a Jackson Pollock painting in progress. She had perhaps five minutes to live, an interval she elected to spend telling me about her past lives in ancient Babylon and Akhenaton’s Egypt.
“Are you by any chance the Abominable Snowman?” she asked, her brain so bereft of oxygen that she evidently felt no pain.
“My girlfriend thinks I’m insufferable, but I’m not abominable,” I replied. “Call me Taktra Kunga, yeti of the Shi-mi Clan.”
“A yeti? Wow! Really?”
“Really.”
“That’s so cool,” she rasped, her voice decaying to a whisper. “An actual yeti,” she mumbled. “This has been the most meaningful experience of my life.”
“And now you are dying, which means I must eat your cerebral cortex.”
“Heavy.”
She wheezed and blacked out. From the subsequent nang-duzul I learned that, for tantric dilettantes like Kimberly Weatherwax, Eastern religion promised three big payoffs: solving the death problem through reincarnation, improving one’s sex life through deferred gratification, and leaving the mundane realm of false values and failed plans for an axiomatically superior plane of relentless joy and unremitting bliss. Years later, trudging toward Gangtok for my first lesson with His Holiness, I decided that such spiritual avarice was the last thing my teacher would endorse. Obviously the dharma was not simply an exotic road to immortality and orgasms, not simply a gold-plated Get Out of Samsara Free card. Clearly there was more to infinity than that.
Dressed in his most sumptuous saffron-and-burgundy robe, Chögi Gyatso stood waiting at the gateway to his private residence, a stately, many-towered palace that the deracinated monks had constructed shortly after the Mao-Maos installed the Phonisattva in Lhasa. As His Holiness led me down the central corridor, I began expounding upon the dharma. “I understand that reincarnation is different from immortality, and I likewise understand that the tantra is not a means of erotic fulfillment. So we can dispense with those issues and get into something meatier right away.”
A man of abiding forbearance, Chögi Gyatso listened thoughtfully, then looked me in the eye and unsheathed his epic smile. “What you understand is precisely nothing, Taktra Kunga,” he said cheerily. “What you understand is zero, less than zero, zero and zero again, or, to use Mr. Bond’s epithet, Double-O-Seven, seven being the number of rightful branches that a bodhisattva will pursue while on the radiance level of his emergence, along with thirty additional such disciplines.”
We slipped into His Holiness’s private bedchamber, where a smiling nun hovered over a tea cart that held a ceramic pot and a You Only Live Twice collector’s mug, plus a plain white mug presumably intended for me.
“I don’t doubt that I am ignorant, Your Holiness,” I told Chögi Gyatso. “What are the seven rightful branches?”
“Correct mindfulness, correct discernment, correct effort, correct joy, correct pliancy, correct meditation, and correct equanimity, but don’t worry about it, Your Hairiness. Perhaps you have the makings of a bodhisattva, perhaps not, but for now we simply want to increase your compassion quotient. Your education will begin with a simple oath honoring Sakyamuni, his teachings, and the community of monks and nuns he founded.”
“Sounds good,” I said, inhaling the sweet oily fragrance of the tea.
“Recite the following vow three times. ‘I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the dharma, I take refuge in the samgha.’”
“‘I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the dharma, I take refuge in the samgha.’”
Twice more I repeated the pledge, and then His Holiness gifted me with a kata — a white silk scarf — draping it around my neck. The nun filled his mug with buttered tea, handed him the pot, and slipped away. He proceeded to load my mug beyond its capacity, the greasy amber fluid spilling over the rim and cascading across the tray, flooding the spoons and napkins.
“Might I suggest you stop pouring?” I asked.
Chögi Gyatso maintained his posture, so that the tray soon held the entire steaming, roiling, eddying contents of the teapot. “Like this mug, your mind is much too full. It runs over with useless musings and self-generated afflictions. You will not progress until you shed all such psychic baggage.” He pointed toward a huge porcelain bathtub, elevated on four solid-brass lion paws to accommodate a brazier for heating the water. “And if you are to empty your mind, Taktra Kunga, you must first empty this tub, transferring all twenty gallons to the cistern we use for flushing the toilets. I was planning to take a nice warm bath tonight, but that ambition has now fallen away.”
“Where’s the bucket?” I asked.
“You will not use a bucket, but rather this implement.” Chögi Gyatso reached toward the inundated tea tray and withdrew a dripping silver spoon.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said.
“Indeed,” said Chögi Gyatso. “Completely ridiculous. The cistern is at the end of the corridor, last room on the left.”
“What if I refuse?”
“Taktra Kunga, need I remind you that these lessons were your idea? In truth I have better things to do with my time.”
“How long will the job take?”
“About seven hours. I suggest you get started right after lunch.”
“Do you want me to chant a mantra or anything?”
“You are not yet ready for meditation, but if you insist on chanting something” — His Holiness offered a sly wink — “try the following: ‘That’s a Smith and Wesson, and you’ve had your six.’”
“Dr. No, right?”
The bodhisattva dipped his head and said, “To become enlightened is to encounter the perfect void, the final naught, the ultimate no. Alternatively, you may wish to ponder the following koan: when a chicken has sex with an egg, which comes first?”
His Holiness laughed uproariously. Under normal circumstances, I might have shared his merriment, but I was too depressed by the thought of the tedious chore that lay before me.
“Evidently it would be best if I did not ponder anything in particular,” I said.
“That is the wisest remark you have made all morning.”
With an aggrieved heart but a curious intellect, I did as my teacher suggested, consuming my lunch, a bowl of noodle soup, then getting to work. While His Holiness sat rigidly in his study, alternately reading Tsong Khapa’s The Great Exposition of the Stages of the Path and Ian Fleming’s The Man with the Golden Gun, I ferried twenty gallons of bathwater from tub to cistern, one ounce at a time. As Chögi Gyatso predicted, the task took all afternoon and well into the evening. Alas, instead of growing vacant my skull became jammed to the walls with toxic resentments. I wanted to put thorns in His Holiness’s slippers. I wanted to break his drums and shatter his James Bond DVDs.
“The job is done,” I told my teacher at nine o’clock.
“Go to your bedchamber, Taktra Kunga, first door on the right. An excellent dinner awaits you, mutton curry with rice. I
