Tulku

9

TIBET. THE YAK-DRIVERS they had met on their way to the valley had said that there was no real border. The Lama waved a vague hand eastward and explained that two whole provinces had been stolen by China a hundred years before, so Theodore’s party had really been travelling through Tibet for many days. But for Theodore the border lay, sharp as a shore-line, at the bridge. From then on the grammar of all things, large and small, changed. There was the change from stillness to travel, from the simple triangular relationship with Mrs Jones and Lung to the far more complex pressures of the Lama and his half-hostile escort. There were the yaks, brooding, slow-paced, utterly alien; even their drivers, who drank their milk, ate their butter, wove their hair and wore their hides, seemed to have no feeling for them.

There was Tibetan tea. The only time Theodore attempted to drink this on the journey his mouth spat it back into the cup before he could will himself to swallow. The first taste was of half-rancid grease, disgusting but manageable; then, inside that – wrapped in it, so to speak – his tongue met scouring soap and sharp salt and a thick woody flavour like the bark of a tree. He looked up, flushing with shame, and saw the Lama watching him with an intense but unreadable stare.

‘I’m sorry,’ he stammered. ‘I couldn’t help it.’

‘It is a strong taste,’ said the old man. ‘You do not remember it, child?’

‘Tibetan tea notorious,’ said Lung in English. ‘Boil leaf long time. Put in salt, soda, sour butter.’

‘It is as well to acquire the taste,’ said the Lama mildly. ‘The drink is full of strength for those who travel in the mountains.’

He didn’t seem at all put out by Theodore’s ill manners, but oddly interested. Then he and Mrs Jones and Lung fell into bilingual small-talk about the tea ceremonies of different countries.

Yaks and tea were trivialities. There was a more important change, which Theodore sensed at once – had in fact sensed in the escort’s behaviour as they had prepared to haul the Lama across the ravine, the very first time he had seen the old man. Tibet was a priest-ruled country. Father had in a sense ruled the Settlement, but had done so as its first citizen, with the consent of his converts. He had been respected, and loved. But in Theodore’s eyes the escort, as well as the inhabitants of the flea-swarming farms where they billeted themselves each night, treated the old man as if he were in some way God. And this strong uncomfortable awe applied not only to the Lama but to everything. Wherever a stream ran near a village it drove at least one prayer-wheel, a tinkling device which at each turn was supposed to repeat the same meaningless syllables of devotion, inscribed on its rim. Prayer-flags – mere rags on sticks, like wash-day in the slums, Mrs Jones said – fluttered from the roofs of houses or in groves along hillsides, to perform the same function. Shrines – little box-like stone buildings, each with a fantastic bobbly spire ending in a crescent moon – dotted every slope. Monks stalked the roads.

Father had always pitied heathens, never hated them, even at their most superstitious. His anger and his hatred had been reserved for those Christians who had, in his eyes, been shown the truth and refused it. But despite himself Theodore couldn’t help a distrust and dislike which was almost hatred. The wheels and flags offended him most. Prayer was not like that. It was a thing which needed to be done each time afresh, with intense personal effort. And yet . . . and yet how different, really, were these meaningless devices, repeating their formulae without a mind behind them, from Theodore’s own useless attempts to pray?

Strangely, this very revulsion made him pray with greater earnestness, as well as with a new sense of frustration. In the valley of the lilies he had felt it would need only one more violent event to break the habit of prayer, but now that event had come and the habit was strengthened.

Perhaps it was the mountains which caused this change. They were, in themselves, the biggest change of all. The peak that had faced across the valley of the lilies had seemed colossal, but soon the party was moving through country where the outcrops and buttresses of the main mountains were larger than that; and the saddle they had crossed into the valley seemed low and easy now, compared with some of the passes they traversed. The ranges were split by immensely steep, thick-forested valleys, each with its rushing river at the bottom, and here and there a huddle of flat-roofed stone houses in a patch of tiny fields. In the valleys the tracks were often tolerable, sometimes even surfaced with logs laid side by side. But then the route would zigzag up to the bare slopes above the tree-line, higher and higher, until they were trailing among wastes where snow lay in crackling drifts between the wind-eroded boulders. Here the paths were usually invisible, except to their guides. Even Mrs Jones would look at some barrier – a cliff carved by frost and blizzard into vertical pleats and pillars, and lined with horizontal layers by the rock-strata – and shake her head, but the Tibetans would find a series of cracks and gullies and yard-wide ledges where only a few worn foot-holds showed that anyone had ever passed this way before. Theodore learnt to walk at these heights with a short-paced shuffle, drearily slow but not using one breath more than was needed of the sparse oxygen, one extra pump of his straining heart. He learnt that it was possible to sit at the midday rest with one’s head in the sun and one’s feet in shadow and suffer sunburn and frostbite at the same time. He learnt to trudge for hours with his eyes half-closed against the brilliant light, though the temptation was to gaze and gaze at the enormous, sharp-seen distances and the piercing colours.

But all these discomforts were overwhelmed by the sense of awe which the mountains imposed. It was no wonder that such a country had come to be ruled by priests who were almost gods. Even Mrs Jones, despite her restlessness at the slow pace of travel, and the feeling that the Lama, by pressing steadily on at that pace, was preventing her from exploring the valleys properly for plants – even she seemed to feel the solemnity of the mountains. They changed her, as they changed everything. Her personality, which in earlier days had been so elusive and at the same so enveloping, withdrew into itself a little. There was no less of it – supposing you could measure such things – but it seemed somehow more concentrated, and more coherent.

This was the change poor Lung took hardest. For some reason the hostility of the escort, never voiced, but expressed in glances, in an angle of the head or a gesture of the fingers, concentrated on him. The Lama, though carefully polite, never allowed him the curious and penetrating interest he often showed in Mrs Jones and Theodore. No doubt Lung could have borne this, and worse, if it had been possible for the idyll of the valley of the lilies to continue, however changed by the changed circumstances. But Theodore could see that the idyll was ended. Mrs Jones might spend whole stretches of the journey, or long hours in the evening, talking quietly with Lung, but they were lovers no more.

To his own astonishment this change filled Theodore with sadness. He should have been rejoicing at the end of the sinful affair, but now he knew what he ought to have known all along, that his own contentment in the valley was not simply a product of the peace and beauty of the place; it had been caused just as much by his companions’ happiness; he had been infected, so to speak, by their joy in each other; so now Lung’s loss was his.

He saw this with sudden sharpness on the second day of their journey, when during the midday halt he found Lung brooding beside a bleak upland lake, whose slaty waters and treeless shores seemed a world away from the brilliance and richness of the valley.

‘Changed, changed, all changed,’ muttered Lung.

‘Are you going to write a poem about it?’

‘No poems. Not any more.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Lung turned away with a noise that began as a laugh and ended as something like the cry of a fox.

On the fifth night they stayed not at a farm but at a monastery called Daparang, an erratic line of almost windowless slabs of building, punctuated by spired shrines and spread along a hillside. Here they were shown to a guest-room near the gate, and for once had some privacy and comfort. (The people in the farms were friendly, but almost as pestilential in their inquisitiveness as the fleas.) The Lama Amchi disappeared into the monastery, but later that evening brought another Lama, a very old man who was Abbot of Daparang, to drink tea in the guest-house. The Abbot spoke about three words, all Tibetan, in the hour he was there, and never took his eyes off Theodore.

When they travelled on next morning they found the escort was increased by two men who wore monks’ robes but were built like wrestlers, and indeed turned out to be just that. At their next halt they engaged in a highly formalized fight, accompanied by sharp barks and grunts. Mrs Jones watched the bout with a keen and knowing eye. Apparently they were soldier-monks, employed to escort important men, and even to fight with monks from other monasteries in disputes over territory. They wore their hair combed over one ear in a great curling swag. Mrs Jones was delighted by them, but to Theodore it was just another example of the absurdity of these heathen beliefs, that a religion which claimed to be founded in peace and the rejection of earthly vanities, should train such men.

That night the three of them were sitting on a pile of rugs in the corner of a single upstairs room in a large farm. The Lama had vanished, as he sometimes did. The escort and the farm family were clustered round the stove in the middle of the room. Mrs Jones was trying to tease Lung and Theodore into asking impertinent questions about the family, which seemed to consist – as in the other farms they had stayed at – of one wife, three or four husbands and a few children.

The door on the far side of the room opened, producing a come-and-go of the chill night air as the two soldier-monks entered. They crossed the room and bowed formally to Theodore.

‘Lama say come. Bring woman,’ said one in grunted Mandarin.

‘’Bout time too,’ said Mrs Jones, when Theodore had translated. ‘We got to sort out how far we’re going along of him, and find a proper magistrate or someone what can give us some travel papers, so as we can go off on our own. I wouldn’t mind staying round these parts for a month – there’s hundreds of things to find in some of these valleys.’

She rose, drawing her cloak round her. Theodore reached for his coat. But as Lung got to his feet the soldier-monk who had not spoken made a vehement gesture with his arm, palm forward, as if to push him back onto the rugs.

‘Lama see boy. Lama see woman. Lama not see man,’ said the first monk.

‘I go where the Princess goes,’ snapped Lung.

The monks frowned at him. He gazed hotly back until Mrs Jones laid her hand on his arm.

‘Best do like he says, love,’ she said. ‘Theo and me’ll look after each other, and somebody’d best stay here, stop the beggars going through our baggage.’

Lung shrugged, sighed and returned to the rugs. The silent monk joined the group round the stove. The other one held the door and let Theodore and Mrs Jones climb down the ladder to the farmyard. After the fug and reek of the upper room the night air, crisp with its passing over frosted snows, brought Theodore’s weary nerves to wakefulness; but as they followed the monk up the hill by the light of a half moon, this sense of energies renewed ebbed away. The monk led them not to one of the other houses in the hamlet but straight up a steep meadow into whispering woods. Calves and thighs ached with each step, and the fresh-seeming night air was only a rasp in the throat, with no substance for the lungs. It was very dark under the trees, but Theodore sensed a beetling mass close ahead. The path twisted as if to avoid it and climbed again, more steeply than ever. At last, when Theodore felt he could go no further without a rest, the monk grunted ‘Wait,’ and moved away to the right. For a while Theodore could hear nothing through the sound of his own gasping breath, but then he was aware of voices that seemed to be coming from the middle of the night sky, somewhere out over the valley.

‘Bit of rock buttress there,’ whispered Mrs Jones. ‘They’re out near the end of it.’

The voices ceased and the monk returned. They followed him up to the right and then, as Mrs Jones had guessed, out along a level platform of rock that led them through the tree-tops and into the open air. At the end of the platform was a small shrine, just like the hundreds of others they had seen in the last six days, a square stone box surmounted by a pointed dome, and at the very top the symbol of a crescent moon, a black shape that echoed the silver crescent now riding above the snow-fields. Round the far side of the shrine, sitting cross-legged on the ground, they found the Lama Amchi. Despite the bitter night air he was naked to the waist.

He spoke briefly to their guide who bowed and left without a word.

‘Sit,’ said the Lama.

They settled, fidgeting a little for comfort on the smooth but icy rock. Below them the few lights of the hamlet glimmered in the mass of dark which lay impenetrable, almost as if it were a liquid, all up the valley’s side to where the tree-line ended; above that in lesser blackness rose the rock screes and the cliffs; and above these, brighter-seeming than the moon itself, the glaciers and the glittering wastes of snow. As the body-warmth engendered by the climb faded, the chill of those snows seemed to fill the slow breeze and seep like water through Theodore’s clothes.

‘I am troubled,’ said the Lama at last. ‘I think you are not after all the one I seek.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You tell me you are thirteen years of age.’

‘That’s right.’

‘There is no mistake about this? You count the years in the same manner as we do? A child who has lived for one whole year and is now in his second year, you call him two years of age?’

‘No. We call him one. We only count whole years. I am thirteen years and five months old.’

‘Ah. And this woman is not your mother? It is necessary for me to know, even if you have reason to pretend other than the truth.’

‘No. Honest. My father was a Christian missionary in Kweichow. My mother died when I was four.’

‘Six days you have been in Tibet. You have eaten our food and drunk our drink, travelled our paths. You have slept in a certain house, met a certain man. All this was wholly new to you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘In these six days you have not seen or smelt or heard anything which woke in you a feeling that you already were acquainted with that thing?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

The Lama sighed and fell into silence.

‘What’s he on about?’ whispered Mrs Jones.

‘I don’t know. He’s asking questions about me, and whether I remember seeing things before.’

‘Not much help,’ she muttered. ‘Ask him why he wants to know. Go on, he won’t bite you. That way we might be able to tell him something he didn’t know he was after.’

Before Theodore could frame the question the Lama sighed again.

‘And yet the signs seemed so sure,’ he said. ‘Tell me, child, how you came to the valley, you and this strange woman and the Chinese, pursued by murderers.’

‘It will take a long time,’ said Theodore, reluctantly.

‘You are cold? Take my robe. I do not need it. I am warm. Feel my flesh.’

It was a command. A little embarrassed, Theodore wrapped himself in the harsh cloth and then reached out and touched the naked shoulder. It was warm, not simply with the warmth of health but as if with a fever.

‘He’s hot!’ he exclaimed in English. Almost languidly Mrs Jones peeled off her glove, touched the Lama’s arm and withdrew her hand.

‘Fancy that!’ she said. ‘Mind you, it’s not all that surprising. I can think myself warm sometimes – not that warm, mind you.’

‘What does she say?’ said the Lama, his voice suddenly sharp with interest. He grunted with approval as Theodore explained.

‘Now tell me your tale,’ he said. ‘For six days I have not enquired, nor told you the nature of my search, because I did not wish to plant seeds of thought in your mind until I found whether the thoughts were already there. They are not. Moreover, the Abbot of Daparang, who knew the one I seek in his previous childhood, could find no echo in your soul. And furthermore your age, which I misunderstood at our first meeting, makes it impossible. So we may speak more clearly now, I think.’

Theodore started into his story. He tried to begin with the destruction of the Settlement, but the Lama made him start with his own birth, and was both surprised and disappointed that he had no idea what astrological signs he had been born under. Then the details and timing of Mother’s death were apparently important, but Father’s work and the success of the Settlement quite uninteresting. When it came to the meeting with Mrs Jones, Theodore expected to have to go back and explain all about her, but the Lama cut him short.

‘We can consider that later, perhaps,’ he said. ‘But ask the woman now why does she roam through wild places, seeking flowers. Whence is this need?’

‘Tell him . . . oh, don’t tell him about Monty – that’d take all night. Tell him I don’t know – I just like the seeking and finding, that’s all. It’s true, too.’

‘A search,’ muttered the Lama. ‘I have read that all searches are the one search. And has the woman found satisfaction?’

‘Funny he should ask that,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘You remember me saying, first time we saw them lilies in the coomb, as how I felt they might of been sending for me, somehow. I really did feel it, all while we was there. But since then, I dunno, I’ve been thinking that wasn’t really it. There’s something else, and them lilies was only a sign-post on the way. Go on. I know it sounds nonsense, but you might as well tell him, since he asked.’

Theodore translated as best he could. The Lama listened with close attention and then began to make a curious humming noise in his throat, a purring vibration that seemed to involve no movement of air in his lungs.

‘A sign,’ he whispered at last. ‘The lilies. And the horse. Child, who drew those pictures which you carry?’

‘Mrs Jones drew the lily. I was trying to draw the horse. Why do you want to know all these things? Where are you taking us?’

The old man ignored the questions.

‘The Chinese with whom you travel,’ he said, ‘is he a servant of his Government? He is no ordinary servant, I think.’

‘Course not,’ said Mrs Jones, when Theodore had translated. ‘What the old geezer means is he thinks Lung is a spy. Tell him I picked poor Lung up in Canton, ’cause his uncle swore he could talk a lot of Chinese lingos, besides Miao and Lolo what he only knew three words of. He’s a poor scrap of a poet what can’t get a government job, ’cause he failed all his examinations from thinking beautiful thoughts – and if he’s got the gumption to go spying, why I’m Queen of England. Besides, I never let on as I was hoping to get to Tibet, or he wouldn’t of come in the first place. Tell him that. And ask him what it’s all about, while you’re at it.’

It was hard to fit her rush of speech into staid Mandarin, but Theodore did as well as he could and added the question at the end expecting to be put off again. But this time the Lama answered quite straightforwardly.

‘Yes, I will explain,’ he said. ‘Then perhaps you, who carried the signs of which the oracle spoke, will be able to tell me the next step of my search. I seek a child. It is our belief that the soul does not die with the body, but begins a new life, forgetting all that went before. Only when a soul has attained enlightenment is it freed from this endless wheel of death and re-birth and can go to join the great soul. I know that you, being Christians, do not share this belief.

‘Now, there are certain great souls who, though they have reached enlightenment, choose to continue in the world of death and birth in order that they may show their fellow creatures the path to freedom which they themselves have chosen. And these men have reached such spiritual mastery that they can overcome the forgetfulness which ordinary souls experience at death and birth. They can will their own consciousness to continue from one life into the next. Their memory does not remain whole, however. At first it is all unrelated fragments, but as they grow they can be helped to piece these fragments back into the whole it once was, so that all their lives and all their old learning become present once more to their consciousness.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard of that,’ said Mrs Jones when Theodore had finished translating. ‘They’ve got this head priest called the Dalai Lama, and when he dies they go and look for a boy born at the same time to be the new Dalai Lama, and they say it’s really the same person.’

The old man must have picked the known syllables out.

‘He whom you call the Dalai Lama,’ he said, ‘we know to be the Tulku, or reincarnation of Avalokitesvara, the Great Compassionate One. But he is not the only Tulku, and the Abbot of my own monastery of Dong Pe was also such a one, Tulku of the Siddha Asara. In his latest body he was known as the Lama Tojing Rimpoche, and though he was not yet thirty years of age, all who knew him bore witness to his spiritual mastery and holiness and wisdom and learning. But for twelve years we have not seen him. He set out on a journey to Daparang, where we rested last night, and never arrived. It was his custom to travel alone, and often to wander into waste places to perform his spiritual exercises, so we did not find his disappearance surprising. But winter came on and he had not returned, and then a rumour grew that he had been waylaid by traitor monks and sold to the Chinese.

‘I must explain that the Chinese have long claimed lordship of Tibet, and there is in Pekin the Tashi Lama, who they say is the true spiritual head of our people. Dong Pe is the nearest great monastery to the Chinese border, and if its Abbot were to acknowledge the claims of the Tashi Lama that would be a victory for the Chinese. Tojing Rimpoche, however, was always loyal to the Dalai Lama at Lhasa.’

‘That explains why he’s been looking so beady-eyed at poor Lung,’ commented Mrs Jones.

‘Now we have a famous oracle at Dong Pe,’ said the Lama, still talking as though he were discussing the most ordinary things in the world, such as weather or crops. ‘But when we consulted it, it told us nothing, not even whether Tojing Rimpoche lived or died. We sent to the State oracle at Lhasa and received only riddling answers. And so matters rested until this year, when two things happened. First a story reached us that the Chinese were preparing to announce the discovery of the Tulku of the Siddha Asara; and second our own oracle at Dong Pe spoke plainly for the first time, saying that Tojing Rimpoche was dead, and it was now time to search for the Tulku. It gave us certain signs, but did not tell us when Tojing Rimpoche had died, so that we could not know the age of the child we sought, except that he must be less than thirteen years of age – which you call twelve years of age.

‘I will tell you the signs. Towards the south-east we must search. There would be a river. There would be a guide, and symbols of lower creations. There would be three people, one of them the mother of the Tulku. And there would be danger to the Tulku. Furthermore, it is usual in such cases for the oracle to describe some point by which the house in which the Tulku is born may be recognized, but this time there was no hint of any house at all. Lastly, though in this the oracles spoke even more obscurely than in the other matters – and oracles are seldom wholly clear – it seemed that the child we sought was begotten in a foreign land. This last sign we greatly feared for it seemed to us that it might be taken to show that the child from Pekin, of whom the rumours spoke, is the true Tulku of the Siddha Asara.

‘Therefore we decided to search for our Tulku. It is normal to form a commission of several experienced Lamas to conduct this search, but in this case we decided to send only one man and to conduct the search in secret. And since it was I who had first recognized the child who became Tojing Rimpoche as the Tulku of Asara, it was thought best that I should conduct the search alone.

‘So I set out, journeying south-east, enquiring in the villages I passed for children of unusual learning. But more and more as I considered the matter, and the signs I had been given, I dwelt on the absence of any sign concerning a dwelling place. Therefore, though I had come to the last village for very many miles, I did not turn back, reasoning that I might meet the one I sought far from houses, and that a child begotten in a foreign land might dwell still in that land. And behold, at the very edge of what is now Tibet I met with a child who said he was in danger and who bore in his pocket pictures which were symbols of lower creations, a lily and a horse. Next he spoke of a foreign woman, who might well be his mother – for how else should he be travelling with her in these wild places? And it was to be surmised that the Chinese of whom he spoke was their guide. When the child told me that his name meant Gift of God I felt assured that I was near the end of my search, though the child gave me no new sign.

‘This might have troubled me earlier, but when I encountered the woman I recognized her as being a soul of great spiritual power, untamed and undirected, and I told myself that such a one might well be the mother of a Tulku and took this for a sign. It was then I decided that we must return to Dong Pe and ask the oracle whether I had read the signs correctly.

‘But during our journey I have become increasingly aware, both from outward observation and from inward searching, that the child is not the one I seek. There were many small signs of this. He felt all around him to be strange. I watched him reading from his Christian book and sensed his active dislike of all our ways and thought. I felt no echo of the Tojing Rimpoche I had known for more than thirty years, and last night the Abbot of Daparang confirmed my thought.

‘And yet the signs were so sure. Even now, though I know my reading of them to have been mistaken, I feel assured that these were the signs I was sent to seek. It is as though I had pieced together a torn sheet of paper, but done so in the wrong order, so that the message I read is not that which the scribe wrote; so I must study the scraps again to discern the true order. Reason tells me that the search is not at an end, and that with your help I may yet find the one I seek. It is possible that the woman is the guide of whom the oracle spoke, and that she will recognize the Tulku when she sees him. I do not know. I have sat here in meditation, cleansing my soul of all old thoughts, so that I may look afresh at the signs and question you further.’

‘So that’s it!’ said Mrs Jones with a teasing chuckle. ‘What do you make of that, Theo? I ’spect you’re glad you’re not some kind of incarnation, ain’t you?’

‘Of course I’m not!’ said Theodore in a spitting whisper. ‘It’s . . . it’s rubbish!’

He surprised himself with his own fury. The calm of the Lama’s voice, and Theodore’s tiredness, and the complexity of turning one language into another, had softened and somehow made remote the actual meaning of what was being said. Fear and repugnance shook him now in the silence. And it wasn’t any use saying it was superstition, to be pitied and disregarded, because the Lama Amchi was what he was, neither pitiful nor stupid, but a man of intelligence and authority. You would need an inner power equal to his own to argue with him, and Theodore felt now that you might never reach the limits of that power. How had he known at once that Theodore wasn’t Chinese when in the past many Chinese had been mistaken about that? How had he caused the bandit with the pistol to miss him at point blank range? How did he keep his body so unnaturally warm in the Himalayan night?

Mrs Jones chuckled again.

‘Wonder what he’ll think of now?’ she said. ‘He can’t go back like this, can he? Must of been a disappointment for him when he seen how set you were on your Bible-reading.’

She was interrupted by a movement. In the moonlight Theodore saw the Lama lean forward from the waist and reach out a thin arm to touch her wrist.

‘I sense more lives than our three,’ he said, in that remote and dreamy-seeming voice with which Theodore had first heard him speak. ‘The woman carries a child in her womb. He must be the one I seek.’

Theodore hesitated. Flushing with embarrassment in the dark he stammered the translation. Mrs Jones drew in her breath sharply and let it slowly out.

‘Lord, I hope not,’ she whispered. ‘I been beginning to wonder. How on earth did the old geezer know?’

‘We will go to Dong Pe and ask the oracle,’ said the Lama.