Sometimes something really strange happens to you. My parochial kindergarten faced the parish cemetery, a green wooded affair with high shade trees, rows of old stone markers sloping down toward the little road with the flags and the V.F.W. memorial. One sunny day, a student noticed a young woman in a white dress standing among the graves—not a remarkable occurrence—and we all went over to the window to look. But Miss Khoury said she couldn’t see anyone, even as we became louder and more insistent. Was she pulling our collective infantile leg? I’m not sure. We were eventually cajoled back to the desks, and when we looked again, the woman in white was gone.
Like most Americans, I’m a rationalist at heart. These little eruptions of the strange into my life are mostly ignored or locked away for those big empty summer afternoons, when the clouds drift from one end of the pale blue sky to the other and you remember that we’re strangers on a strange planet.
Sometimes, though, there’s an artifact. Before me on my desk I have a black book, title in gold leaf: A Grammar of Kham, by one David E. Watters. This book first came into my possession (if that’s the right phrasing) in the midst of an office move. I was in the last days of grad school in New York, trying to whip my unwieldy failure of a first novel into good enough shape that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to have it bound and submitted to the degree committee; I was also about to be married. In brief, I was living on very thin margins and had a lot to worry about.
Naturally this was the period in which I decided to try my hand in learning Tibetan. It was something new to do. I studied Sanskrit briefly and unhappily during and immediately after college—in this period, I with enduring embarrassment committed the technical act of idolatry by helping to light incense before an icon of Sarasvatī in an Indian classroom, which I imagine made for an interesting change of pace for my confessor—but a residual interest in the Mahayāna and Vajrayāna strains of Buddhism enticed me to dip into regions farther afield as a distraction from my actual obligations. There are shallower reasons, too: I like how Tibetan looks on the page, all angles and flourishes, and have always admired the Tibetan visual arts. And of course knowing a bit of a language that nobody else knows has a certain mystique.
Tibet is the center of Vajrayāna Buddhism, which is (roughly speaking) a synthesis of Mahayāna Buddhism with tantric practices—which is to say, occult or esoteric ritual—which help the devotee to cut through the cosmic red tape on the way to liberation, as well as conferring a variety of preternatural powers. (Specialists may quibble with this summary, but it will do for us.) It is analogous to the line of Neoplatonism running from Iamblichus, who fused various mystery-cult rituals and theologies to the Academic tradition to produce the distinctively creepy Late Antique synthesis that the Christian Fathers spent so much time fighting.
How does this cash out? Not very nicely. In addition to the usual sutra-chanting and meditation and invocations of various deities and quasi-deities, Vajrayāna Buddhism sanctions a variety of unsavory sexual practices that are shocking to Western sensibilities. A Christian might reasonably say that Tibet, a theocracy of devil-worshipping perverts, is the only country in world history where Communist rule was an unambiguous improvement. (For some reason, my wife has never been enthusiastic about visiting, even after seeing Nicholas Roerich’s haunting paintings of Lhasa.)
Tibetan is a difficult language for a Westerner. First, its orthography is highly archaic; the letters on the page have a less direct relation to their pronunciation than even in French. Second, its alignment is ergative–absolutive, rather than nominative–accusative—that is to say, rather than the good old-fashioned Indo-European structure of having an agent governing a verb, which in turn governs an object, the recipient of action governs the verb and the agent is in an oblique case. (A variety of Indian languages, most notably Hindi and Urdu, have moved into this structure, ultimately because the passive voice is easier to form in the most used Sanskrit tenses than the active—a lesson about the weird things that can happen if people get lazy about learning their paradigms.) Nor is the vocabulary easy for someone who has never taken on a Sino-Tibetan language; the loosely disguised friends that greet you in every sentence in Indo-European languages are largely absent.
In short, this new hobby was a bit dark and reality-bending in a period of my life that was already marked by significant stress. I was spending a lot of time thinking about the deranging blue vistas of the rooftop of the world, corrupt monks, and the evil spirits of the upper airs; and, among other practical disruptions, the think tank where I was a clerical factotum had changed venue from the mid-Forties and Fifth to the upper-Forties and Broadway, and one of my responsibilities before riding off into the marital sunset was settling us into the new office. After two days of reshelving books and bound reports, shuttling around banker’s boxes and printers, and wrestling with shelves and desks, I finally came to unpacking my own office—which I would occupy for less than a week. I am habitually a disorderly occupant, and my boxes were a farrago: pictures of heroes (Madame Nhu, Malachi Martin, Keith Moon), print-outs of articles and student submissions in various stages of mark-up, takeout containers of varying cleanliness, books. At the very bottom of the last box was a black book, face down—the book now sitting on my desk at home, nearly ten years later and two hundred miles away.
I am not immune to collecting, but as a rule I remember otiose purchases—usually with irritation and regret—and at this point I was scrimping to buy a tuxedo. I went to everyone else in the office to figure out whether someone had mislaid it, or if it was something anyone remembered from the common bookshelves. Nobody had ever seen it. I carried it back to my office, wondering about the solution. (Had a donor sent his latest book, as donors sometimes do? Had a friend visiting me left it?)
I opened it up. It was a missive from the rooftop of the world—and in a language that, even more so than Tibetan, is spoken by very few.
The author lays it out clinically and concisely: “The discovery of the Kham group of languages in Nepal in 1969 is one of the remarkable finds in Tibeto-Burman linguistics this century—it happened against the backdrop of nearly two centuries of fairly intense linguistic activity in the whole of the Indian subcontinent.”
What follows is a brief history of the heroic era of British linguistics, men with powdered wigs and bushy beards prowling the subcontinent, sweating through deserts and jungles, braving malaria and mischance to document verbal paradigms. Watters continues with a very humble summary of his own personal adventure: “Against this backdrop of linguistic activity, the failure to document Kham in any of its varieties is indeed a curious oversight. Kham, after all, is no small language—it is mother tongue to no less than forty or fifty thousand people living in the remote, upper valleys of mid-western Nepal. I first became aware of the possible existence of such a language from an American anthropologist, John Hitchcock, who had approached the edges of their tribal territory on a month’s trek sometime in 1960–1962. He cordially apprised me of their general whereabouts in 1969.”
“The best days of my life have been spent around the fires of the Takales, the Nishels, the Gamales, and the Sheshis—in their villages, in their tents, and in their sheep camps at the foot of the glaciers,” he writes in the acknowledgments. “It was there that we shared food, swapped stories, laughed, wept, and dreamed. I will always be indebted to them for cheerfully sharing their language and giving me a glimpse of a way of life that is fast disappearing from the face of the earth.”
The Kham, as it turns out, are a shamanic, pastoral people akin to the nomads of Siberia; they claim to have descended south from what is now Tibet after their kingdom (identified with the homonymous Kham region of Tibet) was engulfed in ice. They measure their wealth in sheep and hold smiths in high esteem; indeed, they call themselves the “Magar,” which apparently is derived from an ancient Tibeto-Burman word for the smith.
Here, in the isolated valleys and hills of Nepal, there is something older than the great constructs of monks of Lhasa. Watters again:
Shamans also have special burial rites not given to laymen. They are buried sitting up and facing north ‘to the land of the first shaman.’ The upper portion of their bodies are [sic] above ground and a stone cairn is erected over them, plastered, and whitewashed. The crown of a pine tree is thrust into the top, giving the shaman access to heaven. This simple burial cairn is the prototype of the Tibetan stupa in which the remains of great lamas are said to be housed. The prototype of the Dalai Lama’s succession is also found in the shamanistic practices of the Siberian tradition. In Kham villages, after a shaman is chosen by the spirit of his deceased predecessor, he must demonstrate clairvoyant capabilities by finding parts of his predecessor’s costume hidden in or around the village. If he fails, his reckless claims to the shamanistic succession are dismissed, and he is declared a charlatan.
The main portion of the book is a clear, technical exposition of the language itself in all its peculiarities (its baroque verbal system, the fact that it has only three true adjectives). The final chapter has three texts taken from dictation, “Tipalkya kills a leopard,” “Mana and the leopard,” and, most sinister of the triad, “Jaman and the witches,” which recounts a supernatural attack on a trail in the mountains.
Staring at this in my office in midtown, the hair on my head prickled. Staring at it on my office desk, it still does a bit. Here was a man who had spent his life amid the strange.
The question for me remained: Who was Watters? I could find no connection between him and my think tank, but I did discover his obituary. It is worth quoting at some length here.
David met his wife, Nancy, at Prairie Bible Institute, Alberta, Canada, and they were married in 1965.
They committed their lives to Christian service and joined Wycliffe Bible Translators with whom they served for 43 years.
They traveled to Nepal in 1969, and they and their two sons, Stephen and Daniel, began living in a remote village of the Kham Magar in Western Nepal. Their work among the Kham continues to this day.
David’s life embodied a commitment to Christian service and academic scholarship.
David had a significant role in the translation of the New Testament into Kham, and numerous community development projects.
David was recently honored by the Kham Magar nation at a formal ceremony in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he was named their “champion.” Many among the Kham affectionately refer to him as “grandfather.”
The life work of a Christian missionary from Valparaiso, Indiana—a man whose life was dedicated to the proposition that Païens ont tort et Chrétiens ont droit, to bringing the light of the Gospel to the heathens in one of the most remote parts of the world—on a language and culture akin to one I was studying, appearing among my things without explanation: What does it mean? I’m not sure it means anything. The strange coming into your life can’t always be tied down like an Irish pennant. Maybe I’m wrong about the whole thing; maybe I bought it and forgot about it in an uncharacteristic lapse. But I don’t think so.
In the story of Jaman recorded in the Grammar, the narrator is comforted and supported in his struggle with the witches by a character called “Grandfather Sergeant.” It turns out that Jaman was having a dream, but, as so often happens after dreams, a clarity came upon him in the immediate calm of waking: “This is God’s angel that is with me!” he says. “From that time on, my illness, night and day, began to leave me.”
I left New York and got married. The final reading in Hodge’s Introduction to Classical Tibetan is “The Ritual for the Generation of Fierce Vajrapāṇi.” For some reason, I did not feel the need to finish the book. My life since has been, while picaresque, basically normal, and occult knowledge has held less interest for me. Nor have I had to confess idolatry again. David Watters, requiescat in pace.
