Lobsang and the Snow Lioness

Listen, friend, and I will tell you an old story that’s still good. One day, the Buddha went up to the snow mountain to pray. This was long ago in one of the Buddha’s past lives, before the Buddha was the Buddha. Back then, in his own boyhood days, he was still a young bodhisattva full of unfulfilled yearning and struggling to find his way.

When the Buddha came to the place where the tall green grasses meet the great white snow plain, he paused. “I will pray here,” he thought. He took off his robe and set it aside. He sat, folded his legs in the half-lotus position, joined his palms and prepared to pray.

It was at this moment the Buddha looked up and saw the snow lioness, the most sacred and elusive animal of our people. This was long before prayer flags, but in my imagination I always picture the Buddha looking up and beholding the snow lioness with her gleaming white pelt and bristling turquoise mane against a background of snow-capped peak, brilliant dawn-blue sky, and long, multi-colored banners streaming prayers through the world on the wind. Choden never told me if this is indeed what the Buddha beheld. He said only that the Buddha looked up and was arrested. All the rest he left to my own imagination.

The Buddha saw that the snow lioness was dying. She had just given birth to a litter of cubs and was weak. She could not feed her cubs, and so they were starving. The Buddha and the snow lioness stared into each other’s eyes. The Buddha saw the snow lioness’s suffering, and a great compassion filled his heart. He closed his eyes. His left hand he lay palm upright in his lap, while with his right he reached out. With two poised fingers, he touched the earth. He prayed. “Om mani padme hum.”

In the cold and clear, rarefied mountain air, he intoned our primal prayer, the holy words resounding in his heart and resonating throughout the world. With cold and fear both palpitating in his blood and bones, the Buddha trembled. Remember: the Buddha was not yet the Buddha. His mortal terror and his own humanity nearly overwhelmed him.

But the Buddha’s love for humanity and for all sentient beings that live and breathe air on earth overpowered his fear and overcame his human terror. Death, like suffering, lies at the heart of life, integral to life as a root is to a tree, and impermanence is not a horror to abhor but a beautiful truth before which we should stand humbled in awe and wonder, a prayer of praise poised upon our lips.

The Buddha stilled his mind, his breath, his muscled and muddled heart. The morning star rose in the east. He marveled at the dawning of the day, at the radiance of the earth and the inexpressible beauty of the holy snow mountain. The early morning light warmed his body, the sun enswathed his skin, soft and sweet as a lambswool robe, even as the sublime touched his heart and he brushed up against grace.

“Make of yourself a light,” the Buddha said, before he died. The sunshine warmed his auburn face. He smiled. He rose and went to the snow lioness. With a wild yawp, a bold and brave, feral cry like the bawl of a newborn baby plucked bare-bummed from his mother’s womb and thrust headlong into life, the Buddha flung himself down on the earth and offered her his body.

Slowly, the snow lioness rose to her famished feet. Her cubs yipped and yelped. She stared gaunt-eyed and skeletal at the Buddha’s body, she nuzzled his placid face and still limbs. He looked so calm, like a sleeping cub. He looked so serene, like a being who’d shed herself of herself and now dwelled beyond yearning and beyond desire in perfect harmony with nature and with the nature of all living things on earth.

The snow lioness bowed her majestic head in the morning light. Her mighty mane bristled, her turquoise tresses trembled. Hunger wracked her ribs, hunger beset her body. The snow lioness’s hunger overcame her. Life lives off life. In their heart, all living things know this truth, too, as they know the mystery and the mercy of violent grace. Her lion heart beat. She closed her eyes. Sunlight capped and crowned the snow mountain and sent the rippling green grass shimmering with fire, each shining rachilla a perfect flame of wonder and a miracle of life and light. The snow lioness ate the Buddha’s body, and she and her cubs were saved.

I was a young boy when Choden told me this story. If I close my eyes and listen intently, I can see his rough and ruddy face and hear his voice again. Today, I am no longer a young boy, but a grown one, nearly thirteen-years-old, who will soon become a young man. I sit in the dark of the monastery long into the night, and often into the grayblue light of morning, wrapped in his crimson robe, shivering against the cobalt cold. I watch the butter candles burn, and I ponder the story of the Buddha and the snow lioness, and I wonder why Choden immolated himself.

Choden was my brother who one day walked from Manigango to Garzê and set fire to his body in the street for all to behold. I know there is something to this story, some truth or mystery that can answer the question that pangs my heart and that can lead me to a higher peace, a peace imbued with light and with grace. If I meditate each day, and plumb Choden’s story, perhaps one day I will decipher the mystery, grasp the ineffable, and attain the truth I seek.

But for now, there is no time to ponder or to wonder. The dawn is imminent. A new day is coming. I must sneak back out of the monastery before the abbot awakes and the monks trudge in for their morning prayer. The story of the Buddha and the snow lioness must be set aside, for now, like the Buddha set aside his robe before he prayed on the slopes of the snow mountain. The Buddha and the snow lioness must be put out of mind, they must be let go of, like Choden, my old brother who one day immolated himself. Have I said this already?

The morning star rises. My father is calling me. I must return home. His voice is harsh, his voice is not happy. In my mind, I can hear him calling my name, and I know what he is saying. There is work to be done and money to be made today, and dreaming earns nothing, Lobsang.

The music in the story is by Nawang Khechog and Yungchen Lhamo.
These are contemporary pieces primarily for the flute inspired by traditional Tibetan music
from the grassland and the monastery, from nomads and monks,
and the music is intended for both meditation and celebration.
If you like, you may listen as you read by simply pressing play on the audio players
throughout the story.

“Nomads of the Tibetan High Plateau,” by Nawang Khechog, from Quiet Mind.

Chapter I

Morning at the Monastery
& Breakfast at Home

“Light comes early to the high plateau.
Sunlight sweeps across the grasslands
and floods the plains and valleys,
and it comes gray and blue followed by fire,
by yellow, by golden and finally by white.”

Lobsang, Yakherd and Bard of Manigango.

Light comes early to the high plateau. Sunlight sweeps across the grasslands and floods the plains and valleys, and it comes gray and blue followed by fire, by yellow, by golden and finally by white. Light illuminates the prayer flags that fly on the hills and in the high mountain passes, and it strikes the crimson and golden roof of the monastery, from where monks sound the morning prayer call through bright, jewel-studded conches and the deep, hollow skull bones of yaks. Finally, light hits Chöla, emblazoning the mighty massif and transforming the sacred snow mountain from cobalt to cerise to golden to bone white.

In the new morning light, nomads on horses and motorbikes clomp and whir into town, wrapped to their high red cheek bones in bright thick wool blankets and long tattered dirty robes and ragged North Face jackets, their unkempt hair bristling out from under the brims of their hats, or woven and coiled around their heads in fine braids, threaded through with scarlet tassels.

Plastic trash swirls through the dusty streets, and huge mastiff dogs with filthy fur lope out from whatever ditch or dark corner they’d passed the night in. They lift their wet eyes and muzzles to the warm morning light. Soon, they will prowl the smoldering trash heaps and overflowing dumpsters, the clogged-up gutters and brimming barrels, scouring the streets for scraps of food, grappling over garbage, and young grubby-faced boys and old crimson-robed monks and grumpy shopkeepers will throw rocks at them and chase them from the street with sticks and stones.

This is Manigango. This is Kham. This is Tibet, my country. Manigango is my home, I was born here and have lived my whole life here, and unlike my brother Choden and my sister Dolka, I have never longed to leave, and I never will. My heart belongs to Manigango.

We wake before dawn in our house made of fired earth. Each morning, it’s my job to milk our family’s small herd of yaks and then to guide my mother and grandmother up to the plateau to walk the kora around the monastery and give alms to the monks.

My grandmother is nearly eighty-one-years-old, stooped at her waist and humped in her back, and she needs a stick to walk, but each morning she rises as light touches the fringe of the hills and the first flush of dawn fires the sky, and she climbs the steep hill and walks the circuit around the monastery. She walks with strength and vitality. She wears her long, old hair braided into a thick rope that hangs down her back, her heavy charcoal gray chuba robe with her scarlet sash and stripped fuchsia and chartreuse lamb’s wool apron, a beige yak leather cowboy hat, and black Ray-Bans.

As she walks, Momo spins a handheld prayer wheel. The wheel is made of copper and wood and inlaid with three small jade stones, one green, one blue, and one white. Coiled inside the wheel, written continuously on a thin leaf of paper that is wound around itself more than five thousand times, are the words: “Om mani padme hum.” Hail to the jewel in the lotus flower. Hum. She spins the wheel, and the mantra turns, and her prayer spreads through the world like the morning light.

My mother walks beside her and gently guides her elbow. Through her thumb and forefinger, Amma kneads a string of dark brown puti beads and recites the mantra along with my grandmother. On the high earthen trail, I lead the way before them, and some mornings I incant the blessed words under my breath, too.

This morning, though, my heart is uneasy and my thoughts elsewhere, with Choden and the dream I dreamed again last night in the guttering dark of monastery, and I do not speak the sacred words but walk in silence, trying to grasp and make peace with the premonition in my heart. I know that in order to find peace I must let go of my grasping and my desire to understand, my aching yearning to make meaning where maybe there is only mystery, where meaning may be devoid, but it’s so hard.

When we have completed the kora, we pause before the monastery and before Chöla rising above it in the distance beyond. We join our hands, our thumbs tucked inward toward our palms, and lift them toward the monastery and the snow mountain. We touch them once to our foreheads, once to our mouths, and once to our hearts, and we lie face down and prostrate our bodies on the ground. In this way, we pray and pay homage to the new day, and the merit we generate in walking the kora we offer up to the world as a blessing for the benefit of all sentient beings and for all living things on earth.

Others from Manigango have come to walk the kora, too, and soon the monks lumber out of the monastery in their crimson robes and tall yellow plumed hats, yawning, stretching, scratching themselves, wiping the sleep from their eyes, blowing snot from their nostrils and spitting in the dust and dirt. Others squat to piss, leaving fresh puddles of pungent urine steaming in the chilly morning light when they finally gather up their robes and plod on.

They wrap their robes around their shoulders against the chill air and walk in procession and bear their bronze alms bowls, and we give them what little money or food we have to share. Then the monks head up the hill to the sutra hall to pray, as morning fully breaks, and we head down the hill for home. It was at this hour each day, before he was burned and buried in the sky, that I would see my brother Choden.

Years ago, when Choden first left home for the monastery, he’d wave when he saw us and come down the hill and say hello. He’d tousle my hair and hug our grandmother. But later, as the years went by and each of us grew, Choden would barely turn when he saw us, and he seldomly smiled or laughed anymore. Each day, I had a harder time distinguishing him from the other monks with their crimson robes and shaved heads, with their yellow hats and tangerine shoulder bags, until finally, near the end of his life, I could barely pick my brother out from the pack.

“But as for me, so long as prayer flags fly and grass grows and greens the rippling hills of Chöla, so long as the sun dawns on the snow mountain and spring blooms each year and yaks snort and grunt, belch and breathe air on earth,
I believe there is hope for the world.
This, you could say, is my humble faith, friend.”

This morning, as Amma and Momo start down the hill for home, I hang behind for a moment longer, hoping to glimpse the ghost of my brother. His shaved skull and wind-seared cheeks, his brilliant black eyes with their fierce fervent light, his haggard face and uneasy smile. Hoping that at last some truth will reveal itself to me. But all I see is the rude and ragged band of monks pass through the courtyard of the monastery and into the main prayer hall beyond, the hall where I slept and dreamed the fiery dream of the snow lioness again last night.

I cannot linger for too long, though, for as my father says, “Time is money.” Where does he get these ridiculous phrases from? Some days it seems that’s all my father talks about. “Kuàitian, kuàitian, kuàitian.” Money, money, money. Money has even led to fights between Appa and Amma, and money has filled our once-happy house up with anger and ugly words, but I don’t like to speak about angry, ugly things.

Anger and ugliness, though vital parts of life, like suffering and death, I know, muddle up my heart and leave me feeling anxious, fearful, gutted out, miserable and depressed with their monochrome hues, unlike joyful and lyrical, sunlit and varicolored things, which elevate my heart and consciousness and lead me on and upward by their radiance and luminescence toward an experience of the sublime.

As the last of the monks slog up the hill and pass into the prayer hall, I watch one young monk with the light and lovely, loping gait and graceful air of a wind horse in flight look back at me, wave and smile. He wears an orange and apricot silk shirt that shines almost merigold in the morning light and raspberry red Air Jordans.

“Hey, Lobsang,” I see his lips speak, though he is too far away for me to hear his words.       

“Cho day mo. Táshi déleg, Tenzin,” I whisper back, mouthing our greeting, but Tenzin, the young wind horse of Manigango Monastery, has already galloped on into the prayer hall and, like the early morning light that I so love, is long gone.

Alas, nothing in this life lingers for long. The world, like the earth, is forever in flux. Even Tibet and my beloved Kham, it seems, are changing. What will tomorrow bring, and will the dawn herald hope or engender despair in the heart of humanity? Maybe the Buddha alone knows. Or maybe nobody holds the key to the door of this mystery of mysteries.

But as for me, so long as prayer flags fly and grass grows and greens the rippling hills of Chöla, so long as the sun dawns on the holy snow mountain and spring blooms each year and yaks snort and grunt, belch and breathe air on earth, I believe there is hope for the world.

This, you could say, is my humble faith, friend.

It is Dolka’s job to have the fire lit and the water boiled in the copper pot and the yak butter churned and the noodles pulled and prepared to be cooked for our breakfast by the time we get home. But many mornings, we return and find the copper pot still hanging on its hook on the wall and the clay stove unlit and Dolka asleep on the kang under the warm yak wool blankets, and our mother scolds her.

Other mornings, Dolka is up, but we find her combing her hair and gazing at her image in a small pocket mirror, styling her hair into bangs as the Han girls do and speaking to herself in Chinese, which she is taught at school, and then Amma really yells and chases Dolka out of the house with the broom. These days, though, it is often hard to tell if my mother’s anger is truly out of her irritation with Dolka and who my sister is becoming, or if it does not speak to the deeper sorrow and fear in her heart about our brother’s immolation.

Wherever the answer may lie, the truth is my sister is growing up, and she is growing unhappy in Manigango. Each day, the outside world grows closer to us, the modern world presses in, modernity beckons, and Dolka wants to go to it. She wants to go east to Chengdu, Xining, or Kunming and live a modern life, as more and more people from this town and across Kham and Amdo are doing. She wants to join the contemporary times.

Once, Dolka even spoke of going to Shanghai and marrying a Chinese man. “We’ll live in an apartment with a toilet that flushes and that you can sit down on, and we’ll go out to eat in a different restaurant every night, and our baby will be big and fat and beautiful and white with soft, eggy cheeks smooth as silk, unblemished as yogurt, pure and clean as cow’s milk.”

“Light, coming in through the open doorway,
fell in a long shaft across the floor of our house.
Soon the last of the day would be done
and the darkness come.”

It was a late afternoon last fall, a month after Choden immolated himself. Our father had come home early from his work in town and was sitting at the table, studying the numbers in the book where he records his sales and rapping his knuckles against the table.

Dolka was sitting cross-legged on the kang before the cutting board, rolling and pulling the noodles for our supper, while my mother churned the yak butter by the stove, her body looking tired, her work slow and heavy. I sat in the doorway, my own work done for the day, watching the last of the day’s light play on the prayer flags up in the hills by the monastery, feeling the pull on my heartstrings, drinking a warm cup of butter tea, and hoping that any moment Choden would come home for supper. I had to remind myself again that my brother was dead.

When Dolka finished speaking her dream, I laughed. I knew she was only joking, Dolka loves to speak with irony. “Where have you ever even seen a toilet you sit down on and that flushes?” I said.

Dolka stopped pulling the noddle she was working on and looked up. Her auburn hands were lightly dusted with the barley flour, and a loose strand of chestnut hair fell across her eyes and rested on her cheekbone. Sometimes when I look at Dolka my breath is taken away, and for a moment I am arrested. My sister is heart-achingly beautiful. It worries our mother to no end. “Why, where I see everything I see, of course,” she said, smiling, brushing her hair back from her eyes. “On CCTV.”

I laughed again and softly slapped my hat against my leg to shake the last of the day’s dust out. Manigango becomes dustier and drier with each day. Kham, like all of Tibet, is slowly becoming a desert.

Our mother did not laugh, though. Without pausing or looking up from her work, she said if Dolka ever married a Chinese man she would disown her. “You would no longer be my daughter. Understand this,” she said.

Dolka stared at our mother. Her face scrunched up and the laughter and light went out of her eyes. She put her face down and went back to her work, rolling and pulling the noodles. Sometimes it truly amazes me how hard my mother and sister work. They’ll work all day just to make the noodles for our supper. “Fine with me,” she said. “I hate everything here anyway.”  

“Dolka,” I said softly from the doorway, “we shouldn’t say things we don’t mean.”

“Oh, but I do, Lobsang!” she said, sitting up, her face flushed with fervor and a sudden anger quivering in her voice and glinting in eyes, an anger that troubled and challenged me. “I do mean them!” She held out the rolling pin and pointed at objects around our house with it. “I hate that copper pot and that old stove,” she said. “I hate stuffing the stove with yak dung every morning. I hate the stink of yak butter and yak cheese and greasy, yak dumplings. Hate the stink of yak everything that gets in all our clothes and makes us smell like a family of herders, the stink that’ll never get out of my hair.”

“But, Dolka,” I said, feeling confused, “we are a family of herders. And what do you mean, what stink?”  

“Hate this town, Manigango, and these endless dusty grasslands. Hate this red and brown skin,” Dolka went on, pulling on her skin now, “and these high, hard cheek bones.” She pointed with the rolling pin at her face. “Hate Kham, hate Tibet, wish I’d been born Han and had soft pale yellow skin and big round black eyes. Maybe then I’d be beautiful, be happy.” 

When Dolka finished speaking, I turned to our mother to see what we should do. Our father still sat at the table, mulling over his book of sales, though I could feel he was listening, too. I’d never seen Dolka so upset before. Our mother stared at Dolka. She had stopped churning the butter, and she looked so exhausted it nearly broke my heart. “Child,” is all she said, and went back to churning the butter. “Spoiled brat.”

“Amma!” I said and stood up in the doorway. My hat fell off my lap to the floor, but I didn’t pick it up. I waited for our mother to say something more, but she was already at her slow and heavy work again. I turned to Dolka. “Dolka, where’re all these words coming from?” I said. “They sound almost rehearsed. You don’t mean all that. I know you don’t.”

“Sure I do,” Dolka said. She smiled and brushed her hair back. “I hate our pseudo country and our gutless people and everything the Buddha calls—”

Our father rose from the table and crossed the room. He pulled Dolka off the kang by the rope of her hair. She shrieked and fell to the floor with a thud. Our father stood over her, his sun-scorched hands trembling at his sides. “Heinous,” he said. “Heinous words from the mouth of a heinous girl, whose brother immolated himself for this country and people.”

“That’s not the truth!” Dolka said, looking up at our father, her body literally bristling. She held her hair with both of her hands, and her face was sweaty and truly flushed and fervent now, the tears already pooling up in her fierce and frightened eyes. “You don’t light yourself on fire for country. He did it because of face, he did it because of shame, he did it because of a chòu biǎozi, he did it because of a stinking Chinese whore!”

Our father’s face infuriated—did I speak that right? He pulled Dolka’s hair so hard I thought he’d tear it out by the roots and cuffed her across her mouth. Dolka cried out again, her cry a half bitter, half broken sob.

Our father turned and strode toward me. At first I thought he was coming for me, now, but he slammed his sales book shut and seized his fedora from the wall and brushed past me where I stood in the open doorway and went out of our house, walking right over my hat, leaving a pristine footprint of dust on its trampled brim. Dolka sprang up off the floor and ran back to the kang and threw herself onto it and cried into the wool blankets.

“I waited until our father was well gone. Then I stooped and picked up my hat from the floor and brushed the sheaths of dust from its brim and shook it out and went out of our house, stepping through the shaft of light that was now ablaze and glittering cyclically with the splendid motes of dust we’d cast up in our fight, the beam of light like a turbulent world of its own.”

On the other side of the room, our mother stopped churning the butter. She lowered her face and looked away at the floor. I knew she did not wholly agree with my father’s words about the honor and the meaning of Choden’s immolation.

Light, coming in through the open doorway, fell in a long shaft across the floor of our house. Soon the last of the day would be done and the darkness come. From the brick bed, Dolka’s sobs came to me. I wanted to go to her and comfort her, as we used to do when we were children if something was not well with one us, but to my shame, I didn’t. I had no heart in me at that moment. Her words had stung, and my father’s sudden anger had frightened me, too, and together they’d left my head feeling swimmy and my stomach sick and my chest hollow. In short: I felt gutted.

I waited until our father was well gone. Then I stooped and picked up my hat from the floor and brushed the sheaths of dust from its brim and shook it out and went out of our house, stepping through the shaft of light that was now ablaze and glittering cyclically with the splendid motes of dust we’d cast up in our fight, the beam of light like a turbulent world of its own.

As I walked up the hill to the monastery, I tried to remember a time when our house was one and happy, when Choden walked and breathed air on the earth, before he burned his body in the streets of Garzê. If I sit in the silent serene dark of the prayer hall, before the guttering candles, and close my eyes, as I did last night, and more and more often these days do, the time will return to me, and it brings me some peace of heart. Even if the peace is only ephemeral, and even if I do not wholly know whether it is born of memory or myth.

As Dolka says, maybe I am achingly naive and nostalgic for a time and place that never existed. Maybe my faith is futile, pure childish foolishness, my exuberances empty as my verbosity, and all my meditative musings and lush lyricisms vanity and hot air, magniloquent and orotund, but in the end ultimately hollow as a strawman in a wind-scoured field around sundown.

“Year of Tibet,” by Nawang Khechog, from Quiet Mind.

Chapter II

Afternoon in the Hills

“In the early afternoon, it is my job to shepherd our herd
of yaks up to the hills to graze. We climb the grassy slope behind
our house, the thirteen black-haired yaks ahead and I behind.

I drive them up the hill, throwing divots of dirt at the stragglers
and prodding their rumps with my staff, calling, ‘Tush, tush, tush, tush,’
as the copper bells clang around their burly necks and sound through
the hills and countryside, and the deep, rich earthy smells of their
dark, shaggy bodies fill my nostrils and my heart with delight.”

In the early afternoon, it is my job to shepherd our herd of yaks up to the hills to graze. We climb the grassy slope behind our house, the thirteen black-haired yaks ahead and I behind. I drive them up the hill, throwing divots of dirt at the stragglers and prodding their rumps with my staff, calling, “Tush, tush, tush, tush,” as the copper bells clang around their burly necks and sound through the hills and countryside, and the deep, rich earthy smells of their dark, shaggy bodies fill my nostrils and my heart with delight.

From the hilltop, I look out and see all of Manigango in the valley below. I see the tan flat square rooftops of the wood and adobe houses, see the sole street of Manigango town with the small three-wheeled blue trucks and motorbikes puttering along in the dust beside the nomads on their horses and the pilgrims on foot, prostrating in their tattered robes and chubas, wooden blocks fastened to their knees and to the palms of their hands.

From up here, they look so small and the pace of their prostrations so slow. I see the whitewashed walls and the gilded roof of the monastery glinting in the sharp midday light, the paved highway running through the valley beyond town, alongside the Tro River, southeast to Garzê and northwest to Yushu. Low-slung green hills ring every horizon, and over my shoulder to my right the snow-capped peak of Chöla rises up from the grasslands, mighty and majestic as the resplendent day, twenty-six li away.

Below Chöla, though it’s hidden by hills and I can’t see it from where I stand, lies Yihun Lhatso, the holy turquoise lake, to which the pilgrims make their pilgrimage and the prostrators slowly, but surely, work their gritty and grueling, faithful way. Pilgrimage, like life, can be arduous to its core.

When we were boys, before he became a monk and I became a herder, Choden and I would climb to this same place in the hills. As yaks and sheep grazed around us and wild lavender and rapeseed bloomed on the hillsides, we’d lie on our backs and watch the red-billed choughs and black-tailed kites swoop down the sky, and all we’d hear was the deep brush of wind through the high grass and the dim echo of drum song and prayer mantra resonating out from the monastery above the guttural bellow of our beautiful Tibetan long trumpets and haunting dharma horns.

But today I climb the hill alone and come to this place where the grass grows barer and is brittle, the land dusty, tawny and dry, and what I hear is the incessant honk of horns from town. Often, I even catch the shrill and piercing screech of one of the Chinese big rig trucks that travel the highway at breakneck speed between Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu, moving coal and concrete, sand, earth, minerals and metals across our country and through our land, toward what end, who knows.

So, while the yaks graze, I rise and climb farther up the hill, seeking a higher solitude and a more consummate peace, a place where the frantic sounds of the developing world below will fall away to the silences of the high plateau and to the audible memory of long golden grasses rippling green in medallion sundown winds.

I climb to the place where we buried Choden in the sky, where the holy birds of prey descended that fiercely bright blue morning and scoured his bare bones white until they gleamed like burnished jewels. The fire consumed most of Choden’s body, but what remained our family brought home from Garzê and bore up to the hilltop in the hour of the sundown day and hacked to pieces with an axe and broke apart limb from limb, muscle from muscle, sinew from sinew, bone from bone, and buried in this our highland way.

As he worked, as he toiled and labored with sweat on his back and brow for his day’s pay, the body-breaker smoked a cigarette and sipped a Mountain Dew, the cigarette dangling from his lip. Of all the memories that day why is this the detail that haunts my memory the most?

“So, while the yaks graze, I rise and climb farther up the hill, seeking a higher solitude and a more consummate peace.

I climb to the place where we buried Choden in the sky, where the holy birds of prey descended that fiercely bright blue morning and scoured his white bones bare until they gleamed like burnished jewels.”

Today I climb here, and I sit before the sky burial site. I watch the prayer flags blow their brightly-colored prayers on the backs of the swift-footed wind horses across the pear-green grasslands, up to the white billowing clouds, and I think about the story of the Buddha and the snow lioness, and I wonder why Choden immolated himself. The words of both Dolka and my father weigh heavy on my heart.

Some days, I gaze west toward Chöla, and I dream that one day I, too, like the Buddha, will ascend the holy snow mountain and behold the snow lioness, and in her ravishing gaze all mysteries will be revealed to me.

Holy. I know I say holy a lot, likely too much. But the reason I sing holy so much is because, to me, everything on earth is holy. So when I say that Chöla is the holy snow mountain, or that Mount Kailash is the heart of the earth and the center of the world, what I mean is that every mountain is holy and that the center of the world is everywhere and the heart of the earth is wherever you are standing right now.

For, as the grungkans say, “There are no unsacred places. There are only sacred places and desecrated ones.”

So pray, friend, don’t get hung up on holy.

Choden had never wanted to be a monk. But as our family’s eldest son, it was his duty. Whenever he returned from the monastery, I’d ask Choden to tell me about what he’d learned since he’d last come home. I would look for hours through his books, even though I cannot read or write. The pictures and stories of the Buddha enthralled me, and I yearned to learn more. Choden promised he’d teach me to read. Still, his promise, which he never fulfilled, did not fill the yearning that filled me.

The truth is I felt bitterly jealous our father chose Choden to send to the monastery, instead of me. Later, after Choden immolated himself, this feeling sickened me. Yet, I have never been able to cease its rising, and I have always felt this tough truth in my heart: our father loved my brother more than he will ever love me. But maybe now I am the one speaking like a child.

Even if Choden had desired to become a monk, he was never fit for the life. He was a restless boy, clever, but cruel, throwing rocks at the dogs that roam the street of Manigango town and getting into fierce fistfights with other boys over petty quarrels and plastic bottles. Once, Choden beat a Hui boy until he broke his skull and the boy bled from his nose, ears and eyes. He called the boy a dirty mongrel and told him to go back to Gansu.

Like our sister Dolka, Choden dreamed of leaving Manigango and following the highway east to Chengdu. He hated the Han like he hated being poor, and increasingly he spoke aloud in tirades at the monastery against them. Though he loved Kham, his country and his people, Choden hated having nothing, and he was smart enough to know there was no money to be made in Manigango other than selling sheepskins and yak hides in our dusty, one-street town, like our father.

Often, I wanted to ask Choden how such a ferocious hatred for the Chinese and a desperate desire for and love of money were compatible with the teachings of Sakyamuni. In the end, though, I never mustered up the courage to speak my panged heart. Panged? Is that right?

I remember the evening at dusk I saw my brother roaming the street of Manigango when he should have been at the monastery. It was late last summer, only weeks before he’d immolate himself. Our mother had sent me to town to buy a carrot and two more potatoes for our supper. We were having huímian noodle soup. I had the two yuán our mother had given me clenched in my fist when I spotted Choden.

He walked hunched up inside his robe, his gaunt face stubbled with a coarse black beard and his bristly hair grown longer than it should have been. A haunted and hungry gleam lit his eyes, like the gleam in the eyes of the mastiff dogs that prowled the refuse alongside the road, fat tongues lolling, and watched him from the shadows of adobe walls. He wandered up the street, paused in the callused dusk, turned nowhere and was gone.

I wanted to pursue him. A riot of emotions warred in my muddled heart at that moment, as a mob of emotions throng in me this afternoon. First and foremost: I feared for my brother. That summer, there had been protests and riots in Garzê and Aba and the beginnings of immolations across Kham, Amdo and Tibet.

Looking back now, maybe I already felt a sense of foreboding of the darker days to come. But whatever fear I felt for Choden that evening, as I stood shivering in the cold and hungry dusk, the last of the day’s aortal light bleeding out of the street, watching not him but the nowhere he’d gone, I was also afraid of my brother.

This is the truth: I was simply afraid. I had no heart in me. The muscle of my heart was flaccid, broken. So, to my shame and bitter regret, I turned and left Choden to wander his own murderous way, and I went and bought the carrot and two potatoes for my mother and walked home alone.

“Devastation great as in any ancient war in any epic story I’ve ever heard sung, and I am a boy who has heard the grungkans sing the Song of King Gesar from dark to dawn and dawn to dark again, high up in the grasslands through long wind-blown and black star-sprent nights and brilliant white and blue-sky days in the sublime summits of goldengreen summer.”

Early one morning, not long after that, Choden rose before dawn and walked out to the highway. He met two monks from Garze Gompa who had come to Manigango on a retreat to Yihun Lhatso. They haggled rides with a family of nomads going northwest to Qinghai.

They rode the Sichuan-Qinghai highway on the backs of the nomads’ motorbikes to Jyekundo, to famed Yushu. This was just after the earthquake, and most Tibetans had left Yushu for other places. Those who remained wandered the razed streets with the dogs, nowhere to go and nothing to do with themselves. The city lay in supreme devastation and consummate ruin.

Devastation great as in any ancient war in any epic story I’ve ever heard sung, and I am a boy who has heard the grungkans sing the Song of King Gesar from dark to dawn and dawn to dark again, high up in the grasslands through long wind-blown and black star-sprent nights and brilliant white and blue-sky days in the sublime summits of goldengreen summer.

Before the Dharma crossed the Himalaya and came to the high plateau, we Tibetans were a fierce race and a warlike people. And no race among the Tibetan race was as mighty in war as we black-haired, weapon-wielding, horse-riding Khampas of Kham. To this day, the red and black tassels we men wear braided into our fine and thick, long and brilliant, jet-black hair beneath our cowboy hats help protect our scalps during knife fights.

So the great Jyekundo lay in ruin in the wake of the greater earthquake. But news was traveling the highway. Han migrant workers were inundating Yushu for the cheap labor jobs to rebuild the city, and with the Chinese came Sichuan restaurants, cell phone shops, internet cafes, cheap hotels and karaoke bars. There were even stories of cheap red and yellow-lit rooms where women sold their bodies to men for money.

When Choden and his friends returned to the monastery in Manigango three days later, the abbot found them climbing the wall in the dark of dawn, drunk on baijiu, disheveled and shouting. The story spread through Manigango like wild grass fire. Choden and two monks from Garze Gompa had gone to Yushu and gotten drunk and slept with women, with Chinese prostitutes. Choden came home to live with us while the abbots debated what action to take. Rumor said Choden was to be expelled from the monastery and disrobed as a monk.

Now, he would never be able to advance to the monastery at Garzê, or beyond. This had been Choden’s sole hope and dream, to one day leave Manigango. His action was a deep shame to both our family and the monastery, and a source of gossip throughout town. Our mother said our family’s face had been lost. A family without face has nothing in Manigango. Nothing. Méiyŏu. Less than dust, lower than dirt. Worse than a dog.

It was on an early fall morning soon after our mother spoke these words—when the first scent of autumn pierced the chill air and the forests ringing Yihun Lhatso began to blaze bronze and flame cardinal and carmine with their foliage and flicker flaxen at the tips of their leaves and burn merigold bright and deep fire blue—that Choden rose in the predawn light and walked to Garzê with a Coke bottle of gasoline cradled inside the folds of his crimson robe.

Though it’d still be months more until we’d learn the rest of the story, the real reason for Choden’s expulsion from the monastery, two things were already achingly clear and resonantly true for sure: fall had come to Manigango, and my old brother was gone.

“The Wish-Fulfilling Jewel in the Himalaya,” by Nawang Khechog, from Universal Love.

Chapter III

A Late-Afternoon
Talk With Tenzin

“In the late afternoon, I descend from the sky burial site.
I herd the yaks, calling, ‘Tush, tush, tush, tush,’
their great wooly bellies now filled with the sweet blessed grass,
and we head down the hill for home.

On the way, we pass the prayer flags streaming in the breeze
and the curved, bright-white bell-shaped domes and
gilded spires of the chörtens shining in the late sepia light.”

In the late afternoon, I descend from the sky burial site. I herd the yaks, calling, “Tush, tush, tush, tush,” their great wooly bellies now filled with the sweet blessed grass, and we head down the hill for home. On the way, we pass the prayer flags streaming in the breeze and the curved, bright-white bell-shaped domes and gilded spires of the chörtens shining in the late sepia light of the setting sun.

We approach the monastery, and today, on the hill above, I find Tenzin. He is lying on his back in the grass looking up at the sky. A sheet of paper rests on his chest.

“Cho day mo. Táshi déleg. May all auspicious signs come to you, little brother.”

Tenzin sits up and looks at me. A smile brightens his face. “Hey, Lobsang, what’s going on? Happy to see you again today. Cho day mo. How do you do, old brother?” 

Tenzin is my friend. He is eleven-years-old but has been a monk since he was eight. Years ago, before he became a monk, and when Choden was alive, the three of us used to sneak up to the rooftop of the monastery in the late afternoon while the abbots napped and play on the walls. We ran, laughed and leapt, and rode imaginary wind horses through the wild azure air, like our epic warrior king, Gesar of Ling.

It’s strange, now, to remember those days with Choden burned and buried in the sky. They feel so long ago, those delightful days of our merigold youth, when song filled my heart and joy my soul. When my brother walked and breathed air on earth.

“I’m well, little brother,” I say, which is not a lie, even if it is not the whole truth.

“That’s good, old brother,” Tenzin says. “I’m happy to hear it. It is good to be well.”    He smiles again. Then he frowns.

I laugh. “And how are you doing, Tenzin?”

“Not well, Lobsang. Not well at all.” He lies back and covers his face with the paper.

I laugh again. “What’s troubling your heart, little brother?”

“Huge white cumulus clouds billow overhead, mottling the blue, and down the valley
the evening sunlight floods the plains and valleys
and fills the hollows of the hills, turning the earth green and golden as far as we can see,
from one end of the world even unto the other.”

Tenzin removes the paper from his face and hands it to me. I sit down in the grass beside him and look at it. The yaks begin to bray on the hill beside us, and I turn and call, “Tush, tush, tush, tush” to them. I tell them we’ll go home soon. They look first at me and then at one another. Yaks are smarter than most people know, and bigger-hearted and deeper-feeling, too. Finally, they lower their great wooly heads and graze on the life-giving grass, and I turn back to the paper Tenzin has handed me. I train my eyes hard and concentrate on it.

“It’s an exam paper on the Jatakas,” Tenzin says. “The ancient Indian stories of the Buddha’s early lives. You know, once upon a time, in the days long ago, back before the Dharma came to Tibet and before the Buddha was the Buddha, when he was still a young bodhisattva hungry for enlightenment and unsure of his work and his way in the world.”

“I know them,” I say, looking up at Tenzin, my heart beating faster, tolling like a bell. “Choden told me those stories when I was a boy.”

“Sure,” Tenzin says. “They’re beautiful stories. They’re old stories that’re still good.”

I look back at the paper. I focus my eyes and study it harder, but still nothing reveals itself to me. I cannot read for all the yearning in me. “So what’s the problem?” I say, looking up.

“See the red ink?” Tenzin says.  

I look back. Red ink crosses out much of the writing.

“Those strokes are from my master’s pen,” Tenzin says.

I continue to stare, and suddenly it becomes clear. Tenzin has not received a good mark. “What happened?” I ask, turning to him. “I thought you were a model student in history and mythology.

“My master hates me,” Tenzin says. 

“That’s hard to believe, little brother.”

“It’s true,” Tenzin says. He covers his anguished face with his robe and rolls in the grass. “My master hates me. He really hates me.”

I watch him, laughing. Tenzin has a beautiful heart. “Why would your master hate you?” I say, finally.

“Because he knows I don’t want to be a monk anymore.”

I stop laughing. My breath arrests in my chest. Is that right?

Tenzin stops rolling in the grass. He uncovers his face, sits up, and looks me in my eyes. “May I ask you something, Lobsang?” 

I hesitate. I wait for my breath to come back to me, for my heart to return to its gentle, steady beat again. Then, though I still feel flustered and feel a sense of foreboding, I look at Tenzin and speak. “Of course. You may always ask me anything.”

He hesitates. Then he says, “Do you ever dream of leaving Manigango?” 

I stare at Tenzin. My heart stops cold. “So you want to leave now, too, little brother?”  

Tenzin meets my gaze. For a moment there is something hard between us, something like a tinge of resentment and pain. Tenzin smiles, then, and whatever bad feeling had been welling up in my heart is instantly dissolved with his smile.

He falls back in the grass and looks up at the sky. I look with him. Huge white cumulus clouds billow overhead, mottling the blue, and down the valley the evening sunlight floods the plains and valleys and fills the hollows of the hills, turning the earth green and golden as far as we can see, from one end of the world even unto the other.

“Sometimes I dream, old brother. Sometimes I dream,” Tenzin intones.

Tenzin sits up and perches on his elbow. He gazes east across the plain toward the hills on the other side of the valley and the highway running through them. “Sometimes, in the late afternoon, when we’ve finished our studies and duties for the day and I am free to truly be me, I hike to this place and look to the horizon, and I wonder what’s in the world beyond. Don’t you ever wonder, Lobsang?” 

My breath quickens again. I say nothing.

Tenzin rolls onto his stomach and dangles his Air Jordans in the air. He reaches into his small saffron cloth bag with the Pair of Golden Fishes and the Knot of Infinity on it and pulls out a small piece of sleek, black plastic. A cell phone.

“Is your girlfriend texting you, little brother?” I say.

Tenzin laughs, and I ask him if he can get service.

“Not often,” he says. “And besides, there’s really nobody to call. But I can play games and take pictures with it!”

I laugh. “That’s what Amma always says to Dolka when she asks if she can get a phone.”

Tenzin smiles. “What does your mother say?” he says.

“Who’re you going to call, Dolka?” I say, imitating our mother.

Tenzin laughs. “And what does Dolka say?”

“What you said,” I say, smiling. “She can play games and takes pictures with it.”

Tenzin falls back and rolls in the grass, holding his stomach. We laugh together.

“That, and that our mother doesn’t understand her yearning,” I say.

 When our laughter is spent, Tenzin sits up in the grass. “I have a good feeling,” he says. “Let’s take a picture together, old brother.”

I look at Tenzin and his phone. “I’ve never taken a picture before.”  

“That’s fine,” he says. “Then this will be your first.

Tenzin moves over to me. I set his exam paper down in the grass beside us and cover it with a small stone. An ant crawls off the stone onto my thumb. I carefully set the ant back down in the grass. Tenzin puts his arm around my shoulder and holds the phone out before our faces. “Now look here and say eggplant in Han huà,” he says, pointing to the lens inside the phone.

“I don’t know much Chinese,” I tell him.

“That’s all right,” Tenzin says. “Just listen to me and say this then: Qiézi.”

We look into the lens. Tenzin counts to three. We smile and say “eggplant” in Chinese. Tenzin pushes a button. I hear a snap. We lean over the phone and look at the picture together.

“Without a further word, he bounds to his feet and runs down the hill toward the monastery,
his saffron bag bouncing against his hip and his crimson robe streaming behind him in the green and goldenrod breeze and shining in the sunlit evening air.

Tenzin smiles over his shoulder at me, but keeps right on running, swift and free, luminous and lovely, as a young wind horse in the wind.”

Astounding. It is us as we are at this very moment in the world. I see Tenzin’s smiling face, his crimson robe and orange silk monk’s shirt, the brown puti beads with the golden tassel and silver prayer counters dangling from them strung around his neck, his bare shaved head, and his small round glasses glinting in the sunlight.

I see my own face, too. My face with the darker skin and high red brazed cheekbones, my plain beige herdsman shirt and shabby wool jacket, and my thick, curly black hair jutting from the brim of my felt hat. Behind us, the grasslands roll to the horizon, an undulating world of green and golden, and a luminous glimpse of prayer flags in mid-flap toward the sapphire sky is suspended in the upper right frame of the photo.

“Do you like it, old brother?”

“It’s really something,” I say.

Tenzin smiles. “It’s beautiful. If I ever go to Chengdu, I will print a copy and send it to you.”

“I’d like that, little brother. I’d like that a lot.”

Tenzin smiles again. He looks back at the picture. He is quiet, meditative.

Finally, he speaks. “Only I wish one thing more. One thing is missing from this picture. With that one thing, then the picture would be perfect.”

“What’s missing?” I say, though already my heart misgives me as I sense the answer.

Tenzin smiles. He looks at me. “Choden.”

The yaks bray. I look away. Light is fading in the valley and across the high plateau.

“I better go home now,” I say. “My family will be waiting for me for supper.”

“Sure,” Tenzin says. He puts the cell phone away into his bag again and looks down at the monastery below us on the hillside. “And we have evening meditation. I shouldn’t be late again. The lama won’t be happy. And I still have to change my shoes and find my yellow hat.” He turns his face and looks away across the grasslands toward where the light is fading and the sun is going down, and he softly taps his lip with his finger, as if in reflection or remembrance.

Tenzin has a wonderful face, especially when he smiles.

I remove the rock and pick up his exam paper from the grass. “Is the lama ever happy?”

Tenzin turns and looks at me. I hand him back his paper. He smiles. Then he says, “Thanks, old brother. Thanks for just listening to me. Choden was smart, and tough, but you’re much kinder. I wish you could be a monk at the monastery with me, so then I’d have a friend, and maybe I wouldn’t hate it here so much and miss home so bad.” He holds the paper in his hands and gazes at it.

Then, as if a sudden inspiration has overtaken him, an inspiration with the force of epiphany, he crumples it into a ball and throws it like a prayer paper to the sundown wind. The wind catches and tosses it, and the paper tumbles away down the grassy slope. 

Tenzin looks at me. “I know who I am. I know what’s inside me and what my dreams are. As the Buddha says, the Buddha himself is the final obstruction to the truth. All that truly matters in the end is how much we love, how gently we live, and with what grace we let go of the things not meant for us. Make of yourself a light. That’s it, that’s all, brother.” Tenzin smiles. “Gotta fly, Lobsang,” he says with his sly grin. “The wind is awaiting my wings.”

Without a further word, he bounds to his feet and runs down the hill toward the monastery, his arms unfurled and spread wide, his saffron bag bouncing against his hip, and his crimson robe streaming behind him in the green and goldenrod breeze and shining in the sunlit evening air.

“Táshi déleg!” I call after him. “Táshi déleg, little brother!”

“You, too, old brother!” he calls back. “May all auspicious signs come to you, too. Táshi déleg. Day mo!” Tenzin smiles over his shoulder at me, but keeps right on running, swift and free, luminous and lovely, as a young wind horse in the wind.

“Turquoise Lamp,” by Nawang Khechog, from Music as Medicine.

Chapter IV

Lobsang’s Dream

“Some nights, as I sit in the dark of the
monastery and watch the butter candles burn,
waiting for the first grayblue light of
morning to come and for the day to dawn,
sleep overcomes me, and I dream I am
watching my brother’s immolation.”

Some nights, as I sit in the dark of the monastery and watch the butter candles burn, waiting for the first grayblue light of morning to come and for the day to dawn, as I did again last night, sleep overcomes me, and I dream I am watching my brother’s immolation.

In the dream, I stand in a crowd of my own people. Choden, clad in his crimson robe, sits in the lotus position in the middle of a dusty street. It is dusk, and the late light falls callused and copper yellow. It falls in stark shafts and slanted angles and fills the dusty street, and dust motes rise and swirl in funnels along the sunlit air.

The leaves of the trees that line Chuanzang Road are beginning to turn from green and yellow to amber and orange, to crimson and copper, ocher and cinnabar, to burnt umber and flame red, sheathed with the finest dapples of dust from the street and ablaze in the early autumn evening and late afternoon sunlight. Many people are gathered, and they are all watching my brother.

Choden closes his eyes. His lips tremble and make no sound, but I hear the prayer he speaks. I read the holy words on his lips. “Om mani padme hum.” As he whispers the last syllable, the golden hum, Choden ignites in flame. I gasp. My heart arrests. I cannot breathe. I am watching my brother’s body burn.

I cry out. I press through the crowded street. I want to smother my brother’s body. I want to envelop my brother and quench the hungry flames, stop the insatiable burning. I press and push, push and press, but I go nowhere. I cannot break through the crowd. I scream. I cry out. I cry, “He is my brother!” But nobody turns his face to look at me. I thrust, fight and claw, but I go nowhere. I am watching my brother’s body burn. I cannot stop it. I can’t do anything at all. Tears well up in my eyes. Tears pool and course down my face. My cheeks are guttered with tears. I grow desperate. I fall to my hands and knees in the dusty street.

Through a small round opening in the crowd, I see my brother’s face. I call his name. “Choden.” He does not answer me. I call it again. “Choden.” Nothing. I call it once more. “Choden.”

Finally, he turns and looks at me.

Flames emblazon my brother’s body. Flames consume his flesh and eat his skin alive. But his face is unscathed. His face is bronzed and beautiful, his dark eyes radiant and bright. He is like the Buddha at the moment of enlightenment. He is like an image of transcendence and luminescence. In a word: he is sublime.

He looks at me with his long-lidded eyes. A smile comes over his face. His eyelids flicker and flutter, and he closes them. I close my eyes with him. When I reopen my eyes, I am still in the dream, but now I am my brother.

I sit in the sunlit street in the lotus position. Gorgeous orange flames swirl around me and swathe my body and enrapture me. There is no pain. There is no terror. There is only a profound roaring in my ears, like the roar of wind on the high plateau at sundown, or the roar of silence in the hour before dawn. I lift my burning arm and look at it. My flesh has thawed away like spring snow, and all I see now is pure white bone, radiant as fire. I turn my face and look at the gazing crowd.

Then I see him. I see Lobsang. I see myself, my own face, watching me, gazing back from the small round opening in the crowd. A deep soothing calm like sleep overcomes me. My eyelids feel heavy as blue water stones. I close them. Darkness mantles the world, and the world envelops me. When my eyes reopen, I’m still in the dream, but my world is transformed again.

I no longer sit in a dusty street at dusk. Now, I am high up on a mountainside in early morning light. A great plain of snow rolls to my feet. The snows glisten in the bright sunlight, and around me long green grasses sway and sough, roll and ripple in the harlequin breeze, and brightly-colored flags fly and blow prayers to the bound-less blue sky.

Then I look up and see her.

“On those nights, in that dream, I am not Choden, or even Lobsang. I am the Buddha.”

She stands amid the plain of snow, gazing up toward the summit of Chöla that is cloaked in cloud and draped in mist, billows of vapor rising from the holy peak. Her snowy white pelt gleams and her turquoise mane bristles in the sunlight. She turns her regal face and looks at me. Our eyes meet. I gasp. A wellspring of emotion floods my heart. I have arrived. I am cusped to perceive the mystery I have so long yearned and struggled to grasp. But at that moment, always at that moment when the snow lioness lifts her face and looks at me and our gazes meet, my eyes snap open, and I wake up.

I wake from the dream, my heart pounding, my breath coming hard, and find myself lying in a heap of cushions on the monastery floor. The butter candles have burned far down. Their heady aroma saturates the air and overwhelms my senses, and cold cobalt light presses at the high windows and tall wooden door frames, pushing the ghostly dark back. Choden’s robe is knotted around me, and my body is soaked in sweat, which I think is blood.

I think it’s blood because some nights, when I dream I am Choden’s body burning, and I close my eyes and reopen them to find myself high up on the mountainside, gazing at the snow lioness, she is not far off in the distance amid the plain of snow, but face to face with me, her gaunt cheeks flushed and fervent and smeared with blood, her hungry eyes burning with a wild light, as she bows her head and eats my body, ravishing me.

On those nights, in that dream, I am not Choden, or even Lobsang. I am the Buddha.

“A Sad Return To My Birthplace,” by Nawang Khechog, from Quiet Mind.

Chapter V

Evening at Home

“By the time I return home most days, night has nearly fallen.
Tonight, though, there is still some light left in the west.

After the yaks are corralled and my work is done,
I stand in the yard and wipe the sweat from my brow.

I watch the last of the day’s light linger high up in the hills,
and I look to the monastery, but the doors are shut now
and no one is coming down the hill, heading for home,
for a warm supper and an aching, waiting family.”

By the time I return home most days, night has nearly fallen. Tonight, though, there is still some light left in the west. After the yaks are corralled and my work is done, I stand in the yard and wipe the sweat from my brow. I watch the last of the day’s light linger high up in the hills, and I look to the monastery, but the doors are shut now and no one is coming down the hill, heading for home, for a warm supper and an aching, waiting family. I hope Tenzin finds his yellow hat. I hope his master is merciful on him. As for Choden, I don’t know what I hope for anymore.

Inside our house, I find my mother stuffing the clay stove with dung and lighting the night’s fire inside the hollow belly of the brick bed. When she finishes, she goes back to pulling the noodles and cutting the small strips of yak meat for our supper. The water in the copper pot is already boiling. My grandmother dozes on a small wooden bench in the corner, buried under a heap of heavy wool blankets. Dolka is laying out the bowls and chopsticks on the table.

I hang my hat on the wall and put my staff away in the corner for the night and go to the stove and pour a bowl of butter tea from the blue plastic thermos that is always filled, fresh and piping hot. I cradle the bowl and warm my hands and delight in the warmth and in the pungent, sour smell and the salty-sweet taste of the butter tea and watch my mother.

She works slowly and heavily, as usual, and she seems to have grown older these past seasons of fall and winter and now spring, since Choden died. She rarely goes to town or leaves the house anymore, except to buy things when she must. Our neighbors have stopped coming to our house, too. During Losar, nobody brought us even a small basket of tsampa or steamed sesame buns, roasted barley dough balls or fried cookies.

Even my mother and father rarely speak to one another these days, except to bicker and make noise about money, and nobody jokes, laughs or smiles anymore, other than Dolka, who through these long, mournful months has managed to keep alive her fiercely beautiful spirit and who has been the only source of joy in our forlorn house.

Often, I feel that she more than anyone in our family understands the true teaching of our faith. Praise, presence and joy in the perfection of all things. I would like to be more like Dolka and live in the present, in the here and the now, but it’s so hard to let go of the past and so tough not to fret for the future.

My father’s motorbike rattles outside and then falls silent, and I hear the heavy clomp of his footfalls across our yard. I know what these sounds mean. He appears in the doorway. He scrapes off his shoes and hangs his hat on the wall and comes into the house.

I move away from the stove into the corner and sit down on the bench beside my grandmother. I watch the gentle rise and fall of her body beneath the wool blankets in rhythm with her breath, and when she wakes for a moment and reaches out, as if still from within the warm world of her dreams, I put my hand on top of hers and feel her beautiful old wind-worn skin and her sun-blistered fingers, her hard callused palms and her soft smooth veins, and she squeezes my hand back and mouths my name like a mantra, “Lobsang, Lobsang, Lobsang,” she says, and nods off to sleep again.

My father, his clothes filthy with dust, slogs to the stove and pours a bowl of butter tea.

“Supper will be ready soon,” my mother says without looking up from her work.

My father nods. He walks to the window. He stands before it and drinks his tea and looks up toward Chöla, but he takes no delight in either the wonderful warmth of the porcelain bowl cupped in his cold hands or the bittersweet smell and delicious taste of the butter tea, to say nothing of the evening majesty of the snow mountain. Some days Chöla looks so close you could reach out and touch her peak. Other days, the holy snow mountain feels a mythical world away.

As he stands staring out the window, I sense a deep bristling tension between my father’s shoulder blades. I don’t know what he’s so knotted up about tonight, but it must have something to do with Choden. Maybe somebody insinuated something in town today. Some days it really depresses me, our ugly love for gossip and insidious talk. We’re miserable with it in Manigango.

Across the plateau, light is departing and darkness is filling our house, as the long day draws toward its end. I rise from the bench beside my grandmother and take the matches and butter candles down from the shelf. We have the electric lightbulb above the chopping block, now, where my mother cooks, but the old candles issue a softer light.

“Dolka can do that, Lobsang,” my mother says.

Dolka pauses from setting a final bowl and pair of chopsticks on the table for our grandmother. “Sure, Dolka can do everything,” she begins to say, smiling, with a roll of her eyes and an ironic inflection in her voice, but before her face can flush and she can speak in anger, genuine or mock, I step in.

“It’s all right, Amma, I don’t mind,” I say. I light the candles and set them on the table. The candles burn, and a warm tender yellow light fills our house and presses the darkness back.

My mother says, “Supper is ready.”

We fill our white porcelain bowls with the hot clear soup and take our places at the table. My father and I each sit at an end. I sit closer to the door, my back to it. My mother and Dolka sit between us. On the table, steam wafts from my bowl. I bow my head and breathe deeply of the delicious aroma. I cup my bowl and drink the sweet salty broth. My father lowers his head and drinks, too. He adds a scoop of làjiao from the tin container on the table. With her chopsticks, our mother plucks some meat and cabbage and a slice of potato from her bowl and begins to eat.

Dolka stirs her soup with her chopsticks and picks a radish and a few square noodles out. She rumples her nose and pushes the thin slices of yak meat away to the far side of her bowl. She watches us eat and drink. Finally, the aroma overcomes her, and she draws her hair back and bows her head and drinks, too.

I pause and look up at my grandmother, who is still dozing on the bench in the corner under the heavy wool blankets, her hands threaded through her prayer beads, her lips now moving faintly, softly mouthing the sacred words, as each brilliant white puti bead passes marvelously between her thumb and forefinger. “Om mani padme…”

I turn back to the table. “What about Mola?” I say.

My mother and Dolka pause from eating and look up.

“She’s old. Let her sleep,” Abba says, his eyes on his bowl. “She’ll eat when she wakes.”

We have only begun to eat again, when my father puts down his chopsticks, his hard, brown, sun-scorched and work-weathered hands trembling, and says he has something to say.

I look up. A strange pain imbues my father’s eyes, and I can see and feel again the deep knotted tension between his shoulder blades, but he does not look at me. He breathes. He speaks, and the pain fills his voice, but his words are clear. “We will leave Manigango,” he says.

My heart quickens, my breath comes hard and fast. I stare at my father, wondering if I’ve heard him right. When he still refuses to look at me, I turn to my mother. She has put down her chopsticks and lowered her face, and in her silent downcast eyes, I see the truth.

She knows. She’s known all along that these words were coming. And like that it hits me, and I feel like a foolish child. I feel like Dolka says I am. Achingly naïve. I should’ve known all along that this was coming, too, and maybe deep down I did. Maybe this was the premonition I felt in my heart this morning and that has made me uneasy this whole day.

I turn back to my father. “When?” I say.

“As soon as the last of the snows melt in Trola Pass, and I can sell the yaks and the motorbike.”

“And where will we go?” I say.

My father is silent. Then he says, “Chengdu.”

“Chengdu!” Dolka says.

I look at Dolka. She has stopped eating and is smiling, listening intently, her dark eyes bright, ecstatic. I turn back to my father. He sits with his heavy shoulders stooped and his head hung above his uneaten bowl of huímian, from which warm billows of steam are still wafting, wonderful as the clouds in a thangka.

“And what will we do in Chengdu?” I say.   

“We’ll work,” my father says.  

“Where? Doing what?” I ask.

“We’ll find something.”

“Something? That doesn’t sound very promising.”

“Apples.”

“Apples? Apples?” I guffaw. “We’re gonna become apple pickers? Appa, you’ve lost your mind. There’re no apple orchards in Chengdu! They eat rice, fish, shāokǎo, hot pot there.”

“Hot pot’s my favorite,” Dolka says with a smile. “Huoguō. Hmm. So spicy, delicious and good. But Chongqing hot pot is even better than Chengdu’s. Some people would call that arguable, but I call it indisputable. A fact!”

Appa flushes. His face turns red as an apple. “Dammit, not apples, not píngguŏ, but phones!” he blurts out, his frustration and his exhaustion equally palpable.

“Phones?” I stammer. “No, Appa.”

“Cell phones, smart phones, whatever they call those new thing-a-majigs. Apple, from America. Between the new Apple factories and the Tibetan Quarter, we’ll find something. We’ll find our way.”

“And what about Mola?” I say.

My father is silent. The deep, muscular tension knots up again in his shoulder blades. “Your grandmother is old. She’ll die soon,” he says. “We can’t make our decisions by her needs alone. Her time is passed, but our time is now. We must march forward with the modern future. Life is for the living.”

“March forward with the modern future?” I say. “Where’d you hear that, Appa, CCTV?”

My mother looks up. She puts her hand out toward mine. “Lobsang,” she says.

I glance at my mother, but I brush her hand away. I keep my eyes fixed on my father. “I don’t understand,” I say. “But why? Why are we leaving now? Why not yesterday, why not tomorrow, why not a hundred years from now, why not never?”  

“It is time,” my father says, the knot tightening and tightening in his shoulders like a screw, drawing his gaze darker, setting his jaw harder. “It’s past time. And I’ll be damned if that bastard Jigmed thinks I’ll pay him so much as a máo for the gasoline Choden siphoned from his motorbike and the Coke bottle he stole from that miserable trash heap he calls his merchandise. He can go kill himself.”

“No,” I say. “But why? Why are we leaving? Why now, Appa?”

“Who cares why?” Dolka says, leaning across the table toward me. “We’re getting out of Manigango. We’re going to Chengdu. This is a good thing. Like Appa says, it’s time. I know your heart is here in this land, Lobsang, but there’s no future in Manigango.” Dolka smiles and reaches out and puts her hand on my arm. “Don’t look so sad. Like the Buddha teaches, everything changes, nothing is permanent, but everything will be all right in the end, brother. If everything’s not all right, then it’s not the end.”

I push Dolka’s hand off. I look at my father. I repeat my question. “Why?”

My father pounds the table with his fist, and I see the tension that has been mounting in its knot deep within his shoulder blades is ready to erupt, now. Good, I think. Let’s have it out, at last. I’m sick and tired of all the insinuations and the skirtings and the buried emotions and the unspoken words. “Mind your father!” my father says, and the slam of his fist on the table rattles our bowls and chopsticks, though Appa will not look up at me. He won’t meet my eye.

“Why?” I say again. “Why are we leaving our home?”

My mother leans forward. She puts her hand on mine. Her eyes plead with me, now. “Please, Lobsang. Please, be silent, my son. There’s a lot you don’t understand.”

I pull my hand away again from Amma. I stare at my father. “Why?” I cry, in a final desperate plea. “Why are you doing this, Appa? Is it because of what Choden did?”

My father looks up and meets my eyes. He stares at me down the cold length of the table. “Do not speak of my martyred son,” he says.

“I loved my brother more than any of you,” I say, and even before the words are out of my mouth, I hear the childishness of them, the immaturity, even if they are true.

Dolka’s face rumples up. “Hey, Lobsang. That hurts. You don’t really mean that?”

“Stuff it, Dolka,” I say, keeping my eyes fixed fiercely on my father. 

My father starts from the table. “Go away.” He brushes the air with his hand. “Go sleep with the yaks in the yard, or wherever you go at night. I don’t want to hear another word from you. You don’t get it. You understand nothing. You’re a child.”

I stand up and stare at my father down the table. His high hard brazed cheekbones and deep auburn skin caked with dust, his thick black curly hair threaded with the scarlet tassels and his small dark eyes with the sunlines scoured beneath them. It’s like looking at my own face in forty years. Like the face that looked at me in Tenzin’s picture.

“It should have been me,” I say. “It should have been me you sent to the monastery. And it should have been me who burned my body in the streets of Garzê. Then you would still be at peace and happy in your heart. Then we wouldn’t have to leave our home.”

As soon as I finish speaking, I feel sick, I feel ashamed, I feel truly childish, and I’d thought I was growing up and becoming a man. Though again, my words are true, and I do mean them and believe them, even if they are vain, infantile and hurtful.

“I turn from the table, take my hat off the wall, and I walk out of my father’s house. And the last thing I hear as I pass out the door into the dark
is the soft and serene mumbling of my grandmother’s voice as she mouths the prayerful words in her steady refrain in her sleep,
‘Om mani padme hum,’ and I realize I’d been hearing her pray the whole time.”

Dolka leans toward me across the table. She reaches out and puts her hand on mine. “Lobsang,” she says, “where’re these words coming from? I’ve never heard you speak like this before. I loved Choden, too. We all loved him. I know you looked up to him a lot and that this has been brutal on you, but maybe getting out of Manigango is the best thing for our family right now. A fresh start, you know? And on top of that, the opportunities. Think about it. Do you really want to be a yak herd your whole life? You can’t even read, brother. Maybe now you can finally go to school and learn to read and write like it’s been your dream to, like Choden promised to teach you.”

“Dolka,” I say, turning to her, my own body bristling now, “shut up.”

Dolka sits back and draws her hand from mine. Surprise and confusion show in her eyes, and maybe hurt, too.

I turn back to my father. We stare at each other down the length of the table. Pain fills his exhausted and defeated face, filthy with dust, like anguish fills my aching chest and muddled up heart. “He was my brother,” I say. “He was my old brother, and you never understood him.”

“You never would’ve had the courage to do what he did,” my father says.  

“True,” I say. “But you’ll never really know why he did it. And now you will go and honor your martyred son by giving your daughter up to a Chinese man to fuck and bear you bastard Han grandchildren.”

Dolka’s face recoils. Did I get that right? “Lobsang,” she says softly, though she doesn’t reach out to me anymore, and what shows in her bright watery eyes now is clear and deep hurt. “I didn’t know you had such words in you, brother.”

I’m no monk, Dolka! I want to tell her. I’m a herder, and I ain’t as holy as your other brother, who was never as holy as your Appa liked to believe. And unlike both your father and other brother, I contain multitudes. The sacred and the profane, the venerated and the irreverent, the vulgar and the godly, I discriminate against none and embrace all. The holy and the earthy, aren’t they really one and the same, twin roots of a single tree, and doesn’t the true living Buddha embody and celebrate all parts of the heart and ultimately transcend duality?

All this I yearn to bawl. But instead I speak nothing. I sit, bristling, and I watch my sister’s face recoil, and I feel her heart shrink away from me.

My father’s face does not recoil. My father’s face infuriates. I’m sorry, I know I’m really struggling with my words here, but it’s just so hard for me to speak this, right or unright.

“Out!” my father cries. His hands clench into fists, and fire lights his eyes. “Get out of my house! I don’t want to see you tonight!”

I smile, feeling the nastiness of my words well up in my throat. They taste ugly, they taste insidious, they taste like bile, like pure cold heartlessness, but I don’t care anymore. I want them to feel my pain, too. I want the whole world to feel my pain. “Choden was no shame to me,” I begin to say, when my mother cuts me off.

“Don’t you understand, Lobsang?” she says. “This is about more than just Choden and love and our family’s face and shame. This is about money.”

“Money?” I gasp, and now I recoil, tasting the ugliest word in the world in my mouth. It makes me want to spit. “What does money have to do with this? We were talking about Choden, our immolated brother and son!”

My mother shakes her head. “Kham is changing. Tibet is changing. The old life can’t be sustained anymore. The grasslands are vanishing, you should know this better than anybody. Every day the grass is shorter, thinner, dustier and drier than the last. And with the grasslands go the yaks and the sheep, and with the yaks and the sheep go the nomads, and with the nomads our family’s livelihood. The high plateau is becoming a desert. The only future for us is to go east to the city. The earth is changing. Can’t you see this, Lobsang?”

I stare at my mother with a wild and desperate pleading in my eyes. “But what about Manigango? What about our home, Amma?”

My mother stares at me. Tears fill her old eyes. She is beautiful beyond words, my Amma. She says nothing.

I turn from the table, take my hat off the wall, and I walk out of my father’s house. And the last thing I hear as I pass out the door into the dark is the soft and serene mumbling of my grandmother’s voice as she mouths the prayerful words in her steady refrain in her sleep, “Om mani padme hum,” and I realize I’d been hearing her pray the whole time.

“Under the Wings of Blessing,” by Nawang Khechog, from Tibetan Meditation Music.

Chapter VI

Night in the Monastery

“Outside night has descended upon the high plateau.
Beyond the adobe walls of our yard, the yaks huddle in the pen,
and their warm bright breath exudes from their dark shaggy bodies
and fumes from their nostrils in the cold clear moonlight.

Even in the darkness, I feel their eyes watching me.
I have always wondered about yaks, if they are not truly
old bearded bodhisattvas here to help guide
us troubled humans on our troubled way.”

Outside night has descended upon the high plateau. Beyond the adobe walls of our yard, the yaks huddle in the pen, and their warm bright breath exudes from their dark shaggy bodies and fumes from their nostrils in the cold bare moonlight. Even in the darkness, I feel their eyes watching me. I have always wondered about yaks, if they are not truly old bearded bodhisattvas here to help guide us troubled humans on our troubled way.

Behind me, the harsh electric light still issues from the doorway of our house. I walk away from the light and from my father’s house out toward the mud-brick walls of our yard and the yak pen. I plant my dirty herder’s boots in the squalor of our yard, in the muck and waste, and I part my legs shoulder-width apart and square up like a man. I unzip and urinate into the dirt.

As I piss, I cock my head toward the night sky. Above, the dark glimmering canopy of stars blazes, the constellations and the planets wheel in their orbits, and the long band of the Milky Way cuts its cloudy bright swath across the deep indigo sky. On cold and clear nights in Kham, the stars can be truly bedazzling. Sometimes, it seems, maybe a million stars fill the sky, shimmering like mica in a swift-running river, glittering like crystal, quartz and feldspar, delivering light to your wonder-struck eyes from origins and worlds away and from worlds and origins now lost and onyx and unknown, enfolded in night and in time.

Some nights, when I wake from sleep and the warmth of the kang bed, bundled wonderfully under the heaps of the yak wool blankets, nestled deliciously beside Dolka’s soft and sweet-smelling hair and body, and I rise and pull on my old boots and slog outside to piss, to relieve myself in our yard, I will shake myself off, and afterward I will simply stand in the cold and the dark and the silence, listening to the obsidian wind toll and feeling the cobalt cold ring my bones and the rarefied air fill my lungs, as I breathe and I breathe and I breathe, for the wild life of me.

And I will gaze up at the stars, the stars that even now are falling in their irradiant silent tracks across the sky and across the plain and plateau and the ghostly grasslands and over the high dark snowy mountain ranges of the world, somewhere in whose wild heart the snow lioness stalks her quarry—the snow lioness hunts or sleeps, seeking the sublime, shadowing illumination from cold blue crag to stony cobalt outcrop, and from snow-capped peak to cloud-shrouded pinnacle, patiently awaiting awakening—and from where all myths and mysteries originate in a jade-black night elemental, primordial and unnameable, beyond space and outside time and transcendent of both and of all.

My boots rooted to the earth, but my head canted to the sky, I will simply stand and stare up at the stars in awe and wonder, riveted by the myth, arrested to the root of me and wholly enthralled by the mystery of creation, as the sublime seizes my shivering body and stills my beating heart, and I am absorbed by a grace that borders on the violent into the elemental beauty of the earth, as a bejeweled bead of water is absorbed into the eternal ocean of wisdom.

Nights and skies, canopies and firmaments, so sprent with stars I could barely breathe, I have stood beneath, I have seen, or I have dreamed. Some days, it’s as hard to distinguish between the two, between waking and dreaming, as it is to decipher the mystery of Choden’s story or to demarcate where the land of memory ends and the kingdom of myth begins. Who knows. Maybe I’ve made everything up. Would you be able to tell the difference, friend, but more importantly, would it really matter?

In India, wise and holy men say that oftentimes dreams are wiser than waking and that in order to tell the truth sometimes we have to make it up.

Word is Chengdu is big and bright and full of lights. Word is Chengdu has fast-flying cars, slim-hipped women with tight cunts, juicy as apples, sweet and delicious as packaged candy, and everything else a modern man could ever want. But there are three things I know that Chengdu doesn’t have for sure: yaks, snow mountains and stars.

Sorry for this fresh language, friend. But as I said back in the beginning, I’m no longer a young boy, but a grown one, a boy on his muddled way to becoming a man. Besides, like you, like Choden, like the Buddha, like everybody on earth, I contain multitudes, too.

My feet are going cold. I’m all pissed out. My breath fumes from my nostrils, a hungry ghost rising from earth to air in the moon-bright night. I zip up. I turn the collar of my coat up to my cheek bones, wrap myself warm and tight, and I climb the hill to the monastery.

Some of the old faithful are still out there from the long day, walking another circuit of the kora by the astral light, turning the creaking wooden prayer wheels and clanging the copper bells, and the haunting sounds of their faith come to me across the night and across the earth, like a mythic song from another life I lived ten-thousand incarnations ago and can now only dimly recall.

Back in those eons ago when Tibet and the high plateau lay at the ink-black bottom of the Tethys Sea, and I was a being with two brilliant wings sailing far above or four cold claws burrowing deep below the tolling floors of that terrestrial sea—if we were not leviathans, you and I, friend—five-hundred-foot-long, ten-thousand-ribbed, black-bellied, great blue whales ploughing and plumbing the oceanic heart of the earth, forever ferrying our cosmic souls through that yet-yawning gulf and empyreal mystery, out, out, out, out there beyond the effable, where the stars that even now are falling cap and crown with cold fire the massifs of the mighty snow mountains that once lowly stood at the ink-black bottom of the Tethys Sea and all is pure light, rarefied as air and radiant as the sun, liberating and refulgent as fire.

So the unearthly sounds of their faith come to me, the creaking wooden prayer wheels and the clanging copper bells, and the bright beacons of the kora-walkers’ torches and candles carry steadily on in the darkness. Round and round and round the mountain and the monastery, with weariness but without relent, their right shoulders cocked and canted to the center, propelled on over rocks, dirt and yak dung in their earthly orbits by the mountain’s and the monastery’s magisterial gravity, the kora-walkers go like the cosmos and like this my epic song in the astral darkness.

And some nights, as I climb this hill toward the sky, I wonder if they, too, are old ragtag and roughshod bodhisattvas, if they are indeed the ones who hold up the mantel of the earth and keep this world and the universe turning, wheeling in time in their perfect harmony and celestial majesty around the central cosmic holy mountain.

“And I will gaze up at the stars, the stars that even now are falling in their irradiant silent tracks across the sky and across the plain and plateau and the ghostly grasslands and over the high dark snowy mountain ranges of the world, somewhere in whose wild heart the snow lioness stalks her quarry—

the snow lioness hunts or sleeps, seeking the sublime, shadowing illumination from cold blue crag to stony cobalt outcrop, and from snow-capped peak to cloud-shrouded pinnacle, patiently awaiting awakening—

and from where all myths and mysteries originate in a jade-black night elemental and primordial, beyond space and outside time
and transcendent of both and of all.”

Up at the monastery, I wiggle through the opening between the gates in the back wall and cross the courtyard in the starlight and jimmy the lock and slip into the prayer hall and sit before the butter candles. I remove Choden’s robe from my hiding place behind the statue of King Gesar and wrap it around my body. I watch the candles gutter and burn and stare up at the high vaulted darkness, and I ponder and wonder.

I ponder Appa’s words, and Amma’s and Dolka’s, too. I wonder what my life would have been like if Appa had sent me to the monastery instead of Choden. In my heart, this has always been my deepest yearning. To become a monk, to learn our faith and make my family proud. Now all hope of such a life is lost, even if I don’t really want that life anymore, though I still do want to learn to read and write and to walk the Middle Way.

I think about hope and loss. Mostly, though, I think about Choden. I think about the morning he rose before dawn and walked to Garzê.

The walk to Garzê is a long way, a hundred and ninety li. Though many pilgrims do it on their way to Yihun Lhatso, in truth, it’s longer than anybody could walk in a single day. Someone must have picked Choden up along the road. Sometimes I wonder about this. Who that person was, and if they had any idea what he was going to Garzê to do. However he got there, Choden made it to Garzê before nightfall, enough light left for him to do the thing he’d come to do.

He did not go to the monastery and visit his friends. He did not go to a shop for a cup of butter tea or a bowl of yogurt, tsampa or pulled noodles. He simply walked into the middle of the street, spoke aloud his rebuke, spoke fiercely and passionately, with eloquence, ardor, anger and desperation in his voice. He called again for the end.

He took off his robe and laid it aside, sat in the half lotus position, and said the most simple and profound of our prayers. “Om mani padme hum.” Then he drank a mouthful of gasoline, doused himself with the rest in the Coke bottle, and lit a match, first to his body, then to his mouth.

“No matter how many times I speak it,
I can’t let it go. The images of Choden’s immolation play and replay themselves on loop in my mind. It’s become the trauma of my life. It’s a nightmare from which I cannot awake.

In the end, maybe there is no mystery or truth to attain, no higher holy wonder, and no words to sing it in. Maybe all these stories are just that. Stories about the moments in life when we
brush up against the ineffable.”

In my dream, Choden does not cry out. He does not shout, shriek or scream. He speaks no words at all. He sits still and silent as the holy snow mountain and lets the flames consume his body. He burns. He blazes. He gleams. Like the Buddha at the moment of enlightenment. “Make of yourself a light,” the Buddha said, before he died. This is Choden’s immolation in my dream. It is sublime, it is beautiful, it is unscathed by sorrow and by suffering.

In reality, though, it was not so. Those who were there and saw it said as soon as the match hit Choden’s throat and the fire spurted out, engulfing his face and head, he screamed a bone-chilling, marrow-curdling, god-awful, appalling scream. He screamed like an unholy banshee, like a terror and went up like a torch.

He screamed and began banging his head against the street, as the flames licked up around his eyes and ears that were already beginning to burn, and he locked his hands around his throat and squeezed, like a man starved and insane and absolutely desperate for water. Later, somebody would say that Choden had tried to stuff his hand down his throat, as if he thought he could pull the match back out, but that he could get no more than the tips of his fingers in his mouth, so that he looked like a man trying to choke himself.

Even before the fire engulfed his head, it was a weird and wondrous, ugly thing. It had been hard for Choden to get the gasoline down. He coughed, spit and gagged it up several times. Some nights, as I sit here in the dark before the butter candles, I imagine this moment, the bitter taste of the gasoline in his mouth, the vicious stench in his nostrils, the sickening swish of it against his teeth, Choden struggling brutally to get it down. He also couldn’t get a match to light. He lit one, two, three, four, five in vain before the sixth one burned and held its flame.

Killing yourself is hard, as Dolka says.

From Choden’s head, the fire spread to his under robe and body and consummated with the flames that were already raging there. He rolled frantically in the street as the flames lapped and flared around him. A crowd had gathered and was watching by now. The air in Choden’s lungs was soon burned up by the fire, as though the oxygen they both needed to live was the source of the violent and elemental war between them, and the fire was the greater starved, the fiercer and more desperate, and ultimately, the more powerful.

In this way, though he was still screaming hysterically, the crowd watching and listening heard only the roar of the fire and the crack, sizzle and pop of Choden’s skin as it melted away and ran in rivulets down his body—no screaming anymore, now—though they could still smell the gasoline and his flesh burning.

And through a small round hole in his cheek, which had already thawed away, they could see his jawbone and his teeth, small and hard, white and fiercely clenched.

“Om Mani Padme Hung II,” by Yungchen Lhamo, from Tibet, Tibet.

In the end, an old Khampa man from Sêrtar, come to town to trade beads blessed by the Living Buddha of Larung Gar, broke through the crowd and threw a heavy lambswool blanket over his body. But it was too late. Choden was long dead, leaving only his crimson robe, a singed Coke bottle, a half-used-up book of matches, and enough flesh and bone behind for us his family to take home to Manigango and bear up to the hilltop and bury in the sky before the blowing banners of prayer.

It was the ugliest immolation anybody in Garzê had ever seen, in a long year of public self-immolations, though I don’t know what a beautiful immolation would look like, except in my imagination, except for in my dream.

My father said it was an honorable death, the highest sacrifice. My mother said nothing other than her son was dead. But in her heart, I know she bears that deeper sorrow, the fear that Choden’s soul will be lost for what he did, that his soul will become a hungry ghost. To kill oneself is a serious offense, some say karmically unredeemable, though others say there is hope if it is done in love and faith, out of compassion for the suffering of others and in sacrifice. Dolka said that she wishes she could hug her brother one more time.

“It comes like light through a high window in a prayer hall, or like a shaft of light through a cumulus cloud high up in the grasslands on the edge of the great plateau, at the end of a long, hard day of herding and hurting. It comes like luminescence, illumination, like the sublime light of awakening. It comes to me, and I see now what I will do.”

Though I don’t know what I believe, I know what I feel. I feel there is more to this story than my father says. I feel there is some mystery that eludes me. I feel there is a higher holy wonder to life and death, to this world and to immolation. I remember Choden’s words and the story of the Buddha and the snow lioness, and I wonder about the meaning of this tale. I feel that in this story the truth lies, and maybe the hope and beauty, if there is any here. I wonder and I ponder, but I never reach an answer, I never find peace or attain enlightenment. I wonder, but mostly, I remember.

I remember my brother Choden, and I miss him. His wind-seared red cheeks, his rough bardic voice, his hard-edged smile, the feeling of his callused hands gently tousling my hair. Good and bad, dark and bright, beautiful and brutal, savage and sweet, haunted and holy, ugly and lovely, I miss all of him. I miss my old brother who one day rose before dawn and walked from a small dusty town called Manigango in nowhere Tibet to another town that was not his home and burned his body in the open street.

No matter how many times I speak it, I can’t let go of this. The images of Choden’s immolation play and replay themselves on loop in my mind. It’s become the trauma of my life. It’s a nightmare from which I can’t awake. In the end, maybe there is no mystery or truth to attain, no higher holy wonder, and no words to sing it in. Maybe all these stories are just that. Stories about the moments in life when we brush up against the ineffable.

I sit in the dark of the monastery long into the night and watch the butter candles burn. I try again to remember a time when our house was one and happy, when Choden walked and breathed air on the earth, even if I still do not wholly know whether that time is myth or memory. I sit in the dark of the monastery and watch the butter candles burn.

Then, this morning, in the grayblue hour before dawn, when all this anguish and turmoil, all this self-searching and plumbing of the heart and wracking of the soul feels ready to rend my body apart, to tear me limb from limb, muscle from muscle, bone from bone—when I feel so gutted and hungry, sad, lonely, lost and desperate that I believe my ribcage is going to burst and my heart break, and I can see no end to the hurt and no way out of the long, dark night of my life—it comes to me.

It comes like light through a high window in a prayer hall, or like a shaft of light through a cumulus cloud high up in the grasslands on the edge of the great plateau, at the end of a long, hard day of herding and hurting. It comes like luminescence, illumination, like the sublime light of awakening. Satori? It comes to me, and I see now what I will do.

Choden walked from Manigango to Garzê and burned his body in the street for all to behold. But I will not walk to Garzê to burn before strangers. I will not leave Manigango, I will not run away. I will go up to the snow mountain, alone. I will climb to the place where the long green grasses meet the great white snow plain, and there I will do what I must do.

For I am Manigango, and Manigango is my home, and I will pass from this world before I forsake my heart and my home. There is no other way.

“Om Mani Padme Hum,” by Nawang Khechog, from Tibetan Healing Music.

Chapter VII

Morning on the Mountain

“She stands amid the plain of snow on her long, lean limbs.
Her snowy white pelt gleams and her dusty turquoise mane
bristles in the sunlight. Her eyes are majestic, dark and full of light.

She is not famished, she is not feeble. She is not starving or dying.
She stands tall and strong in the full bloom of youth,
and her graceful body pulses with life, and she is fierce and terrible
and holy and inexpressibly beautiful.

She is the most beautiful being I’ve ever beheld.
She’s sublime. She is perfect.”

One thing I have said is not wholly true. There is a second road that passes through Manigango. It leads west past Yihun Lhatso and up over a high pass through Mount Chöla to the ancient lettered town of Dege. From there, the road continues southwest across the vast expanse of the high plateau to the sacred city of Lhasa. It is also not fully true that I have never dreamed of leaving Manigango.

Some late sunlit afternoons, as I herd the yaks up into the hills above the monastery to graze, I look west to Chöla and that road running, and I dream of one day traveling it to Lhasa. I dream of walking into the city to the foot of the Potala Palace and ascending the great white stone stairway to the summit of the third most sacred place in all of Tibet, the Western Treasure House of the World. That was my dream of travel. To make the pilgrimage to Lhasa, and, one day, to Lake Manasarovar and Holy Mount Kailash, far in the long west beyond. But now, like my other dreams, I will have to let it pass to wind, sky and fire.

With Choden’s warm crimson robe wrapped around me and the half-used-up book of matches and the singed Coke bottle filled with its fresh dark light cradled in the inner folds, I head down the hill from the monastery and from Jigmed’s house to the road and follow it west out of Manigango as the first flush of dawn appears in eastern sky. I feel sorry for my theft, but Old Jigmed the junk herder will just have to suffer another half-liter of gasoline siphoned from his motorbike. He’ll live.

As I walk out of town, I think of the note that I would write and leave for Amma on the table in our house if I could write. I know my family will want to bury my body in the sky, so I would tell them where they may find me. But since I do not possess the power of making words, I forget about the note and just keep walking west down the road. I hope they do find me, and that the sorrow is not too much for my old mother to bear. I desire to bring her no suffering, for I am a boy who’s known the pain of no peace.

“At one point along my journey, I come face to face with the skull of a yak nailed to a tree. Across Yihun Lhatso, the face of Chöla appears and disappears and reemerges again with each rise and fall, bend and turn, in the trail, but always Chöla is there.”

Though I could walk to Yihun Lhatso, it’d take all morning. So when a nomad in a red North Face jacket drives by on a motorbike, I flag him down. He waves for me to hop on, and we continue down the highway. After a quarter of an hour, we arrive at the turnoff for the lake. The nomad lets me off, giving me a sideways glance as we part, but all he says is “táshi déleg” and continues on his way, and I start down the road toward the lake in the full radiance of dawn, wondering if he has any idea in the world what I’m going up to the mountain to do.

I cross the river and walk up and over the small knoll on the other side. I come to the edge of the lake and start up the rocky trail along the cold blue shoreline around the left side of the lake, as the prayer flags fly in the first light and the wind horses gallop in the morning breeze. Though Yihun is only a small glacial lake, it is one of our most hallowed in Tibet, and in the green summer of each year old pilgrims from across Kham and Amdo journey here to prostrate their bodies before the sacred turquoise waters and to pray in the holy presence of Mount Chöla. I never made a pilgrimage anywhere myself. Too late.

I follow the trail along the lakeshore. I pass through pine and spruce, larch and hemlock, through stunted shaded forest, through a grove of junipers with their green and dark blue berries budding, and I cross brooks, streams and rivulets, stepping on stones over the gurgling water.

At times, I pass close enough to Yihun Lhatso that I could reach out and cup her turquoise waters in my hands, and at other times the trail winds high up the hillside, and I look down at the trees and lake below. I pass through places where the prayer flags are strung up so densely among the trees they form a wall, and I have to bow beneath them and gently push them aside with my hands. I step over fallen branches and rotting logs where ants are busy living and working, carrying juniper sprigs on their backs, and over a rusted can of Red Bull and scatterings of prayer papers displaying all the five colors of the elements and over plastic bags and packaged fast food wrappers and a crushed Master Kang instant noodles container and over cigarette ends, pine needles and leaves, garbage and trash, I walk.

At one point, I come face to face with the skull of a yak nailed to a tree. Across Yihun Lhatso, the haunting face of Chöla appears and disappears and reemerges again with each rise and fall, bend and turn, in the trail, but always Chöla is there.

After an hour of walking, I reach the end of the trail and the end of the lake, and I pause to rest against a boulder. I lean my face against it and feel the coolness course through my body. The rock, like many around the lake, is painted and inscribed with a mantra, the only words I can read in our language: ཨོཾ་མ་ཎི་པདྨེ་ཧཱུྃ. “Om mani padme hum.”

Morning has emerged.

The light in the valley and along the lakeshore is now a deep cerulean, though full day has still yet to come. Above, I glimpse the great snowy massif of Chöla, its summit cloaked in cloud. But it is there, the peak, I know, for it calls me. It summons me. So, without further lingering, I push myself off the rock and keep walking. And so we go. Through and through, I am shot through with the celebrated walking blues.

In Tibet, walking is a form of faith and a way of praying and meditating, too, as it is in India and Japan and in Zen Buddhism, or so Choden told me. I cross the alpine meadow and the stream beyond the end of the lake. In summer, wild rapeseed, burdock and honeysuckle bloom in the green pastures and golden fields here, and bees and hummingbirds buzz, dip and dive among the fragrant flowers, scattering sheaths of pollen in the sunlight and filling the air with their whirring song.

What is so striking about this world, it sometimes seems to me, is not that it exists at all, or that it all works, but that it all exists, it all works and it is all beautiful. But maybe beauty and grace are not the point at all, not ends in themselves, but purely beginnings, mere conduits, pathways leading into and aspiring toward prayer and praise.

What am I struggling and striving to say? Simply this: I will miss it here. I’ll miss Yihun Lhatso.

When I come to the foot of Chöla, I start up the hillside. Already, above and before me, the sky is brightening, and light warms the greening earth. I climb for a long time. Chöla is one of the highest mountains in Kham, and it feels even higher when you try to climb it. But in time, I pass the last of the fluttering prayer flags and the carved and painted mani stones and the last of the yak pies. No trace of man is left in the world. I am alone with the holy mountain, now. I climb higher, and the grass grows barer and the air thinner. It is hard to breathe.

The air burns my cheeks and lungs, but I do not stop. I climb higher, my sight trained on the snowline. My mind wanders and my heart questions me. But it is too late for wondering and pondering now, and I purge my doubts as swiftly as they arise.

As the Buddha teaches, everything that is born in this world must perish from it in time. Darkness leads to light, and light to darkness, and all passes through the sieve of fire to ash in the end, and is reborn again. I believe the Buddha’s words with my mind, but my heart misgives me, and still I wonder. But that is only my fear and my attachment to this beautiful but corporeal and ephemeral world that I love and will miss so dearly, I know.

I strive on through the cold thin air. Wind bellows around me. It scours the hillside and sears the stunted grass. I trudge on, breathing harder, gasping in the rarefied air. Finally, when it seems so cold and windy I wonder if I can bear another step higher, my feet plunge into warmth. The first patch of snow. I look up. Before me, a hundred feet away, the vast snow plain stretches up the mountainside, and high above, though much closer now, the great white stone face of Chöla looms through auras of cloud.

As I stand staring up toward the summit, the sun emerges fully over the hill behind me to the east. At once, light rends the air and caps the peak of Chöla, as the sky opens and blooms, boundless and blue, and the mountainside cascades with rays of radiant yellow light.

“Day has come. The new day is wholly here.”

I take off Choden’s robe and lay it aside. It is the sole relic I have of my brother, and I want it to endure in this world after I am gone, charred at its fringes as it may be. I sit, cross my legs in the half lotus position, cup my hands and prepare to pray. Sunlight warms my face, and the spring bud green grasses wave around me. The wind has died down and is calm. There are no prayer flags, but in my soul I see them flying, streaming their multicolored prayers through the world on the wind.

I feel inside Choden’s robe and retrieve the Coke bottle of gasoline and the book of matches. I unscrew the cap. I hold the bottle and smell the gasoline. Its reek assaults my nostrils. It is horrible, bitter. My heart beats faster. Am I really going to go through with this vicious thing? The light and the awakening I think I experienced in the monastery this morning, was it really leading me to this, or am I still an achingly naïve boy, full of unfulfilled yearning and struggling to find my way?

I turn and look back toward the way from which I came. The morning fog has dissipated and the valley has opened through the clouds, and I can see it far below in the distance across the lake and the valley, at the end of the road. It’s lit in the morning light, that place in which I was born, and from where I came and called home for the brief passage of my life. Manigango.

My mother will be up now, boiling the water in the copper pot on the clay stove, or sweeping the house out with the ragged broom. My father will be sitting at the table, his hard hands cradling a bowl of butter tea, watching the morning light bloom through the window and silently fill our earthen house. Dolka will be huddled on the kang under the warm wool blankets, her long brown hair tousled around her temples in auburn curls and chestnut tresses, her body cradled in the embrace of sleep.

My grandmother will be out in the yard by the yak pen, her beige cowboy hat propped on her head and her black Wayfarers resting on the bridge of her nose, her wind-and-work-weathered hands threaded through a pair of puti beads, her palms joined and poised above her head, bowing her old body in praise before the earth and the dawning day.

“Praise, presence, and joy in the perfection
of all things,” she will pray.

Will she make the steep climb up the hill to walk the kora around the monastery this morning, and if she does, who will guide her? And what about Tenzin, my young friend, my little brother. Who will be there to chat with him on the hill above the monastery in the late sunlit afternoon, as the great black-haired yaks graze and the wind horses gallop, and who will help him find his yellow hat? And who will lead the thirteen black-haired yaks up to the plateau to feed on the sweet, blessed, life-giving grass?

If only I could have spoken a few words more to each of them. If only I could have told Dolka I was sorry, I didn’t mean those ugly words I said to her last night at the supper table in my anger and confusion. The truth is I understand Dolka’s desire to leave Manigango, even if I don’t share her desire, and the truth is I don’t hate China or our Han neighbors, even if I wish they’d let us alone and let us be who we are and who we aspire to be.

If only I could have expressed to them the yearning inside me and all the panging love of my broken heart. I’m sorry, even now in the end, it’s still so hard for me to sing this right. If only I could have said goodbye to Choden and cracked the mystery of his story. Too late.

“As I open my eyes to look at the world
one more time, this world I love so much it hurts,
my gaze is drawn up the mountainside.
That is when I see her.”

My heart pounds and throbs in my chest, blood beats in my temples. I hold the bottle of gasoline and prepare to drink and douse myself, to let the bitter gasoline fill my body like the fire of life and death. Like the fire of self-immolation. Before I do, though, I set the bottle down beside me in the grass. I close my eyes and speak the holy words a final time. “Om mani padme hum.”  Hail to the jewel in the lotus flower. Hum.

I open the book of matches. I break a match off and strike it against the grain. Fire ignites on my first try. With my left hand, I quickly pick up the bottle of gasoline. The match I hold in my right. I put the bottle to my lips. The smell of the gas assaults my senses again, nearly overwhelming me, now. The savage stench burns my eyes. Tears begin to pool in them. I close my eyes and raise the match, ready to drink, swallow and be through with this violent and ugly, selfish, childish thing.

“Sorry, old brother. I guess, in the end, I could never decipher the meaning of your story. The best I could do was brush up against the ineffable. But maybe mystery is not meant to be deciphered, but purely experienced, even as truth cannot be attained, but simply arrived at, simply awakened to. In this way, perhaps faith has nothing to do with what we actively believe and everything to do with the dawning realization that what we cannot know is wiser than all our knowing. Alas, too late. I guess I’ll never know. Not in this life.”

As I open my eyes to look at the world one more time, this world I love so much it hurts, my gaze is drawn up the mountainside. That is when I see her.

She stands amid the plain of snow on her long, lean limbs. Her snowy white pelt gleams and her dusty turquoise mane bristles in the sunlight. Her eyes are dark and gorgeous and bright, full of majesty and light. She is not famished, she is not feeble. She is not starving or dying. She stands tall and strong in the full bloom of youth, and her graceful body pulses with life, and she is fierce and terrible and holy and inexpressibly beautiful. She is the most beautiful being I’ve ever beheld. She’s sublime. She is perfect.

As she lifts her ravishing eyes and looks at me, our eyes meet, and I encounter the sacred mystery and perceive the elusive truth. I experience the ecstatic, the mercy and violent grace of the earth wash over me like sunlight, and the sublime enswathes me like fire. And as I lower the match and bottle from my mouth, I know in my heart I have at last come to the place I was seeking, and that I have found the peace I was searching for.

“For Chinese Warriors” by Nawang Khechog, from Rhythms of Peace & Tibetan Healing Music.

The End

“The holy heart of the earth and the
sacred center of the world is wherever
we’re standing right now.

‘Praise, presence and joy.’
This, my daily prayer of praise, I pray.”

Lobsang, the Yakherd and Grungkan of Manigango, sings and speaks.

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