Shadow of the Silk Road (8 page)

Then he played me the video of the documentary he had made, with fascinated passion, on Tibet. It was the first of several which he hoped would one day appear on local television. His camera had gazed on those magic ceremonies and customs with rapt sympathy, lingering over sand-prayers on the shores of the upper Yangtze, on the engraved libraries laid in walls of sacred stones, end to end.

‘I was invited to show this at a Santa Barbara film festival,’ he said. ‘and I managed to go. I was astonished to find the Dalai Lama there. I was sitting next to him. I didn’t know what he’d say. While they showed the film, I didn’t dare even to look at him. Only at the end I looked.’ He bit his lip. ‘And he was weeping.’

His wife appeared from the kitchen with dumplings and a Tianshui wine. She looked even younger than he.

Hongming said: ‘I told the Dalai Lama: you should go back to your country. He replied: your people will not allow it.’ He poured out the wine. ‘And there was nothing more to say.’

Even now we were deceptively close to the Tibetan hinterland. Barely a hundred miles to the west, the Qilian mountains sheltered the Lamaist monastery of Labrang, where I hoped to go, then lifted to the grasslands of Qinghai, whose plateaux roll without break south-westwards to Lhasa. Hongming had access to aerial satellite photographs of the whole region to our north, and we tried to trace my route on these–from Labrang to the oasis of Dunhuang, then west again over expanses of alarming yellow nothingness a thousand miles to Kashgar. ‘It’s dangerous,’ he said.

For a while we argued the dilemmas of this route, then elfishly, out of the blue, he said: ‘You should wash your feet.’

‘What?’ They were splayed indelicately in front of me, marinated in thick socks and trainers. How long had he been enduring them? Some Chinese are hypersensitive to smells, I knew. I looked down in dismay. They had almost seven thousand miles to go. Perhaps the Uzbeks would be easier, the Afghans, the Iranians…

Then he said: ‘It’s a kind of therapy. Traditional Chinese foot-washing.’

Twenty minutes later we were sitting in a massage parlour while
two pretty girls in green brocaded jackets and white kerchiefs tugged off our shoes. Some of these places are not what they pretend, but this one was. Our feet were dunked in scalding pails of herbal medicine, then pummelled and kneaded into pink puree. The foot–so Chinese tradition goes–is a microcosm of the body, with its own lungs, heart, kidneys: and as my attendant chopped my soles with fingers like steel rods, I started to believe it. My feet had migraines and heart attacks. The girl smiled sweetly. ‘Foreign feet are so big!’

Meanwhile, on an overhead television broadcasting financial news, Edward Cheung of China Assets Management was discussing the foreign equities outlook with Brian Chu of the Associated Trading Department. I affected to relax like a consequential businessman, but the girl began pulling my fingers from their sockets. They went off like pistol-shots. When I looked across at Hongming, he was lounging in his chair while his torturer went to work, his face bisected by a hedonistic smile, his eyes closed. ‘Are you happy?’ he asked. ‘You are happy, aren’t you?’ Then: ‘Would you like to meet the Living Buddha?’

‘Yes,’ I said automatically, with no idea who that was. I only knew it wasn’t this.

Then the girl transferred her attention to my toes. I had forgotten I had so many. They suffered strokes and seizures. For a while longer she beat a steely tattoo on my calves and shins, knuckling my insteps, frowning a little. Then, just as Brian Chu was clinching his theory about foreign exchange reserves, it was all over. The girls kept my dirty socks by mistake, or as souvenirs, and I hobbled off with Hongming into the shaking city lights.

A Living Buddha is the highest form of Lamaist saint. He is chosen not by lineage but by divination, for he is the reincarnation of many previous Buddhas, the inheritor of a distilled holiness. The Dalai Lama is the highest of these chosen ones, and in China and Tibet there are others; but Beijing fears them as a focus of Tibetan nationalism, so they are displaced, half secularised, hidden away.

The Living Buddha of Tianshui inhabits a small flat in a guarded compound of the National Minority People’s University, where he
teaches Buddhism. There, I suppose, he has been safely sterilised by authority, and there he greets me with a heavy calm, sitting me down on a sofa upholstered with Chinese flowers before a ceremonious bowl of fruit. He emanates a sturdy power. His slippers are inscribed ‘Sport’. His shaven head emerges seamlessly from a bull neck, and his eyebrows stop halfway through their natural arc, dotting his face with a look of genial surprise. In the background I glimpse a shining coil of hair as his wife withdraws, and two teenage daughters linger in the doorway to watch us. One is dark, effervescent; the other tall and heartbreakingly beautiful. The Living Buddha smiles at them, and they vanish. Only occasionally his eyes flicker away from mine, as if a thought or question momentarily perturbs him.

I wonder how he started on this troubled path, who chose him, why. His answers come tranquil and measured, as if he had been born into this state and nothing had ever changed. ‘By custom we identify a Living Buddha after the previous one dies. It’s done by charms, by prayer perhaps, and by the patterns on the oracle lake near Lhasa. I was chosen by the teacher of the last Panchen Lama…’ He adds without a flicker: ‘And it was confirmed by the Chinese government.’ It is my gaze that drops from his. ‘I was born in the same year as the previous Buddha–that’s important. I was just a boy, living with my parents, when the search group reached my area. A neighbour told them my birth date, and they took me away with them to the temple at Tianshui. I was selected from a thousand others.’

‘What did you feel about being taken away?’

‘I was just a child. I didn’t feel anything.’

I search his face. Has he forgotten? Or have I? Years ago, my head full of psychologists’ clichés, I had watched in bewilderment as children in a Beijing orphanage played together with no trace of Western tension. I ask: ‘What did your parents feel?’

‘They didn’t want me to go. They were peasants. They wanted me to help in the fields.’ He looks down at his hands. ‘All the same, I went. But at the age of seventeen I had to leave again. The Communist revolution had come, and the monks were being disbanded everywhere. At first I went on studying. Then in 1964
the government ordered me to marry. They wanted monks to be like other people.’

‘You have a beautiful family.’

He smiles softly. ‘Thank you.’

Buddhism had always struggled to justify itself here, I knew. Confucianism and Communism worked themselves out in society–whether in filial piety or social advance–but Buddhism conjured private salvation. Its destiny was the shedding of illusion. And society was a mirage.

‘But personal things are important to us too.’ The Living Buddha glances at the door where his daughters were. ‘This life, after all, is the only one in which the present relationships will ever exist. So we must do well by them. In the next life I will be born to different parents, and my children will not be born to me, or perhaps even know me, and my wife will be someone else’s. After death, your family cannot follow you.’

These Buddhist values had not saved him, of course. ‘During the Cultural Revolution I was struggled badly. The Red Guards hated the idea of a Living Buddha. Four thousand of them came to get me. I was beaten so badly I had to lie flat for three months, my body broken.’ He touches his arms and knees. ‘All the time they were beating me they were saying “You’re wrong! You’re wrong! Wrong!” and I said “Yes, yes, I’m wrong, I’m wrong!” ’ He bursts suddenly into laughter: not the tense Chinese stammer but a timeless greeting of worldly folly. ‘And all the time I knew in my heart that I was on my way somewhere else, my own path. But I said nothing. While I lay on my back I composed a Tibetan grammar in my head, and years later I wrote it. That way I survived.’

These struggle sessions could be uniquely terrible. In essence they were mass gang-beatings–a Calvary of mockery and torture–sometimes inflicted by a mob of neighbours and erstwhile friends. As the bullying and the terror intensified, everything the victim said would be cursed and denied, until all shred of self-worth was gone. Forced confessions set in train the liquidation of the self. The shame drove many to suicide. If the victim repudiated his family, another prop of selfhood fell away. In time, if he
underwent deeper thought-reform, his pretence of shame might itself slowly destroy the conviction of his innocence, like a mask eating into the face. In this scenario the victim longed to be culpable, otherwise the world itself was deranged. A strange, free-floating guilt enshrouded him. He became his own accuser, his own crime. And the work was complete.

But the struggle session was usually too swift and sudden for more than makeshift pretence. The screamed confessions were like acts of theatre, and the persecutors too were playing a preordained role–the state had written the script. Yet a million people died. Now, almost forty years later, the rhetoric seems as thin as ditties. And often, as with the Living Buddha, something in the victim’s core remained inviolate.

He says: ‘After that I was sent out into the countryside to work among the peasants in the region where I had been Buddha. I was there twelve years.’ He speaks without bitterness or self-pity. ‘Then at last I was assigned here. And now I teach religion to Tibetan students. I even have a house beside the temple in Tianshui, and often I go there for ceremonies. It’s a beautiful place.’

The environment is for ever, he says–now he might be addressing a class–so we must be tender to it. We come and go, but it stays. So he is happy now?

‘After the Cultural Revolution, anything is happy.’

His younger daughter has eased the door open a crack, but is betrayed by a tiny dog which barges through, flies round the room and out again. The Buddha grins indulgently. ‘And yes, I can forgive those young people, because all China went mad at that time.’ He bursts into incredulous laughter again. ‘From top to bottom, nobody escaped–not the high officials, nor Party members, nor the Living Buddha, nor ordinary workers. All China, mad! And now I put that time out of my mind.’ He plucks an imaginary worm from his forehead. ‘I just forget it.’

I do not know if this forgiveness stems from Buddhist compassion or from something else. The Cultural Revolution was blamed on a handful of conspirators–the so-called Gang of Four–then the country set about forgetting. Secretly the terrible
fault-line of the past ran through all society–through every work unit, every village, sometimes every family–but silence closed over it.

As I talk with the Living Buddha, his forgiveness touches me with paradoxical misgiving. I realise I want anger, I want recrimination and failure to understand. In Western dogma psychic health depends on acknowledgement of the past, on coming to terms. Remembrance is catharsis. But to the Cultural Revolution, in the end, almost everybody fell victim, everybody suffered. Perhaps to recall what you did, or what was done, is to remember another person, in another existence. And to choose forgetfulness is to choose life.

My bus winds up into the land of carved dust. The hills circle and uncoil around us, then level out into a high valley where a tributary of the Yellow River has smoothed its bed to a broken pavement. Out of the scattered villages the bus fills up with Muslim Hui, their women wimpled in black or dark green lace; and soon the towns are thronged with their high white caps, as if thousands of chefs were inexplicably wheeling bicycles and handcarts through the streets. As we go west, the mosque minarets, where no muezzin is allowed to call, taper above the roofs in fantastical belvederes and colonettes, or stand like filigreed toys along the heights which shadow us to Labrang.

Then suddenly, beyond Linxia, the loess hills have gone, and our valley steepens into stone. A young monk climbs on board, and smiling Tibetan herdsmen in dented felt hats. The shoulders of unseen mountains drop towards us out of the clouds. Once some police stop the bus and we are all emptied on to the verge while a man sprays disinfectant over the floor. The SARS virus has erupted in Xian to our east. The leftover Chinese hook on white masks. The Tibetans go on smiling.

Soon we are travelling up a steep, misty corridor. The river flows faster, purer, the colour of pale jade. The mountains close in. We have crossed a border unmarked by any map, already infringing on
the plateaux of Tibet. The Buddhist stupas sit like nipples on the hills, while prayer-flags fly from the house courtyards and rustle over cairns in the pastures. Here and there, set far up a hillside, the tiered roofs of a monastery cascade to white walls. Then the road disintegrates to a gravel track. In the dusk the slopes are stamped with the shapes of sleeping yaks, and snow is falling in a soft, thin silence.

I disembark into the night and cold of Labrang. I am still more than three hundred miles from the Tibetan frontier. Lights fade down the street where Hui and Chinese shops have settled beside the monastery town beyond. My feet crunch over the snow, seeming light and lonely, and from somewhere in the darkness ahead–like an old god clearing his throat–sounds the braying of a horn. Then a familiar elation wells up: the childlike anticipation of entering the unknown, some perfect otherness. Your body lightens and tingles. The night fills up with half-imagined buildings, voices you do not understand. The experience is inseparable from solitude and a vestigial fear, because you don’t know where the road will end, who will be there.

As it is, the street empties and I cross a rubbish-filled dyke into the unlit Buddhist quarter, and turn by chance into the monastery guesthouse. It is a courtyard of naked rooms, frosty with trees. Besides a caretaker, I glimpse only the herdsmen pilgrims lumbering from door to door, huge against the snow in their swathing coats. My room has a wooden bed and a pail for collecting water from the communal tap. A coal-burning stove sends a wonky chimney through a hole in the ceiling. A lightbulb hangs from a wire. The room costs fifty pence a night. I stretch out under a damp quilt, and listen to the faint, brittle snap of twigs outside as the snow settles.