Ma Jian - Stick Out Your Tongue

She opened her eyes. The entire hall was flooded with sunlight. Above the dark clouds of incense smoke that shimmered around her, she saw a golden smile appear on the face of Buddha Sakyamuni. She turned her head from Labrang Chantso’s foul-smelling mouth and, among the sea of shaven heads, caught sight of Geleg Paljor. She quickly closed her eyes again, dug her head into Labrang Chantso’s chest and clenched her jaw.

It was noon before the Ritual of Empowerment came to an end.

When Sangsang Tashi woke from her sleep, she found herself on the hard cushions, kneeling on all fours like a dog. She was still trembling and soaked in sweat. Her thoughts suddenly turned to her dying mother.

Two nuns walked over, hoisted her up and with water from a golden bowl wiped the blood and sweat from her body. She was paralysed. Her legs were completely numb.

When she finally made it to her feet, the horns blasted in unison and the air filled with incense smoke and the sound of sacred chanting. The golden bowl was placed on the mandala as an offering to the deities. Labrang Chantso had wrapped himself in his robes again and returned to his woven mat. His cheeks were flushed and glowing. Sangsang Tashi’s legs shook as she waited for the ceremony to end. She was surprised that in just a few hours she had lost all the yogic skills that had taken her so many years to acquire. But the thought that she was a woman, that in every cell of her body she was a woman, no longer astonished her.

It was on her second night in the frozen river that Sangsang Tashi died. According to the rites, she was meant to meditate in the ice river for three days before manifesting her Buddha Nature. Three lamas had taken it in turns to watch over her and crack the ice that formed around her neck. She had tried to recite an invocation to summon fire into her body, which had proved so effective in the past, but it failed to protect her from the freezing temperatures.

On the third day, just before dawn, Lama Tsungma, master of rites, left the campfire, trod through the snow to the edge of the river and saw Sangsang Tashi’s body sinking below the surface. When he pulled her out, he discovered that she had become as transparent as the ice. Where the fish had bitten into her knees, there was not a trace of blood. Her eyes were half-open, as they were when she used to meditate on a flame of light.

At daybreak, a group of lamas arrived to greet the manifested Living Buddha. They were dressed in elaborate ceremonial robes and rode horses draped in coloured silk. It was not important to them whether the Living Buddha was alive or not. Nevertheless, when they saw Sangsang Tashi’s body they couldn’t help but gather round in amazement. She was lying on her back, frozen to the ice. Cool rays of sun bathed her in a soft light. Everyone stared at the organs floating in her transparent body. A fish that had somehow gnawed its way into her corpse was swimming back and forth through her intestines.

The cup carved from Sangsang Tashi’s skull is now sitting on my desk. The man who sold it to me said that he’d inherited it from his great-grandfather who had studied sorcery at Manrinba Medical College. The skull cup used to be Tenpa Monastery’s most prized ritual object. It was displayed in the main temple and used only during the most important empowerment ceremonies. The bone has yellowed with age. It must have been dropped at some point in the past as there’s a crack down the left side that’s crammed with dirt. The fine line running down the dome of the skull zigzags like an electrocardiogram. According to a doctor friend of mine, this indicates that the cranium belonged to a pubescent girl. The exterior of the skull is decorated with ornate brass medallions and the interior is lined with gold.

The seller wanted five hundred yuan for it, but I managed to beat him down to a hundred. If anyone would like to buy it from me, just get in touch. I’ll accept any offer, as long as it covers the cost of my travels to the north-east.

A hunted animal will always try to run as far away as possible. The further it runs, the safer it feels. In 1985, after three years of running from the authorities in China, I finally headed for Tibet. At the time, the Tibetan Plateau was the most distant and remote place that I could imagine. As my bus left the crowded plains of China and ascended to the clear heights of Tibet, I felt a sense of relief. I hoped that here at last I’d find a refuge from the soulless society that China had become. I wanted to escape into a different landscape and culture, and gain a deeper insight into my Buddhist faith.

But when I reached Lhasa, I found a city that was under siege. The Chinese government, which had ‘liberated’ Tibet in 1950, was launching celebrations for the twentieth anniversary of the Tibet Autonomous Region. Although the air was filled with the sound of jubilant music, the atmosphere was tense. One could sense the hostility the Tibetans felt towards their Chinese occupiers. No one was allowed out on the streets apart from a select group of people who’d been chosen by the government either to take part in the parades or to stand on the pavement waving flags. On the second night, I couldn’t bear being cooped up any longer, and slipped out for a midnight stroll, but was promptly arrested by the local police.

When the siege was lifted, I picked up a job painting propaganda murals outside the local radio station. Once I’d earned enough money, I set off into the countryside. What I encountered both fascinated and bewildered me.

From a distance, the wastes of the high plateau had a hypnotic beauty. But after I had trudged across them for days on end, the emptiness became stupefying. I lost all sense of reality and travelled as though in a trance. In the thin mountain air, it was hard to distinguish fact from fantasy. My mind was tormented by visions of Buddhist deities and memories of home.

In the grasslands I slept under the stars or shared tents with nomads; in the villages I slept on dirt floors. The poverty I saw was worse than anything I’d witnessed in China. My idyll of a simple life lived close to nature was broken when I realised how dehumanising extreme hardship can be. The Tibetans treated me with either indifference or disdain. Sometimes they even threw stones at me. But the more I saw of Tibet and the damage that Chinese rule had inflicted on the country, the more I understood their anger. For the first time in my life I felt that I was walking through a part of the world where I had no right to be.

My hope of gaining some religious revelation also came to nothing. Tibet was a land whose spiritual heart had been ripped out. Thousands of temples lay in ruins, and the few monasteries that had survived were damaged and defaced. Most of the monks who’d returned to the monasteries seemed to have done so for economic rather than spiritual reasons. The temple gates were guarded by armed policemen, and the walls were daubed with slogans instructing the monks to ‘Love the Motherland, love the Communist Party and study Marxist-Leninism’. In this sacred land, it seemed that the Buddha couldn’t even save himself, so how could I expect him to save me? As my faith crumbled, a void opened inside me. I felt empty and helpless, as pathetic as a patient who sticks out his tongue and begs his doctor to diagnose what’s wrong with him.

I returned to Beijing in a state of nervous exhaustion. I locked myself up in my one-room shack and started writing feverishly. Through the stories that took shape, I wanted to express my confusion and bewilderment, my sympathy for the marginalised and dispossessed, my frustration with blind faith, and my distress at the losses we incur on the march to so-called ‘civilisation’. I wanted to write about Tibet as I had experienced it, as both a reality and a state of mind. I let my guard down and wrote without thought of what the repercussions might be.