The most striking aspect of orthodox Buddhism is its ascetic ideology, and the monastic tradition built around this ideology. Among the Sherpas, only about 2 percent of the men are under active monastic vows, and the entire lay population is by definition failing to live up to the highest ascetic ideal of celibacy. But these points give no indication of the degree to which the ascetic ideal nonetheless weaves through the lives and institutions of the Sherpa people. For much of life takes place as it were in counterpoint to this ideal, and occasionally in direct conflict with it.

There are, however, opportunities to enact (a version of) the ascetic ideal within lay life. Once a year, in the late spring, there is a four-day holiday called Nyungne, during which individuals may practice certain acts and renunciations, becoming “like monks” for the period of the holiday. There is a second, less stressed observance of a similar nature about six months later. And pious lay people may also spend a day fasting and performing religious actions on the full-moon and no-moon days of each month. In all cases the point is to approximate the ideal of asceticism and to gain religious merit toward a good rebirth.

The key vow of Buddhist ascetism, and the symbol of all the other renunciations of “the world,” is celibacy, abstention from sexual relations.

The field research upon which this book is based was carried out between September 1966 and February 1968. It was made possible by a National Institutes of Mental Health Predoctoral Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Field Research Grant. To both NIMH and NSF I extend my appreciation and thanks, and my hope that their programs, so valuable to scholarship in anthropology, will soon again attain the scope they had at the time I was fortunate to be in graduate school.

The research was first written up as a dissertation for the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago. For their encouragement and criticism of my work on the dissertation, I would like to thank the members of the department, particularly Professors Clifford Geertz (now at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey), Nur Yalman (now at Harvard University), McKim Marriott, David M. Schneider, and Melford E. Spiro (now at the University of California at San Diego).

But this book is not in any direct sense a revision of the dissertation. Basically, I went back to the field notes and started again from scratch. The dissertation contains important data not included here, and I have indicated some of it in notes to the present text. The overall thrust of the book, as well as most of the specific discussions and analyses, are not in the dissertation.

In Nepal, many people were helpful in facilitating my work.

Nepal is certainly one of the more romanticized places on earth, with its towering Himalayas, its abominable snowmen, and its musically named capital, Kathmandu, a symbol of all those faraway places the imperial imagination dreamt about. And the Sherpa people, the subject of this book, are perhaps one of the more romanticized people of the world, renowned for their mountaineering feats, and found congenial by Westerners for their warm, friendly, strong, self-confident style.

What there is about the Sherpa world that conduces to such a style is probably impossible to isolate, although it has variously been attributed to their glorious mountain environment, their Buddhist religion, or, by the Sherpas themselves, to the especially pure water found exclusively in the Sherpa region. In any case, in buoyant, outgoing social style as well as in robust physical type, they resemble their own racial, cultural, linguistic, and religious cousins the Tibetans, and differ substantially in both style and physique from the South Asians and the Chinese, the two major groups that bracket the greater Tibetan culture area.

It has been fairly well established that the Sherpas migrated into their present location in Nepal from the Khams region of eastern Tibet about 450 years ago. It is not clear why they left; harrassment by marauding Mongol tribes, or religious persecution by the reformed Tibetan Buddhist sect have been suggested, although it seems equally plausible that there was some local upheaval in the feudal social structure.

Theoretically, Buddhism rejects the world, and validates no part of it. But analytically we have seen that Buddhism validates the world all too well, contributing to the reproduction of the two most pervasive and discomfiting dimensions of Sherpa experience – social atomism and social hierarchy. The discomfiture of social atomism has several aspects – economic insecurity, family conflict, personal isolation. And the discomfiture of social hierarchy also has several aspects – social insecurity, social resentment. The religion, in aligning itself with these pervasive social tendencies, can itself be shown, as we shall discuss in this chapter, to be resented. Theoretically part of the solution, it is really part of the problem.

Yet the Sherpas assume, in an ongoing way, the absolute indispensability of their religion. Village life is regularly punctuated by religious rituals that seek the protection and support of the gods. The religious ideals may sometimes be a sort of cultural burden, but the religion is also conceived of as having brought civilization to the Sherpas' ancestors, and as having made and continuing to make true society and culture possible.

This view is couched in myths and stories concerning the establishment of Buddhism in Tibet: The myth (recounted in Chapter 4) of the building of Samyang monastery is perhaps the classic example. All of them detail some situation in which people were trying to accomplish some task, or simply trying to go about their business, but were harassed by demons and then were saved by the intervention of a religious figure.

One may envision the task of an ethnography as opening a culture to readers, unfolding it, revealing it, providing not only a sense of surface form and rhythm, but also a sense of inner connections and interactions. If this is one's vision of the task, certain ways of launching upon it will be more powerful and effective than others. One could of course begin with the standard categories – kinship, economy, politics, religion – yet this approach is problematic, not only because the categories are externally imposed but because they are undynamic. They do not carry one into an experience of the interconnections that must be at the heart of the discussion.

One could also proceed by way of, to borrow a phrase from Kenneth Burke, “the representative anecdote,” the little vignette of social life actually observed, that was for the field-ethnographer, and will ideally be for the reader, especially revealing of important cultural dynamics. One recalls, for example, the incident of the disturbed Javanese funeral described by Geertz (1957b), where the corpse could not get buried for the politics of the situation. The episode raised problems of religious and political interpretation for all present, Javanese and ethnographer alike. As in this example, the incidents that are used as representative anecdotes in ethnography generally involve breakdown or conflict, moments where the rules are called into question, or contradictory rules are invoked, where “reality bargaining” (Rosen) is called into play.

The discussion of hospitality in its status, as opposed to exchange, aspects raised the point of wealth differences in Sherpa society. In the context of the hospitality analysis, these differences of wealth were seen merely as the objective basis, the point of departure, for status ordering, which in turn was seen as providing the idiom of political self-regulation in the community. Yet differences of wealth which, along with pedigree and piety, place people in the categories of “big,” “middle,” and “small,” also have other ramifications, which must be taken up here.

It is important to begin by noting that although these categories or strata are not true classes (defined in terms of any sort of surplus-extraction relationships), there are nonetheless real structural differences – and not just differences of comfort and life-style – generated by relative wealth and relative poverty. The immediate advantage of wealth is greater economic flexibility. The wealthy can take advantage of market opportunities when the poor cannot. The wealthy can also absorb a few bad economic breaks without being seriously undermined, whereas for the poor a few bad breaks may send them over the brink. It is clear that at some point a Sherpa family may pass a point of “take-off,” where its wealth sustains itself and even increases, and where anxiety about staying afloat and simply maintaining what it has becomes insignificant.

From one, not inaccurate, point of view, the key fact of Sherpa social structure is its relative “atomization” into nuclear family units and estates. At the same time, however, a Sherpa village is a community, with lively social interaction, a reasonable degree of order and solidarity, and often a certain collective identity. Such communal solidarity and identity is reproduced in many contexts: in the periodic macro-events of village temple rituals, and in the countless microinteractions of day-to-day social life.

But there is also an intermediate level of social event in which the community reproduces itself, with its distinctive structures, processes, and style, as a community: in formal parties privately sponsored by individual households, with most of the rest of the village as guests. A household will give a formal hospitality event in conjunction with a wedding, a funeral, or a privately sponsored New Year, mid-year, or other seasonal ritual. While only the wealthier households commission seasonal rituals and entertain large numbers of people on those occasions, even the poorer families will sponsor major parties in conjunction with weddings and funerals, if they are not to drop out of community membership altogether. Giving and receiving hospitality are among the major acts of sociality in Sherpa culture.

The party

Guests are invited to a party only a few hours before the event is to begin, the host/hostess sending their children around to the village households to tell people, “Come, they said!” When the guests arrive later in the day, they are seated and served tea or beer.

It seems fairly safe to say that orthodox, canonical Buddhism was a religion of and for individuals – or, to slant the point somewhat more strongly, a religion of antisocial individualism. In focusing its critique of the world on egotism, Buddhism highlighted and gave additional form, weight, and meaning to the very phenomenon it attacked. At the same time, all its solutions to the problem, while designed ultimately to eradicate the sense of personal ego, entailed further isolation of and attention to the individual. One who would be saved must renounce all ties of family, marriage, and wider social reciprocity. The quest for salvation is a matter of private mental exercises, and no one can help another in this quest. Further, the quest entails discovering that all the problems that seemed externally caused are really within one. Social life and social bonds are thus doubly devalued – they are trivialized (not the real causes of one's problems), and yet seen as insidiously destructive in enmeshing and blinding one, blocking awareness of truth.

There is, then, an a priori logic to the argument that Buddhism, given its premises, will be antagonistic to social life and will thus be problematic for lay people operating in religion's shadow. The Sherpa case seems to manifest this logic. Sherpa Buddhism, which in many respects can hardly be called orthodox, nonetheless retains the central Buddhist tendency to isolate and atomize the individual, and devalue social bonding and social reciprocity.