Bone Mountain (3 page)

“Lha gyal lo!” Shopo called toward the heavens in a joyful voice. “Victory to the gods!” He rose from the blanket, both hands cradling the pot, and carried it into the compact stone structure that housed half a dozen meditation cells and the hermitage’s lhakang, Shan and his companions close behind. Silently acknowledging the Buddha on the altar at the rear wall, Shopo set the pot on a cedar plank that held ten similar pots and several long, narrow bronze funnels, then turned toward the multicolored, seven-foot circle that covered the center of the stone floor, a reverent awe filling his face.

It was called the Vajrabhairava, the Diamond Terrifier, one of the rarest forms of the intricate mandala sand paintings that had been part of Tibetan ritual for centuries. It had frightened Shan at first, when he heard Gendun explain that the deity they were invoking was one of the fiercest of all the Tibetan deities, and he watched now as the dropka woman halted and grimaced at the old thangka of the Diamond Terrifier, which Lokesh had hung in the lhakang. Some may have thought it meant Shan and his friends were on a path of demons and destruction but Shan had learned how such severe images were used by the lamas as symbols of higher truths, and he knew now not to see violence in the image, but hope. The Diamond Terrifier was the form wisdom assumed to challenge the Lord of Death when it sought to take humans before they achieved enlightenment.

At first Shan and Nyma had listened for hours every day as Gendun orally painted the complex mandala, describing it inch by inch from memory. Finally, a month earlier, Shopo and Gendun had laid out intricate chalk lines on the stone floor, outlining the foundations of the wheel. It had been thirty years since Gendun had helped create this particular mandala, taught to him by a lama who had been ninety years old at the time, but he recalled its many symbols perfectly. The mandala held dozens of symbols, each made by pouring a few grains of sand at a time with the
chakpa,
thin five-inch-long funnels. Indeed, every image, even every color, was a symbol, and each symbol had a teaching associated with it. Shan gazed upon the grounds of the symbolic palace at the center, divided into intricate quadrants. The white east held the wheel of dharma, the yellow south wish-giving jewels, the red west the lotus of purity, and the green north a flaming sword.

After a quarter hour, buoyed by the joy of the Tibetans, Shan drifted outside to the circle of earth in an outcropping above the buildings where he had passed many hours in meditation during the past weeks. Gendun would want him to contemplate the lesson of the sands on this final day, but suddenly Shan felt too full of life, too content with the knowledge that he had, after the ordeal that had been his life thus far, finally found a place in the world.

As he watched the clouds, letting his contentment push back the fear he had felt when sitting by the jagged stone, Shan discovered an unfamiliar nervousness. For tonight, instead of filling the chakpa for Gendun as the lama painted the mandala, Gendun would fill the chakpa for him, so Shan could create the cloud and mountain images along the perimeter of the painting.

For hours the lamas had taught him the proper posture of the hands, and mind, in applying the sand, until Shan sensed he was not so much holding an implement for art but offering a prayer with sand. Then together they had practiced the cursive pattern Shan would create with the white sand along the outer perimeter of the circle.

“Follow the curve a lark makes in its flight,” Gendun had explained, referring to the long graceful dip made by the bird between wing beats, and the lama had expressed wonder about the strange blend of excitement and sadness that had appeared on Shan’s face.

“It’s nothing,” Shan had whispered, after floating for a moment on a tide of memory. His father had used almost the same words, almost the same voice, speaking of birds and willows and the wind, drawing patterns with his brush in the air, when he had taught Shan how to create his first Chinese ideograms.

Suddenly Shan became aware of someone sitting beside him. He turned from the clouds and looked into Gendun’s serene face.

“We will have mountains to climb,” the lama observed abruptly. He was sitting beside Shan in the lotus fashion, his legs crossed, as if he had been spirited there from a meditation cell. The words were Gendun’s way of asking if Shan was ready, not for the mandala, but for the journey they would begin afterwards, for it was because of that journey they had undertaken the mandala. Just as others might methodically assemble supplies and study maps to prepare for arduous travel, the lamas had been methodically strengthening Shan, Lokesh, and Nyma with images of the Diamond Terrifier. Or perhaps, as Lokesh had chillingly suggested, preparing Shan to do the work of the Diamond Terrifier.

“I am ready for mountains, Rinpoche,” Shan said, using the term of address for a revered teacher.

Gendun’s eyes twinkled as he studied Shan’s face. More often than not the two did not need words to communicate. “And there will be more than just yak chips to watch for,” the old lama added.

Shan studied his teacher in confusion. “I thought Tenzin would stay here, Rinpoche,” Shan said. Tenzin had not spoken a word during the two months Shan had known him, but Shan had recognized the man’s sad, broken nature, and the way the dropka warned him away from roads. He was an escapee from the gulag, Shan had realized, another fugitive trying to revive himself, to discover the spark inside after having had so many, for so long, try to extinguish it.

“He is going north. Someone died.”

The remnants of Shan’s grin vanished.

“No,” Gendun added quickly. “Not that way,” he said, meaning not one of the violent mysteries the old Shan had been obsessed with solving. “Nothing to do with the stone or any of us. He’s just going north and I worry about him.”

Although Tenzin usually ate with them and shared their chores, he had stayed away from Shan, denying Shan the chance of knowing him better. Despite all their weeks together, Tenzin was as great an enigma as ever. At first Shan had taken his manner for an aloofness tied to the oddly aristocratic air he projected, even when carrying his dung sack. More than once Shan had wondered if Gendun or Shopo had given the man penance, in punishment for something. Sometimes such men committed violence in making good their escape. Gendun might not condemn him for killing a jailer, but would worry about the damage such an act would cause to his inner deity. The tall, silent Tibetan left at dawn each day with his leather sack and returned at dusk, having filled it with yak dung, a meager haul for a day’s work. But even with a single sack a day he had filled one of the smaller huts to the ceiling with fuel for the hermitage.

“I will help him if I see how, Rinpoche.”

Gendun nodded. “I worry sometimes that he goes beyond seeing.” The lama was not referring to Tenzin leaving their sight, but to the dangers of drifting into deep meditation and losing awareness of one’s immediate surroundings while moving about the treacherous landscape. Monks sometimes broke legs, even necks, when traveling alone in the mountains.

Shan studied his teacher. Gendun knew something about the melancholy man that Shan did not, or at least sensed something that Shan had not seen. Tenzin had never helped with the mandala, but watched its creation with a child-like fascination, steadfastly attending Gendun and Shopo with tea and replenishing all the lamps when the dropka brought skins of butter. Although Shan had never seen him meditate, never seen him show interest in what the Tibetans might call the Buddha within him, he remembered the single sack of dung brought back each day. The sack could be filled in two or three hours time. Did Tenzin spend the rest of his day sitting on the high ridges in meditation? Once, Shan remembered, after Shopo had carefully described how to commune with the river nagas, Tenzin had come back with black sand for the mandala and reverently presented it to Gendun. Another time Shan had discovered him alone, in the middle of the night, hovering at the edge of the mandala with his eyes full of tears, his hand cupped in the air over the image of a hermit monk.

“When he grows his tongue,” the lama said, “it will be better. A few more months perhaps.”

It was how Gendun described the silence of such broken men, how Gendun had referred to Shan’s own dark silence in the weeks after he left the gulag. When the man finally found the spark that had been Tenzin before imprisonment, before the torture of the gulag, the fire of his spirit would reach his tongue and he would be ready to speak with the world. Perhaps, Shan thought, it was why Gendun was asking him to watch over Tenzin, because before he met the lamas Shan, too, had once consisted only of mute, confused fragments.

*   *   *

Sift the sand to find the seeds of the universe.
The words echoed in Shan’s mind as he sat by the mandala four hours later with the pot of white sand by his feet. The sun had set, their last night of work on the mandala begun. A fingertip touched his arm, light as a feather.

“It is time,” Gendun said, and from a sleeve of his red robe he produced a chakpa, extending it toward Shan.

Shan hesitated. From the darkened corridor that led to the chamber he heard the moan of the wind as it played with the crumbling stonework of the hermitage, creating an eerie harmony with the mantra murmured by Lokesh, who sat beside Tenzin at the wall behind them. He slowly raised his hand to accept the narrow chakpa from Gendun, filled with the white sand. The lama handed him a second, empty chakpa, to be used to tap the sand out of the first. Shan’s gaze drifted toward the small wooden altar, toward the jagged eye, then he glanced back at Gendun with a fleeting sense of guilt. The eye was there, always watching. But part of the discipline Gendun had imposed on Shan was not to think about the mysterious eye, to immerse himself instead in the mandala. Not since the first day at the hermitage had anyone spoken about the eye, except Lokesh, who had soberly whispered to him one night that Shan need not worry, because wherever Gendun and the stone traveled, that place would be a sanctuary. Lokesh seemed to think of the upcoming journey as a pilgrimage, in which holy men would return a holy stone, and that the world would part to offer a peaceful path for such pilgrims.

Shan watched Nyma finish a flame shape along the outer ring, then he leaned forward to begin outlining the image of a cloud with a tiny line of white sand. He lowered first the sand-filled chakpa, then the empty funnel, but quickly lifted them away. His hands were trembling. No one spoke. He collected his awareness for a moment by gazing upon the palace at the center of the circle, where wisdom and compassion reigned. His hands steadier, he began to tap the white sand chakpa, loosing a white thread onto the outer rim of the mandala. The tapping of his metal funnels became a tiny muffled bell, a sound that had become part of the nightly ritual, each ring announcing the planting of a few more seeds into the little universe the lamas had created.

As Shan finished the image, he nodded to Nyma, who would continue the pattern by applying vermilion sand in the shape of a tree, then stood and stepped away from the circle, wary of breathing deeply across the delicate sand images. As he turned he saw a stranger squatting by Lokesh, arguing in a low voice. The man wore a heavily stained fleece hat and a
chuba,
the heavy sheepskin coat favored by the nomads who inhabited the sparse landscape, but he was not one of those from the dropka encampment above the hermitage.

The man’s eyes widened as he stood and stabbed an accusing finger toward Shan. His chuba opened with the movement, revealing a long knife at his belt. Lokesh, marking his rosary in the tight grip of two fingers, rose and used his free hand to push down the man’s arm as Shan approached.

“You’re crazy,” the stranger muttered, and as he twisted away from Lokesh his fleece cap fell away, revealing a head shaved completely bald. Shan was wrong, he realized, as he studied the man’s strong, boney features, his smooth scalp and long thin moustache. The stranger was not one of the local herders, he was a Golok, from the far northeast of Tibet, perhaps the most untamed of all the Tibetan peoples. “He’s Chinese!” the Golok barked loudly.

Shan glanced uneasily toward the mandala. Nyma and the lamas were ignoring the man.

“It’s Shan,” Lokesh countered, still holding the man’s arm as if he thought the Golok would attack Shan. “He’s the one.”

The intruder cut his eyes toward Lokesh, then examined Shan. His anger faded, replaced by scorn. “I don’t think so. The one that’s going to patch the god? He’s a criminal. Hard as nails they say. All the other Chinese hate him.”

Lokesh glanced apologetically at Shan. “Not a criminal, a prisoner. Four years
lao gai,
” he added, referring to the hard labor gulag camps run by Beijing. Until the year before, Shan and Lokesh had both served in the 404th People’s Construction Brigade, one of the most notorious camps in China’s slave system.

“This one,” the Golok said as he surveyed Shan’s heavily patched coat, his tattered work boots and the cracked, frayed end of the vinyl belt that jutted from his waist, “he looks like a shopkeeper. A failed shopkeeper,” he added, fixing Shan with a sneer, then surveying the others in the chamber with a frown. “There are supposed to be purbas, supposed to be warriors. No chance you’ll make it. You have no idea,” he said haughtily, turning back to Shan. “You could die a hundred ways. Better men than you have tried and died.”

Shan silently returned the Golok’s stare. If the Golok, who was certainly no purba, knew about their secret plans, he wondered, how many others knew that they were going to return the jagged eye? Why did he seem to know more than Shan? And why, when he so obviously didn’t belong at the hermitage, had the dropka who guarded the buildings let him in?

Lokesh sighed. “Yes,” he said, as if he had heard such warnings before. He took the man’s hand and pulled him forward. “You need to study the sacred circle,” he advised in a patient tone. The words had the sound of a healer’s advice, and Shan decided the man must be one of those bitter, angry Tibetans who were brought to the hermitage by the older herders to witness the mandala and reflect on the power that compassion could exercise over hate and fear.