flashing teeth. Set us down anywhere in the Himalayas, and we become eyes without faces, fangs without serpents, grins without cats.
Committed to conveying His Holiness to Lhasa with maximum efficiency, we eventually devised an elaborate relay system using modified climbing gear. Our method comprised a set of six grappling irons outfitted with especially long ropes. By hurling each hook high into the air and deliberately snagging it on the edge of a crag, Cousin Jowo, the strongest among us, succeeded in stringing a succession of high-altitude Tarzan vines between the gateway to the Lachung Pass and the outskirts of Lhasa. Once these immense pendulums had been hung, it became a simple matter for Cousin Drebung, Cousin Yangdak, Cousin Garap, Cousin Nyima, and myself to swing through the canyons in great Newtonian oscillations, gripping our respective ropes with one hand while using the opposite arm to pass His Holiness from ape to ape like a sacramental basketball. Cousin Ngawang brought up the rear, carefully detaching the six hooks and gathering up the ropes, so the Mao-Maos would remain oblivious to our conspiracy.
Naturally my clan and I never dared venture into Lhasa proper, and so after depositing Chögi Gyatso at the city gates we always made a wide arc to the east, tromping through the hills until we reached the railroad bridge that spanned the Brahmaputra River like a sleek tiger leaping over a chasm. His Holiness’s half-brother, Dorje Lingpa, lived by himself in a yurt on the opposite shore. We could get there only by sprinting anxiously along the suspended rails. The passenger train made two scheduled and predictable round-trips per day, but the freight lines and the military transports ran at odd hours, so my cousins and I were always thrilled to reach the far side of the gorge and leap to the safety of the berm.
Dorje Lingpa worked for the Chinese National Railroad, one of four token Tibetans in their employ. Six days a week, he would leave his abode shortly after dawn, walk twenty paces to the siding, climb into his motorized section-gang car, and clatter along the maintenance line, routinely stopping to shovel snow, ice, stones, rubble, and litter off the parallel stretch of gleaming highspeed track running west into Lhasa. Whereas the typical Beijing technocrat had a private driveway and a Subaru, Dorje Lingpa had his own railroad siding and a personal locomotive.
A considerate if quixotic man, His Holiness’s half-brother always remembered to leave the key under the welcome mat. My clan and I would let ourselves into the yurt, brew some buttered tea, purchase stacks of chips from our host’s poker set, and pass the afternoon playing seven-card stud, which Cousin Ngawang had absorbed from a Philadelphia lawyer who’d run short of oxygen on the South Col. Chögi Gyatso and Dorje Lingpa normally returned within an hour of each other — the true Dalai Lama from counseling the Phonisattva, his brother from clearing the Lhasa line. Usually Chögi Gyatso remembered to bring a new set of postcards depicting the changing face of the capital. The Lhasa of my youth was a populous and noisy yet fundamentally congenial world. Thanks to the dubious boon of the railroad, the city now swarmed with franchise restaurants selling yak burgers, flat-screen TVs displaying prayer flags, taxi cabs papered with holograms of stupas, and movie theaters running Bollywood musicals dubbed into Mandarin.
Our fellowship always spent the night on the premises, Chögi Gyatso and his brother bunking in the yurt, we seven yeti sleeping on the ground in the backyard. Does that image bring a chill to your bones, O naked ones? You should understand that our fur is not simply a kind of cloak. Every pelt is a dwelling, like a turtle’s shell. We live and die within the haven of ourselves.
Dorje Lingpa loved his job, but he hated his Mao-Mao bosses. Every time he hosted Chögi Gyatso and his yeti entourage, he outlined his latest unrealized scheme for chastising the Han Chinese. As you might imagine, these narratives were among the few phenomena that could dislodge Chögi Gyatso’s impacted serenity.
“I’ve decided to target the Brahmaputra River bridge,” Dorje Lingpa told us on the occasion of the bodhisattva’s tenth pilgrimage. “At first I thought I’d need plastique, but now I believe dynamite will suffice. There’s lots of it lying around from when they built the railroad.”
“Dear brother, you are allowing anger to rule your life,” said Chögi Gyatso, scowling. “I fear you have strayed far from the path of enlightenment.”
“Every night as I fall asleep, I have visions of the collapsing bridge,” said Dorje Lingpa, discreetly opening a window to admit fresh air. Though too polite to mention it, he obviously found our amalgamated yeti aroma rather too piquant. “I see a train carrying Chinese troops plunging headlong into the gorge.”
“It’s not your place to punish our oppressors,” His Holiness replied. “Through their ignorance they are sowing the seeds of their own future suffering.”
Dorje Lingpa turned to me and said, “During the occupation, tens of thousands of Tibetans were arrested and put in concentration camps, where mass starvation and horrendous torture were the norm. When China suffered a major crop failure in 1959, the army confiscated our entire harvest and shipped it east, causing a terrible famine throughout Tibet.”
“I have forgiven the Chinese for what they did to us,” Chögi Gyatso told his brother, “and I expect the same of you.”
“I would rather be in a situation where you must forgive me for what I did to the Chinese,” Dorje Lingpa replied.
“Beloved brother, you vex me greatly,” said Chögi Gyatso. “All during Mönlam Chenmo I want you to meditate from dawn to dusk. You must purge these evil thoughts from your mind. Will you promise me that?”
Dorje Lingpa nodded listlessly.
“Anyone for seven-card stud?” asked Cousin Yangdak.
“Deal me in,” said Cousin Nyima.
“At the start of the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards swarmed into Tibet,” Dorje Lingpa told me. “They forced monks and nuns to copulate in public, coerced them into urinating on sacred texts, threw excrement on holy men, scrawled graffiti on temple walls, and prosecuted local leaders in kangaroo courts for so-called crimes against the people.”
“Nothing wild, high-low, table stakes,” said Cousin Nyima, distributing the cards.
“The Red Guards also went on gang-rape sprees throughout the countryside,” Dorje Lingpa continued. “They usually required the victim’s husband, parents, children, and neighbors to watch.”
“First king bets,” said Cousin Nyima.
“Two rupees,” said Cousin Jowo.
“Make it four,” said Cousin Drebung.
Three days later Chögi Gyatso sent an emissary to my lair — Lopsang Chokden, who eerily resembled the massive Oddjob from Goldfinger. He consumed a mug of Gawa’s pineal-gland tea, all the while surveying the scattered skulls, which he called “splendid meditation objects,” then delivered his message. His Holiness would begin my tutelage on the morning after the two-week New Year’s celebration of Mönlam Chenmo, which I knew to be a kind of karmic rodeo combining sporting events, prayers, exorcisms, and public philosophical debates in a manner corresponding to no Western religious festival whatsoever. Chögi Gyatso suggested that I bring a toothbrush, as the first stage of my apprenticeship might easily last forty-eight hours. I should also pack my favorite snacks, provided they contained no Chinese dog meat.
As I prepared for my journey, it occurred to me that the mind I would be presenting to His Holiness was hardly a tabula rasa. My fur was white, but my slate was not blank. Owing to my ingestion of a dozen California pseudo-Buddhists over the years, I’d grasped much of what the dharma involved, or, rather, did not involve. I had particularly vivid memories of a Santa Monica mystic named Kimberly Weatherwax. Shortly before I
