Maya (39 page)

“
Aaiyay. Baitiyay
.”

The deep voice emerged out of silence like the throaty rush of air from a baritone sax. I turned and saw a big man sitting just to the left of the table, on a chowki platform covered with a thick wool carpet emblazoned with woven patterns of leaves and flowers. The man had his legs and feet drawn up under his robes. Above his waist he was wearing only a sleeveless yellow singlet. He had broad, muscular shoulders and arms. In front of him lay the leaves of a text he had obviously been reading before being interrupted.

“I am Dorje Sherap,” he said, somewhat perfunctorily, in Hindi. “Please, sit down.” He gestured toward a nearby chair—the only other piece of furniture in the room.

My host was a middle-aged Tibetan with luxuriant silver brows and stern eyes. A scar ran diagonally across one cheek, beginning just below the left eye and continuing to the angular hinge of his jaw. It looked like it had been made by a sharp blade in a single swift stroke. On the floor next to where he sat, a tiny kitten pounced and leapt, tossing itself into the air like a piece of downy fluff. The little cat was tethered at one end of a fine golden chain looped, at the opposite end, around one leg of the chowki. I remembered this kitten several months later, when I first heard the story of Gampopa and Milarepa, intended to illustrate the danger of becoming attached to Buddhist teachings. “If fettered,” Milarepa had once cautioned his disciple, “one may as well be bound by an iron chain as a gold one, for there is no real difference.”

I introduced myself and described my training at Chicago and my work with Indian pundits. I also told him, in some detail, what I had read in Sanskrit and what I hoped to read in Tibetan. I then proposed that we exchange lessons with each other: I would tutor him in English in return for instruction in Tibetan. He heard me out, then courteously declined my offer. He was fluent in Hindi and this, in his view, was sufficient for his purposes here in India. As it turned out, Geshe Sherap was a celebrated professor with extensive administrative responsibilities; he had neither time nor inclination for such an arrangement. He had been recruited to help create the institute's new library and already had plans to return to Drepung Monastery, in South India, when his work in Sarnath was complete. Nevertheless, I seem to have provoked his interest, for he questioned me about the details of my studies. As it happened, I had only recently begun reading, in English translation,
The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines
and was totally absorbed in the text. I mentioned this and was about to go on when the geshe interrupted me midsentence.

“
Nortul
. . .” He pronounced the Tibetan name warmly but with dismay, as if he were greeting an old friend who had unexpectedly appeared at the door. I remember that I actually glanced over my shoulder, expecting to see someone standing there. But we were alone.

After a long silence he spoke again, this time to me. “There is . . . a Nyingmapa lama . . .”

“Yes?” I waited.

“I think he might be interested in your proposal.”

I felt myself becoming excited. “This lama lives here, in the monastery?”

“Oh no. He is in Delhi.”

“In Delhi?”

“You would need to go there to meet him. Of course I cannot say for certain that he would accept.”

I was about to object—
What good is a teacher in Delhi when I live in Banaras?
—but Dorje Sherap was obviously not concerned about this relatively minor inconvenience. He appeared to be preoccupied with some other, more pressing concern.

“Yes,” he said, almost as if he were talking to himself. “I think he might be interested. But it is curious . . .”

“What?”

He frowned. “That you should come here now, at this particular moment—just when I have once again found him. After all these years.”

“But why curious?” I repeated the same Hindi word he had himself used:
ajib.

He did not answer. Instead, he pushed his legs off the chowki and stood up. “Excuse me.” He walked briskly out the door and returned with a china cup. He cleared a spot on the table and set it down next to his own, then lifted a massive thermos from the floor and filled them both with what looked like chai. “Please.” He indicated the new cup. “It is Tibetan tea.” He watched me closely, smiling in anticipation.

I thanked him, picked it and took a sip. The liquid was hot and salty, with a slight oily flavor. My face must have betrayed, in that first moment, some hint of discomfort.

“Have you tasted this tea before?”

I swallowed and shook my head. “No . . .”

“How do you find it?”

“It's . . .” I searched for the appropriate words. “It tastes like soup. Like some kind of buttery soup.”

He laughed out loud with delight. “Yes. Think of it, then, as soup! Forget all about tea and it will taste better. Everything depends on how you think. Isn't it so?”

This time it was me who smiled. “It's good,” I said, reassuringly. “I like it.” I took another sip.

“Very well.” He settled back down on the chowki, rearranging the robes around his legs. “Now, let me tell you about Nortul Rinpoche.”
“I first met this lama in Tibet—before the Chinese. This was my final year as a student. I was living then in Lhasa, training at Drepung Monastery. But I had gone on pilgrimage to Samye Monastery. You know Samye?”

I nodded. I knew that the monastery at Samye was revered as Tibet's most ancient center of learning. Almost a thousand years ago it had been the central clearinghouse for Buddhist teachings streaming in from India, a place where the early translation teams had worked to recast the Sanskrit texts into a form of Tibetan that had been constructed for this purpose.

“At the time of my visit,” he continued, his Hindi marked by a distinctly Tibetan accent, “Nortul Rinpoche was also there on a pilgrimage. He had walked to Samye from his monastery in eastern Tibet in order to do a retreat at Chim Puk—a meditation cave not far from the monastery. He had been in the cave for several months, I think. But the very day I arrived, he finished his retreat and came to the monastery for a brief stay.”

Dorje Sherap went on to tell me how, in that first chance meeting, the two men passed four or five days in each other's company, engrossed the entire time in conversations that clearly left a strong impression on him. Back in Lhasa he had puzzled over the memory of this unusual Nyingmapa lama. Here was an old man from an unknown, provincial monastery—somewhere out in the boondocks of Kham—who was deeply conversant in a genre of literature rarely studied but held in the highest esteem among the intellectual elite at Drepung.

“I had never before encountered such unpretentious erudition. He is a great scholar, with a remarkable knowledge of Indian Mahayana doctrines. But he is especially interested in
sherchin
—you know? What is the Sanskrit?”

“Prajnaparamita?”

“Yes, yes,” he nodded. “That is it. What you are yourself now reading. These texts, they are very important for his practice.

“When we parted at Samye,” he continued, “there was no reason to expect we would ever see each other again.”

And they wouldn't have if not for the violent upheaval of 1959 when the Chinese army clamped down on Tibet.

“I remember everything.” The geshe pressed his lips together. “Everything. From the moment the Chinese army first entered Lhasa. We had just finished morning puja when we heard, from the streets below, the faraway sound of canons and guns. Shortly after this some laypeople came
to the monastery and told us that the Chinese were killing monks—that we should all leave Lhasa immediately. I and some of the other senior students went to the abbot. He told us we should do as they said and go quickly into the country. There was no time to prepare. I left with ten others, in a small group. We assumed that the fighting would be over in a few days, and that we would then return to our old life. I took with me only one thing—a copy of Tsongkhapa's
Lamrim Chenpo
—a text I was studying at the time. I still have it. It is all I have from Tibet.

“When we reached the first village, the people told us that the Chinese had already been there and they might return at any time. It was not safe. They told us we should go farther into the mountains. So we went on walking. And everywhere we went people told us, ‘Do not stop.' Still, two old lamas were with us—one of them my teacher—and they were unable to continue. I did not want to leave them behind, but my teacher insisted. He would not allow us to stay with him. We left him and the other lama with a family of nomads who were camped high in the mountains. They gave us some tsampa and balep to carry with us to eat, and we continued on to India. By this time we were only a few days from the border, but the crossing was not easy. The pass was very high. Snow was falling. We slept huddled together at night, changing positions frequently so that some of us could be in among the others for warmth.”

Dorje Sherab and Nortul met for the second time in a refugee camp set up by Nehru's government to accommodate the influx of Tibetans streaming across the border at Misamari, near Tezpur in the North Indian state of Assam. Here the two men were thrown together again under circumstances quite different from the tranquil security of Samye. This time their paths crossed in a place that still conjures up nightmarish memories among the generation of Tibetans who were forced to flee from the Chinese. Thousands of them were marooned there in the jungle, oppressed by the low altitude and monsoon heat, by the swarms of malarial mosquitoes. Fetid water and lack of adequate latrine facilities contributed to an epidemic of hepatitis among the displaced men, women, and children who camped there waiting to be redistributed. It was a time of sickness, of uncertainty and apprehension, a time of endless waiting.

“When we arrived in Tezpur, I was taken to a large tent with bunks, and there he was: Nortul! He had walked all alone from Kham. Of course, I was very surprised to see him again. It was in the camp where I learned
what little English I know. Nortul and I studied the language with an old British lady. We were there together for over a month before I was transferred to a settlement in South India.”

Once again he and Nortul parted ways. And that would certainly have been the end of it, if not for one further, very recent development.

It was obvious from what Dorje Sherap told me that since arriving in India, he had established a reputation as an eminent scholar. When plans took shape for the founding of a new Drepung Loseling Monastery in Karnataka State, he had been among an elite core of intellectuals recruited by the Dalai Lama to help. The previous fall—just about the time I moved to Banaras—he had been sent north as an emissary of the abbot of Drepung to assist with the creation of the Institute for Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath. In this official capacity he had traveled to the Indian capital only a few weeks before we talked. The purpose of his visit was to confer with librarians at Delhi University regarding several crates of Tibetan texts that had been in storage there since the time of the Sino-Indian border conflict in 1962. The university had no use for such materials, and arrangements were underway to have them donated to the Institute in Sarnath. The boxes had lain neglected for all these years in a storage facility, uncatalogued and, in point of fact, unopened. Or at least this was what the geshe had been told by his abbot. But when he actually arrived at the university library in Delhi, he was startled to hear that someone else had apparently gotten there before him.

“I knew nothing about this,” Dorje Sherap exclaimed. “Nothing at all. The arrangements certainly had not come through our office at Drepung.”

The director of the library told him that only a few weeks before, an old lama had appeared at the library one afternoon and produced an official letter of introduction signed by someone at the Ministry of Home Affairs authorizing the bearer to inspect the contents of the crates from Ladakh before they were released for shipment to Sarnath.

According to what the librarian told Geshe Sherap, since his arrival the mysterious lama had apparently been working nonstop. Every morning when they came to open the building, people from the library staff found him waiting outside the door, an enormous flowered thermos of chai suspended from one shoulder by a plastic strap; every evening at closing he was escorted out. Or rather, this had been his schedule prior to when he had somehow managed to get himself locked in for the night. One evening the peon assigned to the task of fetching the lama had apparently
neglected to do so. No one realized this mistake until the next morning. When the lama didn't show up at his usual post outside the main entrance to the library, the director went to check and found him in the basement, still sitting at the table where he worked, brooding over a stack of long, narrow woodblock prints. The most astonishing part, however, was not simply that this enigmatic Tibetan monk had been at it for almost twenty-four hours without any break but that he appeared to be completely unaware of how much time had passed. He thought that the library was only then closing for the night.

This story made the rounds, and the monk's assiduousness won him the affection and respect of the library staff. After that incident, he was permitted to remain overnight now and again at the discretion of the director.

Naturally enough, Dorje Sherap was curious to make the acquaintance of any scholar so diligent as this. He was escorted down into the storage facilities, where he saw a squat man in shabby robes that had obviously been restitched and repaired countless times over the years. The old fellow was at that very moment working away with a pry bar, laboring to open yet another crate, but when the two men entered he looked up from his work. Imagine the learned geshe's surprise when he recognized the same Nyingmapa lama he had first met at Samye almost two decades before. Geshe Sherap made a point of telling me that he had himself immediately recognized Nortul, whose appearance and demeanor had not changed in the slightest over the intervening years.