The Breath of God

by Jeffrey Small

  Grant was out of breath, and his leg was throbbing. With the atrophy in his right quadriceps, he struggled to keep up with Kristin’s athletic strides as they ascended the dark steps below the monastery. The motivation of reaching his friend in time pushed him through the pain. Four police officers and eight monks preceded them by a few minutes. The hotel’s night clerk had somehow persuaded a taxi to pick them up and take them directly to the trailhead, where Jigme waited. Grant tried not to imagine what they might find when they reached the monastery. He focused on his breath, just as Kinley had taught him.

  “There.” Kristin pointed to the lowest of the monastery buildings, from which a glowing light spilled out through its open doorway. Grant heard shouting ahead.

  “That’s the dormitory. That’s where Ummon left Kinley,” Jigme said.

  Two minutes later Grant stepped to the doorway of the one-room building, blinking his eyes to adjust to the light. At first he had trouble interpreting the chaos of activity taking place. The room was awash in the flowing crimson robes of the monks as well as the blue and white uniforms of two police officers. One of the officers spoke rapidly into a handheld radio, presumably to the other two policemen in their party who were searching the monastery levels above them. The monks shouted at each other in frightened Bhutanese.

  The other officer met them at the doorway holding his arms out to block entrance into the dorm. As the officer and Jigme exchanged words, the scene came into focus for Grant. Four of the monks carried the body of their fallen brother to one side of the room, where they carefully laid him on reed mats. The other four monks circled around what had to be Kinley, dressed in orange, lying in the center of the floor. Grant’s stomach lurched.

  He shoved past the protesting officer who blocked the doorway. Kristin bolted into the center of the room after him.

  “No!” she cried.

  Grant’s pulse pounded from his chest to his head. He stepped into the circle of monks. Kinley’s normally robust complexion had turned ashen; his robes were soaked in blood. Two arrows stuck upright, buried inches into each thigh. Three monks knelt by his legs, pressing around the arrow wounds, while a fourth who looked to be a couple of years younger than Jigme cradled Kinley’s head.

  “Is he alive?” Grant croaked. For once, he didn’t try to disguise the emotions welling up within him.

  Jigme appeared by his side, speaking in Bhutanese to the younger monk. “He’s unconscious, barely breathing.”

  “Can’t they remove the arrows?” Kristin asked. She knelt and took Kinley’s hand.

  “Not here,” Jigme said, surveying Kinley’s legs. “The arrows are barbed. Pulling them out would tear his veins and arteries. If we could get him to a hospital, a doctor could surgically remove them.”

  “What if we can’t get him there in time?” Grant remembered his own accident and how he had to remain in the monastery in Punakha. But surely Paro had to have modern medical facilities? Then he thought about the difficult hike up the mountain.

  Jigme grimaced. “The alternative is to break the arrows in half and push them out the other side, but in his current state, doing so would cause too much blood loss. Controlling the bleeding is the best we can do for now.”

  The back of Grant’s throat burned, making it difficult to swallow. His friend had saved his life, and now Grant was helpless to aid him. Then he noticed that the monk’s ankles were tightly bound by duct tape. Grant dropped to his knees by Kinley’s feet. Just as he’d done with Kristin only a few days earlier, he began to unwrap the tape. He moved slowly so that that he wouldn’t disturb the arrows embedded in Kinley’s thighs. He felt Kinley’s calf muscle. The skin was cool to the touch. Not a good sign, he knew. The other monks cast wary glances at Grant, no doubt suspicious of the fact that he was a foreigner.

  When he finished removing the tape, he balled it up and tossed it to the corner of the room. He wiped his sticky hands on his jeans and noticed that the denim was soaked through the knees with Kinley’s blood. He rose and moved to Kristin’s side where she sat softly crying, caressing Kinley’s arm. Grant placed a hand on his friend’s chest. His mind raced to figure out a way they could carry Kinley off the mountain without causing him any more harm. Then Grant felt a movement he wasn’t sure was real or imagined. Kinley’s chest seemed to expand, as if he was drawing in a deep breath.

  Grant bent over the monk’s pallid face. “Kinley, can you hear me? We’re here for you.”

  The raspy voice that came from his teacher’s mouth startled him. “What took you so long?”

  Hope surged through Grant. Kinley was conscious. The monk was strong. “Well, you monks didn’t exactly build this monastery in the most convenient of places.” Grant smiled through his tears.

  Kinley opened his eyes—eyes that were clear and knowing. Through chapped lips, Kinley returned Grant’s smile. Grant addressed the young monk kneeling by Kinley’s head. “Water. He needs water.” He seemed to understand and jumped to search the room.

  “Wait, I think I have some.” Kristin pulled a half-filled plastic bottle from the daypack she’d carried up the mountain. She lifted Kinley’s head and helped him drink. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Are you in much pain?”

  “No, I am not,” he said hoarsely. “My body, on the other hand, has seen better times.”

  “I wish I could remember.” She began to sob. “When I was his prisoner and unconscious, I ... I must have said something about this place. All of this death. I’m so sorry.”

  “My dear”—Kinley squeezed her hand—“it is I who am sorry. When I sent you two on this journey, I meant for it to be an eye-opening experience. I was naïve, for I had no idea that it would lead to this suffering. Please do not cry for me. We will all die. My time just happens to be tonight.

  “You will not die tonight,” Grant said, sitting up straighter. “We are going to carry you down the mountain.” Then he noticed a broom in one corner of the room. That’s it, he thought. Knowing how fastidious the monks were about keeping the goembas clean, he imagined that several other brooms could be found. The plan formed quickly. They would fashion a stretcher from the broomsticks and the robes of the monks. Four men would carry the stretcher down, and the police would have an ambulance waiting at the base of the mountain.

  “I think we both know that I’ve lost too much blood.”

  Grant let his eyes fall to the puddle that was still spreading around Kinley’s legs, in spite of the efforts of the three monks putting pressure on the wounds. He felt the wetness on his jeans. The hope he’d held moments before began to slip away. “But you can’t die,” Grant said, as if the force of the words would make it so.

  Kinley’s eyes fluttered closed. Grant’s heart skipped a beat until his friend blinked them open again. “What is the true nature of your journey, Grant?”

  Grant was caught off guard. Even close to death, Kinley had not lost his knack for posing vague questions, but they didn’t have time to sit here and discuss another one of the monk’s koans. They needed to get him off the mountain. Grant opened his mouth to protest, but the determined expression on Kinley’s face caused him to close his mouth and consider the question. The first response to pop into his head was the obvious one—to find the Issa texts—but he dismissed it as too trivial. He considered next the journey that brought him from Bhutan through India and then back again. Is he referring to my crash course on the interconnectedness of religion? Maybe the lessons of the similar mystical experiences shared by the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad?

  Kristin cleared her throat and tugged on Grant’s arm. He was wasting precious time. Kinley’s patient expression, however, communicated that he had all day to wait for Grant’s mind to churn through the possibilities. Ultimately Grant realized that each of these answers captured part of the truth but none entirely. He also knew that Kinley did not like to receive ten answers to a single question. He had learned so much since his fateful kayaking trip, but then there had been so much suffering too. Jigme�
�s shooting. Kristin’s attack. He thought of Deepraj, Razi, and the old monk on the other side of the room. These men had sacrificed their lives for the lessons they had imparted to him. Too high a price. What am I doing here?

  “I don’t know,” he answered in a low voice.

  “Exactly!” Kinley’s own voice contained a strength that belied his condition. “Not knowing is the ultimate truth.”

  “But after everything we’ve experienced—”

  “Ah yes, the most important lesson you have learned is that you still do not know. After a lifetime of study and meditation, I have realized that sometimes it is better to stop seeking the answers, stop asking the questions. Just be.”

  Grant had not expected this response. For so long he’d searched for answers or, at the minimum, for the path that would lead him to the answers he needed. Something in Kinley’s simple statement, however, resonated with him. Maybe he’d been trying too hard. Grasping.

  Kneeling beside his dying teacher, Grant felt a strong sense of déjà vu: he himself lying crippled in a Bhutanese monastery, struggling to solve riddles that had no answer. But now Grant was the healthy one, and Kinley was incapacitated. He recalled one of the koans that Kinley had posed to him in what seemed like another lifetime.

  “When the tree withers and the leaves fall ...” Grant began.

  “The body is exposed in the autumn wind,” Kinley finished. “The answers you seek, my friend. Look first to your questions. The source of both is the same.”

  Although he was still bundled up in his fleece and jacket, Grant felt naked before Kinley. He sensed Kristin’s questioning expression, but he wasn’t sure that he could explain to her why what Kinley said suddenly made sense to him.

  Kinley drew in a deep breath, but instead of exhaling, tremors of deep coughs shook his body. He winced in pain. Kristin exchanged a worried look with Grant. “What can we do to make you more comfortable?” she asked, offering him another sip of water.

  “Having my friends here is enough.” They both had to lean forward to hear the monk.

  Grant’s throat constricted. He knew that despite his desperate wishes, his friend did not have much time left.

  “The books ...” Kinley said.

  “Are they still here?” Grant asked.

  “The tiger’s lair.”

  “Huh?” Grant and Kristin said in unison.

  Kinley’s eyes refocused. “You came here because of the mural in Sarnath?”

  “Yes,” Kristin said. “We recognized the image of Padmasambhava flying on the back of a tiger to the cave on the side of this mountain.”

  “The tiger’s lair,” Jigme said, nodding his head. “Now I understand.” Grant turned to him. Jigme had been so quiet that Grant had forgotten that Kinley’s longest student had been observing these exchanges in silence. The younger monk continued, “What better place to store the texts that describe Issa learning the teachings of the Buddha than the place where Padmasambhava meditated before spreading Buddhism to our country?”

  “The cave exists?” Grant asked. “I assumed it was just a myth.”

  Jigme shook his head. “We can get into it through a concealed door in one of the lower temples.”

  Jigme spoke in Bhutanese to the oldest of the monks who stood by Kinley. The monk responded in an irritated tone, gesturing to Grant and Kristin. Jigme started to argue when Kinley lifted his head a few inches and spoke a few authoritative words that silenced both of them. The elder monk left the room. Jigme helped Kinley lower his head to the floor. The two spoke for a minute. Jigme concentrated on every word his master said, as if each held a little piece of magic.

  When he finished speaking with Jigme, Kinley’s breathing became more labored. Kristin leaned forward and kissed his forehead. Tears fell from her cheeks again. Grant opened his mouth to say something comforting, but he couldn’t make any words come out.

  “Thank you for believing in us,” Kristin said.

  Kinley smiled at her and then shifted his eyes to Grant. His voice came out in a whisper. “I’ve always known the importance of these texts. I was just waiting for the right person to find them.” He closed his eyes and exhaled.

  Kristin stroked the graying stubble on his head with her hand. “Save your energy, don’t speak.”

  But Grant knew that the energy had finally left his friend.

  CHAPTER 52

  TIGER’S NEST MONASTERY PARO, BHUTAN

  THE ROOM WAS STILL. As Grant watched the last breath escape from Kinley’s lips, a word popped into his head. Nephesh. The breath of God. But the spark of the divine in Kinley was lit no more. The monk’s face appeared relaxed, the corners of his mouth turned slightly upward, as if his last moment held a bit of humor for him.

  Grant had just lost a friend and a teacher. Watching Kinley accept his own death with such a sense of peace brought Grant an unexpected comfort. Up to the moment of death, Kinley cared more about imparting a last bit of wisdom to his students than he worried about his own fate.

  “Good-bye, my friend,” Grant said, giving Kinley’s shoulder a final squeeze. He stood and then helped Kristin, whose body shook with quiet sobs, to her feet. He didn’t bother to disguise or to wipe the tears from his own cheeks.

  As the monks began to remove the arrows from Kinley’s legs and wrap him in his robes, a sound rose from the circle of men. The monks began to chant. Each monk, including Jigme, sang. Their voices harmonized, until the vibrations of the chant filled every corner of the room, and every corner of Grant’s body.

  “I can’t believe he’s gone,” Kristin said, leaning on the wooden railing outside the dormitory.

  “I know.” Grant put his arms around her from behind. “These last few weeks I’ve been thinking of the questions I wanted to ask him, and now—” She straightened and leaned her head back against his chest. To Grant, the lights of the town of Paro in the valley far below reminded him of fireflies dancing through the warm air on a summer night. A strange comparison, he thought, considering that the temperature had dropped about thirty degrees since the afternoon, and the wailing wind blowing from the valley pierced his layers of clothing.

  Shuffling from the steps above drew their attention. Someone was coming from the upper levels of the monastery. Grant realized that they hadn’t yet heard from the two officers who were searching the temples. He felt Kristin tense.

  The figure who emerged from the darkness, however, was the monk whom Kinley had spoken to a few minutes earlier. A leather lanyard swayed from his closed fist. The monk glared at the two Americans before he disappeared into the lit doorway.

  A few moments later, Jigme emerged wearing the lanyard around his neck. A single skeleton key dangled from its end. “Come with me,” he said in a hushed voice.

  They followed him up the staircase. Kristin stayed at Grant’s side, allowing him to put a little weight on her arm. His leg had stiffened from the climb, and he was limping now.

  “The texts?” she asked.

  “We are about to enter the tiger’s lair,” Jigme replied.

  After everything they’d been through, they were finally here, Grant realized. Kinley had given up his life protecting the texts. Grant couldn’t help but feel that his sacrifice was too big and that the texts weren’t worth all the lives that had been lost. Following the beam cast by Jigme’s flashlight, they navigated around granite boulders which rose in the center of the passage. The monastery walls around them appeared to grow from the cliff itself, an illusion dispelled only by the uniformity of the masonry work and the colorful murals painted from floor to ceiling.

  Stopping on the second level, Jigme turned to his right and descended a separate narrow wooden staircase, rather than continuing up the main stairs to the higher levels above them.

  Another memory came to Grant. “Kristin, in the Punakha library Kinley spoke of growth being like climbing a staircase.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “After some point, we reach a landing. Some choose to remain on the l
anding where they’re comfortable. Kinley challenged us to keep climbing to the next level and the one above that.”

  Jigme nodded. “That analogy was one of his favorites. Whenever I became too prideful of my progress, he would remind me that there was always another stairway to climb, another plateau to reach. Well, tonight”—he pointed to the stone landing at the foot of the stairs—“we must go down in order to go up.”

  Then a beam of light hit Grant square in the face.

  Blinded, he simultaneously grabbed for both Kristin and the wooden railing. A voice shouted from behind the white light.

  Jigme answered from the step below. The light swung from Grant’s face, but the starburst pattern remained in his vision for several moments. The voice responded in a friendlier tone of Bhutanese.

  “Grant and Kristin, this is Sangay,” Jigme said, introducing them to the man with the intense flashlight who stood on a landing on the upper staircase. “He’s the son of my mother’s sister.”

  “Ah, your cousin,” Kristin said, relief in her voice.

  “That’s right, cousin. He lives here in Paro. A policeman.”

  When Grant’s eyes adjusted, he saw that two men stood on the floor above them, dressed in the same blue and white garb as the officers in the dormitory hall.

  “Did they find anything?” Grant asked, also relieved.

  Jigme spoke to his cousin, and then translated. “The goemba is empty, but someone searched the temples, leaving a path of destruction behind.” He spoke again with his cousin. “Having Sangay here will help us. Come, we must be quick.”

  While the two officers waited outside, Jigme led Grant and Kristin through a thick red door at the bottom of the stairs into a temple not too much bigger than their hotel room. The glow of Jigme’s light illuminated a blue plaster statue that Grant recognized as Padmasambhava behind a stone altar at the far end of the room. The floor was wooden and the walls were covered in silk, giving the temple a softer feel than the rest of the monastery. Jigme recited a short mantra and then prostrated himself on the ground before the statue. On rising, he went to the left wall and parted the silk fabric, exposing a heavy whitewashed door. While Jigme removed the skeleton key from his neck and worked it in the large padlock, Grant peered through the six-inch square opening crisscrossed with iron bars at eye level in the door.