Neon Lotus

by Marc Laidlaw

  “Is there some reason he can’t come with us?” Marianne asked.

  “It’s all right,” Jetsun said. “I just don’t want to be left behind.”

  “That passage is the only entrance to the temple,” Dhondub told him. “There is no chance of them leaving without you.”

  Jetsun pulled his arm from Dhondub’s grasp and went to pour himself a cup of tea from a huge copper kettle. With a smile, he raised the cup to Marianne. “Good luck!”

  “Go ahead,” Dr. Norbu said.

  She stepped into the passage, putting her hands upon the rock walls at either side. She walked toward the light, hearing Dr. Norbu’s footsteps behind her. The passage crooked right and then widened until she could no longer touch both walls at the same time. A soft white radiance flooded the air. She saw the walls angling up into dimness then dropping sharply to form a natural portico. Through that gateway the light streamed steadily, yet there was a flickering quality to it that reminded her of lightning or flames in a wood fire.

  She stopped in the entryway. Reting touched her elbow. The floor of the cave was inlaid with colored tile. She walked out into the temple with the feeling that she was dreaming.

  All that she saw strengthened this impression.

  The cave was alive with light. Constant flickering lines of radiance played through the walls, causing the air to shimmer and dance. The shadows of stalagmites and stalactites leapt forward and back across the floor as the luminance shifted. Much of the cavern seemed to be quartz; she felt as if she had stepped into the center of an enormous geode.

  For a minute she was too dazzled by the piezoelectric display to take notice of anything else. But gradually her eyes followed the crackling trails of light and she realized that they had a focus.

  At the far end of the cavern stood a figure of gold and white, studded with gleaming gems. It moved slowly as if swept by unseen currents. At first she thought it was a person, despite the fact that it stood over three meters tall.

  Then she saw that it was Chenrezi.

  She moved forward on the tesselated floor, running.

  Lightning zigzagged through the rocks above, streaming toward the idol, bathing it in radiant energy. She felt like a bolt of thunder herself, flung without abandon at the figure.

  Chenrezi stood above her, strange expressions crossing his eleven faces, while his thousand arms and five thousand fingers flowed like the graceful tendrils of a sea anemone. The fingers brushed each other, touching tip to tip, parting again. Countless intricate patterns formed as the hands and fingers wove in and around one another; connections were made and broken by the instant. His fingers shaped the most elaborate mudras she had ever seen.

  In the palm of each hand, a jeweled eye gleamed as if it had only now blinked and been moistened by tears.

  She stared at him, trying to find the signature of the artisans and engineers who had built him. The limbs were seamless, the fingers unflawed ivory; they looked like moon-white flesh.

  Chenrezi’s eleven heads were primarily of three colors—emerald, ivory, and cinnabar. They rose in tiers like buds on a living stalk. The lowest three were green, white, and red, with white facing outward. Above them were three more, one of each color, with the green head facing forward. Above these, and slightly smaller, was another set of three, with this time the red overlooking the chamber. The penultimate head bore a dark blue visage, wrathful and staring from three eyes. And at the very peak of the spire—like a topknot on the blue head—was a tiny red face in the likeness of the Buddha Amitabha.

  The heads blinked, smiled and gaped, the five forward faces staring down at Marianne. The illusion of life was perfect. Chenrezi apparently could do everything but walk. His ivory feet were rooted to a disk of polished white stone where the brilliant electricity of the cavern shone at its brightest and most tumultuous.

  “It is the most perfect automaton ever created,” Dr. Norbu whispered. “No one has dared tamper with it to explore the mechanism, but the technology appears as beautiful as the artistry.”

  “A prayer machine?”

  “That’s only my guess based on the holograms I was shown by Dhondub Ling. You see, it is forever forming mudras with its hands. It would appear that the joining of fingertips creates unique electric pathways. It could be a computer, using a thousand hands to store and manipulate binary information. You could think of the hands as memory and the eleven heads as registers. If there were only some way to speak to it, to access that memory, to discover what was stored here when the statue was built.”

  “Religious information probably,” Marianne said. “If it is an elaborate prayer device, those mudras might simply be auspicious gestures. Whoever built the statue might have set it here to work its rituals throughout the ages. It would be a bit like all the solar-powered prayer wheels. But of course this is something on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

  “The nomads believe it was set here to protect Tibet,” said Dr. Norbu. “Knowledge of its presence has been passed down for generations. It has its keepers and guardians, but there’s been little need for maintenance.”

  Marianne gazed up at the eleven faces of the statue. “And why have they brought us here now?”

  “Because I asked them to,” Chenrezi answered.

  For a moment Marianne and Dr. Norbu did not move. In the distance, she could hear the river. Her eyes remained fixed on the god’s faces. The voice, small and almost inaudible, had come from the topmost head of Amitabha, to whom in the legends Chenrezi had made his vow to save all sentient beings from suffering.

  “It speaks,” said Dr. Norbu.

  “I do,” said the fierce blue head of Vajrapani, lord of energy, second from the top. “I also hear, and my eyes never close. None of them—none of a thousand and twenty-three.”

  “And did those who . . . who constructed you, give you this ability?” asked Dr. Norbu. Marianne felt too stunned to speak.

  The lowest of the five forward-facing heads—the white one—answered his question: “I was created with many abilities, Doctor Norbu. Few of these remain, after the passage of ages.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “My guardians have spoken of you. I have received their news when I gave counsel over the years. It was upon hearing of your work, and that of your late colleague, that I decided you were the ones whose goals most closely matched my own. I seek your assistance with a matter that will ultimately benefit yourselves.”

  “How long have you been here?” Marianne asked, finally finding her voice.

  Several of the faces honored her with beatific smiles, but that of the wrathful blue Vajrapani grew increasingly enraged.

  “I have lost that knowledge,” said the lowest white face,

  “Lost it? How?”

  Two of Chenrezi’s hands were clasped together before his breast, in prayer. Now he parted them slightly and held them out to show that they were empty.

  “Once these hands held a black heart-shaped crystal, the Wish-Fulfilling Gem. My own creators took it from me, and with it I lost the knowledge of who they were and of how I came here.”

  As he spoke, his other hands continued to intertwine, fingers curling together, his ceaseless unconscious processes shown outwardly in the movement of his limbs.

  “Over time, I have lost other objects as well, without which I operate at a level far below my ultimate capacity. I recall the objects themselves, but lacking them I also lack their powers.” He held out four of his hands, one at a time, showing each of them to be empty. “In this hand I held a golden wheel. In this, a lotus with crystal petals. Here, a pitcher full of nectar. And here, a golden vajra.”

  Marianne had seen a thousand traditional paintings of the thousand-armed Chenrezi, and in all of them he carried various sacred objects. She wondered if she were looking at the original model that lay behind those images.

  “I need these things,” Chenrezi said. “My land and my people are wracked by suffering. I am all but useless to them i
n my present condition. I know that to you I may appear to be no more than a cleverly constructed machine, but believe me when I tell you that I was designed according to the principles of compassion. I am quite capable of feeling.”

  “How can that be?” Marianne asked. “Without a body of flesh—”

  “Love is not merely a by-product of chemical existence. What you know as compassion is a reflection of abstract principles in the universe. Whoever my makers were, they understood these laws; just as they understood the human psyche and imbued me with this understanding.”

  “I can’t say whether you’re right or wrong,” said Marianne. “These are things I don’t understand myself.”

  “But you know that what I say is possible.”

  She nodded. “From what Dr. Norbu has taught me—”

  “Which is no more than what you proved and taught to me, Marianne, when you were Tashi and I was your student,”

  “When I was Tashi. Yes, of course. But I am not Tashi any longer. So what good am I to you, Chenrezi?”

  “Ask the gods,” he replied. “It was they who chose you, did they not, through the exiled State Oracle of Tibet?”

  Marianne felt a recurrent frustration; it was the same she felt when she looked into a Vajrayana temple or watched the patterns on the screen of the Bardo device.

  “Where are the gods?” she asked. “Within me? Or are they abstractions to be captured in equations and fixed inside our computers?”

  Chenrezi smiled. “Is there some reason that the gods cannot dwell within you, as you? And if in you, why not in everything?”

  “Including a machine?” she said.

  “I am glad that you question me,” said Chenrezi. “Others have simply fallen down before me and pretended that it was only to do me honor.”

  “I see no reason to dishonor you,” she said. “You are an incredible creation. But even if you are a divinely inspired machine, I must satisfy my curiosity as well as my skepticism.”

  “This is an excellent thing.”

  “Now these objects,” she continued, “must have some value other than iconographic. They are something more than symbols, is this correct? They have a physical existence.”

  “Or had one. I have no way of knowing whether they remain on the Earth. Long ago they were dispersed, one at a time, and I was enfolded in ignorance. I assume they were hidden with some deliberation. I also believe that they were meant to be returned to me at a suitable time, but unforeseen events may have prevented this. I possess few clues to their present whereabouts.”

  “But what exactly are your goals?” Marianne asked. “Beyond the gathering of these objects, I mean?”

  The disk at the feet of the statue began to pulsate with white fire.

  “To free my people,” said Chenrezi. “To restore Tibet’s independence. The land has been sick; now it is dying. I feel that its passing will strike a mortal wound to humanity itself. Humankind will lose its mind. Evolution is a two-edged sword. Life can advance or it can slip backward. With the holy Potala transformed into a prison by Governor Rato, I foresee great darkness ahead—more evil than any yet witnessed. I envision hell on Earth.”

  “Unfortunately, I share your views,” said Marianne.

  “Will you promise me,” Chenrezi asked, “that when your mind is satisfied, you will tell me so in certain terms?”

  She smiled for the first time since the statue had begun to speak.

  “I have never made a promise to a machine,” she said. “But I will make this one to you.”

  “We share your dream of liberation,” said Dr. Norbu. “It was for this cause that Tashi worked all his life. It is something he and Marianne have in common.”

  “One of the few things,” Marianne murmured.

  “How is that, Marianne Strauss?” asked Chenrezi. “You are not Tibetan. You were born in America; your ancestors are European.”

  “My soul grew from a seed that was planted in Tibet; my roots are in this land, despite my outward appearance. Are you challenging my intentions?”

  “Merely satisfying my own curiosity.” The tier of eleven heads bowed respectfully forward, like a plant stalk bending in the wind.

  “I wish I could come with you,” said Chenrezi. “I am fastened here. I have no power beyond this point. But if you are willing, I would like to send someone with you.”

  Marianne looked around the chamber, half expecting some other statue to step into sight.

  “Would you accept a companion?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “The bodhisattva Tara.”

  “Tara,” whispered Marianne. In the legends, Tara had sprung from one of Chenrezi s tears. “Where is she?”

  The light in the cavern began to pulsate. It streamed in trails over the ceiling and through the cracks in the mosaic tiles, converging on the disk where Chenrezi stood. The statue began to glow, whiter and whiter. Marianne took a step backward, dazzled by the fire; but then it lessened, gathering in a single point in Chenrezi’s penultimate head. The third eye of blue Vajrapani burned with an intense flame. She stared into the eye as if into a diamond, absorbed by the scintillation of rainbow colors—refracted white light, a swirling rainbow.

  A thin beam shone from the fiery eye, focused on the center of her forehead. She felt a warmth within her skull, as if her brains were turning to honey and dripping down through channels in her body. Although she had not closed her eyes, she no longer saw the cavern or Dr. Norbu or anything familiar to her.

  She floated at the center of a pearly white sphere. She tried to look down at her body but she seemed not to have one.

  I am the sphere, she realized.

  Her mind was a perfect circle, expanding infinitely through space and time. She had become both center and circumference.

  Suddenly, out of the soft white glory, there appeared a flicker. A rainbow bubble condensed from the milky, iridescent whiteness.

  The colors shifted and took on the shape of a young girl. The face captivated Marianne: she had never seen such clear, wise eyes. They sparkled with life, gazing back at her with curiosity the equal of her own. The smiling mouth opened and laughter rebounded from the edges of the sphere that was Marianne’s mind. The rainbow girl seemed like the grain of divine sand around which this boundless pearl had accreted. Here was a part of herself that she had hardly known existed.

  “What are you?”

  “I am part of you, and also part of Chenrezi,” the rainbow Tara said. “May I come with you?”

  “Of course,” Marianne thought, flooding the diamond-hued girl with affirmation. “But how?”

  “I will stay here, within you. Wherever you go, I go also.”

  “Welcome, then, Tara.”

  The girl’s dazzling laughter caused her eyes to fly open. She found herself sitting on the cavern’s tiled floor, gazing up at Chenrezi. Dr. Norbu crouched next to her, fingers on her wrist.

  “Are you all right?” he said. “You dropped so quickly, I thought you had passed out.”

  “Not out,” she said. “In.”

  She could hear Tara’s laughter echoing through her mind.

  “Chenrezi,” she said, “whoever made you had incredible skill—and, as you say, great knowledge of human beings. I did not know such things were possible.”

  “I merely draw on your own power,” Chenrezi replied. “Do you like your new companion? She can go with you where I cannot.”

  “I love her,” Marianne said. “She feels like . . . like myself, and yet someone else. A sister,”

  “Sister,” Tara echoed. “That I am.”

  “What happened?” Dr. Norbu asked.

  “I have given her a yidam, Doctor. A personal deity, a companion and a guide who is a part of herself and yet shares some of my knowledge.”

  Dr. Norbu smiled, taking her hands. “You have received a Tara?” he asked, looking into Marianne’s eyes.

  “She’s here inside me, Reting. It’s the strangest sensation.”

 
He nodded. “I know it well, Marianne. I was introduced to a yidam of my own many years ago, shortly after Tashi’s death. It was not a Tara but a wrathful god, Mahakala, to offset my own tendencies toward passivity. A lama gave me the empowerment and guided me through the visualizations, but I have so little time for meditation these days that Mahakala’s image grows always fainter, and I forget details.”

  “Tara will not fade,” said Chenrezi. “Not unless you will her away, Marianne.”

  I would never do that, Marianne thought.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Now I think we should ask what you know about these objects, your ornaments. Where might they be found? You’re aware that little in Tibet remains as it was. Almost everything has changed.”

  “One thing has not,” said Chenrezi, “and that is the spirit of my people. Look to them for assistance. The nomads long ago began the search for my possessions, flinging their net wide over Tibet, into China and India, Russia and Mongolia. They will lead you from here, for I cannot leave this spot. News of current affairs is more to be trusted from their mouths than from mine.”

  “Say goodbye,” Tara whispered.

  “Goodbye, then,” said Marianne.

  The eleven faces of Chenrezi, including the wrathful blue one, gave her their fondest smiles. “Tashi deleg” they said. “Good fortune.”

  Then the statue stiffened slightly and the eyes lost some of their luster. The hands curled on through intricate manipulations. Hundreds of mudras blended into one another, vanishing almost in the instant they arose, each moment presenting a different tapestry of fingers.

  She wondered at the memories lost among those hands, irretrievable without the jewel, the vajra, the vase, the lotus, and the wheel. She hoped that one day she would be able to restore the ornaments and ask Chenrezi who had made him, and why.

  As they turned and walked toward the fissure that led out of the cavern, she felt an intense sadness. She did not want to leave Chenrezi’s presence; she wanted their conversation to go on endlessly, for his voices were as hypnotic as the motion of his hands. She felt a tear on her cheek. Wiping it away, she had a momentary vision of Tara, who was also weeping.