Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

“You gain much merit in doing such things.”

“Lokesh said in time I will find that the lamb saved me.”

The former abbot slowly nodded. “A man can easily put on a robe. It could mean many things.” They were talking about the murders again.

“Where is the monk Dakpo?”

The dog raised its head.

“Dakpo has gone beyond the mountains. He knows he must return before the full moon.”

“You mean India?” Dakpo had family with the exile government, Trinle had said.

“The other direction.”

Shan puzzled over the words. The other direction was north, or east, deeper into Tibet. The full moon was in five days. Dakpo had confided in Patrul, but not Norbu.

“Why,” he asked hesitantly, “would he leave without the abbot’s permission?”

“Without the government’s permission,” Patrul said, as if correcting him. Some monasteries, Shan reminded himself, had to secure government permission for its monks to travel. Dakpo had not wanted the government to know. Or was it that he didn’t want Major Liang to know?

“Rinpoche,” Shan asked, “you said Jamyang was a friend. Was he a new friend or an old friend?”

“We weren’t sure, he and I.” It was a very Tibetan answer. “When he came to the valley he traveled all the pilgrim’s paths and found me on one up on the mountain. He spent the day with Dakpo and me, praying, cleaning old shrines along the paths, and I invited him to come to the gompa. He declined, said he had become a creature of the high paths, like the wild goats. He said he felt a great affinity for our valley, as if he had been here before. I reminded him that over the centuries many gentle spirits like his had lived at our gompa. He wasn’t certain that day but as time went by he seemed to be convinced he had been here previously, that he had some duty from another time that he still owed the gompa.”

“He said that? A duty?”

The old man offered another serene smile as he turned to stroke the dog. “I told him the devout owed a duty to all of Tibet.”

“To all of Tibet, wherever it is located,” Shan ventured after a moment.

Patrul turned back with surprise on his face. It seemed his eyes were alive again. They fixed Shan with an intense gaze, fixed not on his face, it seemed, but something behind his face. “Once in Tibet there were earth-taming temples to subdue the demons that threatened it. They are lost to us today, but there are new ones, secret counterparts to the old.” When he leaned forward the woman stopped spinning her wheel. His final words came in a low plaintive whisper. “Are you the demon tamer we have prayed for, Shan?”

* * *

Shan left the motorbike hidden among rocks and made the long climb to Jamyang’s shrine. The visit to the monastery had been strangely unsettling. Patrul had been trying to tell him that Chegar had a secret connection to Dharamsala. The trail of a murderer had led him to Tibetan freedom fighters. He had no heart for exposing a killer if it meant also exposing more dissidents. But Liang would relish the opportunity. Revealing a killer in a nest of dissidents would earn him another promotion.

He paused at the intersection of two trails, recognizing the old pilgrim’s path. His last hours with Jamyang continued to haunt him. Words had been spoken that he had not understood, then or now. From where he stood he could just glimpse the little flat where Jamyang had asked him to stop, where the lama had prostrated himself to the mountain. Shan put his hand on a cairn of mani stones, lingering for a moment as if to consult them, then turned onto the path.

When he reached the flat he stepped to the nearby road, trying to reconstruct each of Jamyang’s movements when he had asked Shan to stop his truck there. The lama had warned Shan that he did not understand the dangers of the valley, echoing Shan’s own words. He had asked to stop at the cairns where pilgrims communed with the powerful mountain that protected the valley. The old abbot had said Jamyang felt a connection to the valley, as if he owed it something. He had prayed at each of the cairns and … Shan froze. As the wind lapsed for a moment he heard a new sound, a low, quick murmuring coming from over the edge of the drop-off.

Shan warily approached, seeing now how one end of the prayer flags Jamyang had left had blown out of its anchor and was dangling over the edge. He stared for a moment in disbelief as he saw the white-haired figure huddled on the steep slope at the end of the strand of flags, then carefully climbed down to join him.

Lokesh was tightly clutching the last of the flags in the strand. He nodded as Shan sat beside him. Shan had come to view the silence that often preceded Lokesh’s words as something of a benediction, a way of building reverence before speaking.

“It was always going to be the way of his life,” the old Tibetan said at last. “There was never a chance you could change that.” He spoke as if Shan needed comforting. “Chenmo and Ani Ama came. They are with the American,” he added, acknowledging the question on Shan’s face.

Shan looked back at the flag. Lokesh was again doing exactly what Shan was doing, except in a totally different way. The old Tibetan had gone to the flags to understand Jamyang. Shan had been in a rush with Jamyang, had not paid attention to the lama’s flags, assuming they were traditional mani mantra flags. Now as he lifted one he saw something unexpected, an intricately rendered, unfamiliar deity.

“There are thirty-five flags,” Lokesh said, as if the number were significant. “I saw him working on these. I thought it was for the shrine.”

Shan examined another flag, and another. Each of their images was different, each a painstakingly rendered image of a deity of a different color or shape. Each would have taken hours to complete.

“This would have been the first one,” Lokesh explained, pointing to the white-bodied, highly ornamented deity at the end of the twine. “Vajrasattva. This is how it begins,” he added, pointing to the words inscribed below the image.

“ Namo gurubhay, namo Buddhaya, ” Shan read, then looked up in query.

“Some call it the refuge prayer, others the prayer of remorse. It is the beginning of the ritual, invoking the first of the Confession Buddhas. There are thirty-five in all. Each must be invoked to purify corruption. Scores of thousands of mantras must be offered to empower each. I remember in the last month how tired Jamyang always seemed.”

Shan nodded. “He was going without sleep to complete this.”

Lokesh gazed upon the anchor deity again, as if in silent prayer, then sighed. “We should go up. We should fasten the flags as Jamyang intended.”

Shan rose and put a hand out to help Lokesh up the slope. They tied the strand tightly around the biggest stone they could find and placed it on top of a cairn. He gazed on the flapping flags, ashamed that he had not paid attention when he had been there with Jamyang, ashamed too that he not seen the lama’s need for confession earlier. He reached and touched one of the flags. “I have seen this one, or a bigger one like it. Jamyang kept it by his altar.”

Lokesh stretched the flag and examined it. “There are gods for confession of theft, of lying, of sacrilege,” he said, pain now entering his voice. “But this one”-he looked up at Shan with a lost expression-“this one is for killing.”

After a long moment the old Tibetan settled onto folded legs in the center of the square defined by the cairns, as if to continue the dialogue Jamyang had started with Yangon, the sacred mountain. Shan knew better than to persuade him to come with him. He turned and headed back to Jamyang’s shrine.

He was not sure why the shrine drew him, not sure when he arrived why he felt the need to clean the offerings again. Halfway through the task he realized he had stopped and was staring at the carved deities. “I’m sorry,” he said. The words came out like a sob. More than ever he felt he had let Jamyang down, had failed the Tibetans. The murders were going to be used to destroy the valley, to sap the essence that made it so important to Tibetans. He looked down the slope. Part of him still seemed to be searching for Jamyang’s ghost. He was more confused than ever about who Jamyang was, but knew now that he had felt great anguish in his final days. If Shan had only seen it, perhaps he could have spoken with the lama, helped him find a path other than the day of death.