Reality by Other Means. James Morrow

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 stumbled upon this hapless climber, she had fallen from the Lhotse face, simultaneously losing her oxygen tank and stabbing herself in the back with an ice ax. Her blood oozed through her parka and leaked onto the snow like 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,