Jamyang Norbu - The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes

'Merciful Tara. This is terrible. It was unforgivable of me to allow you to put your lives at such risk.'

'You must not upset yourself over it, Reverend Sir,' said Holmes reassuringly. 'When all's said and done, we did manage to come out of it without too much damage.'

'Not quite, Mr Holmes. I just received word from Tsering that two men were wounded by the firing from the Chinese legation -though not mortally so – thanks be to the Buddha. But far more serious is the matter of your exposure to the Dark One, or Moriarty, as you know him. The Amban is bound to lodge a serious complaint to the Regent about unauthorised foreigners in the city.'

'With our locus standi in this country fast becoming a questionable one,' said Holmes, 'it is vital that we act swiftly.'

'The Regent will also lose no time in pressing charges of treason against me,' said the Lama Yonten mournfully. The Lama's melancholia was infectious and even dampened somewhat the tremendous joie de vivre I was experiencing from having survived that terrifying encounter with Moriarty. The Lama's low spirits also reminded me of the original purpose of our mission – and its failure.

'Oh! Dash it all!' I exclaimed, disgusted with myself. 'After all the trepidation and bother, and I did not even think to appropriate the bally scroll before fleeing the scene.'

'Don't be too hard on yourself, old fellow,' said Holmes, 'I nearly forgot too, in all that excitement.'

'You have it!' I cried with joy.

He pulled out the scroll from the pouch of his heavy robe. 'Yes. We have not yet met our Waterloo, Hurree – if I may resume Moriarty's Napoleonic analogy – but this is our Marengo, for it began in defeat and ended in victory.'

He pushed the empty dishes on the table to one side, and, unrolling the scroll carefully, laid it flaton the surface of the table. He then methodically examined it with his magnifying lens.

The painting, on sized cotton, was about one and a half feet by two, but its rich brocade border brought it up to the measurements that Mr Holmes had mentioned earlier. The design of the mandala itself was exactly the same as others of the Kalachakra tantra that I had seen before, though the colours on this one were appreciably deeper, probably due to its great age.

'It has obviously been hung for a very long time,' commented Holmes, without looking up from his lens.

'Well, it has been there on the chapel wall,' said the Lama, 'ever since I can remember. And I entered the service of His Holiness's

former sacred body as a boy.'

'… the design on the brocade,' observed Holmes' 'has become distorted by the stretching of the vertical weave in the material – the cumulative effect of time and gravity. Now let us see what we have on the other side.'

He turned the scroll over carefully. On the back of the painting were a number of lines of Thibetan writing in the uniform uchen print. It stated briefly, just as the young Grand Lama had told us, that the painting had been commissioned by the first Grand Lama after his meeting with the 'Messenger,' and his journey to Shambala; followed by the date and the seal of the Grand Lama. Below this were seventeen lines of verse. Thefirst seven lines were a kind of benediction, while the remaining lines formed the actual poem, seemingly a description of the various parts of the mandala structure, but mixed with strange instructions. A queer rigmarole, with something of the flavourof a nursery rhyme. These seventeen lines were written in the cursive umay script, clearly penned with the angular nibbed bamboo peri that Thibetan calligraphers were wont to use. As I remarked at an earlier instance, Mr Holmes was unfamiliar with this script, and he now requested the Lama Yonten to read it to him. The Lama adjusted his spectacles and, bending over to peer at the scroll on the table, read the following lines in his high, sing-song voice:

Om Svastil

Reverence to thee, Buddhas of the Three Ages and Protector of all Creatures.

O, assembled Gurus and Warriors of Shambala.

Out of your great compassion show us the true path.

When wandering through the delusion of samsara guide

us on to the true path.

Facing the sacred direction

Turning always in the path of the Dharma Wheel

Circle thrice the Mountain of Fire

Twice the Adamantine Walls

Proceeding once around the Eight Cemeteries

And Once the Sacred Lotus Fence,

Stand before the Walls of the Celestial City.

Then from the Southern Gate turn to the East

Enter the inner-most palace from the Northern portals

And sit victorious on the Vajra throne. EE – TI!

'It is a lot of gobbledegook,' said I, when the Lama had finished.

'Nay, not necessarily so, Babuji,' objected the Lama Yonten. 'The occult sciences have always used inscrutable and symbolic language to safeguard secret knowledge and prevent its revelation to the profane.'

'So you think, Sir, that this has some hidden meaning?' I asked.

'Verily, though it be hidden from me.'

'And from anyone else, too, I should jolly well think,' said I, scratching my head absolutely mystified.

Sherlock Holmes absent-mindedly sipped a cup of Chinese tea – the only refreshment he had partaken of that day – and once again lit the unsavoury pipe which was the companion of his deepest meditations.

'I wonder…' said he, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. 'Perhaps there are points that have escaped your Spencerian intellect. Let us consider the problem in the light of pure reason. The common denominator in the various pieces of our puzzle -the Grand Lama's proposed retreat, the Ice Temple, the mandala painting, and this cryptic verse – is some kind of connection to Shambala. That is our point of departure.'

'A somewhat broad one, Sir,' said I doubtfully.

'Well, let us see, then, if we can narrow it. As I focus my mind upon the verse, it seems rather less impenetrable. In spite of its cryptic nature, it is not too difficult to see that what we have here is a set of instructions.'

'It is a guide to Shambala!' I cried triumphantly.

'A guide?'

'I mean it is a description of the route to that place. We have the legend that the first Grand Lama may have travelled there. Probably he recorded the route of his journey.'

'Humm. Any other reasons for thinking so?'

'Well, there are also certain words in the message which provide indications of it being some kind of travel itinerary. We have the word…umm "Proceed" in the twelfth line. Then… let me see… aah… "direction"… in the eighth and ninth lines. There are also the many references to "Mountains" and "Walls" and a "City."'

'Good Hurree, good! But not, if I may say so, quite good enough. There are difficulties with your theory. Consider just the tenth and eleventh lines… "Circle thrice the mountain of Fire, Twice the Adamantine Walls"… and others like it. Even if we were to assume that such places did exist, just going round and round them would not get us anywhere.'

'We'd be going around in circles,' I admitted, a trifle abashedly.

'Exactly There are just too many references to circles in this message to make it possible that it is a physical description of a route to some actual destination.'

'You are right, Mr Holmes,' said the Lama Yonten.'The message is probably symbolic. The circle, or the wheel, is the omniscient symbol of the essential principles of our faith; of cause and effect, of birth and death, indeed of the entire cycle of existence itself. Perhaps the message is nothing more than that – just a religious discourse couched in recondite metaphysical terms.'

'That really won't do, Your Reverence,' said Holmes, shaking his head. 'It hardly stands to reason that a man of Moriarty's unregenerate nature should take such trouble to steal a religious tract. No. The message definitely conceals something of great material advantage to the Professor. His own words seem to indicate that he is seeking some tremendous source of power.'