A Kingdom in the Mountains Shares Its Secrets
WHEN American curators arrived one spring morning at Norbugang Yu Lhakang, a Buddhist temple in a remote village in western Bhutan, they found a group of monks sitting on the floor in bright robes, chanting. They had been there since 6 a.m., intent on creating the right ambience for a divination ceremony.
The question before them was whether a small 18th-century gilt bronze sculpture — a female personification of supreme Buddhist wisdom — could make its way to the United States for a traveling exhibition of Bhutanese art.
It fell to the sculpture’s owner, a Bhutanese businessman whose family had had the piece for generations, to roll the divination dice. Tremulously, he rolled a two, a six and a nine.
A furious dialogue ensued in Dzongkha, the Bhutanese language, among the priests, the owner, the government official overseeing the country’s cultural properties and the curators’ Bhutanese driver over how to interpret this ambiguous sign. (Even numbers are bad, ascending numbers are good, and nine is great, the most auspicious number of all.)
The priests, eager to see their temple receive some international exposure, kept on chiming in to say “Give it a chance,” recalled Stephen Little, director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts, describing the scene in an interview. But it wasn’t their decision. It was up to the owner, who seemed to have a presentiment that if he allowed the object to depart, his father would die.
A member of the curatorial team who is also a physician pointedly told the owner that there was a 50-50 chance that his father would die anyway. (The father was 90.) But Mr. Little, observing the owner’s clouded face, called an end to the discussion. Having vowed early on never to press against resistance to lending an object, the team from the Honolulu Academy had to accept the outcome and walk away.
Yet that was one of the rare reversals for Western scholars on a two-year trek of discovery to remote temples and monasteries in Bhutan. They succeeded in borrowing some 110 objects and recording 330 films of ritual dances never before seen in the West — all of which will go on view Tuesday in “The Dragon’s Gift: The Sacred Arts of Bhutan” at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
The curatorial odyssey got started in the fall of 1997, when Ephraim Jose, a conservator of Asian and Himalayan art from San Francisco, faced a 24-hour layover in Paro, Bhutan, on his way home from a vacation. […more]
