Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

They ate in wary silence, and Yao was laying out blankets as Shan read the pilgrim’s guide for Zhoka, when Ko muttered a low, frightened curse and pressed his back against the nearest wall. Shan turned to see a figure in the shadow, curling up against a rock. As Corbett coaxed the fire brighter, and Yao found one of the battery lamps, Shan stepped to the newcomer with a blanket.

“We missed you,” he said.

Lokesh gave only a small murmur of acknowledgment. Shan brought him tea, but he would not drink. Corbett brought him an apple but he would not eat. Finally Dawa just sat with him, holding a hand, until both were asleep.

“That bounty for me,” Shan said as he and the American studied the pair. “I presented myself. You should pay me a hundred dollars.”

“I suppose…” Corbett began uncertainly.

“I will give it to Lokesh, for bus fare for Dawa’s parents. They should come home.”

Corbett smiled. “The American taxpayers would be honored.”

When Shan awoke at dawn Lokesh was sitting cross-legged on one of the walls surveying the ruins. Not surveying, Shan saw as he approached his old friend. Praying. His hands were wrapped in a ritual gesture Shan stopped to study. It was not a mudra Lokesh used often. The right hand was crossed over the left, the middle finger and thumbs touching as if he were about to snap his fingers. It was a warrior mudra, meant to invoke a wrathful deity.

Shan sat beside his old friend and tried to find words, starting to speak more than once but stopping short, the sound hanging on his tongue like a small groan.

“Where did you journey inside the rock, all those hours?” Shan asked at last.

“I saw no one. I visited old paintings. I sat in every chamber I could find. It was very dark. It is hard sometimes in such darkness to know if you are moving or the world is moving about you.”

Shan studied his friend. Lokesh was still investigating, seeking in a different way, trying to sense the true nature of the enigmatic gompa.

“Gendun is in there,” Lokesh said.

“We don’t know that for certain.”

Lokesh sighed. He seemed disappointed in Shan’s words. “Not the way that inspector knows things. But he is in there. He is doing what Surya was going to do. He is putting Zhoka back in its place. If it is not too late,” the old Tibetan added.

Shan looked back over the ruins. The words might have had the air of witchcraft to some, senile ramblings to others. Shan didn’t entirely understand himself what Gendun was doing in the dark recesses of the old Buddhist power place. He suspected that putting Zhoka back in its place had something to do with changing the people in the lands that surrounded it. Perhaps restoring it was little different from what the monks who had originally built the earth taming temple had done. It was as if Gendun had gone inside to find an old furnace whose coals had been stoked and banked decades earlier, to revive the last dim spark before it died. But how did anyone, even the holy men of Yerpa, restore such a place?

Shan still didn’t fully understand what Zhoka had been. Perhaps that was the greatest mystery, the one that would explain all else. It was a place of great history, of deep magic, of saints and deities, connected even to a faraway emperor in a faraway time, a place the old Tibetans would die to protect.

“I went into every meditation cell I could find,” Lokesh said suddenly. “I descended into every hole, hoping it was a tunnel. I found many old paintings, some of images I had never seen before. We have seen only a tiny part of what was meant to be.”

“But the passages leading farther inside are all collapsed,” Shan said.

“Yes. I found some small tunnels leading to shrines but the shrines led nowhere else. They were all places of preparation. For somewhere else.”

Corbett appeared, with a bowl of tea for each. After he drank, Lokesh looked up, and rubbed his eyes, as if just coming awake. “I found the beginning place for pilgrims. Come.” He did not elaborate but climbed down and began briskly walking to a ruin nearly fifty yards away, as the others followed. Shan had taken the huge pile of rubble to be a collapsed hall. But the hall was not fully collapsed and Lokesh had found a narrow passage inside.

They climbed down a narrow flight of stairs and entered a chamber inhabited by demons. Every inch of the surviving walls and ceiling had been painted with the images of wrathful protector demons. Yao, carrying his small pack, produced his copy of the pilgrim’s guide and leafed through the pages. “Newcomers may only enter the earth temple through the garden of the demons who watch over it, to all sides and the sky above.”

Yao looked up from his reading for a moment and seemed to lock his gaze with that of a blue demon above him. “Here is where you leave your life behind, for only by doing so may you attain the heaven beyond. Be terrified, or do not continue to the four gates. Become pure or you will not know which is heaven and which is hell. Be always a pilgrim or you will be blind to what you seek.”

“The pilgrim meditated on the demons to become pure,” Shan explained.

“And then descended to the four gates of the mandala,” Lokesh said.

“But there were only two gates,” a voice said from the shadows behind them. The beam of Corbett’s light found Liya, who sat against the wall. The side of her face was bruised, a line of dried blood where the skin on her cheek had been split. As Dawa ran and embraced her she extended her hand as if to ward off any aid. “I’m not really hurt. They jumped me, those same two. I scratched the big one on the cheek when he grabbed me. He hit me and I ran.” She straightened and looked at Shan. “Two gates, only two stairways down.”

Lokesh reached into a pocket and extracted a stone. “I found this by that waterfall. I think it had fallen from above, where it is all shadow now.” He handed Shan a small piece of rock, no more than two inches long.

Shan rolled it over in his palm, looking inquiringly at Lokesh, then studied it closely. One side was painted green. Shan and the old Tibetan exchanged a knowing smile, then Shan gestured for the others to follow him outside, showing them how the entrance to the tunnel was lined up with the end of the collapsed hall. “Probably it was all one structure, so from the time of entering to greet the demons the pilgrim had the sense of being inside the earth.” He squatted at the top of the stairs and made a circle in the soil.

“One of the basic symbols in Tibetan tradition is the circle, the fundamental shape of the mandala,” he explained. “Symbolism was used throughout the construction of gompas, incorporated into the architecture. Several old gompas had central structures built on the scheme of a mandala, three or four stories high, creating three-dimensional mandalas to represent sacred mountains and the ascent to Mount Meru, the center of the universe, the summit of heaven.”

“But everything here was destroyed,” Corbett observed. “Even if there had been a mandala palace, the army leveled it.”

“If you were trying to reach the earth deities, if you were taming the demons who lived in the earth, where would you put your mandala? In the earth,” Shan suggested, and pointed toward the tunnel that led down to the fresco room and drew a line at the base of the circle on the ground, and another at the top, representing the collapsed tunnel on the opposite side of the ruins, then asked for Corbett’s compass. “These tunnels are on an east-west axis.” He demonstrated his point using the compass. Traditionally a mandala had four gates, aligned in the cardinal directions, each associated with complex symbols, each represented by a separate color. “The arrangement of the gates would depend on the deity at the center.” Shan cast a look of inquiry toward Lokesh. “If the earth is to be tamed then it must be the Lord of the Thunderbolt.” Lokesh nodded. “Then the east gate will be white, the south yellow, and the west red. And here,” Shan said, marking a point in the circle halfway between the east and west, “is the waterfall with the old writing on the wall. The green wall. Marking the north gate.”