Reality by Other Means. James Morrow

gorge swallowing a troop train like the great god Za feeding a string of sausages to the mouth embedded in his stomach.” He speculated that this vision might be “a sign from heaven,” and that Za himself was telling him “to render a divine judgment against the evil ones.”

      His Holiness began to weep, the subtlest display of anguish I’d ever seen, the tears trickling softly down his face like meltwater in spring, his sobs barely audible above the guttural breathing of the seven hairy apes in the yurt. Dorje Lingpa remained adamant. The People’s Liberation Army must pay for its crimes. Changing the subject, or so it seemed at the time, he said that shortly after dawn he would like to take His Holiness on “a brief excursion in my track-inspection vehicle,” then turned to his yeti guests and declared that there would be room for one of us. I told him I would like to join the party.

      Thus it happened that, shortly after sunrise, Chögi Gyatso, Dorje Lingpa, and I climbed into the open-air section-gang car and tooled eastward along the maintenance line at a brisk eighty kilometers per hour, enduring a wind chill from some frigid equivalent of hell. Dorje Lingpa wore his bomber jacket, His Holiness sat hunched beneath a yak-hide blanket, and I had wrapped myself head-to-toe in a tarp — not because I minded the cold, but because the surrounding gang car defied my usual white-on-white camouflage. Suddenly the harsh metallic bawl of a diesel horn filled the air, and then the train appeared, zooming toward us along the adjacent high-speed rails in a great sucking rush that whipped our clothing every which way like prayer flags in a gale. Each passenger coach was crammed with Han Chinese, some perhaps bound for a holiday in Lhasa but the majority surely intending to settle permanently, players in the government’s scheme to marginalize the native population. Five hundred faces flew past, lined up along the windows like an abacus assembled from severed heads. Each wore an expression of nauseated misery — a syndrome probably born of the thin air, though I liked to imagine they were also suffering spasms of regret over their role in the rout of Tibet.

      As the morning progressed, Dorje Lingpa’s agenda become clear. He meant to give us a guided tour of recent outrages by the Chinese. Periodically he stopped the gang car and passed us his binoculars, so that we could behold yet another exhibit in the Museum of Modern Expediency: the bombed lamaseries, razed temples, trampled shrines, maimed statues — desecrations that the Beijing regime imagined would help stamp out the indigenous cancer of contemplation and replace it with the new state religion, that cruel fusion of normless monopoly capitalism and murderous totalitarianism. Once again His Holiness’s eyes grew damp, and now he wept prolifically, great dollops of salt water rolling down his cheeks and freezing on his chest, so that he soon wore a necklace of tears.

      Knowing of his brother’s fascination with James Bond’s Aston Martin, Dorje Lingpa asked if he would like to take the throttle during our return trip. For a full minute the grieving monk said nothing, then offered a nod of disengaged corroboration. Dorje Lingpa stopped the inspection vehicle, then threw the motor into reverse. We pivoted in our seats. His Holiness gripped the controls, and we were off, retracing our path westward through the scattered shards of the Tibetan soul. Drawing within view of the gorge, we again heard the blast of a diesel horn, and seconds later we were overtaken by another train from Beijing, bearing still more Han into the sacred city.

      We reached the yurt shortly after two o’clock. My cousins had prepared a hot luncheon of steamed dumplings, but I was not hungry, and neither was His Holiness. The meal passed languidly and without conversation. At last Chögi Gyatso broke the silence, his resonant and reassuring voice warming the icy air.

      “Beloved brother,” he told Dorje Lingpa, “that was a good thing you did, taking us across the plateau. I understand you much better now.”

      “I am grateful for your praise,” said the trainman. “Will you join my war against the People’s Liberation Army?”

      “What do you think?” asked Chögi Gyatso.

      “I think I should not count on your participation.”

      “That is correct.”

      “I’m reminded of an old joke,” said Cousin Ngawang. “A man went to a priest in the north of Ireland and confessed that he’d blown up six miles of British railroad track. And the priest said, ‘For your penance, you must go and do the stations.’”

      “Very amusing,” said Cousin Jowo.

      “Decidedly droll,” said Cousin Drebung.

      But no one laughed, most especially myself, most conspicuously Chögi Gyatso, and most predictably Dorje Lingpa.

      My third tutorial with His Holiness took me to the fabled Bebhaha Temple of Cosmic Desire, the very loins, as it were, of the Gangtok Buddhist Complex, famous throughout Asia for its six thousand masterpieces of erotic art. Despite his celibacy, or perhaps because of it, Chögi Gyatso held a generally approving attitude toward the sex act, and he believed that, my embarrassing performance in the monastery notwithstanding, the meditation practices pursued in the Bebhaha Temple might occasion my awakening. Moreover, this time around I would be following a regimen drawn from His Holiness’s specialty — the tantric path, the diamond discipline, the venerable Vajrayana.

      The mystic principle behind the temple was straightforward enough. Tsangyang Gyatso, the sixth Dalai Lama, had put it well: “If one’s thoughts toward the dharma were of the same intensity as those toward physical love, one would become a Buddha in this very body, in this very life.” And so it was that I spent a week in Gangtok’s spiritual red-light district, contemplating hundreds of paintings and sculptures depicting sexual ensembles — couples, trios, quartets, quintets, human, yeti, divine, biologically mixed, taxonomically diverse, ontologically scrambled — engaged in every sort of carnal congress, homoerotic, heteroerotic, autoerotic, even surrealistic: images of copulating trees and randy pocket watches, playfully signed “Salvador Dali Lama.” I seethed with lust. I stroked myself to torrential spasms. At one point His Holiness suggested that I take up with the kind of sexual consort known as a karma-mudra, an “action seal,” so named because the practice sealed or solidified the seeker’s understanding that all phenomena are a union of ecstasy and emptiness. I declined this provocative invitation, feeling that His Holiness’s syllabus had already put enough strain on my relationship with Gawa.

      Even as I wrapped my hand around my cock, I sought to keep my eye on the ball. The idea was to gather up all this libidinous energy, this tsunami of seed, and, through diligent meditation and focused chanting, channel it toward detachment, sunyata, and boundless pity for the suffering of all sentients. From onanism to Om mani padme hum, oh, yes, that was the grand truth of the tantra, an ingenious strategy of masturbate-and-switch, and I did my best, O depilated ones, you must believe me, I truly played to win.

      “I tried,” I told Chögi Gyatso as I stumbled out of the Bebhaha Temple, all passions spent. “I tried, and I failed. Immerse me in the tantra, and my thoughts turn to wanking, not awakening. Let’s face it, Your Holiness. I was not made for the Vajrayana, nor the Mahayana either, nor even the Hinayana.”

      “You’re probably right. But I must also say this, Taktra Kunga. Your attitude sucks.”

      “So do half your deities.”

      “Might we try one final tantric lesson? At the start of the tenth lunar month, come to the Antarabhava Charnel Ground on the slopes of Mount Jelep La, eight kilometers to the northeast. You will know it by the vultures wheeling overhead.”

      I shrugged and said, “I suppose I have nothing to lose.”

      “No, Taktra Kunga, you have everything to lose,” His Holiness reproached me. “That is the whole point. Lose your illusions, lose your goals, lose your ego, lose the world, and only then will you come to know the wonder of it all.”

      O smooth ones, you might think that an ape whose lair was appointed with skulls would revel in the ambience of the Antarabhava Charnel Ground, but in fact I found it a completely ghastly place, a seething soup of shucked bones, strewn teeth, rotting flesh, disembodied hair, fluttering shrouds, buzzing flies, busy worms, industrious crows, and enraptured vultures. By Chögi Gyatso’s account, two geographical circumstances accounted for this