange footprints in the snow, of mysterious animals spotted walking on two legs, of tales their porters told around campfires.
Just maybe, some thought, there could be truth in those tales. The high Himalayas are among the most isolated, forbidding parts of the world. Couldn't something — perhaps a species of gorilla, or even a form of proto-human — have hidden for centuries amid the crags?
Similar tales had proven accurate before. In 1902, a German soldier proved that central African legends of an enormous, hairy mountain beast were based in reality. But Capt. Robert von Beringe came home with proof: The body of a mountain gorilla that he had shot.
So the yeti hunt was on. In 1954, Britain's Daily Mail newspaper sent out a search party. In 1957, a Texas oilman took up the chase. Three years later, Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hillary searched along the Nepal-Tibet border. In their wake came Soviet expeditions, TV crews, scientists and hucksters. .
Possible photographic documentation of elusive creature, the yeti (gyandotcom)
Plenty of tantalizing clues have been found, from footprints to hair. But science can explain most — they often turn out to be from bears — and five decades of searching has turned up no body, no high-quality photograph. Eventually, even many fervent yeti hunters see the truth in more prosaic explanations.
The great Italian climber Reinhold Messner spent years tracking yeti stories across the Himalayas and even caught a glimpse of it a couple times. But in the end, the truth was obvious to him. "All evidence," he wrote at the end of his travels, "points to a nocturnal species of brown bear."
___
Or maybe not.
Ask politely, and Sangay Wangchuck will take you into a meeting room at the headquarters of Bhutan's conservation department and show you half a dozen framed plaster casts mounted on the wall. The frames show the outline of irregular grayish footprints around 12 inches long. All, according to small signs, come from yetis.
Wangchuck, the national director of conservation, knows what it is to wrestle with belief and science.
He has a master's degree from Yale and a doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He's a scientist who oversees legions of rangers and researchers. His training tells him not to believe in something unless he has proof.
But the yeti stories run deep here, and denial means more than casting off an old belief.
"My parents, my village, they still believe," says Wangchuck, a genial, erudite man clearly pained by the twin pulls of science and his heritage.
So he speaks slowly when he talks about the yeti, words stumbling out in sentence fragments as he tries to straddle the line between the empirical and the emotional.
"As a biological entity, it's very difficult" to believe, says Wangchuck, looking down at his desk, covered with piles of papers. But does it exist? "It's very difficult to say no."
So this man of science has found a very unscientific middle ground. "I tell people: 'Let's not dig too much into it. Let's talk about it, but leave it at that, and not conclude 'Yes, it's there,' or 'No, it's not there.'"
Talk to most Bhutanese, though, and few have such quandaries. . Sonam Dorji, right, relates a tale of his encounter with an Yeti as his son-in-law Tshering Sithar, left, listens at the remote village of Signyar in Bhutan, Sunday, March 9, 2008. Even in this remote mountain kingdom that has held out against the modern world as long as it could, times are rapidly changing as old beliefs yield to the modern ways of life (AP Photo/Saurabh Das).
Sonam Dorjee runs Om Bar, a Thimphu gathering spot popular among the rich, the royal and the well-connected. "I believe in it about like you do," says Dorjee, smiling. "These are stories for country people."
Later, driving through the nighttime Thimphu streets, he talks a little more. "Look, this country is changing so much. There's a lot of money here now, a lot of business. Some of these beliefs aren't going to survive."
Here's the thing, though, about how countries modernize: It's seldom a dramatic transformation from one era to the next, even in an isolated country like Bhutan. Instead, it's an inexorable slide that often remains invisible until — in retrospect — the change becomes obvious.
"The common belief is that traditionalism dissolves in the solvents of modernity," said Mark Dailey, an environmental anthropologist at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vt., who has studied China's modernization. "That's an oversimplification."
The reality is that cultures change piecemeal, and often find themselves holding onto beliefs that can appear contradictory.
"People tend to be stubborn," said Dailey. "Traditional beliefs help root them."
Outwardly, this country holds tightly to its past, aggressively policing its own culture. Laws require everything from traditional dress — robes for men and ankle-length skirts for women — to historic styles for new buildings.
But legally mandated culture can be a strange beast, blurring the line between reality and fiction. It's increasingly easy to find places, particularly in tourist areas, where Bhutan can feel like a hollow, Bhutan-themed reproduction of itself, where even gas stations are ornamented with carved wooden pillars and where nearly everyone seems to ask if you've seen any traditional dancing yet.
Some of this is pure economics. Much of Bhutan's earnings come from tourists who come in search of beautiful mountain scenery, ancient beliefs and a society unsullied by the larger world.
"We want to attach an economic sense to the culture," says Khandu Wangchuck, the finance minister. The key players in the culture business — travel agencies, tour guides, hoteliers: "Their whole livelihood will depend on maintaining our culture."
The value of the yeti, on the other hand, is not what it once was.
"Our stories grew around things that we could not explain," says Kunzang Choden, a Bhutanese writer and folklorist.
Just a decade or so ago, the yeti helped explain the often intimidating natural world nearly everyone lived in — the nighttime shadows, the terrifying noises on lonely forest paths, the strange footprints. But increasingly, the sounds of the forest are drowned out by music played on cheap stereos smuggled in from China.
People who no longer need the yeti can dismiss it. Believing, Choden says, "is an implicit sign of being too traditional, or even backward."
___
Which, in Bhutan, no one wants to be. Even the most traditional families dream these days of well-paying jobs for their children, of lives that will take them away from ancestral homes and centuries of rural life.
Dhau, a 53-year-old farmer who uses only one name, was raised and still lives in Zamsa, a small village separated from the nearest road by a cable bridge barely large enough for a bicycle. He grew up to be like his own father, and he once expected his children would grow up to be like him.
But today there's a primary school not far away, and three years ago electricity reached the village. He has an electric cooker and a ceiling fan that can chase away the clouds of monsoon insects. One of his children is in high school, boarding in town. Another is studying computers.
Asked if he wants them to move back home someday, he was stunned by the question.
"Of course not," he said, stopping to talk as he walked home from his fields on a cloudy afternoon. "Life is difficult here, not like in the towns. I want them to get government jobs and live easier lives."
By nearly all appearances, he is a man from another time — a subsistence farmer who works his fields with handmade tools and who holds tightly to a deeply mystical form of Buddhism. He believes fiercely in miracles and demons.
But like the tigers that roamed these forests a century ago, the yeti he once knew is gone. His children don't know about it, and he doesn't miss it. Its loss has left no obvious holes in his cultural soul. If it survives, he says, it went far away a long time ago.
"My parents used to talk about it, about meeting the huge man in the forest," he says. "But we don't talk about it now."
Then he walks away, following a dirt path toward a wooden house where electric lights now chase away the night and whatever might be hiding in its darkness.
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