Part 2 (1/2)

'So young!'

But even here the novices were boys as young as ninesome seventy of themwhose adolescence waited like a time bomb. He goes on: 'But when I told my parents, my mother cried ”No! No! Not a monk! You will just sit there, studying”, and even my father said: ”You may want to go now, but when you are twenty, twenty-five, you will regret it, you will want to leave and marry.” I was the first son, you see, and the first son is meant to look after his parents. All the same, I went away.' In the hall beneath us, the monks' prayers have softened to purring. 'Now I cannot help them. I am here. They are far down the valley.' He pulls his crimson robes closer about his neck.

I ask bleakly: 'How do they live?'

'Their second son is twenty-five now, and he looks after them.'

'Do they want to return to Tibet?'

'They cannot.'

The people of this region, he says, can obtain a Chinese permit to cross the border for a week, usually to trade, and may with luck extend it for a pilgrimage to Kailas. But few of them did; and the monks were too afraid. 'It is you who can go to Kailas,' he says. He has never been. He says this without bitterness, yet the few Western trekkers pa.s.sing through have motives alien to any he knows. As for my own, I hesitate to speak them to him, inchoate as they are. They belong to a world grown dim to him, to Western self and attachment, not to the abstract compa.s.sion that he entertains. He speaks of Kailas with a dreamlike evangelism. He wants me to honour the journey that he cannot make himself.

'You know this is a mountain of great power. To travel there multiplies merit. The Buddha often flew there with his followers. And spiritual treasure-seekers meditated there thousands of themso its caves are full of blessing.' Sometimes I cannot decide whether he is a sage or a child. And often his words are drowned by the pounding drums beneath us. 'People walk around the mountain to cleanse their evil, the ten seats of sin. Yes, they may also come because they want things, perhaps success in some business, perhaps they have too many daughters and want a son...'

After a while, when the sound below subsides, he gets up and we descend to the prayer hall. The monks are dispersing in flocks of crimson and saffron, and the temple darkens.

He takes me round a dim confusion. The avenue of low pews, where the monks had sat among cus.h.i.+ons and bells, leads to the painted skeleton of a great altar. It rises in tiers of bright artefacts: offerings in barley dough and wax, guttering b.u.t.ter-lamps and bowls of water, plastic flowers, monstrances, peac.o.c.k feathers, topped by photographs of prestigious lamas in ceremonial crowns and dark gla.s.ses. Above these again a huge gilded Buddha, draped unrecognisably in golden cloth, gazes from his halo with a smile of exalted absence. The abbot, patient and soft-voiced, guides me along the walls, identifying statues of other Buddhas and teachers, G.o.ddesses and multiple bodhisattvas, the blessed ones who postpone their own nirvana for the salvation of the world. In this proliferating pantheon, often elusive to me, the deities may reappear in different aspects or emanations of themselves. Their arms and faces divide and multiply in the dark. Often they turn feral and demonic. They hold up gems and lotuses, rosaries and thunderbolts, and stare into nothing. They are not only G.o.ds, but incarnate ideas. Their gestures are a cryptic language. Here divinity is protean and fluid. It manifests in b.e.s.t.i.a.l fury, female pity; it wears a smile of compa.s.sion and a garland of skulls. The abbot leads me falteringly on. But often I can discern no more than the gilded hand of a body obscured by votive scarves, or the plaster grimace of a demon. Most of the images are so coa.r.s.ely moulded that I cannot imagine any sanct.i.ty or meaning in them.

The doors close behind us, dimming the last light. I am uneasily aware of walking among a revered army whose evolution the Buddha would have condemned. The Buddhism that Tibet first received in the seventh centurymore than a thousand years after the death of its founderwas already rich in these alternately beautiful and grotesque offspring. Moreover the faith created its Tibetan bridgehead in the isolated kingdom of Shang-shung, near Mount Kailas, and in those bitter plateaux encountered a swarm of chthonic G.o.ds and spirits who violently coloured it. Then, over the coming centuries, the richly evolved Mahayana tradition of northern India infused the whole land, bringing with it a generous field of salvation and a host of variegated Buddhas, bodhisattvas and Hindu deities in disguise.

Of this inclusive pantheon the figures around me are descendants. Here is Chenresig, the Tibetan form of Avalokitesvara, whose incarnation is the Dalai Lama. He is the all-seeing lord of compa.s.sion, whose myriad arms burst like a peac.o.c.k's tail behind him, each hand pierced with an eye. The abbot points out the G.o.d's offspring, Drolma, the kindly G.o.ddess of pity and fertility, and several obscure incarnations of Padmasambhava, Tibet's patron saint.

In these, and the figures crowding round them, the austere origins of Buddhism are transformed. What was once a rigorous, agnostic philosophy, in which karma persisted through countless generations, has evolved into the promise of swift, esoteric systems of liberation, guiding saviours. It was in Tibet that tantric Buddhism reached its apogee, initiating its devotees into practices that enabled them to bypa.s.s the toilsome cycle of worldly reincarnations and enter nirvana in a lifetime's leap.

His monastery, the abbot says, belongs to the sect of Nyingma, the Ancient Ones, who claim their origins in Tibet's oldest Buddhism. They are followers, above all, of tantric ritual and contemplation, and at the end the abbot leads me, as if in challenge, to two statues in towering embrace. Here is the white-painted Buddha Vajrasattvas.h.i.+ny, crude, abstract. In his circling arms clings a sinuous consort, her legs hooked around his waist, their loins intermeshed. This is not s.e.x as humans know it, but a marriage of symbols. They suggest eternal o.r.g.a.s.m. Their nudity is glorified by bangles and tiaras. Her mouth is raised to his impersonal lips in an exalted offering of life.

The abbot says: 'This is the union of nothing and compa.s.sion.'

'Nothing?'

'The G.o.d is nothing. He realises nothingness.' The abbot is voicing the insistent wisdom of the Mahayana: the a.s.sertion that phenomena do not in themselves exist, that all is relative, illusion.

'And she?'

'She is compa.s.sion. She completes him.'

Such figures of carnal bliss generate many interpretations, and among advanced adepts their visualisation, even their enactment, may achieve a mystic dissolution on the path to Buddhahood. Sometimes compa.s.sion is attributed to the man, and wisdomflas.h.i.+ng insightto the woman. Often she is conceived as his shakti, shakti, his embodied energy, entwining the G.o.d who created her. his embodied energy, entwining the G.o.d who created her.

There are married lamas, the abbot says, who follow this s.e.xual path, but not in his monastery. In the past, tantric extremes were often the way of solitary yogis, but in the monasteries the tantra coexists with philosophy and dialectics. However fractured since the golden fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these parallel traditions of logic and lived mysticism endure. On the banked shelves along the temple walls the abbot locates the cloth-enveloped scriptures of the Buddha's supposed sayings and their commentariesthe Kangyur and the Tengyurwhich in old Tibet inspired a vast and subtle literature of metaphysics. Here too are the tantric texts beloved of the abbot's order. He talks of them with easy affection, while I remain baffled. Who was the primordial Buddha Samantabhadra? What is the Secret Essence Tantra? How to understand the Clear Light of the Great Perfection? They rise from a sacred learning of which barely a fraction has been translated.

Only one element in these secret disciplines is half familiar to me. Forty years ago an old friend, the traveller Freya Stark, had given me a mandala of symmetrically disposed Buddhas on a golden field. She had bought this in Nepal, drawn to its strangeness. To me its cloud-enthroned Buddhas resembled autocratic babies mysteriously afloat; but once perhaps they had accompanied the meditation of a monk or hermit as his private window on salvation.

Cla.s.sically such mandalas portray a deity seated at the heart of a densely walled palace. The picture acts like a sac-red domain, impermeable to the illusory world outside. Adepts often use the mandala to focus on the deity with whom they strive to identify. Jung thought it a healing archetype of the unconscious. Other adepts use it more lightly as an aide-memoir. Still others systematically imagine their mandala to be centred on Mount Meru or Kailas, the spine of the world, and their own bodies aligned with the mountain too, drawing down power from above.

In the temple porch the abbot points out a muralled mandala whose archetype was designed in legend by the Buddha himself. 'This is the original, the Wheel of Becoming. You see it is turned by the G.o.d of death, Yama. And in the centre...people falling.'

I stare up. Around the axis of this great spoked disc, an arc of humans is climbing toward nirvana or catapulting down to h.e.l.l. At their core, isolated on the wheel's hub, I make out the tableau of a serpent, a c.o.c.kerel and a pig biting each other's tails.

'These are the poisons at the world's heart,' the abbot says. 'The snake-one is anger, the pig-one is ignorance, the c.o.c.k is desire. You see...'

I see that in the rest of the wheel all mortality is going about its business: conversing, acquiring, making love. Only the Buddha stands outside the circle, pointing to the moon in sign of liberation. But his nirvana, of course, cannot be depicted; even the h.e.l.l at the wheel's base looks schematic and unlikely; and the lives of those trapped on this earthly roundabout appear innocent, sometimes a little comic. If the artist was trying to suggest suffering, he seems to have lost heart. The animals that represent brutishness stand tranquil as if in paradise, and the G.o.dswho will come to grief in timeare enjoying themselves in the interim.

I ask the abbot what monk or layman painted this schema. (The role of the painter in Tibetan life is as disputed as most else.) 'Painting is a tradition among our monks,' he says. 'An old man who fled with the Dalai Lama taught it here, but went away to meditate in a cave near Kermi, and died there. He had already taught a disciple, but that monk left for Simikot'he smiles forgivingly'and went into business. But he in turn had taught two others...'

'And who painted the Wheel of Becoming?'

'I'm not sure.' The abbot's clear brows knit for a second, then he laughs. 'But I think it was the businessman.'

On the track beyond the monastery I come upon two memorial towers in rough stone. I peer through the narrow openings into their core, cluttered with pebbles and dust. Here relatives place a little rice or even a fleck of gold, or insert paper mantras to Drolma, the G.o.ddess of compa.s.sion. Deep inside I see the tiny cones moulded out of clay and a pounded fragment of bone from whoever is remembered here.

In these valleys, where bodies are burned or fed to vultures, the vanishment of the dead seems utter. Only the rare turret or stupa of some revered lama makes a gesture at remembrance. But when I ask a group of pa.s.sing monks about the towerswhen were they built, who do they commemorate?they do not know. And why would they care, who have been taught the transience of things?

As they walk on, I wonder at them, their lightness, their lack of need. They might already have pa.s.sed through a painless, premature death. They have shed what others shed in dying. They will leave nothing material behind them to be divided, claimed or loved. Their dispossession strikes me as at once freedom, and a poignant depletion. Their buoyant laughter follows me up the valley, but I do not quite envy them. I only wonder with a m.u.f.fled pang what it would be in the West to step outside the chain of bequeathal and inheritance, as they do, until human artefacts mean nothing at all.

My feet slow on the trail. But my memories come too hard for quiet thought. With the death of a last parent, material thingsold correspondence, a dilapidated house, a pair of slippersemerge like orphans to enshrine the dead. My mother threw away nothing. Her drawers spilt out letters, diaries, doc.u.ments, photos, fifty, seventy, eighty years old, with the stacked correspondence of my father, my dead sister, my nurse, even my nurse's mother. For months the papers lie piled, waiting. They grow huge with delayed sadness. How to decide what is to survive, what is to perish? The value of things no longer belongs to cost or beauty, but only to memory. The chipped and faded teacup is more precious than the silver tray that n.o.body used. And the letters bring confusion. Sometimes what was written for a day echoes in your head as if for ever. Every one discarded sounds a tiny knell of loss. The past drops away into the waste-paper basket and oblivion, and in this monstrous disburdening, grief returns you to a kind of childish dependence. You sift and preserve (for whom?) and cling to trivia. You have become the guardian of their past, even its recreator.

I had planned to burn my parents' love letters, then find I cannot. Instead I start to read, guiltily, fearfully, as if testing water. I have an idea that they should survive, placed in some archive, perhaps to flow at last unmoored into history. I tie them with new rubber bandsthe old ones have corroded over the envelopesand stack them away, I do not know for what. This, I suppose, is how once-private things endure: not by intention, but because their extinction is unbearable. So I dither between keeping and destroyingboth seem like betrayaland I store the letters, in all their devotion, their longing and sometimes loneliness, until another time.

In my father's wartime letters censors.h.i.+p precludes any word of military activity. He surrounds this void with casual incident, humour and remarks on flowers and birds. Even from the sh.e.l.l-racked beachhead of Anzio his letters tell my mother that April violets and wild crocus are growing there, with vetches, scarlet pimpernels and orchids. His caravan at divisional headquarters, he writes, is adorned with photographs of her, my sister and myself, among walls of cigarette tins stuffed with irises and cyclamen. There are birds too ('but of course not many owing to the continual explosions')yellowhammers and nightingales, which sing by day, and 'the prettiest is a wren-like little bird rather like a goldfinch', which reminds him of her. Only obliquely does he mention the sh.e.l.l craters around him, or the death of fellow officers, ormonths laterhow his caravan (and our photographs) was shredded by shrapnel.

Sometimes the darkened world and wasted years seem only a tunnel to the dream light of reunion. But their mutual danger went on haunting them. During the Blitz my mother had driven trucks in the London docks. Then my father begins to mention the Russian advance, and the Wehrmacht's decline. ('Our prisoners are poor fellows compared to those we captured in Tunis.') As the war nears its end, the scent of pines in the Italian hills starts to remind him of India, and on VE Day anemones and sorrel are whitening in the Austrian woods. He had not seen my mother for over two and a half years.

We are standing on a railway station in Hamps.h.i.+re, my hand in hers. My sister Carol is on her other side, I think. I am barely seven years old. At school I have announced that my father has killed all the Germans and is coming home to put up the Christmas decorations, in May. And now the steam train has pulled in, and returning servicemen are flooding down the platform. I scan their faces in paralysed suspense. I cannot remember what my father looks like. The men approaching us have alien moustaches and s.h.i.+ning boots. Then a staff cane comes somersaulting out of a carriage window and my mother cries: 'That will be him! He's always joking.' The next moment he is striding towards us. My mother's hands loosen in ours. He is almost six foot five, huge for his day, unreachably handsome and covered in medals. And he is suffused with happiness. He is the father every schoolboy wants. I am at once scared and elated. When we arrive home my rediscovered parents do not reach the sitting room but fall embracing on the spare bed off the hall. Carol and I watch in stunned surprise, then enfold each other in copycat confusion.

I close the letters up, with the photo alb.u.ms that my father kept even before his marriage. In his earliest, Indian snapshots the young officers go unnamed. But who were the women, I wonder, left behind in sepia faintness, labelled 'Diana' or 'Marjorie'? Or the merry flapper who inscribed above her photograph in parting: 'Good luck, old thing'? He never spoke of them. He liked to imagine, my mother said, that there had been n.o.body before her.

But in my mother's first snapshots she is no more than a tiny girl; in my father's he is a twenty-year-old cadet; and for seven years of marriage the camera records a carefree childlessness. Around these early alb.u.msfor their leftover childsomething subtly s.h.i.+fts. The couple who inhabit them lived before I existed. They are young again, far younger than I am now, and a little mysterious. She kneels among her Dalmatian puppies or rides her horse in an army point-to-point. He is buffooning at the regimental party, dressed as a conjuror. They live in roles and contexts where I no longer miss them, and this separateness a.s.suages mourning. They inhabit their own lives, and I lose them a little. The tall lieutenant jokes with his comrades five years before he met my mother, fifteen before I was born. You recognise at last that their lives were not yours.

Yet strangely, in all but the youngest photos, the opposite is also true. Somehow, as if they possessed precognition or you were seeing them bifocally, they are already your parents, already senior, and inexplicably, although blithely young, are forever older than you.

All day a wind has been whipping up the Karnali valley, and intensifies at evening as we approach Yangar. From a distance the village might be built of card houses. They mount on one another's shoulders precipitously above the river, until they merge with living rock, flat-roofed and raised in horizontal courses of timber and stones, their flagpoles streaming prayers into the wind. Women are was.h.i.+ng clothes where a brook splashes down, and turn their oval faces to us, smiling. We might already be in Tibet. We tramp the labyrinthine lanes under blank walls and beetling eaves. Serried beam-ends poke out like tiers of cannon. The houses loom in an interlocking maze of s.h.i.+fting levels and walkways. The alleys are twilit ravines. All around us long ladders climb and descend to aerial yards and terraces, and the voices of invisible people sound from the sky.

These dizzy perspectives multiply even after a family invites us in. The Dendu Lamas are farming people with short, Tibetan faces and ebony eyes. Yet they inhabit the air. In these eyries a woman may emerge to chat from the door of a terrace two yards away, but between you yawns a thirty-foot drop into the street. The heads of horses apparently stabled underground gaze into lanes at first-storey level. You ascend three tiers only to find yourself on somebody else's ground floor, and cowbells jangle from what you imagined to be an attic. n.o.body can afford to sleepwalk. Dhabu sits down by mistake on a rickety bal.u.s.trade, and is nearly pitched, laughing hysterically, into the alley below.