To a Mountain in Tibet(12)
But as we climb the wooden stairs to a chamber above the prayer hall, where the Ceremony of Long Life is swelling with drums and horns, the abbot’s talk falters around this tulku. Scandalously the monk had married, then become a tantric yogi, and under the abbot’s guarded words I wonder if the tulku had been a little mad. ‘He wanted to re-create the monastery he had lost near Kailas–the Chinese had destroyed it by then–but he was poor, and…sickness prevented it. But before he died, he left a mandala describing where the new monastery should be built. And it was on this spot.’
We settle at a heavy table that looks as if it has been here centuries. The abbot says: ‘So his son founded this monastery with a handful of monks in 1985. He is still here, the oldest man in our monastery, and afterwards the tulku’s own grandson became the divine incarnation, and is here too, studying as a monk.’
I listen in silence, perplexed by this unearthly genealogy. (Later I glimpsed the old founder, mounting ceremoniously to his room after the Service of Long Life.) The abbot recounts these reincarnations as matter-of-factly as natural births. There are five tulkus among his own monks, he says, reincarnated from different lama ancestors.
I stare at him across a deep divide. He has the moon face of Tibetan calm, regular and stressless, its lips upturned faintly like those of a statued Buddha. These reincarnations to him are conduits of an enlightenment that springs like a flame from candle to candle, man to man (they are almost always men). The precise nature of the flame, the continuance–psyche, spirit, memory–is uncertain, but the tulku, as its holder, is the envoy of a changeless purity.
The abbot senses the doubt in me, I think. He orders a novice to bring us tea, while I shift uncomfortably on the monastic bench. He is less than half my age, yet his surety is grand and a little mysterious. But I belong helplessly to another culture. He is focused on spiritual continuance, while I am overborne by individual death. What is it, I ask, that survives to be reincarnated?
Some shadowy capacity for remembrance must endure, the abbot implies, because of the way a tulku is discovered. When a likely child is located, a group of monastic elders confronts him with various possessions, and the infant is acknowledged if he recognises those of his tulku predecessor. This practice, or something like it, has perhaps been going on in Tibet since the twelfth century, and reached its zenith in the recognition of the reincarnate Dalai Lamas. The process was often corrupt, of course. But sometimes, as now, it seemed that Tibet’s heart survived in these sacred kinships, flowing through generations like divine electricity, or simply–like this monastery itself–as stupendous acts of remembrance.
‘But our life is very hard,’ the abbot says. ‘Some monks cannot take it too long. Many leave for Kathmandu, or join our monasteries down on the plains or in India. Or they marry.’ He adds regretfully, courteously: ‘The West is attractive to many of them.’ Even on his own wrist, I notice, the prayer beads nestle beside a digital watch. ‘So our problems always vary. A few years ago the Maoists threatened all this region. They closed down many monasteries and forced the monks into working as farmers. They even captured two of our own community.’
I wonder aloud what happened. The monasteries were cruelly vulnerable, no longer armed fraternities as they had once been.
The abbot smiles ironically. ‘The two monks went separate ways. One escaped and went to India. The other was converted by the Maoists, and carried their secret messages through the mountains. After the Maoists made peace with the government, he went back to his village and got married. We never saw him again.’
Marriage haunts monastic life. There is little compensating comfort. In the old Tibet the monks had been a pampered elite among serf farmers and nomads. But here, in a Hindu land, the rigours of their life are untainted by any vestige of wealth. They are sidelined, isolated, perhaps cleansed. The abbot’s own grandfather, he says, had been a lama in Tibet, but lapsed and married. ‘Then the Chinese invaded our country, and my father left home and fled.’ He breaks off. ‘The Chinese killed many of us last year, you know. I don’t hate the Chinese people, but their policies, their government…’ He bows his head. ‘It was my father who taught me the sacred scriptures and our country’s history. And when I was eleven I decided to become a monk.’
‘So young!’
But even here the novices were boys as young as nine–some seventy of them–whose adolescence waited like a time bomb. He goes on: ‘But when I told my parents, my mother cried “No! No! Not a monk! You will just sit there, studying”, and even my father said: “You may want to go now, but when you are twenty, twenty-five, you will regret it, you will want to leave and marry.” I was the first son, you see, and the first son is meant to look after his parents. All the same, I went away.’ In the hall beneath us, the monks’ prayers have softened to purring. ‘Now I cannot help them. I am here. They are far down the valley.’ He pulls his crimson robes closer about his neck.
I ask bleakly: ‘How do they live?’
‘Their second son is twenty-five now, and he looks after them.’
‘Do they want to return to Tibet?’
‘They cannot.’
The people of this region, he says, can obtain a Chinese permit to cross the border for a week, usually to trade, and may with luck extend it for a pilgrimage to Kailas. But few of them did; and the monks were too afraid. ‘It is you who can go to Kailas,’ he says. He has never been. He says this without bitterness, yet the few Western trekkers passing through have motives alien to any he knows. As for my own, I hesitate to speak them to him, inchoate as they are. They belong to a world grown dim to him, to Western self and attachment, not to the abstract compassion that he entertains. He speaks of Kailas with a dreamlike evangelism. He wants me to honour the journey that he cannot make himself.