The Ninth Buddha

by Daniel Easterman

  The hunters gave them directions to Gharoling, the monastery to which Tobchen Geshe had tried to take Samdup for refuge.

  They arrived there two days later. The monastery was situated to the north of the mountain range through which they had passed, in a secluded valley through which ran a tributary of the Yarlong Tsangpo, the northern section of the Brahmaputra. Shigatse, the capital of Tsang province, was only a few days away to the northeast.

  An early spring had come to the valley. Grass grew on the banks of the river, riveted to the earth by small blue flowers that neither of them could name. There were trees, and birds to sing in them, and green buds forming on their branches. A small village nestled beneath the gompa, which stood on a low hill near the head of the valley. White prayer-flags fluttered everywhere, filling the air with a soft flapping sound.

  They stood at the entrance to the valley, dressed in their travel worn clothes, pinched and hungry, gazing at the scene in front of them like damned souls gazing into paradise. Chindamani’s eyes were wide with amazement: she had never known a world that was not bound by winter. The seasons meant nothing to her. She touched the grass with unbelieving fingers, smelled the warm air, and watched the birds collect twigs for their nests.

  Christopher picked a flower for her and placed it in her hair.

  “I’ll keep it always, Ka-ris To-feh,” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “No,” he said.

  “It will die soon. If you put it in water, it will last a few days more. But then it will die.”

  She looked crestfallen for a moment, then smiled.

  “Perhaps that is why it is so beautiful,” she said.

  He looked at her, at the flower on her temple.

  “Yes,” he said. And he thought she was beautiful. And that she would die.

  She spent most of the day following their arrival closeted with the abbot, Khyongla Rinpoche. When she emerged that evening, her face was serious, and Christopher’s best efforts could not secure a smile. She would not tell him what the abbot had said.

  They slept in separate rooms, and that night she did not come to him. He waited for her until dawn, but in the end resigned himself to her absence and slept fitfully through the morning.

  A week passed, during which they ate and rested and gained strength for the journey ahead. Each day they left the monastery and walked together in the green valley, or sat on the banks of the river. Dorje-la seemed worlds away, a place of horrors unimaginable here. They were lovers in a world made for love. The rest was a nightmare or an illusion. But when she came from her talks with the abbot her eyes were clouded with sadness neither the sunshine nor his words of endearment could dispel.

  “Do you love me truly, Ka-ris To-feh?” she asked.

  “Yes, little Drolma,” he said.

  “Please. I’ve asked you not to call me that.” Her face grew troubled.

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  He frowned.

  “Does she still live in you?” he asked.

  She nodded. A shadow passed over the water.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “No matter what happens, she lives in me.”

  “I see. Very well, I promise not to call you Drolma if you promise to call me what my friends call me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Chris,” he said.

  “Ka-ris.” She laughed.

  “That’s all right. I’ll call you Ka-ris from now on.”

  He smiled at her.

  “And you,” he said.

  “Do you love me truly?”

  She bent forward and kissed him. In the sky a lammergeyer plunged.

  They talked of his life: India, England, the war. It was all fresh to her, all beyond imagining. When he talked of cities, she could see nothing but gigantic monasteries, seething with people. When he told her of ships sailing the sea between India and home, she thought only of a vast expanse of rippling snow. The river beside which they walked was the first flowing water she had seen: the ocean was beyond all thought. When he spoke of tanks and aeroplanes, she shook her head in disbelief and closed her eyes.

  Once, an early butterfly passed over their heads, bright-winged and doomed to die by nightfall. He watched it go and thought of Puccini’s opera, of Butterfly waiting year after year for the return of Pinkerton, of Oriental fidelity and Western treachery.

  “My Butterfly,” he murmured, caressing her cheek with a thoughtful hand.

  She smiled and looked at him, thinking of the painted wings that had passed her a moment ago. He looked away, remembering a painted stage and a woman in a kimono, dying for love, waiting for smoke to appear on a distant horizon.

  In a cave above the monastery lived an old hermit, a gomchen who had been immured there at the age of twenty, forty years earlier. The cave had neither window nor door, but inside a spring rose up and flowed through a small opening in the wall before running down to join the river below. Every morning, the villagers would leave food in the opening; every evening they would collect the empty bowl. Otherwise, nothing passed in or out of the cave:

  no light, no sound, no fragrance. If six days passed without the food being touched, they would break down the wall and take the old man’s body for burial.

  They went up the hill to visit the cave.

  “What does he think about?” Christopher asked.

  “If I knew, I would be walled up like him.”

  “Don’t you know? Doesn’t the Lady Tara tell you?”

  She shook her head, irritated.

  “I’ve told you. She tells me nothing. I’m just the vehicle. But it’s different anyhow. I have no choice about being a trulku. He chose to enter his cave. He will escape rebirth through his own efforts.

  The Lady Tara will go on being reborn, in me, in others after me.”

  “We have holy men,” he said.

  “But they don’t wall themselves up like this. They pray, but not incessantly. They fast, but not to excess.”

  “Then they cannot be very holy men,” she replied.

  “Perhaps they may have the fortune to be reborn as gomchens.”

  “I think it’s horrible,” he said, ‘to be walled up like that. To have no light or company or fresh air, year after year for forty years. It’s worse than prison. A man might go mad in there.”

  “This world is a prison,” she answered.

  “He is seeking to escape.

  Light and fresh air and conversation are nothing but bars and walls. We are doomed to be reborn to them. In his cave, he is already free.”

  He took her hand and held it tightly.

  “Do you believe that?” he asked.

  “Do you believe that when we make love, when I lie with you? Do you believe that now, here with me in the sunlight?”

  She looked away, at the cave, at the little stream running from it, at the hillside.

  “I don’t know what to believe any more,” she answered. She could hear nothing from the cave, not even the sound of the old hermit’s voice reciting prayers.

  In front of them, the valley stretched out of sight. Smoke rose from the chimneys of the huts that made up the village. In a field, yaks were grazing. At their feet, the monastery glistened with gilded cupolas.

  “I remember,” she said, ‘paintings on the walls of the Chqje’s room.”

  She paused.

  “Yes. Go on,” he said.

  “They were bright paintings. I used to think they showed scenes from the next world, from hell. In one of them, a man was being held by a band of monks. His arms and legs were tied, and they were lifting him.”

  She paused again. Beyond the valley, stark peaks rose into a sky of ice. She shivered.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Go on.”

  i “There was a hole. They were lifting him to lower him into the , hole.”

  i “I see.”

  “And in the next picture, he had been lowered through the hole and was stand
ing in a dark room. I think .. .” She shuddered.

  “I

  think he was held there by a spider’s web.”

  “I understand. And was there more? Were there any more pictures?”

  She nodded.

  “Yes. Another one,” she said.

  “In it the man was lying down.

  Perhaps he was not a man, but a boy. He seemed very small. And demons with several arms were attacking him. I tell you, I thought it was hell.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It was hell.”

  But he thought though he could not be sure why of the photographs he had found in Cormac’s desk.

  “Simon, Dorje-la?, 1916’, “Matthew, Dorje-la?” 1918’, “Gordon, Dorje-la?” 1919’.

  “I think they must have lowered the victims into the room a few days before it was time to go down to the first chamber to bring up the Chqje’s things. The rest of the time, there would be some guardians to watch over the treasure; but while the treasure was needed, they would all be feasting at the other end of the tunnel.”

  He shuddered. Had his father known what went on? Had Carpenter known to what uses the boys he sold were put?

  “When was the last time the Oracle appeared in public?” he asked.

  She thought briefly.

  “About... a week before you arrived at Dorje-la,” she said.

  He remained silent. It fitted. The fresh body. No traces of spiders in the treasure-chamber.

  “I think we’d better go back down to the river,” he said.

  On the fourth day, the abbot called for him. Chindamani took him

  there, then left them alone. The abbot was old and stern, but

  Christopher sensed that some at least of the lines that creased the skin round his eyes were laughter lines; he guessed that, at another time and under other circumstances, the old man might have shown himself less severe.

  “You are the son of the Dorje Lama? Is that correct?” the abbot asked after tea had been served.

  “I am the son of a man who was called Arthur Wylam,” Christopher answered.

  “In my world he died. In yours, he became the abbot of a monastery. I don’t understand it. I can’t explain it.

  I don’t even seek for an explanation any longer.”

  “That’s very sensible of you. There are no explanations that you would understand. You say you thought your father died. Perhaps it is best if you continue to think of things that way.”

  The abbot paused, then looked up at Christopher.

  “Tell me about Zam-ya-ting, the Burial.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “The truth. As you understand it. Who he is. What he wants with Dorje Samdup and your son.”

  Christopher told him what he could. Each time he was about to let his personal feelings about Zamyatin interfere with the facts, a look in Khyongla Rinpoche’s eyes stopped him. It was not a conscious thing, but afterwards he realized it had happened throughout the interview.

  When he had finished, the abbot nodded and poured tea into Christopher’s cup. For the first time, Christopher noticed that the cups they used were to-tai, identical to those he had drunk from in Dorje-la.

  “And the woman, Jebtsumna Chindamani,” the abbot said.

  “Do you love her?”

  “Has she told you that I do?”

  “Yes. She has told me so. And that she loves you. Is that true?”

  Christopher felt like someone walking on an ice-covered lake, who hears the ice groaning beneath his feet. He was sure he had contravened a fundamental law of this ritual-obsessed society.

  What did they do to mortals who ravished their goddesses?

  “Have you slept with her?”

  Christopher could not keep himself from nodding. Perhaps whatever death they chose to inflict would be quick.

  “You don’t have to conceal it from me. She herself has told me.

  I am glad.”

  “Glad?” Christopher was sure he had misheard.

  “Of course. Did you think I would be angry? We value chastity this is a monastery, after all. All Buddhist monks and nuns are celibate. But Jebtsumna Chindamani is not a nun. She is not bound to the Sangha by vows. It is merely a convention that the Tara trulku at Dorje-la remains unmarried.”

  “But I’m not .. .”

  “Divine? Neither is she. Not exactly. But I expect she has already tried to explain that to you and failed. I am not sure that I approve of her choice ofapee-ling for a lover. That may be unwise. But the Lady Tara dwells in her. And you are the son of the Dorje Lama.

  I cannot criticize her. If she has chosen you, then the Lady Tara has chosen you.”

  Christopher began to wonder if he had any choice in this at all.

  He had never felt more like a puppet. And he knew exactly whose hands held the strings.

  “Go back to her now,” said the abbot, ‘and tell her I wish to speak with her again. Do not ask her to tell you what she and I talk about there are things it is better for you not to know. But do not resent that. You have an important task. You have been chosen for it, see that you fulfill it.”

  On their last night at Gharoling, she came to his room, wearing a Chinese gown of white silk and small stitched shoes of Indian brocade. She brought tea and barley cakes and purple incense that smelled of honey and musk and wild roses. As they sat and sipped from their tiny cups, coils of smoke wreathed their heads, filling their nostrils with a heavy, intoxicating fragrance. The smell reminded him of his childhood: of church on high holy days, of spring evenings crammed with the sweet smell of holiness, of the white hands of the priest turning bread to flesh and wine to blood.

  But there was no priest, no altar, no life-renouncing god to stand between him and his senses. He feasted on her hair and eyes and lips, on the simple miracle that she was there. He had grown to need her, and he wondered how he had lived before he knew her.

  “Do men love women where you come from, Ka-ris?” she asked.

  He smiled.

  “Of course. And women love men.”

  “And do they marry?”

  “Yes.”

  “The person they love?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, not always. Perhaps very seldom. They marry for money or land or to please their parents.”

  “And may a woman have more than one husband?”

  He laughed.

  “No,” he said.

  “One is enough.”

  “In Tibet, a woman may marry several brothers at one time.

  When the oldest brother is away, she has to sleep with the next.

  She is never lonely.”

  “What if she does not like her husbands?”

  She shrugged.

  “She may like one. What if an English wife does not like her one husband? Can she choose another?”

  i “Sometimes. If she is wealthy.”

  I “And if she is poor?”

  “Then she will have to stay with him.”

  , “Even if he beats her?”

  He nodded.

  A “Even if he beats her.”

  She paused.

  “I think your people may be very unhappy,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Sometimes I think they are.”

  Chindamani sighed.

  “I don’t understand why such a simple thing should cause such unhappiness.” She paused.

  “Do I make you happy? Are you happy when you lie with me?”

  He nodded. She was beautiful.

  “How could I not be happy? I wish for nothing else.”

  “But if I ceased to please you?”

  “You will never cease to please me.”

  “Never is very long.”

  “Even so.”

  She sat, watching him, lifting her lower lip with little white teeth, breathing the perfumed air.

  “Does my body please you?” she asked.

  “I never slept with a man before you. I find
everything about you wonderful. But you have known other women. Does my body please you in bed?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Very much.”

  She stood and unbuttoned the white gown and let it fall to her feet. She was naked. Only coils of incense smoke veiled her. It was the first time he had seen her naked: each time they had made love ‘ on their journey, it had been in the darkness of their unlit tent.

  “Does this please you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “Yes.”

  Afterwards she seemed sad and a little withdrawn. She had grown serious again, just as he had seen her before, after her talks with the abbot.

  She stood and went to a door that led on to a small terrace.

  Opening it, she stepped outside. She wore her white gown: the night air was cold. He joined her and took her hand.

  She looked out at the darkness. The stars seemed so far away, the darkness so near, so immediate.

  “Don’t think I can be yours forever,” she said.

  “You must not think that ‘ He said nothing. Below them, he could see lights in the valley, little lights that twinkled as if the sky had fallen.

  “What must I think, then?” he finally asked.

  She turned, and he saw tears in her eyes.

  “That I am dying, that I am dead, that I have been reborn where nothing can ever come to me not you, not the Lady Tara, not even the darkness.”

  “Please,” he said.

  “Don’t speak to me in riddles. You know I don’t understand. When you speak like this, you frighten me.” He paused and shivered.

  “You say we’re all reborn. Very well, if you’re planning on dying and coming back, why can’t I do the same?

  What’s to stop me?”

  Her cheeks flushed angrily.

  “What do you know of it?” she snapped.

  “Do you think it’s easy?

  In places like this, men spend their whole lives preparing for death.

  They study it like a text that has to be memorized. They know its face as if it were the face of a loved one; the sound of its voice, the feel of its breath, the touch of its fingers. And still, at the very last moment, their thoughts are corrupted and they fail. Do you think you can make death so easy?”