The War of the Realms

by C Steven Meldrum

  The rusted and broken grate listed precariously to one side of a yawning chasm. I climbed to the top of the cairn and stood astride the uninviting tunnel, the weak sunlight above me partially illuminating an ancient metal ladder that descended into darkness. I imagined Brother Chumbling regaling the other brothers in joyous rapture of my predicament. I cursed and swore as I grasped my mop and bucket and lowered myself to first rung, uncertain as to whether it would support me but uncaring if it did not – let him explain my maggotridden corpse to the Abbott as I lay in bluish abiosis upon his desk, my death forever on his conscience.

  In protest, the ladder squealed slightly but did not collapse. I climbed down into the darkness for about half a chain until my foot felt only space rather than another rung. I could hear the slight trickling of water below and, not knowing how far I would have to fall, dropped the bucket and mop. There was an almost immediate splash and booming echo around me. I dropped from the ladder and splashed down in an ankle-deep stream– the icy water not nearly as uncomfortable as the dank and rotten smell that suddenly overwhelmed me.

  The tunnel was roughly a fathom in height so I could almost stand straight without hitting my head. I felt for the bucket and mop and, wanting to spend the least amount of time in there as possible, began working my way upstream. The dim light from the access chute was soon hidden by the twists and turns of the tunnel. The way seemed to be fairly steep and snaked around in all directions for what seemed leagues until at last it started to level out and I could hear water pouring into this pipe from various feeder pipes. Thinking to myself that I must be under the keep by now, I trudged forward, continuing up the incline, my shoes and pants sodden to my knees with the churning and gurgling of the fast-moving stream the only sound, broken only by the echoes of my hoarse breathing and continual coughing.

  Before long I came to the infarct; a partial collapse of the ancient cloaca, whereupon all sorts of hideous matter had clung over decades or centuries creating a turbid and impervious dam. In complete darkness I gagged and pulled up part of my robe, wrapping it around my nose and mouth in a vain effort to filter some of the rancid miasma. Taking the mop, I blindly stabbed and levered with the long handle, loosening bits and pieces but did not really make much of an indentation. After what seemed a watch or more, I jabbed the pile yet again and heard a section come away with a sizeable gush of water and other debris that I did not want to think about washing past my legs. Feeling my way as best as I could, not knowing whether it was the ancient stone of the tunnel I gripped or something I did not want to think about, I climbed the solid part of the collapsed section and then settling myself into a horribly uncomfortable position, jabbed a bit more.

  And then I had the strangest sensation that I could make out the outline of my hands and some of the topography around me, as if they were a paler black against the black that enveloped me, almost as if the sun had peaked out from behind a cloud, lending a bit more light to the frozen tundra, and then has just as quickly been hidden again. Immersed in the inky blackness, I looked upward into the jagged cavern that had been the ceiling of the tunnel and again, I could make out a fleeting and tenebrous grey hue and what seemed a jagged way upward.

  No sooner had I started climbing than through my hours of effort and uncounted pressure on the other side, the obstipation suddenly gave way, rushing past me in a torrent of cold, black filth. Able to see nothing, I had the impression that something incredibly large glided passed me, and thought that the blockage must have been enormous. The rushing deluge was louder than a storm and I pulled myself further upward to avoid being dragged away in the deadly tsunami.

  As it subsided, I felt around me and noticed that the concavity created by the collapsed tunnel was as large as a small room and extended via a fissure up through the dark clammy rock, a dull, grey light coming through it from above. I pulled myself up and through a hole hardly wide enough for my head and shoulders and rested for a moment in a level section that, while I still could not see enough to make out any detail, seemed of straight lines, like a tunnel.

  A delicate breeze of cool, fresh air brushed past me and I moved forward away from the breach. It was an indescribable joy to breathe that cleaner air after being in the tunnel for so many watches. I chose a direction and crawled on for a short while until ahead of me I could finally see the source of light – a crack or some tear in a wall ahead of me. The small break about head high seemed to coincide with the stone floor of a squarish room beyond. It was barely large enough to squeeze through but after much grunting and scraping I managed to pull myself up through the hole and looked around to find myself in a small, laser-hewn chamber about eight feet by four feet, and with just enough room to stand, the only remarkable feature being the raised sarcophagus upon which I now crouched.

  After searching below the stupa for a short time, I had also found a heavy stone door near that slim fissure that had allowed me access to this vault. After a watch or more of effort I was able to grind it open which allowed access to a partially collapsed, damp, narrow and unlighted tunnel that crossed beneath the courtyard and emerged via a hidden entrance in the back of a little used storeroom in the level below the foyer of the Dragon Tower. I concluded that it must have been an escape tunnel so that if the Dragon Tower were ever besieged, for example, it offered discrete passage beneath the courtyard to the outer wall. Following it as far as I could toward the outer wall, I saw that it had collapsed at some point in the past. Ancient and broken rocks, some as large as me, had settled where they lay, totally blocking the tunnel.

  It was not difficult to come back and forth by way of the foyer (rather than traipsing up through the ancient drain I had just had the misfortune of cleaning). The Dragon Tower was always a busy place with students hoping to be able to see and speak to the black robes as they passed within. Once beneath the stupa, I would sit there enjoying the brief respite from the constant attention of friends, teachers and others – a luxury at the time that now seems despicable to me– solitude in any but the briefest of durations, for one that has trod the paths that I have, is a curse beyond all reckoning.

  When I had first sat on the edge of the sarcophagus with my knees pulled up to my chin and robe wrapped tightly about me, I had thought originally that the courtyard I could see before me was simply an abandoned area of the monastery. However, early one morning, unable to sleep because of the excitement of my discovery, I slipped down here just after dawn and espied a score of black-robed warrior-priests in formation, in the middle of a training session.

  I looked out again now, an eternity it seemed since that first occasion, and noticed the huge double doors opening. A dozen monks quickly emerged from the ground floor of the tower and, once in formation, began the warm-up exercises that meant a training session was due to begin. Master Jai and some of his apprentices followed with training mechs, combat dummies, various weapons and padded mats. I laughed quietly to myself thinking that Dorje would soon enough be one of those apprentices. What an adventure he was in for! The evening meal was still a watch away so I settled in and watched intently, spending the time to learn more combat manoeuvres that I was sure would even be more than Dorje could handle once I had the opportunity to practise them, for by observing one only learns that a thing can be done. Real knowledge requires that you put your learning into action.

  Chapter 6: Rinpoche The Panchen Erdeni is the one of the two highest ranking lamas (together with the Dalai Lama). The successive Panchen lamas form an unbroken

  reincarnation lineage of Amitabha Buddha. The 691st Dalai Lama, Tenzin Khedrup Je, had known the last Panchen Lama for 132 years, from boyhood, as it were, and after his death, spent the next twenty one years searching for the next incarnation of perhaps the greatest of the Erdeni. When news reached the capital of a boy in the bitter north-western provinces of Yam that had conversed with the Golden Goddess, he knew his search was over.

  Lobsang Chökyi Gyalsten I had never seen so much pomp and ceremony as when the p
arty from the capital arrived.

  It was a beautiful spring day and we had managed to secure a great position in amongst the ranks of our monastery’s students and masters atop the barbican, overlooking the approach to the monastery. Dorje sat next to me with Puk on his other side. Pasang was talking to a few other monks and Yeshe had gone for some food. A river of red, white and yellow snaked around the bends in the road coming from the mountains and across the short area of relatively level ground before the main gates to the monastery. The traditional deep-bass aum rang from columns of monks playing impossibly sized tungchen and rag-dun. Drums and cymbals clanged and clashed in a wailing dissonance to announce the arrival of the official party from the capital.

  Villagers and pilgrims also joined in the festivities. It had been more than fifty years since any officialdom had been to this province and everyone saw it as an auspicious omen and a sign of special favour from the gods. Those musically trained within the monastery played a variety of traditional instruments including drilbu; small hand-bells held in the left hand and played with the damaru, a hand-drum shaped like an hour-glass with fixed clappers that struck the skins by vigorously shaking it back and forth in the right hand. There were large rolmo and small silnyen, cymbals struck by either vertical or horizontal movement, and several rGna, large drums supported on a pole or suspended in a frame, and struck with a crooked cane with a knobbly point. We used the same in prayer classes.

  Monks dressed in traditional costumes performed theatre and danced and sang across the courtyard. The air was full of chanting, music and mantra recitation, and above us wind-whipped prayer flags and colourful dachor and the long trailing katak adorned the keep. In the main hall another group of monks had spent weeks delicately completing a magnificent dul-tson-kyilkhor or sand-mandala. It measured about half a chain across and while the official party approached the gates, a score of monks worked feverishly to have it completed the moment they entered the great hall.

  In a traditional style that was many thousands of years old, each monk held a chak-pur in one hand while running a metal rod on its serrated surface with the other, the vibration causing the sands to flow like liquid. Every coloured grain had slowly brought the image to life. With the main doors flung wide to allow enough light to work by, I looked down from my perch to spy the almost completed image. This kyil khor depicted the enlightened vision of a Buddha. From the wall I could make out an outer circle and an inner square with an ornately decorated mandala palace placed at the centre surrounded with various and ancient symbols and glyphs as well as images of various Yidams. I could make out the likenesses of Vajrayogini, Yamantaka, Hevajra, Hayagriva, Guhyasamaja, Dorje Phurba, Kurukulle, Kalachakra and others. A myriad of symbols crowded the work also such as the Astamangala, or Eight Auspicious Symbols including the endless knot, the lotus flower, the white conch and the wheel of Dharma.

  I had never paid much attention to prosopopoeia in the mandala previously or indeed really looked at the other manifestations of the gods in the artwork and symbology scattered throughout the monastery. But lately, in daily prayers, I had lost myself in visions and imaginings. Even now, standing upon the battlement of the outer wall with the official party less than fifty chains away, looking down at the giant sand-mandala spread out on the floor of the main entrance, I stood as if spell-caught. With no more eloquent way to describe it, all I can say is I suddenlysaw “through” the mandala to a sacred space, a Pure Buddha Realm, a world separated and protected from this everchanging and impure outer world of Samsara, a place of Nirvana, a place of peace. Our masters had always tried to teach us that by visualizing purelands, one learns to understand the experience itself as pure, and the abode of enlightenment. If we but have the strength to see samsaric confusion as the "shade" of purity, then the protection we need is from ourselves as much as from outside.

  Dorje spoke but it was as if he spoke from a league distant and I was transfixed for a moment, remembering that brief moment where I walked in a land of perpetual bliss on the other side of the mandala. Before the sensation had left me and I was once again myself, I was immersed for a brief moment in each of the four outer circles: the purifying fire of wisdom, the strength and fearlessness of the Vajra (the lightening bolt of knowledge), the circle of eight tombs (representing the eight states of consciousness) and the lotus (the plant standing with its roots in the mud, yet raising its blossom towards the light).

  Returning to normality, I was suddenly assailed by earthly sensations which I had not noticed until then; the sudden feel of the rough hewn stone of the wall that I leaned upon, the mixed odours of burning wood, roasting meats and smoking juniper, the smells of a myriad different foods drifting toward me, the pungency emanating from the closely packed and unwashed students, the harsh glare of the sun and the keening of the light breeze. The discordant wailing, the clanging of instruments and a thousand different conversations invaded my head and I suddenly felt faint.

  Having walked the purelands, which seemed as if for hours although it could not have been more than seconds, I experienced a sudden disgust for this temporal existence with its cacophony of sounds, sights, smells, tastes and textures. It was as though having come from an obverse of purity, one forgets and cannot readily or easily be immersed in anything other again.

  Something pressed against me and the glare before my eyes was intermittently cut off by shadowy shapes that spoke and then withdrew so that I squinted in the glare again. Voices sounded dull and I could not make out anything being said. I had a terrible taste in my mouth and was suddenly aware of somebody roughly wiping my face with a smelly rag.

  “Come on Tashi. I think you’ve had a bit too much sun.” That was Yeshe.

  “What happened to him?” Was that Master Panuaru?

  “He just collapsed.”

  “This is a big day for him – no wonder.”

  I felt pain. Intense pain.

  Then, images; disjointed, opaque and vague, flashing through my head. I was on the ice once more, no it was sand, and I was thirsty, so thirsty. It was hot and in an adumbral twilight in which a choking dust made it impossible to breathe, I staggered and beheld an almost endless plain, broken only at the far horizon by cruel mountain peaks that stabbed toward the darkened heavens, shrouded by oppressive, caliginous and writhing clouds. Before I could wonder at anything, the twilit quiet was suddenly interrupted by a thunderous clamour. Mother Irth suddenly shook and great gouts of stone, mud, burning rock and sulphurous gases were spewed forth from a chasm in the distance and the piceous walls and towers of a great city slowly sprang from the ground before me.

  When all had quietened again and I could stare in wonder, I saw the mighty gates yawn slowly open and from the bowels of the fortress marched a vast army, a host of the dead. And at its head rode a fell general of the night, a woman, beautiful in one way but hideous and fey to behold in every other. She sat astride a great black war elephant. As the host approached I stood, slowly and painfully. My robes were not the grey of a novice but were torn and dirty from what seemed many hard leagues of travel and seemed to have at one time been of a fine make.

  About my neck a talisman of silver and jade burned brightly. I tried to cover it as it would surely be a beacon to that vast host but its light enveloped me in a sphere of heavenly brilliance.

  The leader galloped toward me, slowly at first and then with a thundering speed, holding the reins in one hand and a large spear in the other. I tried to move, to flee, to run but could not. I could only watch in dumb silence as she released the spear from a hundred paces away. I tried to scream but no sound issued from my lips. All I could do was watch as the spear reached the apogee of its arc and descended inexorably toward me. I could not more than grimace as the cruelly shaped ebon spearhead completed its journey; plunging through my chest, out through my spine to bury itself in the dusty rock on which I stood.

  I clutched the ebon shaft futilely, collapsing to my knees. Borne upon that cruel spike I screamed, and so did
she, me in a tortured affliction I cannot describe, she in a maniacal frenzy, and each unknowable word of that effusion was like the screams of a thousand tortured souls. And I wallowed in agony and misery, for I could do nothing else, impaled so that the sticky pool that was my life’s blood soaked the ground beneath my feet. And as I faded in death, so too did the witch-queen and her host. As if no more than a dream the mighty city suddenly crumbled to dust to drift upon the wind and a name drifted to me across the tormented landscape of that nightmare realm.

  “Hold him down!”

  “He’s mad – he screams and screams and clutches his chest!” “Who is Mura?”

  “Tashi – come back to us!”

  I suddenly looked at the worried faces gathered above me– Master Jai,

  Master Panuaru, Dorje, Rogel, Yeshe, Lhapka, Puk … Lhapka? Panting and sweating profusely, I turned to my side and emptied the

  contents of my stomach.

  I could not have said why my mind was filled with these images – or what the evil dream portended (if it was a dream). Once I had come down from the wall and had chased away all the good intentioned people that crowded around me, I sat with Master Panuaru for a while afterwards, drinking some water, collecting my thoughts and describing it all to him. He sat and listened and resolved that we should speak to Abbott Tomas.

  “T he Holy Regent himself is at the head of the column that even now approaches the gate, Tashi. Lord Tenzing Phurba!” He thought for a moment. “Do you feel well enough to continue with this madness or shall I take you to the infirmary? Do you want to talk to Abbott Thomas?”

  “I will, but not now,” I muttered, and added as an afterthought, “Master.” “Go back to your friends then. But be careful and come down if you feel sick again.” As I climbed back towards where Yeshe and the others leaned over the wall, watching the column approach, I silenced all the concerns and asked for food to convince everybody that I was fine. Yeshe went off to find some. I settled back in to watch the arrival of the regent, just as his party passed under the barbican and into the main courtyard.