rattled out of the yard, frogged onto the Lhasa line, and raced away at full throttle. I planted myself squarely on the maintenance track, the better to see Chögi Gyatso depart his present incarnation. An instant later the car reached the bridge and continued across, a caterpillar crawling along a hissing firecracker. The wheel flanges hit the detonator, and there came forth a deafening explosion that catapulted the car and its passenger a hundred meters into the air. A plume of fire and ash billowed upward from the shattered span. Flames licked the sheer blue sky. The vehicle succumbed to gravity. My former teacher hung briefly in the swirling smoke, as if suspended on the breath of a thousand thwarted demons, a miracle truly befitting the bardo of a bodhisattva, and then he fell.
I am pleased to report that His Holiness’s scenario played out largely as he’d imagined, with the troop train’s engineer slamming on the pneumatic brakes the instant the ka-boom of the dynamite reached his ears. The wheels locked, flanges squealing against the icy rails, leaving five hundred Mao-Mao soldiers at the mercy of a capricious friction. The gargantuan locomotive skated crazily, dragging its fourteen coaches toward the abyss.
By this time my cousins, no strangers to the laws of physics, had arrayed themselves along both sides of the tracks, gear in hand, waiting for the train. I threw the switch as His Holiness had requested, then climbed a snowy knoll, from which vantage I beheld my worthy clan improvise a grand act of salvation.
“Hurry!” I shouted superfluously.
Moving in perfect synchronicity, the apes hurled the six grapping irons toward the rolling coaches, smashing the windows and securing the hooks solidly within the frames.
“Such lovely beasts!” I cried.
Having successfully harpooned the passing train, my cousins allowed the ropes to pay out briefly, then tightened their grips. Still skidding, the locomotive towed the six yeti along the roadbed like an outboard motorboat pulling multiple water-skiers, spumes of ice and snow spewing upward from their padded heels. In a matter of seconds the momentum shifted in compassion’s favor. The train slowed — and slowed — and slowed. I shouted for joy. The Bön gods smiled.
“Tiao!” cried my clan in a single voice. “Tiao! Jump! Tiao! Jump! Tiao! Tiao! Tiao!”
The soldiers rushed toward the coach doors in a tumult of brown uniforms, gleaming rifles, and wide-eyed faces. They jumped, spilling pell-mell from the decelerating train like Norway rats abandoning a sinking steamer. My cousins, satisfied, released the ropes and headed for the hills, determined that this would not be the day of their unmasking. Sprawled in the roadbed, the perplexed but grateful Mao-Maos gasped and sputtered. The engineer abandoned his post none too soon, leaping from the cab barely thirty seconds before the coasting locomotive and its vacant coaches glided majestically across the burning bridge, reached the rift, and hurtled off the tracks. Seconds later the train hit the river, the thunderous crash echoing up and down the gorge.
Before the eventful morning ended, my clan and I, along with Dorje Lingpa, managed to sneak within view of the Brahmaputra and observe the twisted consequences of His Holiness’s courage. Having shattered the river’s normal sheet of ice, the hot locomotive and its strewn coaches clogged the current like vast carrots floating in an immense stew. I scanned the steaming wreckage. The corpse of Chögi Gyatso was easy to spot. His saffron-and-burgundy robe rose vividly against the bright white floe that was his bier.
“Forgive me, brother,” said Dorje Lingpa.
“Goodbye, Your Holiness,” said Cousin Ngawang.
“Farewell, beloved monk,” said Cousin Jowo.
“I hope you’ve gone to heaven,” said Cousin Drebung.
“Do lamas believe in heaven?” asked Cousin Yangdak.
“Rebirth,” Cousin Garap explained.
“Then I hope you’ve been reborn,” said Cousin Drebung.
“Though they don’t come any better than you,” noted Cousin Nyima.
I attempted to speak, but my tongue had gone numb, my throat was clamped shut, and my lungs were filled with stones.
The clan and I bore Chögi Gyatso’s dead body far down the frozen river and secured it behind a boulder, lest the People’s Liberation Army come upon it while investigating the loss of their train. As I knelt before the dead bodhisat-tva and began to partake of his brain, I decided that this nang-duzul would mark a new phase in my life. No, I did not forswear meat-knowledge, to which I was addicted and always would be. But from now on, I promised myself, I would cease to kill my prey. I would instead become like the charnel-ground raptors, leaving my nourishment to the whims of chance, consuming only such human flesh as my karma merited.
Yes, O glossy ones, eventually I realized that I should not simply demur from devouring a stranded climber — I should also summon a rescue party. So far I haven’t endeavored to save anyone’s life, even though such altruism would hardly compromise my species’ security, for the Sherpas already know we exist, and they would never dream of betraying us to either a Mao-Mao patrol or an Everest entrepreneur. But old habits die hard. Give me a little time.
I wish I could say that some political good came of His Holiness’s deliverance of the Mao-Mao soldiers. In fact the ugly status quo persists, with Tibetan culture still withering under the iron boot of the People’s Liberation Army, may they rot in hell. As for Dorje Lingpa, he was never officially fired from his job with the National Railroad. Instead he was arrested, tortured with a cattle prod, imprisoned for five years, tortured again, and hung. The moral of his sorry life is simple. If you want to be a successful insurgent, don’t practice on Chinese Communists.
When I told the Panchen Lama where to find Chögi Gyatso’s body, he did not at first believe me, but then I began laying out evidence — a grappling iron, the Beijing Times headline, His Holiness’s white silk scarf — and the monks dispatched a recovery team to the Brahmaputra River gorge. No sky burial, of course, for Chögi Gyatso. No vultures for His Holiness. The monks cremated him on the grounds of the New Ganden Monastery, then set about searching for his reincarnation. At last report they’d located a promising three-year-old in the village of Gyanzge.
So what is it like to be enlightened? What rarefied phenomena does a bodhisattva perceive? I regret to say that the gift was largely wasted on me. To be sure, shortly after eating Chögi Gyatso’s cerebrum I found myself praying compulsively, chanting incessantly, and meditating obsessively, much to Gawa’s consternation. For a few incandescent days I saw the world as he had, lambent and fair and full of woe, abrim with beings who, without exception, every one, each and all, deserved my unqualified kindness.
But my wisdom did not endure. It faded like the westering sun, and what I recall of ecstatic emptiness cannot be articulated in any language, human or simian.
I suppose this loss was to be expected. As these pages attest, I was always a lousy candidate for wakefulness. In my heart I’m a child of that other Enlightenment, the one personified by such cheeky freethinkers as Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin. At the end of the day I’m a carpe diem creature, a rationalist, really, the sort of primate who can’t help wondering whether a compassion born of emptiness might not be an empty compassion indeed. I love my life. I treasure my attachments. That is not about to change. True, this ape may eventually evolve, in the Darwinian sense, but for now I shall leave transcendence to the professionals.
That said, I am endlessly honored to have been his student. My gestures of remembrance are small but constant. Every night, after making love to Gawa, I stare into the blackness of our lair and give voice
