Shadow of the Silk Road

by Colin Thubron

  A Living Buddha is the highest form of Lamaist saint. He is chosen not by lineage but by divination, for he is the reincarnation of many previous Buddhas, the inheritor of a distilled holiness. The Dalai Lama is the highest of these chosen ones, and in China and Tibet there are others; but Beijing fears them as a focus of Tibetan nationalism, so they are displaced, half secularised, hidden away.

  The Living Buddha of Tianshui inhabits a small flat in a guarded compound of the National Minority People’s University, where he teaches Buddhism. There, I suppose, he has been safely sterilised by authority, and there he greets me with a heavy calm, sitting me down on a sofa upholstered with Chinese flowers before a ceremonious bowl of fruit. He emanates a sturdy power. His slippers are inscribed ‘Sport’. His shaven head emerges seamlessly from a bull neck, and his eyebrows stop halfway through their natural arc, dotting his face with a look of genial surprise. In the background I glimpse a shining coil of hair as his wife withdraws, and two teenage daughters linger in the doorway to watch us. One is dark, effervescent; the other tall and heartbreakingly beautiful. The Living Buddha smiles at them, and they vanish. Only occasionally his eyes flicker away from mine, as if a thought or question momentarily perturbs him.

  I wonder how he started on this troubled path, who chose him, why. His answers come tranquil and measured, as if he had been born into this state and nothing had ever changed. ‘By custom we identify a Living Buddha after the previous one dies. It’s done by charms, by prayer perhaps, and by the patterns on the oracle lake near Lhasa. I was chosen by the teacher of the last Panchen Lama…’ He adds without a flicker: ‘And it was confirmed by the Chinese government.’ It is my gaze that drops from his. ‘I was born in the same year as the previous Buddha–that’s important. I was just a boy, living with my parents, when the search group reached my area. A neighbour told them my birth date, and they took me away with them to the temple at Tianshui. I was selected from a thousand others.’

  ‘What did you feel about being taken away?’

  ‘I was just a child. I didn’t feel anything.’

  I search his face. Has he forgotten? Or have I? Years ago, my head full of psychologists’ clichés, I had watched in bewilderment as children in a Beijing orphanage played together with no trace of Western tension. I ask: ‘What did your parents feel?’

  ‘They didn’t want me to go. They were peasants. They wanted me to help in the fields.’ He looks down at his hands. ‘All the same, I went. But at the age of seventeen I had to leave again. The Communist revolution had come, and the monks were being disbanded everywhere. At first I went on studying. Then in 1964 the government ordered me to marry. They wanted monks to be like other people.’

  ‘You have a beautiful family.’

  He smiles softly. ‘Thank you.’

  Buddhism had always struggled to justify itself here, I knew. Confucianism and Communism worked themselves out in society–whether in filial piety or social advance–but Buddhism conjured private salvation. Its destiny was the shedding of illusion. And society was a mirage.

  ‘But personal things are important to us too.’ The Living Buddha glances at the door where his daughters were. ‘This life, after all, is the only one in which the present relationships will ever exist. So we must do well by them. In the next life I will be born to different parents, and my children will not be born to me, or perhaps even know me, and my wife will be someone else’s. After death, your family cannot follow you.’

  These Buddhist values had not saved him, of course. ‘During the Cultural Revolution I was struggled badly. The Red Guards hated the idea of a Living Buddha. Four thousand of them came to get me. I was beaten so badly I had to lie flat for three months, my body broken.’ He touches his arms and knees. ‘All the time they were beating me they were saying “You’re wrong! You’re wrong! Wrong!” and I said “Yes, yes, I’m wrong, I’m wrong!” ’ He bursts suddenly into laughter: not the tense Chinese stammer but a timeless greeting of worldly folly. ‘And all the time I knew in my heart that I was on my way somewhere else, my own path. But I said nothing. While I lay on my back I composed a Tibetan grammar in my head, and years later I wrote it. That way I survived.’

  These struggle sessions could be uniquely terrible. In essence they were mass gang-beatings–a Calvary of mockery and torture–sometimes inflicted by a mob of neighbours and erstwhile friends. As the bullying and the terror intensified, everything the victim said would be cursed and denied, until all shred of self-worth was gone. Forced confessions set in train the liquidation of the self. The shame drove many to suicide. If the victim repudiated his family, another prop of selfhood fell away. In time, if he underwent deeper thought-reform, his pretence of shame might itself slowly destroy the conviction of his innocence, like a mask eating into the face. In this scenario the victim longed to be culpable, otherwise the world itself was deranged. A strange, free-floating guilt enshrouded him. He became his own accuser, his own crime. And the work was complete.

  But the struggle session was usually too swift and sudden for more than makeshift pretence. The screamed confessions were like acts of theatre, and the persecutors too were playing a preordained role–the state had written the script. Yet a million people died. Now, almost forty years later, the rhetoric seems as thin as ditties. And often, as with the Living Buddha, something in the victim’s core remained inviolate.

  He says: ‘After that I was sent out into the countryside to work among the peasants in the region where I had been Buddha. I was there twelve years.’ He speaks without bitterness or self-pity. ‘Then at last I was assigned here. And now I teach religion to Tibetan students. I even have a house beside the temple in Tianshui, and often I go there for ceremonies. It’s a beautiful place.’

  The environment is for ever, he says–now he might be addressing a class–so we must be tender to it. We come and go, but it stays. So he is happy now?

  ‘After the Cultural Revolution, anything is happy.’

  His younger daughter has eased the door open a crack, but is betrayed by a tiny dog which barges through, flies round the room and out again. The Buddha grins indulgently. ‘And yes, I can forgive those young people, because all China went mad at that time.’ He bursts into incredulous laughter again. ‘From top to bottom, nobody escaped–not the high officials, nor Party members, nor the Living Buddha, nor ordinary workers. All China, mad! And now I put that time out of my mind.’ He plucks an imaginary worm from his forehead. ‘I just forget it.’

  I do not know if this forgiveness stems from Buddhist compassion or from something else. The Cultural Revolution was blamed on a handful of conspirators–the so-called Gang of Four–then the country set about forgetting. Secretly the terrible fault-line of the past ran through all society–through every work unit, every village, sometimes every family–but silence closed over it.

  As I talk with the Living Buddha, his forgiveness touches me with paradoxical misgiving. I realise I want anger, I want recrimination and failure to understand. In Western dogma psychic health depends on acknowledgement of the past, on coming to terms. Remembrance is catharsis. But to the Cultural Revolution, in the end, almost everybody fell victim, everybody suffered. Perhaps to recall what you did, or what was done, is to remember another person, in another existence. And to choose forgetfulness is to choose life.

  My bus winds up into the land of carved dust. The hills circle and uncoil around us, then level out into a high valley where a tributary of the Yellow River has smoothed its bed to a broken pavement. Out of the scattered villages the bus fills up with Muslim Hui, their women wimpled in black or dark green lace; and soon the towns are thronged with their high white caps, as if thousands of chefs were inexplicably wheeling bicycles and handcarts through the streets. As we go west, the mosque minarets, where no muezzin is allowed to call, taper above the roofs in fantastical belvederes and colonettes, or stand like filigreed toys along the heights which shadow us to Labrang.

  Then suddenly, beyond Linxia, the lo
ess hills have gone, and our valley steepens into stone. A young monk climbs on board, and smiling Tibetan herdsmen in dented felt hats. The shoulders of unseen mountains drop towards us out of the clouds. Once some police stop the bus and we are all emptied on to the verge while a man sprays disinfectant over the floor. The SARS virus has erupted in Xian to our east. The leftover Chinese hook on white masks. The Tibetans go on smiling.

  Soon we are travelling up a steep, misty corridor. The river flows faster, purer, the colour of pale jade. The mountains close in. We have crossed a border unmarked by any map, already infringing on the plateaux of Tibet. The Buddhist stupas sit like nipples on the hills, while prayer-flags fly from the house courtyards and rustle over cairns in the pastures. Here and there, set far up a hillside, the tiered roofs of a monastery cascade to white walls. Then the road disintegrates to a gravel track. In the dusk the slopes are stamped with the shapes of sleeping yaks, and snow is falling in a soft, thin silence.

  I disembark into the night and cold of Labrang. I am still more than three hundred miles from the Tibetan frontier. Lights fade down the street where Hui and Chinese shops have settled beside the monastery town beyond. My feet crunch over the snow, seeming light and lonely, and from somewhere in the darkness ahead–like an old god clearing his throat–sounds the braying of a horn. Then a familiar elation wells up: the childlike anticipation of entering the unknown, some perfect otherness. Your body lightens and tingles. The night fills up with half-imagined buildings, voices you do not understand. The experience is inseparable from solitude and a vestigial fear, because you don’t know where the road will end, who will be there.

  As it is, the street empties and I cross a rubbish-filled dyke into the unlit Buddhist quarter, and turn by chance into the monastery guesthouse. It is a courtyard of naked rooms, frosty with trees. Besides a caretaker, I glimpse only the herdsmen pilgrims lumbering from door to door, huge against the snow in their swathing coats. My room has a wooden bed and a pail for collecting water from the communal tap. A coal-burning stove sends a wonky chimney through a hole in the ceiling. A lightbulb hangs from a wire. The room costs fifty pence a night. I stretch out under a damp quilt, and listen to the faint, brittle snap of twigs outside as the snow settles.

  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 s
aints 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.