“We’ve been trying to figure out what it means,” I said.
“So have I,” Dan said. “I’d heard about it from a Frenchman I met, an ex-monk who’d studied with the Gyuto Order for years. He said it was the most extraordinary sand mandala he’d ever seen. Every spring, a small group of Tibetan monks trek down from the mountains to construct the elaborate mandala in the sanctum of the monastery’s temple. It remains undisturbed there for exactly three days before it’s deliberately destroyed. Only a select group of the monastery’s monks are allowed to set eyes on it. I had to sneak into the temple in the middle of the night to be able to make those sketches.”
“Fiore go in with you?” I asked.
“Dr. Fiore is a Gyuto monk himself—the Tibetans consider him a lama. He arrived with the mandala makers.”
“With his granddaughter?” Phoebe asked.
“Yes,” Dan said. “In fact, it was through Govindi that I gained access to the temple.”
Phoebe eyed him curiously. “Really. Govindi. I wonder how you managed that?”
“She appreciated my passion for Tibetan Buddhism,” he said.
“Your—” Phoebe stopped herself. “It’s funny you’ve never mentioned this woman before.”
“I haven’t seen her in 18 months.”
“So you’re counting, then.”
Phoebe looked miffed. I wondered: Was she jealous?
We reached the rental car; Dan popped the trunk. From deep inside a backpack, he pulled out a Ziploc bag. “These are yours,” he said to Phoebe, handing her the seeds. “Tell Karakov he has me to thank for keeping them from the Assassins.”
The Aryan seeds looked dark and shriveled. “So I take it you’re not afraid they can germinate,” Phoebe said.
“Not those,” he said. “I sterilized them.” He fished out another bag of similar-looking seeds. “I’m keeping this portion for myself. And these”—a third bag—“I lifted from the monks.”
He tossed the bag to me. It contained several dozen light-gold seeds, dried, but plump and hearty. “Just like what you sent me in Rome,” I said.
“I knew if I was captured they’d be taken from me,” Dan said. “I sent you those few for safekeeping.”
Phoebe took the bag and squinted at the seeds. “Was your girlfriend an accomplice in this caper, too?”
“Govindi? No. In fact she tried to kill me.”
It appeared he wasn’t kidding. “Because you stole them?” I asked.
Dan hesitated. “Because the seeds were a part of the mandala.”
Phoebe grimaced, incredulous. “You stole them from the mandala?”
“Talk about bad karma,” I said.
“Your brother doesn’t care about karma,” Phoebe said. “Or the ten commandments or the Hindu dharma or the Buddha’s eightfold path. Why should he bother to restrain himself? He thinks he can have his ‘spiritual experience’ and ignore all those silly rules.”
“The experience is the basis of it all,” Dan said. “Direct apprehension of the transcendent truth—”
“Tell that to the men who want to kill you. They seem to be ignoring all those silly rules, too.”
“Or believing in a bunch of silly ones.”
“That only proves my point. The ‘experience’ can be misconstrued—”
“Excuse me,” Anand said, interrupting. “I’m confused. You said you took the seeds from the mandala. But wasn’t the mandala made out of sand?”
“The mandala was constructed in the traditional way, by trickling grains of colored sand, but the lotus flower the Buddha held was formed entirely of lotus seeds. When I saw that, I knew I was on to something.”
“What made you think they were from the soma plant?” I asked.
“I only had a theory,” he said. “It wasn’t until I could test them against these”—he held up Karakov’s dark, shriveled seeds—“that I knew the lotus of the Buddhist monks was the same as the ancient Aryans’.”
I had trouble reconciling the connection. “Why would teetotaler Buddhist monks have anything to do with the Aryans’ soma?”
Dan set a seed on the palm of his hand. “You could say the Vedic Aryans planted the initial seed of Buddhism. Soma gave them courage, but taken in heavier doses it could be a real trip. I believe it was the catalyst that turned their warrior culture inward. Early Hindu seers began probing human consciousness, exploring ways to make permanent the ‘invincible’ state of mind. Over the course of centuries, they developed various meditation techniques that came to be known collectively as yoga, a Sanskrit word meaning ‘yoke’—‘to bind together.’ The idea was to yoke one’s limited self to the unlimited ground of being, what the Hindus called Brahman, the all-pervading divine. With years of diligent practice, yogis hoped to break free from the dream of samsara—the relative world of suffering and desire—and awaken into a permanent state of enlightenment .”
A dusty breeze swept over the hilltop. I peered out over the city below, where several killers had just been hunting us. One had been slashed with a knife in the square; another—Dan’s torturer—had been shot dead in the tomb. The world of samsara was no make-believe dream. Yet from this lofty vantage, those events did begin to seem somehow slightly dreamlike, and I knew they’d only become more so as my memory of them faded, like washed out photos from the first world war, its purpose long forgotten, its passions absurd.
“Siddhartha Gautama came out of this tradition,” Dan was saying, “and developed his own radical innovations. Guided by his own experience, taking absolutely nothing on faith, the Buddha realized he could not honestly affirm that the yogic state was divine. He even disputed the instinctive assumption of an inner, autonomous ‘self.’ Our identity, he asserted, was fluid and contingent, like a burning fire or a flowing stream, never exactly the same from moment to moment. It was therefore indescribable, not a self, but ‘no-self’; what the Buddhists refer to as ‘emptiness.’”
I thought of the black void of Tamerlane’s gravestone, and pulled out the black jade chess piece. “So is that what the camel means—we’re nothing?”
“Emptiness does not mean nothingness,” Dan said. “It means being emptied of the false sense of ‘self.’ No ‘I,’ no ‘thing’ stands completely independent and apart. It is only our thinking makes it so. That’s living in samsara—the illusion of separateness.”
I tossed him the camel. He responded instinctively, catching it. “That thing is separate,” I said. “So am I and so are you. And if you need reminding, so was the guy who nearly tortured you to death.”
Dan’s eyes darkened at the memory. “I’ll be the first to admit...I felt completely alone.” He viewed the camel on his open palm, his hand still trembling slightly. “And yet I know it isn’t so.”
Anand held out his hand, and Dan gave him the piece. The Gurkha studied it closely. “There’s a famous phrase in Sanskrit, said to be the sum of all Hindu philosophy: Tat tvam asi. ‘That art thou.’” He handed the camel to me.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m the camel and the camel is me, and everything is empty, and we’re all part of one great big cosmos. But meantime we got to live down here on Earth, where people are killing each other over a lousy lotus.”
“That’s the nature of samsara,” Dan said. “Constant change and conflict. The trick is to find the pathway through it. That empty, open path is nirvana, ‘the Refuge of the Buddha.’ But finding and maintaining that state of mind is a difficult endeavor. Like the journey to Shambhala. That’s why this sect of Buddhists kept the soma plant, I think. To give their novices a taste of what they’re looking for—to offer them a glimpse of enlightenment.”
Dan’s theory about soma had a certain logic to it, but something about it still bothered me. “How could this group of Buddhists be the only ones that still have the lotus?”
“I’m not really sure,” he said. “But somewhere during the course of the past three millennia, this particular lotus species vanished. My guess is, it was deliberately destroyed. In ancient Persia,
the reforming firebrand prophet Zoroaster condemned the intoxicating haoma ritual. The religion he established replaced haoma with a much milder stimulant derived from the ephedra plant. It’s still in use by Zoroastrians today. Something similar happened in India with the rise of Hinduism and the renunciations of the yogis. Buddhists in particular would have wanted soma suppressed—to prevent the plant’s misuse or its exploitation in war. So the religious function of the lotus flower became entirely symbolic. Soma was eventually replaced with padma, the beautiful Nelumbo nucifera lotus, the so-called ‘Sacred Lotus’ of India.”
“Is padma a stimulant, too?” I asked.
“Padma contains alkaloids that are mildly psychoactive,” Dan said, “but nothing like the experience attributed to soma. My theory is that soma interacts with serotonin-2 receptors, affecting the fear response, the survival instinct, and the sense of one’s physical boundary—all interlinked in the oldest and most primitive part of the brain. Basically, the sense of one’s ‘self’ is transcended. You’re left to experience the boundlessness of pure being.”
“As if touched by the divine,” Anand added.
“Or by chemistry,” I said.
“We’re bio-chemical organisms,” Dan said, “enmeshed in a material world. How else could a brain reach beyond itself except by reaching through it?”
Anand agreed. “Nirvana is in samsara,” he said.
“Exactly. The Sacred Lotus represents enlightenment on earth. Padma grows up out of the muck, its leaves repel the muddy water and its bud blooms into perfection.”
“Om mani padme hum,” Anand said.
“‘The jewel is in the lotus,’” Dan translated. “It’s considered the most important Buddhist mantra of all. Emptiness, divineness, nirvana—the jewel—is right here, before our eyes, within our mucky world. For Tibetans the jewel is a diamond, the symbol of perfection. Like the Tibetan ‘diamond thunderbolt’ adapted from the Aryans—”
“Your Vajra!” I’d nearly forgotten about it. Digging it out of my pack, I tossed it over to Dan.
His eyes lit up at the sight of it. He fingered the curved prongs that formed the two hollow spheres. “This represents everything I’ve been talking about. The Buddhist turning inward to contemplate the void. Emptiness within suchness. The union of opposites. Yoking the blood-and-guts world of samsara with the timeless world of nirvana.” He centered the Vajra on his outstretched finger, delicately balancing the spheres. “One who achieves enlightenment rests with equanimity in both—”
The Vajra slipped off his finger—he grabbed it in midair. He seemed delighted to have this “no-thing” back in his possession. “Govindi gave me this Vajra…before we fell out. Theirs is a Vajrayana sect of Buddhism—the ‘Vehicle of the Diamond.’ They use special means and practices to accelerate the process of awakening.”
“Special means?” Phoebe said.
We all turned. Phoebe had been quietly studying Dan. “Now I know why you never mentioned her.”
“Govindi?”
She turned to me. “Vajrayana is better known as Tantric Buddhism, Jack. I think I’m beginning to understand your brother’s sudden ‘passion’ for it.”
Dan visibly blushed. “Sex is only one area of tantric practice, Phoebe. And it’s actually not used all that often.”
“Of course not. Special means need special circumstances. Like a willing woman for one—”
“Tantra is merely a means—”
“Please, Professor, enough with the lectures. Tantra is about restraint, though I’m sure you convinced Govindi that’s just another rule to break.”
“Govindi didn’t need convincing! She’s not so strong-willed like—” Dan stopped himself, realizing what he’d just admitted. “Like you.”
Phoebe stared at him, her suspicions confirmed. She glanced at me, then back at Dan. “It turns out I’m not so strong-willed, either.”
Dan’s eyes slowly narrowed. “Really?” He turned to me with his mouth open.
I shrugged.
“Excuse me.”
It was Anand. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “This is most...fascinating. Quite exciting, really. But I remind you, we do live—as you said—in the world of time. And I’m afraid our time at present is quickly running out.”
Dan tried to shake off his shell-shock. “Yeah,” he said. “Of course.”
The moment he looked away, Phoebe and I exchanged a glance. Could it really be that easy?
Anand in the meantime was asking Dan, “Can you tell us whether the monks grew any lotus at the Dharamshala monastery?”
“No, there’s no pond,” Dan said. He still seemed to be trying to absorb the revelation from Phoebe. He turned to her. “I couldn’t very well tell you about Govindi without having to tell you everything.”
“Like the fact that you’d fallen in love, you mean, and never bothered to mention it?”
“If I didn’t keep my involvement with the monks and her quiet, their secret would have gotten out in no time. You remember what happened in Greece—”
“That was hardly my—”
“Please,” Anand said, growing impatient. “What about their orchards, their vegetable gardens?”
Dan shook his head. “I searched. There were no water plants anywhere on the premises.”
On the sun-baked hood of Dan’s rental car, Anand unfolded his English-labeled, “Silk Road” tourist map. “If that’s the case,” he said, “one could assume the monks from the mountains carried the seeds down with them.”
“Most likely,” Dan said. “I assume the mandala is remade every year for the benefit of the exiles in India. I think it’s a ritual of confirmation, verifying the soma lotus is alive, that’s it’s still being actively cultivated.”
“In Shambhala,” I said.
“That’s my theory,” he said.
Anand’s fat-fingered hands fanned out, flattening the creases of the map. “The only question then is where.”
74.
The Source
STANDING AROUND THE MAP, the four of us peered down like gods over Asia. Red lines traced the ancient Silk Road from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, across the Middle East and the Land of the Stans, deep into the vastness of China. South of these lines, in the northern neck of India, Anand’s roving fingertip skated to a stop. “Dharamshala is here,” he said, “in the foothills of the Himalayas. You’re certain these monks came down from the mountains?”
“That’s what Govindi told me,” Dan said. “She wouldn’t say from where.”
The crescent sweep of the Himalayas—the famous “Roof of the World”—formed a long, formidable border with Tibet. From east to west the mountains stretched some 1500 miles, with yet more ranges thickly stacked above them to the north.
“Well that certainly narrows things down,” Phoebe said.
Dan looked it over despairingly, the night’s torture still in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is why I’d hoped to find an answer in the tomb.”
Anand moved his finger to the city we were in—Samarkand, in southeast Uzbekistan. “How does the camel go?” His finger moved diagonally down, then across. “Afghanistan…Pakistan...and...India…Tibet.”
Phoebe exclaimed, “Two countries diagonal, two countries across!”
The four of us stared down, wondering.
“Seems a bit of a stretch,” I said. Still, it was all we had to go on. I took the chess piece out of my pocket and placed it down on Tibet. “Camel in the mountains?”
“Fish out of water,” Phoebe said.
Dan agreed. “I can’t see how the lotus plants could survive the Himalayan winter.”
“And it still leaves an awful lot of ground to cover,” Phoebe said.
“Even more than you think,” Anand said. “Since the occupation, Tibet is considered a province. Officially, the country that camel’s in is China.”
“Where Tamerlane was looking,” Dan said.
The four of us surveyed its immensity. �
��Third largest country in the world,” Phoebe said.
The absurdity of it reminded me of the street peddler’s joke. “Xitoy,” I said.
“What?” Dan asked.
“The Uzbek’s name for China. In the square, a man was selling chess…” I broke off.
“What is it?” Dan asked.
I picked up the camel.
“Jack, what’s wrong?” Phoebe asked.
“The secret is right before your eyes,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Dan asked.
“It’s what your torturer said when we showed him the camel,” Phoebe said.
Dan took the chess piece. Looked at it. Looked at me.
“You thought Ulug Beg left some clue inside the tomb,” I said. “But what if the clue was the tomb itself? What if the clue was the jade?”
Phoebe eyed the camel. “The largest block of jade in the world.”
“Where did it come from?” I asked.
“India, supposedly,” Dan said. “But no one really knows. Some believe it was mined in Mongolia. Others—”
“China,” I said. “Xitoy.”
“It’s certainly possible,” Dan said.
“More than possible,” Anand said. “It’s actually quite likely. Long before they began trading silk, the Chinese were trading jade. In fact, the Silk Road in China actually followed what used to be the ancient Jade Road.”
We all stared down at the red, ropy lines, each knotted with scattered oases.
“Maybe the monks didn’t just come down from the mountains,” I said. “Maybe they came over the mountains.”
Anand pushed his fingertip north from Dharamshala. “The nearest route across would put you down about here,” he said.
Dan set the camel down on the spot—the Silk Road just north of Tibet. The road at that point had split into two, a north and south route around a large, empty basin, ringed by a conga line of mountains.
“The Taklimakan Desert,” Anand said. “The Uyghurs call it ‘the Sea of Death.’”
Given my recent preoccupations, the emptiness of it intrigued me. Except for the rivers that died into it, and the name “Taklimakan,” the desert itself contained not a mark.
The Assassin Lotus Page 32