Joshua stroked his chin for a moment and stared at me as if he was deep in thought, while at the same time I thought he might burst out laughing any second. I’d spent a whole week thinking about this. This theory had vexed me through all of my training, all of my meditations since we’d made the pilgrimage to the yeti’s valley. I wanted some sort of acknowledgment from Joshua for my effort, if nothing else.
“Biff,” he said, “that may be the dumbest idea you’ve ever had.”
“So you don’t think it’s possible?”
“Why would the Lord create a creature only to have it die out? Why would the Lord allow that?” Joshua said.
“What about the flood? All but Noah and his family were killed.”
“But that was because people had become wicked. The yeti isn’t wicked. If anything, his kind have died out because they have no capacity for wickedness.”
“So, you’re the Son of God, you explain it to me.”
“It is God’s will,” said Joshua, “that the yeti disappear.”
“Because they had no trace of wickedness?” I said sarcastically. “If the yeti isn’t a man, then he’s not a sinner either. He’s innocent.”
Joshua nodded, staring into his now-empty bowl. “Yes. He’s innocent.” He stood and bowed to me, which was something he almost never did unless we were training. “I’m tired now, Biff. I have to sleep and pray.”
“Sorry, Josh, I didn’t mean to make you sad. I thought it was an interesting theory.”
He smiled weakly at me, then bowed his head and shuffled off to his cell.
Over the next few years Joshua spent at least a week out of every month in the mountains with the yeti, going up not only with every group after alms, but often going up into the mountains by himself for days or, in the summer, weeks at a time. He never talked about what he did while in the mountains, except, he told me, that the yeti had taken him to the cave where he lived and had shown him the bones of his people. My friend had found something with the yeti, and although I didn’t have the courage to ask him, I suspect the bond he shared with the snowman was the knowledge that they were both unique creatures, nothing like either of them walked the face of the earth, and regardless of the connection each might feel with God and the universe, at that time, in that place, but for each other, they were utterly alone.
Gaspar didn’t forbid Joshua’s pilgrimages, and indeed, he went out of his way to act as if he didn’t notice when Twenty-Two Monk was gone, yet I could tell there was some unease in the abbot whenever Joshua was away.
We both continued to drill on the posts, and after two years of leaping and balancing, dancing and the use of weapons were added to our routine. Joshua refused to take up any of the weapons; in fact, he refused to practice any art that would bring harm to another being. He wouldn’t even mimic the action of fighting with swords and spears with a bamboo substitute. At first Gaspar bristled at Joshua’s refusal, and threatened to banish him from the monastery, but when I took the abbot aside and told him the story of the archer Joshua had blinded on the way to Balthasar’s fortress, the abbot relented. He and two of the older monks who had been soldiers devised for Joshua a regimen of weaponless fighting that involved no offense or striking at all, but instead channeled the energy of an attacker away from oneself. Since the new art was practiced only by Joshua (and sometimes myself), the monks called it Jew-dô, meaning the way of the Jew.
In addition to learning kung fu and Jew-dô, Gaspar set us to learning to speak and write Sanskrit. Most of the holy books of Buddhism had been written in that language and had yet to be translated into Chinese, which Joshua and I had become fluent in.
“This is the language of my boyhood,” Gaspar said before beginning our lessons. “You need to know this to learn the words of Gautama Buddha, but you will also need this language when you follow your dharma to your next destination.”
Joshua and I looked at each other. It had been a long time since we had talked about leaving the monastery and the mention of it put us on edge. Routine feeds the illusion of safety, and if nothing else, there was routine at the monastery.
“When will we leave, master?” I asked.
“When it is time,” said Gaspar.
“And how will we know it is time to leave?”
“When the time for staying has come to an end.”
“And we will know this because you will finally give us a straight and concrete answer to a question instead of being obtuse and spooky?” I asked.
“Does the unhatched tadpole know the universe of the full-grown frog?”
“Evidently not,” Joshua said.
“Correct,” said the master. “Meditate upon it.”
As Joshua and I entered the temple to begin our meditation I said, “When the time comes, and we know that the time has come for us to leave, I am going to lump up his shiny little head with a fighting staff.”
“Meditate upon it,” said Josh.
“I mean it. He’s going to be sorry he taught me how to fight,” I said.
“I’m sure of it. I’m sorry already.”
“You know, he doesn’t have to be the only one bopped in the noggin when noggin-boppin’ time rolls around,” I said.
Joshua looked at me as if I’d just awakened him from a nap. “All the time we spend meditating, what are you really doing, Biff?”
“I’m meditating—sometimes—listening to the sound of the universe and stuff.”
“But mostly you’re just sitting there.”
“I’ve learned to sleep with my eyes open.”
“That won’t help your enlightenment.”
“Look, when I get to nirvana I want to be well rested.”
“Don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it.”
“Hey, I have discipline. Through practice I’ve learned to cause spontaneous nocturnal emissions.”
“That’s an accomplishment,” the Messiah said sarcastically.
“Okay, you can be snotty if you want to, but when we get back to Galilee, you walk around trying to sell your ‘love your neighbor because he is you’ claptrap, and I’ll offer the ‘wet dreams at will’ program and we’ll see who gets more followers.”
Joshua grinned: “I think we’ll both do better than my cousin John and his ‘hold them underwater until they agree with you’ sermon.”
“I haven’t thought about him in years. Do you think he’s still doing that?”
Just then, Number Two Monk, looking very stern and unenlightened, stood and started across the temple toward us, his bamboo rod in hand.
“Sorry, Josh, I’m going no-mind.” I dropped to the lotus position, formed the mudra of the compassionate Buddha with my fingers, and lickity-split was on the sitting-still road to oneness with allthatness.
Despite Gaspar’s veiled warning about our moving on, we again settled into a routine, this one including learning to read and write the sutras in Sanskrit, but also Joshua’s time with the yeti. I had gotten so proficient in the martial arts that I could break a flagstone as thick as my hand with my head, and I could sneak up on even the most wary of the other monks, flick him on the ear, and be back in lotus position before he could spin to snatch the still-beating heart from my chest. (Actually, no one was really sure if anyone could do that. Every day Number Three Monk would declare it time for the “snatching the still-beating heart from the chest” drill, and every day he would ask for volunteers. After a brief wait, when no one volunteered, we’d move onto the next drill, usually the “maiming a guy with a fan” drill. Everyone wondered if Number Three could really do it, but no one wanted to ask. We knew how Buddhist monks liked to teach. One minute you’re curious, the next a bald guy is holding a bloody piece of pulsating meat in your face and you’re wondering why the sudden draft in the thorax area of your robe. No thanks, we didn’t need to know that badly.)
Meanwhile, Joshua became so adept at avoiding blows that it was as if he’d become invisible again. Even the best fighting monks, of whom I was not one
, had trouble laying a hand on my friend, and often they ended up flat on their backs on the flagstones for their trouble. Joshua seemed his happiest during these exercises, often laughing out loud as he narrowly dodged the thrust of a sword that would have taken his eye. Sometimes he would take the spear away from Number Three, only to bow and present it to him with a grin, as if the grizzled old soldier had dropped it instead of having it finessed from his grip. When Gaspar witnessed these displays he would leave the courtyard shaking his head and mumbling something about ego, leaving the rest of us to collapse into paroxysms of laughter at the abbot’s expense. Even Numbers Two and Three, who were normally the strict disciplinarians, managed to mine a few smiles from their ever-so furrowed brows. It was a good time for Joshua. Meditation, prayer, exercise, and time with the yeti seemed to have helped him to let go of the colossal burden he’d been given to carry. For the first time he seemed truly happy, so I was stunned the day my friend entered the courtyard with tears streaming down his cheeks. I dropped the spear I was drilling with and ran to him.
“Joshua?”
“He’s dead,” Joshua said.
I embraced him and he collapsed into my arms sobbing. He was wearing wool leggings and boots, so I knew immediately that he’d just returned from one of his visits into the mountains.
“A piece of ice fell from over his cave. I found him under it. Crushed. He was frozen solid.”
“So you couldn’t…”
Joshua pushed me back and held me by the shoulders. “That’s just it. I wasn’t there in time. I not only couldn’t save him, I wasn’t even there to comfort him.”
“Yes you were,” I said.
Joshua dug his fingers into my shoulders and shook me as if I was hysterical and he was trying to get my attention, then suddenly he let go of me and shrugged. “I’m going to the temple to pray.”
“I’ll join you soon. Fifteen and I have three more movements to practice.” My sparring partner waited patiently at the edge of the courtyard, spear in hand, watching.
Joshua got almost to the doors before he turned. “Do you know the difference between praying and meditating, Biff?”
I shook my head.
“Praying is talking to God. Meditating is listening. I’ve spent most of these last six years listening. Do you know what I’ve heard?”
Again I said nothing.
“Not a single thing, Biff. Now I have some things I want to say.”
“I’m sorry about your friend,” I said.
“I know.” He turned and started inside.
“Josh,” I called. He paused and looked over his shoulder at me.
“I won’t let that happen to you, you know that, right?”
“I know,” he said, then he went inside to give his father a divine ass-chewing.
The next morning Gaspar summoned us to the tea room. The abbot looked as if he had not slept in days and whatever his age, he was carrying a century of misery in his eyes.
“Sit,” he said, and we did. “The old man of the mountain is dead.”
“Who?”
“That’s what I called the yeti, the old man of the mountain. He has passed on to his next life and it is time for you to go.”
Joshua said nothing, but sat with his hands folded in his lap, staring at the table.
“What does one have to do with the other?” I asked. “Why should we leave because the yeti has died? We didn’t know he even existed until we had been here for two years.”
“But I did,” said Gaspar.
I felt a heat rising in my face—I’m sure that my scalp and ears must have flushed, because Gaspar scoffed at me. “There is nothing else here for you. There was nothing here for you from the beginning. I would not have allowed you to stay if you weren’t Joshua’s friend.” It was the first time he’d used either of our names since we’d arrived at the monastery. “Number Four will meet you at the gate. He has the possessions you arrived with, as well as some food for your journey.”
“We can’t go home,” Joshua said at last. “I don’t know enough yet.”
“No,” said Gaspar, “I suspect that you don’t. But you know all that you will learn here. If you come to a river and find a boat at the edge, you will use that boat to cross and it will serve you well, but once across the river, do you put the boat on your shoulders and carry it with you on the rest of your journey?”
“How big is the boat?” I asked.
“What color is the boat?” asked Joshua.
“How far is the rest of the journey?” I queried.
“Is Biff there to carry the oars, or do I have to carry everything?” asked Josh.
“No!” screamed Gaspar. “No, you don’t take the boat along on the journey. It has been useful but now it’s simply a burden. It’s a parable, you cretins!”
Joshua and I bowed our heads under Gaspar’s anger. As the abbot railed, Joshua smiled at me and winked. When I saw the smile I knew that he’d be okay.
Gaspar finished his tirade, then caught his breath and resumed in the tone of the tolerant monk that we were used to. “As I was saying, there is no more for you to learn. Joshua, go be a bodhisattva for your people, and Biff, try not to kill anyone with what we have taught you here.”
“So do we get our boat now?” Joshua asked.
Gaspar looked as if he were about to explode, then Joshua held his hand up and the old man remained silent.
“We are grateful for our time here, Gaspar. These monks are noble and honorable men, and we have learned much from them. But you, honorable abbot, are a pretender. You have mastered a few tricks of the body, and you can reach a trance state, but you are not an enlightened being, though I think you have glimpsed enlightenment. You look everywhere for answers but where they lie. Nevertheless, your deception hasn’t stopped you from teaching us. We thank you, Gaspar. Hypocrite. Wise man. Bodhisattva.”
Gaspar sat staring at Joshua, who had spoken as if he were talking to a child. The old man went about fixing the tea, more feebly now, I thought, but maybe that was my imagination.
“And you knew this?” Gaspar asked me.
I shrugged. “What enlightened being travels halfway around the world following a star on the rumor that a Messiah has been born?”
“He means across the world,” said Josh.
“I mean around the world.” I elbowed Joshua in the ribs because it was easier than explaining my theory of universal stickiness to Gaspar. The old guy was having a rough day as it was.
Gaspar poured tea for all of us, then sat down with a sigh. “You were not a disappointment, Joshua. The three of us knew as soon as we saw you that you were a being unlike any other. Brahman born to flesh, my brother said.”
“What gave it away,” I said, “the angels on the roof of the stable?”
Gaspar ignored me. “But you were still an infant, and whatever it was that we were looking for, you were not it—not yet, anyway. We could have stayed, I suppose, and helped to raise you, protect you, but we were all dense. Balthasar wanted to find the key to immortality, and there was no way that you could give him that, and my brother and I wanted the keys to the universe, and those were not to be found in Bethlehem either. So we warned your father of Herod’s intent to have you killed, we gave him gold to get you out of the country, and we returned to the East.”
“Melchior is your brother?”
Gaspar nodded. “We were princes of Tamil. Melchior is the oldest, so he would have inherited our lands, but I would have received a small fiefdom as well. Like Siddhartha, we eschewed worldly pleasures to pursue enlightenment.”
“How did you end up here, in these mountains?” I asked.
“Chasing Buddhas.” Gaspar smiled. “I had heard that there lived a sage in these mountains. The locals called him the old man of the mountain. I came looking for the sage, and what I found was the yeti. Who knows how old he really was, or how long he’d been here? What I did know was that he was the last of his kind and that he would die before long without h
elp. I stayed here and I built this monastery. Along with the monks who came here to study, I have been taking care of the yeti since you two were just infants. Now he is gone. I have no purpose, and I have learned nothing. Whatever there was to know here died under that lump of ice.”
Joshua reached across the table and took the old man’s hand. “You drill us every day in the same movements, we practice the same brush strokes over and over, we chant the same mantras, why? So that these actions will become natural, spontaneous, without being diluted by thought, right?”
“Yes,” said Gaspar.
“Compassion is the same way,” said Joshua. “That’s what the yeti knew. He loved constantly, instantly, spontaneously, without thought or words. That’s what he taught me. Love is not something you think about, it is a state in which you dwell. That was his gift.”
“Wow,” I said.
“I came here to learn that,” said Josh. “You taught it to me as much as the yeti.”
“Me?” Gaspar had been pouring the tea as Joshua spoke and now he noticed that he’d overfilled his cup and the tea was running all over the table.
“Who took care of him? Fed him? Looked after him? Did you have to think about that before you did it?”
“No,” said Gaspar.
Joshua stood. “Thanks for the boat.”
Gaspar didn’t accompany us to the front gate. As he promised, Number Four was waiting for us with our clothes and the money we had when we arrived six years before. I picked up the ying-yang vial of poison that Joy had given me and slipped the lanyard over my head, then I pushed the sheathed black glass dagger into the belt of my robe and tucked my clothes under my arm.
“You will go to find Gaspar’s brother?” Number Four asked. Number Four was one of the older monks, one of the ones who had served the emperor as a soldier, and a long white scar marked his head from the middle of his shaved scalp to his right ear, which had healed to a forked shape.
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