“What do you think?” asked Chögi Gyatso.
“I think I should not count on your participation.”
“That is correct.”
“I’m reminded of an old joke,” said Cousin Ngawang. “A man went to a priest in the north of Ireland and confessed that he’d blown up six miles of British railroad track. And the priest said, ‘For your penance, you must go and do the stations.’”
“Very amusing,” said Cousin Jowo.
“Decidedly droll,” said Cousin Drebung.
But no one laughed, most especially myself, most conspicuously Chögi Gyatso, and most predictably Dorje Lingpa.
My third tutorial with His Holiness took me to the fabled Bebhaha Temple of Cosmic Desire, the very loins, as it were, of the Gangtok Buddhist Complex, famous throughout Asia for its six thousand masterpieces of erotic art. Despite his celibacy, or perhaps because of it, Chögi Gyatso held a generally approving attitude toward the sex act, and he believed that, my embarrassing performance in the monastery notwithstanding, the meditation practices pursued in the Bebhaha Temple might occasion my awakening. Moreover, this time around I would be following a regimen drawn from His Holiness’s specialty — the tantric path, the diamond discipline, the venerable Vajrayana.
The mystic principle behind the temple was straightforward enough. Tsangyang Gyatso, the sixth Dalai Lama, had put it well: “If one’s thoughts toward the dharma were of the same intensity as those toward physical love, one would become a Buddha in this very body, in this very life.” And so it was that I spent a week in Gangtok’s spiritual red-light district, contemplating hundreds of paintings and sculptures depicting sexual ensembles — couples, trios, quartets, quintets, human, yeti, divine, biologically mixed, taxonomically diverse, ontologically scrambled — engaged in every sort of carnal congress, homoerotic, heteroerotic, autoerotic, even surrealistic: images of copulating trees and randy pocket watches, playfully signed “Salvador Dali Lama.” I seethed with lust. I stroked myself to torrential spasms. At one point His Holiness suggested that I take up with the kind of sexual consort known as a karma-mudra, an “action seal,” so named because the practice sealed or solidified the seeker’s understanding that all phenomena are a union of ecstasy and emptiness. I declined this provocative invitation, feeling that His Holiness’s syllabus had already put enough strain on my relationship with Gawa.
Even as I wrapped my hand around my cock, I sought to keep my eye on the ball. The idea was to gather up all this libidinous energy, this tsunami of seed, and, through diligent meditation and focused chanting, channel it toward detachment, sunyata, and boundless pity for the suffering of all sentients. From onanism to Om mani padme hum, oh, yes, that was the grand truth of the tantra, an ingenious strategy of masturbate-and-switch, and I did my best, O depilated ones, you must believe me, I truly played to win.
“I tried,” I told Chögi Gyatso as I stumbled out of the Bebhaha Temple, all passions spent. “I tried, and I failed. Immerse me in the tantra, and my thoughts turn to wanking, not awakening. Let’s face it, Your Holiness. I was not made for the Vajrayana, nor the Mahayana either, nor even the Hinayana.”
“You’re probably right. But I must also say this, Taktra Kunga. Your attitude sucks.”
“So do half your deities.”
“Might we try one final tantric lesson? At the start of the tenth lunar month, come to the Antarabhava Charnel Ground on the slopes of Mount Jelep La, eight kilometers to the northeast. You will know it by the vultures wheeling overhead.”
I shrugged and said, “I suppose I have nothing to lose.”
“No, Taktra Kunga, you have everything to lose,” His Holiness reproached me. “That is the whole point. Lose your illusions, lose your goals, lose your ego, lose the world, and only then will you come to know the wonder of it all.”
O smooth ones, you might think that an ape whose lair was appointed with skulls would revel in the ambience of the Antarabhava Charnel Ground, but in fact I found it a completely ghastly place, a seething soup of shucked bones, strewn teeth, rotting flesh, disembodied hair, fluttering shrouds, buzzing flies, busy worms, industrious crows, and enraptured vultures. By Chögi Gyatso’s account, two geographical circumstances accounted for this macabre ecology. Because wood was scarce in Tibet, cremation had never become the norm, and — thanks to the rocky and often frozen soil — interment was equally uncommon. Instead Tibetans had resorted to the colorful custom of sky burial, dismembering the corpse and leaving the components in a high open place to be consumed by jackals and carrion birds.
“Death, decay, and transmigration: the three fundamental facts of existence,” said His Holiness.
“I want to go home,” I said, my eyes watering and my brain reeling from the foulness of it all. The stench was itself a kind of raptor, pecking at my sinuses, nibbling at the lining of my throat.
“The sorrowful cycle of samsara,” Chögi Gyatso persisted. “The wretched wheel of life, turning and turning in the widening gyre, but there is no rough beast, Taktra Kunga, no Bethlehem, only more turning, more suffering, more turning, more suffering. Sean Connery is reborn as George Lazenby, who is reborn as Roger Moore, who is reborn as Timothy Dalton, who is reborn as Pierce Brosnan, who is reborn as Daniel Craig, who is reborn as Brian Flaherty. It can be much worse, of course. A person might spend his life deliberately harming other sentient beings. Owing to this bad karma, he will come back as an invertebrate, a miserable crawling thing, or else a hungry ghost, or maybe even a hell being. Agent Double-O-Seven, if he truly existed, would probably be a dung beetle now. So it goes, Taktra Kunga. You can’t win, you can’t break even — but you can get out of the game.”
“You didn’t get out of the game,” I noted, staring at my feet. “You keep opting for reincarnation.”
“That doesn’t mean I like it.”
“If your brother sends a troop train into the gorge, how may lifetimes will he need to discharge his karmic debt? A hundred? A thousand? A million?”
“I don’t want to talk about my brother,” said Chögi Gyatso, placing his open palm beneath my shaggy simian chin and directing my gaze toward the open-air ossuary. “Behold.”
Bearing a narrow palanquin on which lay a robe-wrapped corpse, a solemn procession shuffled into view: monks, mourners, tub-haulers, and a team of specialists that His Holiness identified as rogyapas, body cutters. Expectant vultures arrived from all points of the compass. After finding a relatively uncluttered space, the palanquin-bearers set down their burden, whereupon the rogyapas secured the corpse with ropes and pegs, “lest the birds claim it too soon,” His Holiness explained. Availing themselves of the tub, the monks next washed the body in a solution scented with saffron and camphor, “thereby making the flesh more pleasing to the nostrils of its feathered beneficiaries.”
“Your religion is good with details,” I noted.
“In giving his body to scavengers, the deceased is performing an act of great charity,” Chögi Gyatso explained. “Even as we speak, that person’s hovering consciousness negotiates the bardo, the gap between his present life and his next incarnation. He is presently confronting a multitude of confusing sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes, as well as hordes of tantric deities, some peaceful, others wrathful, each spawned by his mind. It’s all in the Bardo Thodol.”
“We should try selling it to the
