detest it.”
“You’re in good company,” said Chögi Gyatso. “When the Buddha first spoke of the quest for sunyata, thousands of his followers had heart attacks.”
“Then perhaps we should omit emptiness from the curriculum?”
“A person can no more achieve enlightenment without sunyata than he can make an omelet without eggs.”
“I don’t want to have a heart attack.”
“To tell you the truth, I never believed that story,” said Chögi Gyatso. “Although it’s always disturbing to have the rug pulled out, the fall is rarely fatal.”
“But if everything is an illusion, then isn’t the idea that everything is an illusion also an illusion?” I asked petulantly.
“Let’s not stoop to sophistry, Taktra Kunga. This is contemporary Gangtok, not ancient Athens.”
Having acquitted myself so poorly in the Hall of Empty Mirrors, I anticipated even worse luck in the locus of my fourth and final week, the Chamber of Silence, reminiscent of the padded cells in which Western civilization was once pleased to warehouse its lunatics. My pessimism proved prescient. Much as I enjoyed meditating amid this cacophony of quietude, this mute chorus of one hand clapping, no foot stomping, thirty fish sneezing, forty oysters laughing, and a million dust motes singing, I was no closer to deposing my sovereign self than when I’d first entered the New Ganden Monastery.
“I’m discouraged, Your Holiness.”
“That is actually good news,” he replied.
“No, I mean I’m really discouraged.”
“You must have patience. Better the dense glacier of genuine despair than the brittle ice of false hope.”
O hairless ones, I give you my teacher, Chögi Gyatso, the Charlie Chan of the Himalayas, forever dispensing therapeutic aphorisms. And if His Holiness was Chan, did that make me his nonexistent offspring, his favorite illusory child, his Number One Sunyata? Raised by the Antelope Clan, I’d never known my biological parents, who’d died in the Great Khumbu Avalanche six months after my birth. In seeking out His Holiness, was I really just looking for my father? The more I pondered the question, the more mixed my emotions grew — a hodgepodge, a vortex, an incommodius vicus of recirculation, to paraphrase a Joycean scholar I’d once assimilated.
Chögi Gyatso bid me farewell. I left the New Ganden Monastery and headed for the Lachung Pass as fast as my limbs would carry me, sometimes running on all fours, eager for a sensual reunion with Gawa. Midway through my journey I again encountered the corpse of Robin Balaban, the NYU film professor. His gutted cranium taunted me with the void I’d failed to apprehend in the monastery. I averted my eyes and howled with despair.
My indifference to Professor Balaban’s fate, I realized to my infinite chagrin, was equaled only by my apathy toward his bereaved loved ones. With crystal clarity I beheld my benighted mind. I would never awaken. Buddhahood was as far away as the summit of some soaring Jomolungma on another planet. And so I howled again, wracked by a self-pity born of my inability to pity anyone but myself, then continued on my way.
While Chögi Gyatso doubtless regarded me as a difficult pupil, perhaps the most exasperating he’d encountered in his present incarnation, the primary menace to his tranquility in those days remained his bitter, restless, firebrand brother. Although Dorje Lingpa had kept his promise to spend the whole of Mönlam Chenmo in profound meditation, his efforts had proved abortive, and he was now more determined than ever to strike a blow against the Han Chinese. Unenlightened being that I was, I framed Dorje Lingpa’s failure in egotistical terms. If His Holiness’s blood relatives had difficulty attaining sunyata, then I shouldn’t feel so bad about the absence of emptiness in my own life.
The intractability of Dorje Lingpa’s anger became apparent during our next secret pilgrimage to Lhasa. In a tone as devoid of compassion as a brick is devoid of milk, he confessed that he could not shake his mental image of “the Brahmaputra gorge swallowing a troop train like the great god Za feeding a string of sausages to the mouth embedded in his stomach.” He speculated that this vision might be “a sign from heaven,” and that Za himself was telling him “to render a divine judgment against the evil ones.”
His Holiness began to weep, the subtlest display of anguish I’d ever seen, the tears trickling softly down his face like meltwater in spring, his sobs barely audible above the guttural breathing of the seven hairy apes in the yurt. Dorje Lingpa remained adamant. The People’s Liberation Army must pay for its crimes. Changing the subject, or so it seemed at the time, he said that shortly after dawn he would like to take His Holiness on “a brief excursion in my track-inspection vehicle,” then turned to his yeti guests and declared that there would be room for one of us. I told him I would like to join the party.
Thus it happened that, shortly after sunrise, Chögi Gyatso, Dorje Lingpa, and I climbed into the open-air section-gang car and tooled eastward along the maintenance line at a brisk eighty kilometers per hour, enduring a wind chill from some frigid equivalent of hell. Dorje Lingpa wore his bomber jacket, His Holiness sat hunched beneath a yak-hide blanket, and I had wrapped myself head-to-toe in a tarp — not because I minded the cold, but because the surrounding gang car defied my usual white-on-white camouflage. Suddenly the harsh metallic bawl of a diesel horn filled the air, and then the train appeared, zooming toward us along the adjacent high-speed rails in a great sucking rush that whipped our clothing every which way like prayer flags in a gale. Each passenger coach was crammed with Han Chinese, some perhaps bound for a holiday in Lhasa but the majority surely intending to settle permanently, players in the government’s scheme to marginalize the native population. Five hundred faces flew past, lined up along the windows like an abacus assembled from severed heads. Each wore an expression of nauseated misery — a syndrome probably born of the thin air, though I liked to imagine they were also suffering spasms of regret over their role in the rout of Tibet.
As the morning progressed, Dorje Lingpa’s agenda become clear. He meant to give us a guided tour of recent outrages by the Chinese. Periodically he stopped the gang car and passed us his binoculars, so that we could behold yet another exhibit in the Museum of Modern Expediency: the bombed lamaseries, razed temples, trampled shrines, maimed statues — desecrations that the Beijing regime imagined would help stamp out the indigenous cancer of contemplation and replace it with the new state religion, that cruel fusion of normless monopoly capitalism and murderous totalitarianism. Once again His Holiness’s eyes grew damp, and now he wept prolifically, great dollops of salt water rolling down his cheeks and freezing on his chest, so that he soon wore a necklace of tears.
Knowing of his brother’s fascination with James Bond’s Aston Martin, Dorje Lingpa asked if he would like to take the throttle during our return trip. For a full minute the grieving monk said nothing, then offered a nod of disengaged corroboration. Dorje Lingpa stopped the inspection vehicle, then threw the motor into reverse. We pivoted in our seats. His Holiness gripped the controls, and we were off, retracing our path westward through the scattered shards of the Tibetan soul. Drawing within view of the gorge, we again heard the blast of a diesel horn, and seconds later we were overtaken by another train from Beijing, bearing still more Han into the sacred city.
We reached the yurt shortly after two o’clock. My cousins had prepared a hot luncheon of steamed dumplings, but I was not hungry, and neither was His Holiness. The meal passed languidly and without conversation. At last Chögi Gyatso broke the silence, his resonant and reassuring voice warming the icy air.
“Beloved brother,” he told Dorje Lingpa, “that was a good thing you did, taking us across the plateau. I understand you much
