Authors: Eliot Pattison
As if it had been listening, Yapchi Mountain replied with another of its ominous rumbles.
C
HAPTER
S
EVEN
They rode at a brisk trot over the high plain, their horses seeming eager to catch up with the caravan. Perhaps, Shan thought, the animals were unsettled by the plain, experiencing the same sensations he did, a vague presence, an expectation in the air. He could find no words to describe the feeling. It wasn’t fear, although Dremu frequently rose in his stirrups to look about as if wary of pursuit. There were moments when Shan even felt an unexpected exhilaration as they loped across the wild, remote plain. The high ridges that bounded it on three sides gave it a remote, secret air, a sense of being a world untouched and apart.
As they closed with the caravan he slowed his horse and dismounted, letting Dremu and Winslow catch up with the others as he walked behind. He studied the column of animals and people stretched out over the windblown plain and realized how, during the more peaceful moments of the past few days, he had come to think of their journey as a pilgrimage. He considered the odd assembly. The young girl who spoke for the deities. Nyma the uncertain, illegal nun. The rongpa who thought a jagged piece of stone would protect them from the Chinese. Dremu the bitter warrior, who searched for a way to restore dignity to his family. Perhaps they were more like fugitives than pilgrims. Tenzin the escapee. The American, fleeing from a life and career of disappointment. Perhaps even the Yapchi villagers themselves, now that Colonel Lin had glimpsed Lhandro and Nyma and confiscated Lhandro’s papers.
As the caravan entered the little grove of trees, Nyma and Anya, at the back of the line, paused to study a pattern of stone shapes visible on the slope beyond the trees. They trotted into the shadows as if eager to investigate further. Lhandro waited as the sheep and horses gathered around the small stream that coursed through the grove, then gestured Shan and Winslow down a path that led to the far side of the grove. Shan looked for Lokesh, found him helping the villagers untie the packs from the sheep, then followed the two men through the trees.
Shan had seen many ruined gompas in Tibet, the work of the army and, later, the Red Guard, who together had destroyed all but a handful of Tibet’s six thousand monasteries and convents. But as he stepped out of the grove he realized that never—except for the huge complexes near Lhasa and Shigatse that had been the most conspicuous symbols of traditional Tibet—had he seen such total annihilation. Dozens of large buildings had once extended up the slope and out onto the floor of the plain to the edge of the stream. Nothing was left of them but ragged shards of foundations and, in a few piles, the shattered remains of stone walls. A line of stones extended around the perimeter, along the line of a thick high outer wall that survived only at the nearest corner, where a section nearly ten feet high towered over the ruins.
“Someone’s planning to build something?” Winslow asked at his shoulder.
Shan glanced in confusion, then understood. Scattered among the old foundations were rectangles of small, precisely laid rocks. To the casual observer it might not appear to be so much a ruined gompa, but someone’s plan for a new gompa.
“I forgot what it was like. I was just a youth last time I was here,” Lhandro said in a hushed tone as he joined them. The village headman walked slowly along the line of the outer wall, as if frightened of crossing the line of rocks. “The army came with big cannons, led by Mao’s children.”
Mao’s children. It was a euphemism for the Red Guard, the fanatical waves of Chinese youths unleashed by Mao Tse Tung during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guard had destroyed libraries, universities, hospitals, and any other establishment identified with the reviled four “olds”—old cultures, old customs, old thought, and old habits. Sometimes they had commandeered entire units of the military for their campaigns of political cleansing.
“We all thought there must be rebel soldiers hiding in the mountains. Even the monks came out and stood on top of the walls as though curious to see how far into the mountains the guns would shoot. But the soldiers turned the guns on the gompa. They didn’t warn the monks. Just began shelling. Soldiers set up machine guns and shot into the gompa. Like a war, though no one was fighting back. Some of the old buildings had cellars, temple rooms carved into the rock below them. It took two days before the soldiers decided no one could still be alive in the cellars. Then the Chinese conscripted everyone they could find for miles to work. Every man, woman, and child.”
“Even the monks?” the American asked.
“The monks?” Lhandro asked, looking at the American with a melancholy expression. “That day, when they started shelling, was the last time I saw a monk for years. When they destroyed the gompas in this region they never gave the monks a chance to flee. Many here went to the lhakang, the main temple, and prayed until the end. Some went to the shrines underground. I was with the first group of workers sent here. We were slaves really, slaves for the army.” He stared at the ruins with a hollow expression. “There weren’t any whole bodies left, just body parts. But they made us put all the parts, all that was left of the monks, in two of the big holes that were the remains of the underground shrines. Then we had to cover them. There were no machines to use. We had shovels and hoes only. We buried the monks, then for six months we burned all the timbers and hauled away the rocks.”
“The rocks?” Winslow asked.
“The building stones. Nearly every loose stone was put in trucks. So the gompa couldn’t be rebuilt. The gompa was over five hundred years old, and the old books said it had taken fifty years to construct. Fires were lit and kept burning for days, with paintings and altars and books for fuel. Everything that was not metal or rock was burned. There were a lot of stones. Some went to be crushed for Chinese roads. Some to an army base fifty miles from here. We were sent to use them to build barracks there for the Chinese invaders. That took another six months. Everyone was a slave to the Chinese in those years.” He spoke in the distant, matter-of-fact tone Tibetans usually resorted to when describing the tragedies of the Chinese occupation. Lhandro had to distance himself from the events or he would be unable to speak of them at all. “When we were done here we had to rake the ground smooth,” he added in a near whisper. “They made us spread salt on the soil, so not even a flower would grow again.”
“Christ,” Winslow muttered, his face drawn in pain. His eyes settled on a circular depression of blackened earth thirty feet away. It was, Shan realized, a small bomb crater. “It’s like it just happened.”
But not entirely. New rocks had been brought, or dug out of the soil, and arranged to outline several of the old foundations. And four small buildings had been rebuilt among the ruins. Three of them were at the far side of the old compound, over three hundred yards away, and had the appearance of painstaking reconstruction. The fourth Shan saw only as he stepped closer to the surviving section of outer wall: a small sturdy stone and stucco structure consisting of two new walls built into the surviving corner section of outer wall. In front of its door sat a young boy, playing with pebbles. As Shan appeared the boy’s jaw dropped and he darted away toward the restored buildings in the distance.
In the same moment Lhandro touched Shan’s arm. He turned to see Lokesh standing, slightly bent, holding his belly as he stared at the ruins, as though he had been kicked. As they watched, the old Tibetan turned, or rather staggered about, to study the trees and then the slope above with an anguished expression. He faced the ruins again and stumbled forward, slowly at first, then more quickly until, with a sound like a sob, he broke into a trot toward the center of the ruins.
He ran with a curious gait, repeatedly slowing, looking about, turning left, then right, then jogging again, once even stopping to squat and lift a handful of the sandy earth, gazing at it forlornly as the particles trickled through his fingers, then lowering his hand until it touched the earth. At several places where Lokesh turned, Shan saw there was a narrow line of stones that recalled former foundations. But at most of his turns the earth was bare, although Lokesh seemed to perceive something. As if, Shan realized, he saw the buildings that once stood, as though he were navigating around them.
Suddenly his friend stopped, close to the slope, more than halfway across the ruins, and dropped cross-legged onto the ground. Shan took a few steps forward to join him. But then a figure emerged from the buildings at the far side, walking hurriedly toward them, the boy at his side.
“The keeper,” Lhandro announced with a tone of relief. “He will help us. He will help the monk.” The rongpa stepped forward and met the man a hundred feet away. Together they hurried off toward the injured monk, now lying on a blanket by the stream.
Shan stepped into the ruins, wandering along a long line of rocks before pausing near the center of the vast ruin by two low oblong mounds. A small cairn had been built on each, and along the perimeter of each were stones inscribed with Tibetan letters, some carved, some painted, with the mantra to the Compassionate Buddha: om mani padme hum.
Mani stones,
they were called. As he studied the first mound a deep sadness welled within him. Between the two mounds was a square, eight feet to the side, three feet high, made of stones and mortar. Someone was building a
chorten,
one of the seven-stage shrines, capped by a balloon dome and spire, that were often used to mark sacred relics. How many had there been, he wondered, how many monks at such a large gompa? Three hundred perhaps. Even as many as five hundred.
He felt weak and sat, facing the mounds, and found his right hand extended over his knee, the palm and the fingers extended toward the ground. They had formed a mudra, the earth witness mudra, calling the earth to bear witness.
When he finally stood he saw that Lokesh had not moved. Shan walked to his friend’s side and sat again. Lokesh’s hands were bent in a mudra as well, the thumb and index finger of both hands touching to form a circle, the remaining fingers of each hand extended upward. Shan studied it a moment, confused. It was the
dharmachakra,
the wheel-turning mudra, a mudra used by teachers to invoke the union of wisdom and action which was the goal of Buddhist learning.
“I didn’t know,” his friend said after several minutes, his voice cracking with emotion. “No one mentioned a name for this place where we were going. Rapjung gompa is its name. That plain is a holy place. Metoktang it is called.” It meant the Plain of Flowers.
“You were here before?”
Lokesh nodded. “I didn’t recognize it. Who could have recognized it, after what they did?” He shook his head forlornly. “I always came on a trail that led from the south, not from the west like we came. There were so many buildings, beautiful buildings. And the slopes were covered with trees then, beautiful tall evergreens and rhododendron. I heard the Chinese had taken the forests. I didn’t know they meant like this. Not a twig left except that little grove of junipers.”
“Did you come for the government?” Shan asked.
“Before that. Rapjung was famous for its medicine lamas,” Lokesh said, his voice cracking again. “Not just doctors, but scholars of medicine, those who first found awareness in Buddha and then dedicated their lives to understanding the connection between the health of men and the natural world around them. This plain has great spiritual power. Students came from all over Tibet, from Nepal and India even, to learn about herbs and mixing medicines. There was one lama who taught only about the hour of mixing.”
Shan remembered the strange haunted feeling he had experienced out on the plain. “The hour?”
Lokesh nodded his head solemnly. “There were times of the year when certain medicines should never be mixed, times of the day when certain mixtures were best made, when they would be most potent, certain places where mixing worked best.” He stared down at the barren earth at his feet. “Special medicine plants grew here, on the grounds and out on the plain and in the mountains nearby, that grew nowhere else,” he said, surveying the stark ground of the ruins with haunted eyes. His mouth opened and shut several times, but no words came, and his eyes grew moist. The Chinese had poisoned the earth with salt.
“It was such a joyful place in the summers,” Lokesh continued after a moment, an intense longing entering his voice. “The lamas took us on the plain or into the mountains and we pitched tents so we could collect wild plants and study them, and sometimes collect big sacks of herbs to send to the medicine makers. There were special songs they sang to invoke the healing power of the plants and special foods they ate. When I was here there were a dozen lamas of over one hundred years. I asked one of them whether he lived so long because of the special herbs here. He grew very solemn and said, no it wasn’t the herbs, it was the songs, because the songs kept them connected to all the deities that lived in the land here. They knew teaching songs that would be sung all day without repeating a verse.”
Teaching songs. Lokesh meant special recitations of ancient texts, memorized by the lamas, sometimes done to the accompaniment of horns and cymbals and drums.
“They’re lost now, you know,” Lokesh said in a small voice. “Some of them are lost forever.” His voice shook, and he looked up to Shan as if asking why. “Gone,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion.
The songs were lost, Lokesh meant. Because the lamas who had memorized them had been killed, with no chance to teach them to another generation.
“Why here?” Shan asked after a moment. “You came to this particular spot.”
Lokesh looked up with a sad smile. “There was a lama here, named Chigu. A hundred and five when I last saw him. He had been abbot for many years but had left office when he was seventy-five to spend all his time meditating and making medicines. There was a small courtyard here, with wisteria vines”—Lokesh paused and pointed in the direction of the reconstructed buildings—“where he taught the drying and chopping of herbs and roots. There were big cleavers, and sometimes students lost fingers.” Lokesh paused again. He was adrift in a flood of memory. “Each summer he and I would go out on the plain, only the two of us, walking on game trails, for a week at a time. We gathered herbs and prayed and at night stared at the heavens. There were places high up on flat rocks where we sat, where you could see nothing of the earth, only the heavens, so that we called it sitting in the sky. He told me things his own teacher had told him. His teacher had been one hundred fifteen when he died, in 1903, the Water Hare Year. Chigu Rinpoche told me things from his lips that his teacher had told him from his lips, of things he experienced in the years of the Eighth Dalai Lama,” Lokesh said, wonder in his eyes now. The Eighth Dalai Lama had died in the eighteenth century. “To sit in the night, in the wilderness, and to be connected to the years of the Eighth by a chain of only two tongues, it burned something into my soul,” he said, looking into the patch of empty earth before him. “This is where he lived, these are the chambers where I would come to meet him when arriving each summer.” The last words choked in his throat as Lokesh was overcome with emotion.