Shadow of the Silk Road (9 page)

The monastery grew up three hundred years ago under the tutelage of local Mongol princes. A stronghold of the Yellow Hat sect, to which the Dalai Lama belongs, it became one of the six great lamaseries of the Tibetan world. Its curriculum was liberal in its way, tinged by the shamanism of local nomads, but rooted in meditation and theology, and in Buddhist medicine and
mathematics. By 1959, when the Tibetans rose against China and the Dalai Lama fled, it sheltered four thousand monks.

Then came mass arrests and expulsions. The library of ten thousand manuscripts burnt to the ground. In the Cultural Revolution half its temples were levelled. Only in 1980 did the monastery cautiously reopen; the monks started to filter back, and novices came from Tibet, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia. Now there were over two thousand, and in the dawn snow the pilgrims’ boot-prints already trailed out of the hostel toward their old sanctuaries. I cleaned my teeth in the snow. The communal tap was frozen. The lavatory was a line of holes above a pit, where I squatted in a row of jovial herdsmen, whose windburnt faces cracked into grins. One wore a silver medallion of the young Dalai Lama, which he concealed again in the folds of his coat.

Outside, feathers of snow were still falling. In the whitened sky the mountains left only the tracery of their stone, like stencils hung in nothing. I followed a curved track–slushy with mud now–between the walls of the monks’ fraternities. There was no sound but the dripping of snowmelt from the eaves, and the lisp of water in the open drains. Suddenly ahead of me a cluster of pilgrims fell to their knees. Up the long avenue between the monks’ cells, misted in falling snow, I saw far away–like the backdrop to some sacred drama–the crests of gilded temples glinting against the mountains. They rose in façades of oxblood red, then mounted to green and mustard-yellow tiles, while beyond them again the farthest shrines banked upward in a surge of golden roofs. Beneath this unreal city, the magenta and purple robes of the monks were drifting back and forth.

But as I approached them, the buildings separated into rough-built halls and fort-like gates. Their height was an illusion. The distinctive façades–a deep oxide red–were built of compacted twig bundles, long dry. The rooftops teemed with golden griffins, the deer of Benares, the Wheel of the Law. Dragon gargoyles leered from their eaves. All was earthy, vivid, strange.

Under the arcades of the philosophy hall–the largest of the temples–three hundred monks waited in casual conclave, wrapped in magenta and crested in yellow cockscomb hats. The
young were innocently boisterous, thumping and tussling together. They greeted me in rough Chinese, and foraged for news of the Dalai Lama. Outside, they were snowballing one another. But a senior monk beckoned them by groups into the shrine, and from there the guttural prayers stirred like the drone of bees, or a mantra muttered in sleep.

I slipped into the sanctuary beside them, enclosed among avenues of pillars. Twenty years ago the hall had been swept by fire–an electrical fault, the monks said–and now it was lit only by a glimmer of butter lamps and the wintry light dying through its porticoes. The monks had dwindled in its gloom, squatting round their teachers in broken semicircles. I walked here alone. The pillars were draped in cloth, as if they were alive, and faded to darkness down glades of synthetic colour. A thousand tiny, identical Buddhas covered the side walls, and across the deepest recess, perched on clouds and lotus thrones, a double rank of reincarnate saints filled the dark with their dreamy power. Their fingers held up flowers and bells, or cradled thunderbolts. Yak-butter lamps and hundreds of candles stranded each in a zone of orange fire. Here sat the multiform Bodhisattvas, blessed beings who had delayed their entry to nirvana in order to save others. Monastic founders perched gold-faced in pointed wizard’s hats, and demon guardians–the countervailing faces of death–danced with necklaces of skulls or severed heads. Everywhere divinity branched and proliferated–many-headed, multi-armed–loving, death-dealing, indifferent. I stared at them in alienated bafflement, as a lama might wander a church. The air reeked of rancid butter.

On one altar I noticed three photographs. They were of the past three incarnations of the Panchen Lama, second in holiness only to the Dalai Lama. The last was a rosy-cheeked boy in a peaked hat.

Where was he now? I asked.

‘I believe he is in the Chinese capital,’ a young monk said, not meeting my eyes. The chosen Panchen Lama had been taken away by the Chinese and never seen again. They had cynically substituted one of their own.

And where was the Living Buddha of Labrang? I wondered.

He was in Lanzhou–the monk said unhappily–serving in the
Ministry of Religion. So he too had been sterilised. The monk beckoned me away. ‘Here,’ he said a little desperately, steering me to other statues, ‘are the two most important Buddhist philosophers.’

‘Who are they?’

‘I’m sorry…’ he looked crestfallen. ‘I do not know.’

How long had he been here?

‘I came twelve years ago, from a village near here. I was fourteen.’

‘Why did you come?’

‘Because my mother and father wanted it. At the time I knew nothing. Then the world became strange for me. Everything very strange. I understood nothing at all.’ He spoke as if he still did not understand. He looked far younger than his years: a shy youth with a dust of moustache. ‘We pray a long time, three times a day. We may study all day, or just an hour or two. It never ends.’

I went out into the labyrinth of the monastery, following the groan of horns. I attempted to gain entrance to closed courtyards, forbidden halls. The palace of the Living Buddha, the monks said, had been locked up for years. The relics of his forerunners lay under gilded stupas. In another temple these ancestral Buddhas had been intricately sculpted in yak butter for the Buddhist New Year: high-coloured saints who would melt with the summer. Once only I saw a photograph of the Dalai Lama–put up before he fled, a monk said, and so it had remained: a cloudless face, from the time of peace.

Along the galleries of prayer-wheels, and threading between all the shrines, the pilgrims marched in dogged, hungry devotion: Tibetans and Mongolians from the grasslands, their hair matted and wild, mysteriously happy. Their ankle-length robes, trimmed with lynx or fox, transformed them to giants in brilliant cuffs and sashes. Their cheekbones surged under coppery skin, the women’s sometimes wind-flayed scarlet, as if by rouge. Often their coats eased off their shoulders, and their enormous sleeves trailed unused along the ground. Then the women’s robes would part casually on an arsenal of coral and turquoise jewellery; and belts dangled silver pendants. Their hair fell to their waists in two glistening cables, linked high up by silver clasps.

What were they seeing? What did they expect? They tramped in robust euphoria. Divinity to them was everywhere. You might touch it with your hand. Turn a prayer-wheel, light a butter lamp, and something was set in motion. Wizened elders and tiny matriarchs tapped their foreheads at temple doors and caressed the votive scarves which hung there. The perpetual breath of their prayer,
Om mani padme hum
, sighed like a low heartbeat. Some prostrated themselves full length in a clatter of bangles, drew their bodies forward to their outstretched hands, rose, fell again, and sometimes circled the temples or the whole monastery like this, their palms blistered, their hair clogged with mud, in a state of unearthly grace.

The April snow dusted from the mountains. In early morning, approaching the walled fraternities, I would hear the chanting rise from different courtyards, but often could not locate them, and ambled without direction through a murmuring city. Then the monks’ black felt boots, heaped in a shrine’s porch, betrayed their presence, and I would glimpse them lining its avenues, lost in prayer, cowled in their robes against the cold. From time to time their chanting would peter to a stop and its thread be sustained by a lama’s single, deep hum; then the throbbing patter would start again, and an abbot ring a bell or clash little cymbals, and novices would run in with kettles to replenish the monks’ teacups.

The pilgrims meanwhile would be stirring along the sacred way. For two miles they tramped an intermittent gallery of prayer-wheels–more than a thousand of them–which ringed the monastery with the perpetual whirr and whine of supplication. Sometimes whole colonnades of the copper drums were set squealing and whispering together as the burlier pilgrims bustled past. Often they turned hand-held prayer-wheels of their own. With each roll of the cylinder the paper invocations inside awoke and chanted themselves to heaven. I found myself turning them too, as a kind of courtesy, and the old women laughed while entire galleries shimmered with their spinning.

At the end of each arcade, a prayer-cylinder higher than a man stood in its own chamber, and struck a little bell whenever turned.
In one of these a tall young monk, nervously alert, asked me where I came from, what was my faith? I answered, a little ashamed, in faltering Mandarin, that I was not a Buddhist, but he seemed to take pleasure in my turning the wheels, and after each gallery he would wait for me and ask me another question. Was my work in England or in China?…So I was travelling then…Was I alone?…

Sometimes the way swerved into temples where tiers of brass orbs spun noiselessly, then flowed out again into the galleries. And the monk was always lingering outside, waiting. ‘What is your work?…Have you seen other Buddhist places?’

‘Yes. Nepal, Sri Lanka…’ I could not keep the apology from my voice. They could not mean to me what they would to him. He went silent. His boots squelched over the huge polished stones of the arcade. ‘Have you been to India?’

Then I realised his intent. He was still wary, always waited until we were alone. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘To Bodh Gaya and Sarnath.’ The Buddhist heartland.

Perhaps it was his thin frame, restless with diffidence, which made him seem insubstantial beside other monks, transient. Or perhaps, I thought now, it was because he did not want to be here at all. He asked: ‘And how will you leave?’

‘I’m going out through Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan…’

He frowned. He didn’t know where these were. But by now our way had climbed in a tranquil arc behind the monastery, close against the hillside, and we were looking down in solitude on the white-walled maze of monastic dwellings, and on shuttered temple windows. Settled on a wall above them, the monk loosened his robes in the weak sun. His gaze was tentatively trusting. ‘You’ve been to Dharamsala?’

‘No. But I have friends who’ve worked there for the Dalai Lama. People say he’s a good man. Intelligent, spiritual.’

Sadly, whispering: ‘Yes.’ He sank his head. Its shaven pate was barely glazed with black. ‘But it is forbidden to love him.’

Black-winged hawks were grazing the temple roofs below, while above us, scattered like beehives along the hillside, were tiny meditation cells, abandoned. I asked: ‘When did you come here?’

‘Twelve years ago. I’d wanted to be a monk since I was ten.’

‘Why?’

‘I just felt it. I liked the dress.’ He looked back at me unsmiling, with the same eyes and bow-shaped lips as the Buddhas he served. Then, as if to make certain, he asked: ‘You in the West favour the Dalai Lama, don’t you?’

‘Yes. We think of him as the head of your Buddhism.’

His face opened in the sunburst Tibetan smile. ‘I want to leave here! I have an older brother at Dharamsala. He crossed into India eleven years ago. I want to follow him! So do both my parents. My father’s a peasant, out of work now. We all want to go.’

‘How easy is that?’

‘I can go through Tibet into Nepal. You have to be strong for that, and have a little money. But others have done it, and I can’t stay here. Things are wrong between the Chinese and my people. I want to go away. To India, to anywhere.’

‘Do many of you feel that way?’

‘Some.’ His smile disappeared. ‘They all love the Dalai Lama.’ A group of pilgrims passed in a scuttle of mud-spattered robes. ‘But I’ve only been able to telephone my brother twice in eleven years.’

Back in the guesthouse, hidden among the bricks beneath the stove, I had left my satellite telephone–a faltering lifeline back to the West, which I barely used. Now it might come into its own. Its calls would be untraceable. I offered him the use of this, and he accepted with lingering uncertainty, and a tinge of wonderment. So we went on walking along the path under the hillside, I going a little ahead of him, while beneath us the monastery swam supernaturally under its golden roofs.

In the safety of the guesthouse, where only a few pilgrims lingered, he sat in my room, staring at nothing, while I went out into the courtyard and tried to dial his brother. After a while I received a message that the number was out of service. I tried again, with the same faded answer. The monk was still sitting on my bed as if in a trance, upright among my notebooks and thermal underwear. But he had the number of the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard, he said–the man worked with his brother. So I tried this number too–but it too failed. I felt a creeping sadness. I imagined that only
some extra digits separated us from contact, but I could not guess them.

Back in my room the monk was fumbling a key-ring decorated with a London bus, which I’d imagined giving to some child or other; now I offered it to him instead: anything Western seemed to comfort him. He nodded wanly, and it disappeared into his robes.

There was nothing more to do. The numbers were out of date, he realised, and the knowledge of this new barrier deepened his dejection. So I promised to telephone his brother from England somehow, to pass on a message, and we slid back into the monastery streets, not knowing what to say. A light snow was falling again, blurring the temples and the sky to the same cold oblivion. As we walked up the alleys in silence, his feet began to drag, and he wrapped his robes around his face, closing himself away.

I asked: ‘Is it okay to be seen walking with me?’

‘No, no problem.’

The problem was elsewhere, I realised, rankling in his mind, and as his pace slowed I drew slightly ahead of him, and he did not quicken his step, so that we drifted little by little apart, until he was lost in the purple and magenta crowds of the others, and in the thickening snow.