It may be that some Han Taoist, wandering into To-Bhot long ago, when the natives still worshiped the Old Peacock, kindly tried to explain to them his amiable religion. The Bho could hardly have misunderstood the universal act of putting male organ into female—or jewel into lotus, as the Han would have expressed it—or mani into pémé, in their language. But such oafs would have been baffled by the higher significances of yang and yin, so all they ever retained of Tao was that preposterous chant of “Om mani pémé hum.” Still, not even the Bho could have built much of a religion on a prayer that had no loftier meaning than “Amen, stick it in her! Amen!” So, as they later and gradually adopted Buddhism from India, they must have adapted the chant to fit that religion. All they had to do was construe the “jewel” as Buddha, or Pota, because he is so often portrayed as sitting in meditation on a large lotus blossom. So the chant came to mean something like “Amen, Pota is in his place! Amen!” And then, no doubt, some later lamas—in the way that self-appointed sages always complicate even the purest faith with their unsolicited commentaries and interpretations—decided to festoon the simple chant with more abstruse aspects. So they decreed that the word mani (jewel, male genitals, Pota) would henceforth signify The Means, and the word pémé (lotus, female genitals, Pota’s place) would henceforth refer to Nirvana. Thus the chant became a prayer beseeching The Means to achieve that Nirvana oblivion which Potaists deem the highest end of life: “Amen, blot me out! Amen!”
Certainly, Potaism no longer had any laudable connection with sexual relations between men and women, because at least one of every three Bho males, at puberty or even younger, fled from the prospect of ever having to endure sex with any Bho female, and took the red robe of religion. So far as I could tell, that vow of celibacy was the only qualification necessary for entrance into a Pota-lá and eventual elevation through the ascending degrees of monkhood and priesthood. The chabis, or novices, were given nothing like a secular education or seminary instruction, and I encountered only three or four of the oldest and highest-grade lamas who could even read and write the “Om mani peme hum,” let alone the one hundred and eight books of the Kandjur scriptures, let alone the two hundred and twenty-five Tengyur books of commentary on the Kandjur. In speaking of the holy men’s celibacy, however, I should rightly have said celibacy in regard to females. Many of the lamas and trapas flagrantly flaunted their amorousness toward each other, to leave no doubt that they had forsworn sordid, ordinary, normal sex.
Potaism, however it developed, was a religion demanding only sheer quantity of devotion, not any quality of it. By that I mean a seeker of oblivion simply had to repeat “Om mani pémé hum”
enough times
during his life and he expected that would take him to Nirvana when he died. He did not even have to speak the words, or repeat them in any way requiring his own volition. I have mentioned prayer mills; they were everywhere in the lamasarais, and in every house, and even to be found standing in empty countryside. They were drumlike cylinders within which were wound paper scrolls on which the mani chant was written. A man had only to give the cylinder a spin with his hand and those “repetitions” of the prayer counted to his credit. Sometimes he rigged it like a waterwheel, so that a stream or cascade kept it turning and praying constantly. Or he could hoist a flag inscribed with the prayer, or a whole line of them—those were far more frequently to be seen in To-Bhot than any lines of washing hung out—and every flap the wind gave every flag was credited to him. Or he could run his hand along a line of dangling sheep shoulder blades, each bone inscribed with the mani, strung like wind chimes, and they prayed for him as long as they went on clattering.
I once came upon a trapa crouched beside a creek, flinging into it and hauling out again a tile attached to a string. He had been doing that, he said, all his adult life, and would go on doing it until he died.
“Doing
what
?” I asked, thinking that perhaps, in some idiotic Bho way, he was trying to emulate San Piero as a fisher of souls. The monk showed me his tile; it was engraved with the mani prayer, in the fashion of a yin seal. He explained that he was “imprinting” the prayer on the running water, stamping it there over and over again, and he was accruing piety with every invisible “impression.”
Another time, in a Pota-lá courtyard, I saw two trapas come to violent blows because one of them had given a twirl to a prayer mill and then, glancing back as he walked on, saw a brother monk stop the mill and spin it in the other direction to pray for
him.
Atop one of the major towns on our way was an especially large lamasarai, and there I made bold to seek audience of its venerable and filthy and sap-daubed Grand Lama.
“Presence,” I addressed the old abbot, “I seldom observe anything going on in any Pota-lá that looks like ecclesiastical activity. Aside from twirling prayer mills or shaking prayer bones, what exactly are your religious duties?”
In a voice like the rustle of far-off leaves, he said, “I sit in my cell, my son Highness, or sometimes in a remote cave, or on a lonely mountaintop, and I meditate.”
“Meditate on what, Presence?”
“On my once having laid eyes on the Kian-gan Kundün.”
“And what would that be?”
“The Sovereign Presence, the Holiest of Lamas, he who is an actual reincarnation of the Pota. He resides in Lha-Ssa, the City of the Gods, a long, long journey from here, where the people are building for him a Pota-lá worthy of his occupancy. They have been building on it for more than six hundred years now, but they expect to have it completed in only four or five hundred more. The Holiest will be pleased to grace it with his Sovereign Presence, for it will be a palace most magnificent when it is finally done.”
“Are you saying, Presence, that this Kian-gan Kundün has been alive and waiting for six hundred years? And he will still be alive when the palace is finished?”
“Assuredly so, my son Highness. Of course you, being ch’hipa—outside the belief—might not see him so. His corporeal integument dies from time to time, and then his lamas must cast about the land and find the infant boy into whom his soul has transmigrated. So the Sovereign Presence looks physically different, from lifetime to lifetime. But we nang-pa—we within the belief—we know him to be always the same Holiest of Lamas, and the Pota reincarnated.”
It seemed to me somewhat unfair that the Pota, having created and prescribed Nirvana for his devotees, evidently never got to rest obliviously there himself, but had to keep on being fetched back to Lha-Ssa, a town doubtless as awful as any other in To-Bhot. But I refrained from remarking on that, and gently prompted the old abbot:
“So you made the far journey to Lha-Ssa, and you saw the Holiest of Lamas … ?”
“Yes, my son Highness, and that event has occupied my meditations and contemplations and devotions ever since. You may not believe this, but the Holiest actually opened his own rheumy old eyes and looked at me.” He put on a wrinkled smile of rapt reminiscence. “I think, if the Holiest had not been then so ancient and approaching his next transmigration, he might almost have summoned up his strength and spoken to me.”
“You and he only looked at each other? And that has furnished you with meat for meditation ever since?”
“Ever since. Just that one bleared glance from the Holiest was the commencement of my wisdom. Forty-eight years ago, that was.”
“For nearly half a century, Presence, you have done nothing but contemplate that single fleeting occurrence?”
“A man blessed with the beginning of wisdom is obligated to let it ripen without distraction. I have forgone all other interests and pursuits. I do not interrupt my meditation even to take meals.” He arranged his wrinkles and blotches in a look of blissful martyrdom. “I subsist on only an occasional bowl of weak cha.”
“I have heard of such wondrous abstentions, Presence. Meanwhile, I suppose you share with your underlamas the fruits of your meditations, for their instruction.”
“Dear me, no, young Highness.” His wrinkles rearranged into a startled and slightly offended look. “Wisdom cannot be taught, it must be learned. The learning to be done by others is up to them. Now, if you will excuse me for saying so, this brief audience with you has constituted the longest distraction of my meditative life … .”
So I made my obeisances and left him, and sought out a lama of fewer pustules and less exalted degree, and inquired what he did when he was not churning prayers out of a mill.
“I meditate, Highness,” he said. “What else?”
“Meditate on what, Presence?”
“I fix my mental regard on the Grand Lama, for he once visited Lha-Ssa and looked upon the visage of the Kian-gan Kundün. From that, he acquired great holiness.”
“And you hope to absorb some holiness from meditating on him?”
“Dear me, no. Holiness cannot be taken, only bestowed. I can, however, hope from that meditation to extract some small wisdom.”
“And that wisdom you will impart to whom? To your junior lamas? To the trapas?”
“Really, Highness! One never casts one’s regard downward, only upward! Where else is wisdom? Now, if you will excuse me … .”
So I went and found a trapa, recently accepted into monkhood after a long novitiate as a chabi, and asked what he contemplated while awaiting elevation to the priesthood.
“Why, the holiness of my elders and superiors, of course, Highness. They are the receptacles containing all the wisdom of all the ages.”
“But, if they never teach you anything, Treasured One, whence comes that knowledge to you? You all claim to be eager to acquire it, but what is the source of it?”
“Knowledge?” he said, with lofty contempt. “Only worldly creatures like the Han fret about knowledge.
We
wish to acquire
wisdom.”
Interesting, I thought. That same disdainful estimate had once been made of me—and by a Han. Nevertheless, I was not prepared to believe, then or now, that inertness and torpor represent the highest attainment humanity can aspire to. In my opinion, stillness is not always evidence of intelligence, and silence is not always evidence of a mind at work. Most vegetables are still and silent. In my opinion, meditation is not infallibly productive of profound ideas. I have seen vultures meditate on a full belly, and then do nothing more profound than regurgitate. In my opinion, inarticulate and obscure pronouncements are not always expressive of a wisdom so mystically sublime that only sages can comprehend it. The mouthings of the Potaist holy men were inarticulate and obscure, but so were the yappings of their lamasarai curs.
I went and found a chabi, the lowest form of life in a Pota-lá, and asked how
his
time was spent.
“My admission here was granted on condition that I apprentice as a cleaning orderly,” he said. “But of course I pass most of my time meditating on my mantra.”
“And what is that, boy?”
“A few syllables from the Kandjur of holy scripture, assigned to me for my contemplation. When I have meditated long enough upon the mantra—some years perhaps—and it has expanded my mind sufficiently, I may be considered fit to rise to the status of trapa, and then begin to contemplate larger bits of the Kandjur.”
“Did it ever occur to you, boy, actually to spend your time in cleaning this sty, and studying ways to clean it better?”
He stared at me as if I had been rendered rabid by a dog bite. “Instead of my mantra, Highness? Whatever for? Cleaning is the lowliest of occupations, and he who would rise should look upward, not downward.”
I snorted. “Your Grand Lama does nothing but squat and contemplate the Holiest of Lamas, while his underlamas do nothing but squat and contemplate
him.
All the trapas do nothing but squat and contemplate the lamas. I would wager that the first apprentice who ever actually learned cleanliness could overthrow the whole regime. Become the master of this Pota-lá, and then the Pope of Potaism, and eventually the Wang of all To-Bhot.”
“You have been grievously mad-bit by a dog, Highness,” he said, looking alarmed. “I will run and fetch one of our physicians—the pulse-feeler or the urine-smeller—that he may attend you in your affliction.”
Well, so much for the holy men. The influence of Potaism on the lay population of To-Bhot was about equally elevating. The men had learned to twirl any prayer mill they encountered, and the women had learned to screw up their hair into one hundred and eight braids, and both men and women were careful always, when walking past any holy edifice, to walk to the left of it and keep it always on their right hand. I do not know exactly why, except that there was a saying, “Beware the demons on the left,” and there were to be found in the countryside a great many stone walls and piled-up heaps of stone that had some indiscernible religious significance, and the road always divided around them, so that a traveler from either direction could keep the holiness on his right.
At every twilight, all the men, women and children of every community would leave off their day’s occupations, if any, and squat in the town streets or on their own rooftops, while they were led by the lamas and trapas of the Pota-lá overhead, in chanting their evening appeal for oblivion, “Om mani pémé hum,” over and over again. I might have been impressed by what was at least an example of popular solidarity and unabashed religiosity—in contrast to Venice, say, where my sophisticated townsfolk would blush to make even the sign of the cross in any gathering more public than a church service—but I simply could not admire a people’s devotion to a religion that did no good for them, or anyone.