Ma Jian - Red Dust

I follow the brothers back to the body. Immediately the sky darkens with screeching vultures that dive and wheel. Black crows cover the cliff waiting for their chance. The moment Dawa slits his knife through Myima’s face and peels the skin back, I forget what she used to look like. Dorje chops her flesh into small pieces, hammers her fingers to a pulp and throws them to the crows. A pack of vultures fight over the intestines.

Myima’s body disappears from the burial site. I think of the ritual bowl made of a human skull that I bought in the Barkhor. The bone is brown and burnished from years of use. It must have been dropped at some point in the past — the crack along the left side is filled with dirt.

At last Dawa staggers back to the fire, driving the birds away with a bunch of Myima’s braids that are still tied with red thread.

I check my watch. I have been up here for two hours. It is time go down. The soldier is waiting for me in his room. He said he would borrow a boat today and take me fishing on the lake.

When I leave the seat of Tingri county and set off for Everest on a path five thousand metres above sea level, I understand how hard it is for man to live in the sky. The air is so thin I have to breathe through my mouth. The ground seems to shake and the houses of the nearby village and the river beyond it appear to waver in mid-air. I think back to the show I saw a few days ago in Shigatse celebrating thirty-one years of ‘peaceful liberation’. As soon as the Sichuanese troupe finished dancing ‘Tibetan Girls Wash Clothes For Their Dear Friends, The PLA Soldiers’ with beaming smiles, they rushed backstage and clamped oxygen masks over their faces. They travelled here on a political assignment, I came to find peace of mind. But Tibet’s high plateau is no place for the Han.

I sit down at the village crossroads and try to catch my breath. Children slowly surround me. Some peer at my hair and face, others at my clothes, beard, camera. In the pauses between breaths I try to smile. Eventually I stand up and ask the way to the village committee house.

The village secretary attended Tingri county high school. In the time it takes to smoke a cigarette he reads my introduction letter. His face melts into a smile and five minutes later he looks up. I tell him the radio station has sent me here on a political assignment to climb Mount Everest. He is not interested in who sent me, but insists I cannot climb alone. A man started from here last year, and wrote a will before he left. When he returned two weeks later, his face was purple, his nose and ears lost to frostbite. He had to spend a month in the county hospital. The secretary rests his head against the wall. His dropsied face looks serene. ‘Not everyone can touch Green Tara’s face,’ he says, very slowly. Then, after a long pause he adds, ‘At the foot of Everest, is a river. If its waters do not freeze you to death, its ice rocks will break your bones.’

I gaze at the dusty willow in the yard outside and my heart sinks.

‘There is a hill nearby you can climb, if you want a glimpse of Everest.’

‘I heard expedition teams drive past here on their way to Base Camp.’ I take out my fountain pen and mutter, ‘I’ll just fill up my pen if you don’t mind.’

‘But they are mountaineers, with professional equipment. That mountain is no place for tourists.’

‘Well, are there any cultural sites near here?’ When the cartridge is full I discover the ink is blue, not black as I had thought. I hate writing with blue ink. A wave of tiredness sweeps over me.

‘I can introduce you to an eighty-three-year-old Nepalese silversmith. Two Lhasa journalists interviewed him this year. He’s had his picture in the papers.’

‘All right, I will see the Nepalese silversmith then. Is there somewhere to stay in the village?’ My heart is still pounding.

‘We have a small guesthouse.’ He points to a string of keys hanging on the wall. ‘But no restaurant, I’m afraid.’

So I stop and go no further. I will explore the village and head back to Shigatse tomorrow. When I collapse on the metal bed my mind turns to jelly. I open my map and notebook and try to organise my thoughts.

The village is not marked on the map, so I draw a red circle around Tingri. My path south is blocked by the highest mountain in the world. It was mad of me to come here. I have no equipment and no experience of climbing above the snow line. My notebook has lost its spine.

25 August. Gyantse. This morning I visited the huge, octagonal stupa also known as the ‘Tower of A Hundred Thousand Images’. It was ransacked in the Cultural Revolution and the interior was cold and bare. The streets outside were empty, apart from a lone postbox at the crossroads. As I climbed to the fort behind the stupa it rained and I kept slipping down the hill. When the British force advanced on Gyantse in 1903, that hill was the main battleground. The Tibetan soldiers defending the fort were heavily outnumbered and many chose to jump to their deaths from the ramparts rather than die at the hands of the British.

Back in my hostel this afternoon, I met a living buddha from Sichuan who is travelling to Shigatse for a religious meeting. I fetched a prayer scarf and went to visit him in his room.

I told him I was a journalist and a Buddhist. He asked me who my teacher was, I said Master Zhengguo and he said he knew him well. He is 56 years old. At 8 he studied Buddhist scriptures at Sera Monastery and attended classes for young incarnate lamas at Drepung.

I asked him his views on the changes taking place in Tibetan monasteries. For example, in the past, the 1,200 monks of Tashilumpo Monastery relied on the community for their upkeep, but now the monastery has opened a Buddha Warrior Company and supports itself from the revenue of souvenir shops.

He said: ‘The government has relaxed its policies on religion. Retired lamas receive a cadre’s pension now and people are free to visit temples, give offerings and invite lamas to recite scriptures in their homes. But Buddhists are more concerned about the next world than the trivialities of the present. In the past, every Tibetan was a Buddhist and society was stable. But today’s monks do not understand the scriptures. Their studies are poor. Their minds have been corrupted by the six dusts. All they seek is material comfort and this leads to suffering. There was more poverty in old Tibet, but less suffering than there is today. The more desires the deeper the pain.’

I said desires are not the only source of pain. Man can also suffer from a sense of helplessness, a feeling of being oppressed by society and having nowhere to turn. Then I asked about the punishments the religious leader Tsong Khapa stipulated for monks who violated Buddhist law: chopping hands, cutting lips, burying alive, drowning. I asked how a religion that promised release from misery could endorse such cruelty.

He said: ‘Every religion has its rules. Those punishments only apply to the monastic order, and they are seldom carried out. In China, Daoist monasteries employ the death sentence. All suffering has its cause though, and man must learn to reap what he sows. Our punishments are the fruit of sins committed in previous lives. The only escape from a life of misery is to empty the craving from your heart. The Buddha said that the three realms of samsara are worlds of dust, filled with suffering. It is good to ask questions, but you should not be so concerned with success and failure. It will cause you much turmoil.’

I said: ‘I became a Buddhist because I thought the world was full of pain and that Buddha offered a path to freedom. I was rebelling against the Party and all that it stood for. But now I see that although the communists have destroyed Tibet, lamas lay the blame on karma and the sins of past lives. The communists only allowed religion to return because it absolves them from responsibility for the pain they have inflicted. Buddhism is playing into the hands of the tyrants. And this has made me question my belief.’