What is a Gift?

Written by Elizabeth Parsons

For many, the word calls to mind a bouquet of roses, a cashmere sweater, a sparkling set of wine glasses bestowed upon a pair of newlyweds about to begin a life together.

For Jane Vance and the team behind A Gift for The Village project, it is a seven-month creative labor that stretched long hours into many nights, and its result: Vance’s towering and extraordinary Thanka, or sacred painting, of one of Tibetan Buddhism’s most esteemed and accomplished holy men. It is an 8,000 mile journey across three continents, ten time zones, and two oceans; it is an ascent of 12,000 feet to the remote village of Jomsom, Nepal, strung along the banks of the ancient Kali-Gandaki River. 

For the artist and six dedicated professionals, a gift is a bridging of cultures, a prayer-set-in-motion for the burgeoning relationship between East and West. In other words, a gift is no mere token. It is a sacred endeavor.

On June 15, Vance and her team flew from Roanoke to the South Asian country of Nepal to deliver her painting, called Amchi, to Jomsom’s villagers, which include the painting’s namesake and subject, Dr. Amchi Tsampa, a Tibetan Buddhist lama. The painting is a narrative in dizzying detail, a seven-by-five-foot image-and-word depiction of Tsampa’s 2001 visit to Virginia, where he lectured at Virginia Tech on Tibetan medicine and toured the region to learn about the strange and fascinating land of cell phones and Happy Meals, tabloids and tanning beds—a place that had long tickled the Renaissance man’s imagination. Vance, who stepped foot in South Asia in June for the eighth time, met Tsampa in 1995, beginning a friendship and cultural exchange with the lama that later inspired the Amchi painting. But her relationship with the people of South Asia began long before, with her first journey to India in 1985. Despite witnessing a café bombing only feet from where she stood, and suffering an infection that nearly cost her her foot in the 125° heat, Vance became obsessed with returning to the region not long after arriving home in Blacksburg. Despite—or perhaps because of—her brushes with the inexplicable and the threatening, the beautiful and the unnerving—Vance felt “a new heart start beating.”

“I was no longer afraid,” she says. “I realized that I would accept the difficulties, accept even dying, if I could just get back to what I had begun to see there.”

Between 1989 and 2000, Vance returned six times and her eyes opened wider, venturing deeper into the region, including parts of neighboring Nepal.  In 2000, she traveled with Prices Fork’s fifth-grade public school teacher, Jenna Swann, the first recipient of the McGlothlin Award for Teaching Excellence. The $25,000 prize—in honor of Swann’s work in introducing rural students to cultures around the world—stipulated that the teacher must spend $10,000 of the money on international travel. Swann tapped her friend Vance—whose son and daughter attended Prices Fork—to join her. The pair traveled through India and Nepal for three months, visiting schools, monasteries, homes, artists, and craftspeople, while Swann corresponded with her classroom and others in Ohio, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Their travels resulted in the production of Into Nepal: A Journey Through the Kathmandu Valley, which Swann and Vance co-wrote and videotaped. The production won NETA’s (National Educational Telecommunication Association) award for Best Documentary of 2003.

This June, Swann and Vance were joined by Tom Landon, a producer and education specialist for Blue Ridge Public Television who helped produce 2001’s Into Nepal; photographer Sherrie Austin; outdoorsmen and Jenna’s brother Jason Swann; Blacksburg public school teacher Reba Webb Hoffman (who ventured outside of the country for the first time); and Diane Scribner Clevenger, senior minister of the Unity Church of Roanoke Valley. The eclectic group delivered the painting on June 28th and participated in an elaborate festival to honor the exchange. It was the first festival to celebrate a relationship between Westerners and the people of this remote region, and it was all carefully recorded through the lens of Jenna Swann’s high-definition video equipment. The team plans to later edit the footage and create a follow-up documentary to Into Nepal.

As the first Westerner, and the first woman, to be invited to undertake the sacred art of Thanka, in August of 2006 Vance with Swann wrote His Holiness the Dalai Lama to inform him of the project. His Holiness responded with his personal approval and good wishes for the festival and film, along with recognition of Amchi Tsampa’s many achievements. 

Who is this Tsampa? The lama is the tenth-recorded generation in his family of continuous amchis, or highly trained traditional Himalayan Tibetan herbal doctors, practitioners of a rare and endangered field. One of his major accomplishments of cultural preservation—one that was delivered to the Dalai Lama himself—was a project in which Tsampa personally interviewed more than 1,000 fellow amchis, recording variations of their dying art. As the world’s foremost expert in the subject, Tsampa worked with National Geographic when the magazine was crafting an article on the endangered medicinal plants of the Himalayas.

The lama also planned and built the Jomsom Eco-Museum, and spearheaded the building of a monastery for women outside of Jomsom. Opened in January 2000, the nunnery houses up to forty women and thrives on spring water and water-powered electricity.

And as an adherent of Nagpa, a form of Buddhism known as the Whispered Secret Tradition, the cultural leader is “one of the last of his kind,” according to Vance. Only a few initiates on Earth are reared to represent this tradition at any one time.   

To Vance and Swann, Tsampa is also a dear friend.

Officially consolidated into Nepal in 1762, Tsampa’s hometown of Jomsom and the surrounding region of Mustang were once Tibetan soil. The political partition would prove fortunate for the ethnically Tibetan Nepalese population that thrives there. Since the Chinese illegal invasion of Tibet in 1949, religious and cultural freedom has been impossible for Tibetans in their occupied homeland.

And while Vance believes Tibet will persevere—that exiled Tibetans like the Dalai Lama will eventually return home to a liberated Tibet— there is a sense of urgency in the artist’s voice when she talks about A Gift for The Village. Fifty years of torture, environmental plunder, and atrocious human rights violations have taken a toll on Tibetan society, and even if China relinquishes its claim—which it shows no signs of doing as of yet—there will be no returning to the fabled Tibet of centuries past. Of the many documented brutalities, in Ama Adhe’s The Voice That Remembers, a Tibetan woman recalls 29 years inside Chinese-forced labor camps. Among many degradations, the woman was forced to take long pages of rare, sacred texts, illuminated with real gold ink, and soil them with prisoners’ urine and feces. Under threat of torture or worse, the prisoner then beat them together with mortar and pestle, applying this “gruel” by hand to her cell walls, like adobe.  

Yet Adhe is one example of the many Tibetans whose spirit and compassion persevere in the face of devastation. “The Tibetans are resilient beyond compare,” Vance says. “Given how little the world has offered to help, they are the most successful exiles in history.”

For Vance, A Gift for The Village is a reminder of the struggle, but more, it is symbol of each individual’s responsibility in creating a more compassionate, connected world. The Amchi is no mere expression of an artist’s fascination with a distant culture, in other words; nor is the 8,000 mile journey an indulgence of a band of travelers’ itchy feet.  In fact, in Vance’s view, there’s “no more time” for art—or for any form of expression—that does not serve a purpose—of healing, of connection, of bridging cultures and people in an increasingly disconnected and violent world. 

“We’re not doing this just to do it,” she says thoughtfully. “We’re doing it because there’s no more time to operate without trying to be of genuine benefit. Not for a poet, not for an artist, not for a conversation between neighbors.”

This—a re-envisioning of what a gift means—is Vance’s gift. Not only to Tsampa or to the people of Jomsom, but also to the world.

To read more about A Gift for The Village, visit the project website at www.agiftforthevillage.com and keep an eye out for the forthcoming documentary. View other examples of Jane Vance’s work and read more about the artist at www.janevance.com. For the latest news on the Tibetan struggle, visit the official website of the exiled Tibetan government at www.tibet.com.

Photo Captions:
Second from Top: Detail from the Amchi painting.
Third from Top: Amchi Tsampa (third from left) and Jane Vance (far right) with Jomsom friends.

Posted: July 1st, 2007 under Visions.
No Comments » 

     Next »

~Elizabeth Parsons’ passion for culture and the arts has earned her a degree in Anthropology and stamps on her passport from places as diverse as Ecuador, Turkey and the European Union. Recently working as a Writer and Event Planner for the Grammy Music Awards in San Francisco, CA, she returns to her hometown of Roanoke to pursue her M.F.A./Creative Writing at Hollins University. Elizabeth can be contacted at 540.345.6300 or elizabeth@citymagazineonline.com.