Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

As Shan looked at Gendun again he felt a sudden, deep sadness. It was the way the Tibetans defended themselves, taking virtuous positions against impossible odds. In the original war against the Chinese invaders thousands of Tibetans had charged machine guns with muskets and swords, or holding only prayers in their hands. Coming to Zhoka was Surya’s way of doing the same thing. “Lha gyal lo,” Shan said at last in a tight voice.

The old lama nodded somberly.

“Why now?” Shan asked.

Gendun waved his hand toward the ruins. “Zhoka was a very important place once, a place of great miracles. There are many things to learn here, things that must be revived.”

Shan surveyed the abandoned gompa. The deep bowl in which the monastery had been built was over five hundred yards across at its base, and the ruins spilled up the slopes. Many of the rock walls that had defined courtyards and gardens had survived, even a number of the building walls stood, though none could be called intact. One huge wall, the end of what must have been an assembly hall, towered nearly twenty feet high, with a jagged six-foot hole in its center. Charred floor and roof timbers jutted from walls that leaned precariously. Shan knew little about Zhoka, except that it had been famed for its artists. Many of Zhoka’s remaining walls bore fragments of paintings like the broken image of a deer Surya had held. Surya was Yerpa’s most accomplished artist, the creator of magnificent thangkas, traditional Tibetan cloth paintings, and murals that graced the walls of the hermitage. For Surya, Lokesh had once said, his art was the way he prayed. But Gendun was sending him to live in a place where all the art had died.

They sat in silence and listened to the distant throat chant.

“What can be said to all these people, who have never been inside a temple?” Shan asked at last. “To those whose fear has been so great they have never even spoken with a monk?” There was to be a meal at noon, when Gendun meant to address the gathering.

Gendun smiled. “We will teach them to begin falling with their eyes open.” It was one of the old teaching riddles, one Gendun had used with Shan in Shan’s first days at Yerpa. What is the way of human life, the student asked. An open-eyed man falling down a well, the master replied. As jarring as the words seemed at first, Shan had come to recognize them as the perfect caption for the lives of those who lived at Yerpa. The spirit was jostled through many life forms in its development, Surya had told Shan during his early days at Yerpa, and could expect to live a brief human incarnation only after a thousand other incarnations. Life was so short, and the human incarnation so precious, that the hermits of Yerpa devoted every moment to enriching it, not only through their religious teachings but by creating wondrous works of art, illuminating manuscripts, writing histories, composing poetry and creating beauty in the ways that translated the teachings of compassion into the smallest of actions. Once you recognized the well you were tumbling into, Gendun was fond of saying, what else could you do?

Gendun knew as well as Shan that one informant, one errant patrol on this day, could mean the end of Yerpa, which had sheltered monks, scholars, and hermits for nearly five hundred years. The end of a place Shan had come to view as one of the great treasures of the planet, a brilliant gem on the crust of a drab world.

“I have brought what you will need, Shan,” Gendun said, gesturing toward a tattered canvas drawstring bag with faded, once elegant Tibetan script depicting the mani mantra, the traditional invocation of compassion. “Lokesh can show you the way this evening. There is a full moon.”

Gendun and Shan had solemnly packed the bag the day before as Gendun spoke of ancient hermits and recited poems the hermits had written. In the excitement of the day Shan had forgotten that he was about to leave on a solitary month-long hermitage in a cave deep in the mountains.

The sight of the bag released a new flood of emotion. Not long after he had returned to Yerpa from the north the month before, Shan had fallen gravely ill, burning with fever, lapsing in and out of consciousness for three days. When he recovered, Gendun had been very quiet around Shan, as if troubled. Something had happened that no one would speak of. Fearful that a new danger had arisen for the monks, Shan had pressed Lokesh until the old Tibetan had explained that in his fever one night Shan had called for Gendun like a frightened child, crying, saying he had to go home, saying he had to be free now.

The words from Shan’s sickness had strangely shaken Gendun and Lokesh. It was why Shan’s fever had lasted so long, Lokesh had explained, leaving him so weak he could barely sit up, because his spirit had become so imbalanced, because he had what the Tibetan doctors called heart wind.

Shan had no home beyond Yerpa, no real family but the monks and Lokesh. But Lokesh explained that the fever had burned away into a dark place inside Shan, a desperate place that had not been touched by the Tibetans’ healing, a place the Tibetans did not know how to reach. It had hurt Shan beyond words to see the self-doubt on the countenances of Gendun and Lokesh, and it had been days before he could bring himself to speak about it, to try to explain it away, as a dream perhaps, one of the recurring dreams of himself as a boy looking for his father. Don’t believe that voice, he had wanted to tell them, don’t believe that part of me doesn’t want to stay with you, don’t believe that you are incomplete as teachers.

“You must journey inside,” Gendun had finally told him, using one of his phrases for a long-term meditation. “You must find a way to stop imprisoning yourself. I know a cave,” he had announced, and they had spent more than a week preparing, meditating together, selecting the items to accompany Shan. A few butter lamps. Two blankets. A pouch of barley, a small pot, a pouch of yak dung for fuel. And his old heirloom throwing sticks, used by Shan and several generations of his family before him to contemplate the Tao te Ching, the ancient Chinese book of wisdom.

“How could I leave now?” Shan asked in a whisper, not even sure Gendun could hear, but knowing what the answer would be. “The soldiers will tell Colonel Tan about the festival now. There will be danger for the monks of Yerpa, danger like never before.”

“For us there is nothing more important than meeting these people, for whom the Buddha has been but a shadow all these years. For you there is nothing more important than reaching that cave.”

There was movement behind them. They rose and discovered Liya, gazing at them hesitantly. The shy young woman seemed somehow stricken. Lokesh appeared behind her, glancing with a worried expression toward Shan, trying to calm Liya with a hand on her shoulder.

The big ox-like herder emerged from the shadows, leading Jara and most of the other hill people.

“Soldiers!” he barked, pointing to the old stone tower. “Between us and our homes!” The Tibetans were murmuring excitedly, fear back in their eyes. “The whole world knows of your secret festival!” the big herder snapped at Liya in an accusing tone. “You may as well have sent a personal invitation to that damned colonel.”

Liya turned toward Gendun, and her eyes grew wide in surprise. Shan followed her gaze to discover that Gendun had settled onto the long lintel stone. He was in the lotus position, feet folded under him, his right hand open, fingers pointing downward, in the earth witness mudra, one of the ritual hand gestures. He was facing the western ridge, in the direction of the soldiers. One of the old women who had been sitting at the chorten pushed forward and settled to the ground in front of the lama. “If soldiers are coming today,” she declared, “here is where they will find me.”