‘I will get straight down to business, Wang,’ the man said, when they were seated alone in his living room. ‘On the arts black market, there is a notice for a secret bidding for a… ’ He paused, took out a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and read out, ‘An artefact called a
paiza
. This
paiza
is supposed to date back to the time of the first emperor of the Yuan Dynasty, Kublai Khan.’ There was a momentary silence before he looked up at Wang and declared, ‘It is imperative that the Party win this bid – for reasons that are not important to you.’
For many years now, Michael Wang had been part of a select coterie of dealers with insider information on the auction of objets d’art which could not be sold on the open market and quietly found their way into the private collections of billionaires and unelected heads of state.
‘Yes,
Zungjing de Tongzhi
,’ Wang said obsequiously, addressing the other man as his ‘respected comrade’, ‘I have heard of such an auction. But it is open to a select few; and the starting bid is ten million dollars.’ He paused, took a deep breath and added, ‘It is way too much for an artefact of that period.’
‘That is precisely where you are mistaken, Wang,’ the Party official rebuked him. ‘It is
not
a common artefact, as you have assumed. This
paiza
is rumoured to be a map of some kind that will lead to the Tibetan kingdom of Shambhala. The winner of the bid I have mentioned will automatically become a member of the team being put together for an expedition whose mission is to discover the kingdom.’
‘I was not aware of this,
Zungjing de Tongzhi
.’
‘You deal routinely and, I understand,’ the Party official gave a sly smile, ‘very profitably in the arts. So profitably, it seems, that you can afford to live in the most expensive suburb in America. Yet you talk like a miser.’
‘It is for the cover,
Zungjing de Tongzhi
.’
‘Yes, indeed. And that is why the Party has selected you for this job; with you operating on our behalf, no one would suspect our involvement.’
Wang bowed in acquiescence, but the other man could read the worry on his face.
‘Your avarice knows no bounds, Wang,’ he declared, his voice acquiring dangerous overtones. ‘You remain as greedy as a pig, despite the decadent lifestyle you have been enjoying all these years with the Party’s full financial support.’
‘The sum in question is so large,
Xiansheng
,’ Wang mumbled, ‘that I am apprehensive about offering the Party a guarantee about winning the bid.’
‘Do not lose control of your bowels, Wang. The amount will be wired to you.’ Having said that, the man continued in a softer, silkier voice, ‘Do not fail us, my friend. It will not be thought of well.’
‘It shall be as the Party desires,
Zungjing de Tongzhi
.’
New York
A
PRIL 1986
The snow, falling in thick, powdery swirls on the sidewalk, speckled the windscreens of the big cars as they pulled up, one after another, with five-minute intervals between, in front of the entrance to the club. It had taken some doing to convince their clients that transport from their residences and peripheral security would be taken care of. As the occupants of the cars alighted in groups and checked in, the pairs of men on lookout, posted on both sides of the street, radioed in the arrivals.
As the last motorcade docked, the woman seated backstage next to Josh Wando received the information over a headset she was wearing. She nodded to him and said, ‘We’re about to roll.’
Inspired by Charon, the boatman on the River Styx who admitted the dead into the afterworld on payment of a fee, the club’s name, Josh mused, was an apt one, given the nature of the business they were about to transact. Built in the 60s and an avant-garde nightclub in its heyday, when the flower cult in Lower Manhattan was at its height, the
Charon
had subsequently gone into a decline after suffering years of neglect. With real estate in this area looking up lately and given the club’s ideal location, it had been bought over by a little-known entrepreneur who specialized in opening and managing gentlemen’s clubs with specific requirements. The man had demolished the existing establishment and was redesigning it to very select specifications. He had chosen to retain its old name, though.
Three weeks ago, while still under renovation, with heavy plastic sheeting and scaffolding on the outside, the club’s premises had been taken on rent. The interiors had, however, been completed and were appropriately designed in keeping with the club’s function as a rich voyeur’s retreat, where he could sample the forbidden fruit in luxurious anonymity. Overlooking a central revolving stage were spacious, opulently furnished boxes, where clients could relax and watch the proceedings below, while simultaneously entertaining themselves in their own enclosures, their privacy guaranteed by one-way bulletproof glass panelling which made them invisible to both the performers on the stage below and the occupants of neighbouring boxes. Not that anyone would have thought to intrude. Every person, irrespective of gender, who entered the
Charon’s
artificial afterworld valued anonymity above all else.
As each group stepped out of a car, bundled in ubiquitous overcoats and wearing the trademark dark glasses so essential for obscuring identity – the guests distinguishable from their personal bodyguards simply because of the latter’s imposing bulk – another group of security men whisked them in, led them up one level in a lift and ushered them into their boxes, without them encountering a second lot of clients. No one on the streets saw them go in; the weather had helped in keeping bystanders away, but the security staff wasn’t taking any chances. Two drunks and a black teenage male prostitute in drag had been interned half a block away.
Since the performers of the day were not the usual suspects – Hollywood stars, languishing for too long without a hit, or members of the glitterati known for their exhibitionistic streak – the stage was not awash in multicoloured lights and ‘smoke’ from dry ice to set off the writhing bodies. In their place was a large map of the world, lit up by focus lights from below and above. The woman who had taken the club on rent and now called herself Claire Donovant was on stage, positioned in front of the map. She had found the lights beaming down on her too harsh, but forced herself to get used to the glare. It was eerie, she thought, having to address panels of opaque glass instead of an audience she could actually see. She might as well have been in a sci-fi movie of the 60s.
‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ she began, ‘I am Dr Claire Donovant. It’s so good to know that all of you could make it to this event. I assume you’ve been through the literature we sent you.’
Yes, they have
, she thought,
with their hired experts going through it with a fine-tooth comb. That’s why they’re here today.
‘But as they say, there’s nothing like being face to face. You are all extremely busy people. So we have kept things tight and will just go over the basics. Needless to say, we are paranoid about security. So you need have no worries on that score.’
She was a woman of average height, with a trim, athletic figure. Her heart-shaped face was framed by a mop of thick curly brown hair. She would have been called attractive in a mindswept, just-back-from-a-jog sort of way.
‘What I have, basically, is a background to the, well,’ she paused for a fleeting moment, ‘process – if that’s the appropriate word – under discussion. Most of us are familiar with the Western Asian religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All three have a common background or “basic story”; they share many prophets and beliefs. Their adherents are people of the “Book”, as it were. Some of the main points where these religions converge are as follows: the Genesis or the story of creation, the concept of heaven and hell and the belief in a messiah.’
Claire emerged from behind the rostrum now and strode across to the map, her knee-length skirt revealing long, strong legs. It was something that men noticed right away, she had long realized; while trousers were comfortable, they got you only half the attention. But perhaps she needn’t have bothered for the present audience, she thought wryly.
‘Then there are the Eastern religions,’ she went on, ‘Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and some other lesser-known ones like the animistic Bon of Tibet.’ She indicated the geographical areas on the map as she spoke. ‘Like their younger counterparts in the West, they too share many fundamental beliefs. Now coming to the two we are interested in, both Hinduism and Buddhism specifically believe in a cyclic process of birth and death, which the immortal soul must go through. The Hindu Bhagvatam says that it is only after going through eighty-four billion lives and deaths that the soul gets to be reborn as a human which, in ancient times, was believed to be the highest life form. Good deeds carried out during a soul’s human incarnation apparently ensured a better life in the next cycle; evil actions, on the other hand, were likely to lead to rebirth as, say, a dog – or even a worm.’
She paused. This was the moment where she should have got a laugh from her audience, but the people concealed by the opaque glass panels remained unresponsive, impersonal. She continued, unruffled.
‘The Hindus and Buddhists also believed in the concept of heaven and hell, but these were considered mere cooling-off periods between transitions and not permanent end states.’ She paused again, this time, for emphasis. ‘Their religions, therefore, concentrated on achieving
moksha
or permanent salvation, liberation from this endless and futile cycle of death and rebirth.
‘In the eighth century
CE
, two very important things happened: the first was the advent of Shankara, an Indian philosopher who would lead an unprecedented revival of Hinduism in his country.
‘Shankara was a sanyasi or ascetic by choice from birth. When he felt his mission in the world was over, he focused on achieving liberation. It was then that he recognized the hurdle that stood in the way of his goal. The eastern religions lay great stress on the necessity of balance, moderation and harmony in life and in this sense, Shankara’s evolution as an individual was wanting. Being an ascetic, he had never experienced life as a householder, an average human being with worldly joys and sorrows, hopes and despair. By turning an ascetic even before he could go through a householder’s many phases in life, he had neither knowledge nor understanding of the balance of existence that was essential to complete his quest for spiritual release. Shankara then turned to the power of tantra or magic rituals, whereby his soul could leave his body and enter that of a monarch who was on his deathbed. The king magically revived and lived on for another year, enabling Shankara to undergo the experiences of a worldly person. When that period was over, he left the royal personage’s body and re-entered his own, which had, in the meantime, been carefully tended to by an acolyte awaiting his master’s return. Incidentally, these developments are meticulously documented in the scriptures.’
She let her audience absorb the information as she moved back to the rostrum to take a sip from the bottle of water placed there for her.
‘Around the same time,’ she continued, ‘the Buddhist monk Padmasambhava, who is credited with introducing Buddhism to Tibet, wrote the Bardo Thodol or Book of the Dead. This was a tantric text which freely borrowed ideas from existing Hindu tantric and Bon occult practices. The Bardo Thodol focused on one particular aspect of existing thought, maintaining that crucial moments of transition – especially those between death and rebirth – were charged with great spiritual potential and presented a series of opportunities for recognizing the true nature of reality.’
She paused for a moment, allowing the import of her words to sink in.
‘Now I will come straight to the point,’ she said, smiling up at the panels. ‘The book serves as a guide to the soul, as it is liberated from its mortal body and awaits reincarnation. To help the souls of the deceased gain insights into their ambiguous situation, a lama or spiritual teacher recites inspirational prayers and instructions from special funerary texts. In fact, “Bardo Thodol” means “liberation by hearing on the after-death plane”.
‘The first and primary objective of such a practice was to liberate the soul; in other words, give it
moksha
. In most cases, however, the purpose was defeated, as the soul had not been adequately prepared to receive the knowledge which would help release it. Recoiling in terror, the soul would attempt to return to the mortal world it was more familiar with. The lamas would then try to give the soul awaiting reincarnation a noble birth. The lamas were aware that indiscriminate use by the masses of the tantra, as laid down in the Bardo Thodol, had the potential of ripping the fabric of ordered society. So while the teachings of the Bardo Thodol were propagated and put into practice at the deathbed of individuals – as they are, even today – their study in the original form, as conceived by Padmasambhava, was limited to a select few. Buddhism was then at its zenith, with the religion making inroads into all parts of the known civilized world along the silk routes and across the seas. The great thinkers, however, could foresee in their wisdom the danger posed by the steppe nomads or Mongols, who could well destroy or misuse all that Buddhism had created and preserved so far. Indeed, knowledge that held such power needed to be used with discretion and, therefore, had to be guarded from all but the enlightened few. The only way to ensure this would be to contain it in a secure place. And such a place existed – in Shambhala.
‘Without meaning to digress, I would like to offer you a snippet of information that might come as a surprise to you. The Bardo Thodol texts that we know of, at present, were discovered by Karma Lingpa, a
terton
or “treasure revealer”, in 1350
CE
– approximately five hundred years after Padmasambhava.’ She paused to make her point, then smiled. ‘Perhaps this was the version deemed fit to be disseminated to the general public.’