The Ninth Buddha

by Daniel Easterman

  ‘.. . Christopher.”

  And at the end, his father’s voice, in the centre of the void,

  reassembling the dust, refashioning the world:

  ‘.. . Christopher? Don’t you remember me, Christopher?”

  They stood by the last of the chortens together. Christopher’s father had opened shutters in the wall so that they could see out across the pass. For a long time, neither man spoke. The sun had moved, and from its new position it carved patterns of light and darkness on dim white peaks and snow-filled gullies. Apart from shadows, nothing moved. The whole world was still and silent.

  “That’s Everest,” said the old man suddenly, pointing south and west, as a father will point something out to his child.

  “The Tibetans call it Chomolungma, the Goddess Mother of the Earth.”

  He paused while Christopher located the peak to which he had pointed. Fragments of cloud covered all but the last extremity of the great mountain, dwarfed by distance.

  “And that’s Makalu,” he answered, pointing a little further south.

  “Chamlang, Lhotse you can see them all from here if the air is clear. Sometimes I stand in this spot for hours watching them. I never grow tired of this view. Never. I can still remember the first time I saw it.” He fell silent again, thinking of the past.

  Christopher shivered.

  “Are you cold?” his father asked.

  He nodded and the old man closed the shutter, confining them inside the chorten hall once more.

  “This was my last body,” Christopher’s father said, brushing his hand against the burnished metal of the tomb.

  “I don’t understand,” said Christopher. Would even two and two make four again, or black and white combine to make grey?

  “Surely you understand this much,” his father protested.

  “That we put on bodies and take them off again. I have had many bodies.

  Soon I shall be getting rid of this one as well. And then it will be time to find another.”

  “But you’re my father!” Christopher protested in his turn.

  “You died years ago. This isn’t possible.”

  “What is possible, Christopher? What is impossible? Can you tell me?

  Can you put your hand to your heart and say you know?”

  “I know that if you are my father, if you are the man I knew as a child, you can’t be ... the reincarnation of some Tibetan holy man. You were born in England, at Grantchester. You married my mother. You had a son. A daughter. None of this makes sense.”

  The old man took Christopher’s right hand and held it firmly in his own.

  “Christopher,” he said, ‘if only I could explain. We’re strangers now, you and I; but believe me that I’ve never forgotten you. It was never my wish to leave you. Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know what you wished. I only know what happened.

  What they told me happened.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  “That you disappeared. That you left camp one night and could not be found in the morning. After some time had passed, it was assumed you were dead. Is that true? Is that what happened?”

  The old man let go of Christopher’s hand and turned away from him a little.

  “After a fashion,” he said in a quiet voice. He was a small man, dwarfed by the tombs of his predecessors. His lined and wrinkled face showed signs of great weariness.

  “It is true, but only after a fashion like most things in this world. The deeper truth, the truth they could not guess, much less tell you, was that Arthur Wylam had been dead long before he walked out of his tent that night. I was a shell, I was empty, there was absolutely no substance to me, none at all. I acted, I performed my duties, such as they were, I passed for a man. But inwardly, I was already dead. I was like one of the ro-langs people believe they have seen in these mountains.

  “When I left the camp that morning, I didn’t know what I was doing, where I was going. I remember very little, to be honest. All I know is that there was nothing more for me in that life. I’d exhausted everything it had to offer and found it rotten at the core.

  All I wanted to do was walk. And that is exactly what I did. I walked and climbed and stumbled for days, deeper and deeper into the mountains. I had no food, I had no idea how to find any, I was lost, and my mind was in total confusion.”

  He paused, remembering, tasting again the emptiness and the horror of those days.

  “They found me at a place called Sepo two monks from Dorjela. I was in a state of collapse, close to death. Nothing extraordinary, really a dying man, cold, hungry, with his mind in tatters.

  But in Tibet, nothing is quite ordinary either. They find signs in everything in a meteor, a monstrous birth, a bird circling a hill.

  It is often the tiny things that draw their attention the shape of a child’s ears, the way the thatch lies on a farmer’s roof, the path smoke takes as it rises from a chimney. Things you and I would not even notice. We have grown out of touch.

  “The place they found me at was a junction where two glaciers met.

  There was a sharp peak to the east and a steep precipice to the west. On the day they found me, two vultures had been seen nearby, just hovering. I rather think they were waiting for a meal once I was finished. All simple things those but they took them as signs. They said there was a prophecy, that the new abbot of Dorje-la would be found in a place of that description. To this day, I don’t know if that was true or not, if there was a prophecy or not.

  But they believed it. And afterwards ... I came to believe it too.”

  Christopher broke in, still not comprehending.

  “But you weren’t a child,” he said.

  “You were a man of forty, an adult. They always choose children as new incarnations, at the age of three or four.”

  His father sighed and placed a hand on Christopher’s shoulder.

  “This isn’t an ordinary monastery, Christopher. This is Dorje-la.

  Things happen differently here.” He paused and sighed again.

  “I

  am the thirteenth abbot of Dorje-la. My predecessor died in the same year I was born and left instructions not to seek for his successor until forty years had passed. He said the new incarnation would come from the south, from India. And that he would be a pee-ling.”

  He fell silent. Christopher said nothing. If the old man believed this nonsense, what right had he to object? And perhaps it was not nonsense after all. Perhaps there was some substance to it that Christopher’s western mind could not appreciate.

  “Shall we go to another room?” the old man asked.

  Christopher nodded.

  “I’m in your hands,” he said.

  His father looked at him, still trying to find in the man the child he had left so many years before. Was there anything left, anything at all?

  “No,” he said, ‘you’re in your own hands.”

  They left the chorten hall and passed through heavy curtains into a small room. It was a. circular chamber, about twelve feet in diameter, empty of the usual cushions and hangings, devoid of ornamentation. At the end of the world, Arthur Wylam had found austerity. A plain carpet covered the floor and a long bolster ran along a section of wall. In niches books were ranged in small piles.

  Several lamps hung from a shallowly domed ceiling.

  They sat down together, leaning against the bolster, father and son.

  “It’s very simple, I’m afraid,” the old man said.

  “No birds, no butterflies, no fish.”

  “Why do you have them?” Christopher asked, meaning the animals and plants in the rooms he had passed through earlier.

  “My predecessor began the rooms. He was curious about things.

  He wanted to have examples of the world about him. I preserve them, replenish them when necessary.”

  “They represent the elements? Is that their significance?”

  The abbot nodded.

  “The elements, y
es. That and more. They show us decay. And birth.

  And the levels of existence. And much else besides.”

  “I see.” Christopher hesitated. He wanted to talk about other things.

  “After they brought you here,” he said, ‘why didn’t you try to get in touch with someone, explain what had happened? You never even wrote to me. I thought you were dead.”

  “I wanted you to think that. What else could I have done? Told you I was alive, but that I was never coming back? You would have tried to find me. At first, I didn’t understand this place or what it stood for. I didn’t even know who I was, who they expected me to be. So how could I have coped with your coming here, seeking me out, reminding me of who I had been? And later .. .

  later I began to understand. And when I understood .. . there was no going back.”

  “What about love?” asked Christopher.

  “What about trust?”

  The old man sighed. He had not heard those words in any language for a very long time.

  “Don’t you see I was beyond all that?” he replied.

  “Beyond love, beyond trust. I had no more of either in me not a shred, nothing.

  I pray you never reach that state. Not, at least, in the way I came to it. In the end, you will have to abandon all such things love and trust and desire. Especially the last, especially desire. Otherwise they will devour you. Believe me, they are greedy. Desire is insatiable, it knows no beginning and no end. There are no boundaries to it. But they are the cords that bind you to suffering.

  They will bind you for the rest of your life if you do not prevent them. And for all your future lives.”

  “Why did you steal my son?” Christopher asked abruptly.

  The abbot did not answer. His face was troubled. He looked away from Christopher at shadows.

  “He’s important to you for some reason, isn’t he?” Christopher persisted.

  “Because he’s your grandson. That’s the reason, isn’t it?

  You want him to be some sort of incarnation as well, don’t you?”

  His father bent his head.

  “Yes.” he said.

  Christopher stood up angrily.

  “Well, you’re wrong. William is my son. My wife’s son. You have no part in him. It was your choice to die. Very well, stay dead: the dead have no claims on the living. William is my son and he belongs with me. I’m taking him home with me.”

  The old man looked up.

  “Sit down,” he whispered.

  Christopher remained standing.

  “I am old now,” his father said.

  “I don’t have much longer to live. But when I die, Dorje-la will be without an abbot. Please try to understand what that means. These monks are like children, they need someone to be a father to them. Now especially, when the world outside is changing so rapidly. They may not be able to remain secluded here much longer. When the world comes knocking on the gates of Dorje-la, there must be someone in charge who can meet it on its own terms. An outsider, a pee-ling like ourselves.”

  “But why William, why my son?”

  The old man sighed.

  “There is a prophecy,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter whether you believe in prophecies or not. The monks here believe in them, and in this prophecy in particular.”

  “And what does it say, this prophecy?”

  “The first part refers to myself. So they believe.

  “When Dorje-la is ruled by a pee-ling, the world shall be ruled from Dorje-la.” The second part refers to “the son of a pee-ling’s son”. He will be the last abbot of Dorje-la. And then the Buddha of the last age will appear: the Maidari.”

  “And you think William is this “son of a pee-ling’s son”?”

  “They believe all Europeans marry and that the child must be the grandson of the pee-ling abbot. I did not believe that at first.

  Even if you had a son, I could see no way of ever bringing him here. I had no means.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  The abbot paused. Whatever was troubling him had returned with renewed force. Christopher thought he was frightened by something.

  “Zamyatin changed my mind,” he said finally.

  “When he came here, he already knew of the prophecy. He knew of me:

  who I was, where I had come from. He told me that, if I had a grandson, he could arrange to have him brought here. At first I argued, but in the end he persuaded me. I needed the boy, you see. I needed someone to carry on the line.”

  “Couldn’t you have tried to find a new incarnation in the normal way? Here, in Tibet. A Buddhist child, one whose parents would have been happy for him to be chosen.”

  The old man shook his head.

  “No,” he said.

  “There was the prophecy. During the years after my predecessor died, before I came here, there was a vice-regency.

  A man called Tensing Rinpoche ruled in the abbot’s place. When they brought me here at first, he opposed my selection as the new abbot. He died two years later, but a section of the monks has always thought of him as the true incarnation.”

  “When he was a young man, he belonged to another sect, one that does not require its monks to be celibate. He had a son. That son is now an important man in his own right here. His name is Tsarong Rinpoche. If I leave Dorje-la without an abbot most of the monks can accept, Tsarong Rinpoche will have his opportunity.

  There are enough who will follow him. And I need not tell you what it will mean if he proclaims himself abbot.”

  “Why don’t you get rid of him?”

  “I cannot. He is the son of Tensing Rinpoche. Believe me, I cannot send him away.”

  “Why did Zamyatin offer to help you? What was in it for him?”

  The abbot hesitated. Behind him, a candle stirred in the chill air.

  “He came to Tibet in search of something. What he sought was here, in Dorje-la. He made a deal with me: my grandson in exchange for what he wanted. At first I refused, but in the end I saw I had no choice. I accepted his offer.”

  “What was it he came here to find?”

  “Please, Christopher, I can’t explain. Not yet. Later, when you have been here a little longer.”

  “And William will I be allowed to see him?”

  “Please be patient, Christopher. Eventually, when it is time. But you must understand that you cannot be allowed to take him away. You must reconcile yourself to that. I know it will be hard, but I can teach you how. You may stay in Dorje-la indefinitely. I would like it if you stayed. But you can never leave with your son.

  He belongs to us now.”

  Christopher said nothing. He went to the curtains and pulled them aside. Outside, the sun had set and darkness had taken hold of the chortens. He could feel the knife in his boot, the hard metal against his skin. It would be so easy to hold the blade against his father’s throat, force him to give William up to him. No-one would dare to stop him while he held their abbot hostage. He wondered why he was unable to act.

  “I want to be taken back to my room,” he said.

  His father stood and came to the doorway.

  “You can’t go back there. Zamyatin has tried to have you killed once:

  he won’t make a mistake the next time. I’ll give instructions for you to be housed on this floor, near me.” He looked out at the darkened chamber beyond.

  “It’s already dark. I have my devotions to attend to. Wait here: I’ll send someone to show you to your new room.”

  The abbot turned and went back into the little room. Christopher watched him go, his hair white, his body bent. His father had come back from the dead. It was like a miracle. But if it meant he could take William out of this place, he would gladly wipe out the miracle and send his father back to the grave.

  The room to which Christopher was shown was larger than the cell in which he had first been confined. It was square and finely furnished, with high walls that were finished with brightly glazed tiles
that had come all the way from Persia. Peacocks strutted and sloe-eyed maidens cast alluring glances over brimming bowls of wine. On a blue sky, the silhouettes of nightingales and hoopoes formed patterns elaborate as birdsong. It was a place of riches, hardly a monastic room at all; but for all that, it was as much a prison as the tiny chamber below had been.

  He lay awake afterwards in a tight darkness that smelled to him of childhood. His butter-lamp had extinguished itself, leaving him to relive his past in the sudden knowledge that his father had been alive all along. While Christopher had mourned, his father had been here in Dorje-la, perhaps in this very room, assuming the contours of a new identity. Did it make any difference at all? he wondered. Nothing could change what had been. He fell asleep uneasily, just as he had gone to sleep that first night long ago, on the day news of his father’s death had reached him during a passage of the Aeneid.

  He was awakened by a small sound, and at once saw a light flickering in

  the room. Someone was standing near his bed, watching him silently. At

  first he thought it was his father, come to watch over him while he

  slept; but then he saw that the figure with the light was smaller and

  un stooped

  “Who’s there?” he called out; but he knew. “ “Shshsh,” the intruder hissed. In the same moment, the small light was lifted higher and he saw her, captured for him in its glow.

  How long had she been standing in the half-darkness, watching him?

  She came over to his bedside, without a sound.

  “I’m sorry if I startled you,” she whispered. Close by, he could at last make out her features perfectly. He had not imagined it: she was extraordinarily beautiful. Her face bent out of the darkness towards him with a look of concern.

  “I came to see if you were awake,” she continued, still in a whisper.

  He sat up. Even though he was fully dressed, the room felt cold.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “I don’t think I’ve been asleep long. To tell the truth, I’d rather stay awake.”

  She put her lamp down on a low table and moved back into the shadows.

  He sensed that she was frightened of him.

  “Why did they move you to this room?” she asked.