The Prince and the Zombie (13 page)

O
NCE AGAIN,
Prince Dechö Zangpo crossed the whole breadth of the kingdom until he reached India and the place where the dead dwelled. Eager to get the job done, he kept forcing them to move aside by using the red cone-shaped object, looking around for that distinctive body that was gold on top, silver on the bottom, and had a mane of pure turquoise. He spotted it easily—the zombie in question had taken refuge in the top of a sandalwood tree. The prince took out his ax and touched the trunk of the tree lightly with it. He threatened the zombie, saying, “Come down to the ground; otherwise I'm going to cut down this sandalwood tree!”

Ngödrup Dorje, sure of not remaining a prisoner for very long, replied, “You poor prince, you are going to tire yourself out. Wait, I will be the one to make the effort. I will come down to where you are.”

Thus the prince caught the sly zombie without difficulty and once more put it in the magic sack, which he securely fastened.

On the forty-ninth day, the prince was in the process of crossing the great barren plain that had seen him so many times before, when Ngödrup Dorje began speaking to him in a spellbinding voice:

“In this desolate region, there are no people and you will not find a place to rest, not even a spot the size of a prairie-dog dropping. So to make this long journey a little more pleasant, I propose two solutions. Either you, who are a living being, tell me a story, or I, who am a dead being, will tell you one.”

The prince remained silent, and then the zombie began telling him another beautiful and incredible story.

30

The King of Pearls

O
NCE IN A
certain country there lived a king and queen who regularly had themselves entertained by their court fool. The fool was known as the King of Pearls, because every time he laughed he vomited a great number of exquisite pearls. With the intention of accumulating the greatest possible number of pearls, the king invited to his court many entertainers who were able to make the fool laugh. Now, one day at one of these events, though everyone else was laughing to the point of tears, the fool himself was not able to laugh. This made the king very angry, because he attributed this failure to some bad intention on the part of the King of Pearls. So he began thinking how to punish him.

What had really happened was that the previous evening, when the poor fool had come home, he caught his wife in the midst of deceiving him with another man. That put him in such a bad mood that nothing could make him laugh.

After the evening's entertainment at which he had not been able even to smile, the fool, fearing the king's wrath, was afraid to go home and decided to go spend the night in the stables. But strange noises there kept him from sleeping. Someone was banging against one of the posts in the stable with a wooden stick, and a male voice, impatient and furious, kept repeating over and over, “She's still not here! She's still not here!” The fool recognized the voice of the stable master. It was he who was carrying on in this very strange manner. But the explanation for his behavior was not long in coming. From his hiding place, the King of Pearls heard the hurried steps of a woman entering the stable. As soon as she spoke, he recognized the voice of the king's wife. No matter what excuses she came up with for being late, her angry lover kept beating her and beating her. He beat the living daylights out of her. Then as though no such thing had happened, she yielded herself to the stable master and cheated on the king right before the fool's eyes.

Upset by what he saw, the King of Pearls thought to himself that if even the king could be betrayed by his wife, the fool's own situation of being betrayed by his wife was in fact not so unbearable. For that reason, that night he fell asleep quite peacefully on his pile of straw.

The following day at noon, he was taking his meal as usual at the royal table. He noticed that the queen was quite nervous. She was not able to eat keeping her chopsticks perfectly parallel in accordance with the etiquette of the Chinese court. After some time, she accidentally let her chopsticks cross, as though she were not accustomed to eating in the proper court manner. Noticing this trifle, the king lightly tapped his wife's hands with his own chopsticks by way of reminding her of her manners. At once the queen began to cry and shout, accusing the king of having struck her. At this, the king's fool was suddenly seized by a huge fit of laughter, which he was unable to stop. Everyone was amazed.

As he laughed, he vomited thousands and thousands of pearls, which all the courtiers avidly rushed to pick up. Nobody was in the least concerned about what had provoked the King of Pearls' fit of laughter. The fact was that he found it just too funny that the queen had made such a fuss about the king's mild tap to remind her of her manners, when the night before she had submitted to an avalanche of blows from the stick wielded by her lover and had then given herself to him despite the beating!

Finding all of this outrageous, Dechö Zangpo opened his mouth to say aloud what he was silently thinking: “What a hypocrite this queen was!” But the long period of hard training he had gone through and all the failures he had suffered had had the effect of making his vigilance advance to a very high state. Just in time, he remembered what would happen if he spoke. He bit his lips, clenched his teeth, and kept the words from coming out of his mouth. He continued peacefully on his way without listening to the cries and protestations of the zombie Ngödrup Dorje, who was feeling the power of his captor's presence of mind. The excellent prince at last arrived before the cave of the great master Gömpo Ludrup. He felt tremendous relief at having at last succeeded in completing his great and difficult mission.

Epilogue

The tale has told us of the difficulty Prince Dechö Zangpo had in not allowing himself to be captivated by all the zombie's wonderful stories. Because of that difficulty, he was obliged to go back to India again and again to recapture him. These stories were so beautiful and so compelling that they caused his vigilance to slip again and again, no matter how hard he tried to prevent it. A moment always came in which he forgot his commitment to silence and responded to the words of the cunning zombie. Thus the zombie was freed from his captivity time and again and was able to go back home to India.

Thus it is told that after eighteen (some say twenty-four) long and perilous journeys from Tibet to India, the prince finally succeeded in capturing the zombie and bringing him all the way back to the guru Gömpo Ludrup. After all the time he had spent on this very difficult task, it was with a feeling of immense relief that the prince laid his heavy burden down before the old sage.

“There, it's done!” the prince allowed himself to say through sheer inattention. Instantly the sack opened and once again the triumphantly gloating zombie escaped to India. But the old sage of the cave was an extraordinary being possessed of a high level of intuition. He made a deft and rapid movement to catch hold of Ngödrup Dorje. But he failed! That is to say, he almost failed, because the guru was able to grasp three hairs from the renowned zombie's mane. Making use of these, he was able to exterminate entirely several incurable diseases and save the lives of a great many people throughout the world. In this way the prince's bad karma, after so much time and effort, was finally purified.

At last the prince was able to return home to his parents, the king and the queen. They had aged a great deal because of the grief they had suffered at the disappearance of their only son. Everyone had believed he was dead. But now the young prince had become a fine and handsome man, tall of stature and with a royal bearing. Once in his kingdom, despite his shabby traveling clothes, people immediately recognized him as he passed by and they followed him all the way to the palace. The news of his return spread like wildfire throughout the land, and word of it rapidly reached the king and queen. Still in disbelief, they waited for his arrival at the palace. Seeing him, they were beside themselves with happiness. They had really regained their beloved son. They prepared a great feast to which all the people were invited. It was a magnificent and joyful celebration that lasted seven weeks. The royal parents chose a bride for him, a bride worthy of their son—beautiful, intelligent, and with a big and noble heart. The marriage ceremony was performed—and on the same occasion, the prince was enthroned as the new king. This began an era of boundless happiness for the entire kingdom.

The royal couple had fourteen children, all beautiful, intelligent, and endowed with good hearts, like their parents. In spite of the heavy task of guiding the country on a path that would bring benefit to the people, the king saved some time for his wife and children. He regaled them with all the fine stories that the zombie Ngödrup Dorje had related to him during all those trips from India back to Tibet. Little by little, these stories became known throughout the palace, and then, in not so very long, they spread beyond it, so that in the end all the people of Tibet came to know them.

So it was that my grandmother learned them from her parents and told them to my father, who in his turn transmitted them to me during my childhood in Germany. I am very happy now to be able to share some of them with you through the present volume. I hope that as time goes by, you will tell them to those around you, and in this way the wonderful stories of the zombie Ngödrup Dorje will live forever.

Afterword

It was my wish through these tales to introduce you to the world of imagination of the Tibetan people as well as to some social, cultural, and spiritual aspects of Tibetan life. I also wanted to address a topic of current concern. I am referring to the psychological quality of obsessive attachment and its destructive consequences. Nowadays, what with the Internet and other new technologies, hardly a day passes when we do not learn of a variety of dreadful occurrences brought about by an obsessive attitude toward power, money, sex, passion, and various perversions in these different areas. These events clearly show us the high degree of ignorance that prevails in our world regarding the path toward happiness and lasting inner peace.

The framing story in our tale illustrates the point of view and practical approach of Buddhism with regard to attachment. In Buddhism, attachment is regarded as one of the three fundamental causes of suffering and the negative actions that bring about bad karma.

The Buddha taught that there is no self that exists independently of its environment. Nothing in this world exists independently in itself. We have been created and exist in an interdependent fashion. We and our world are the result of the coming together of various conditions. Thus the self exists on the level of relative reality but not on the level of ultimate reality. It is this relative self that we experience in everyday life. We assign it a proper name at the time of birth, and little by little we let ourselves be drawn into the illusion of an “I” existing by itself, without any link to its environment. This is an erroneous and dangerous approach, because it encourages belief in duality and in the total separation of self and other. Such an outlook results in the conflicting feelings of desire, attachment, and aversion—hatred toward people and things. In the opposite approach, the approach of Buddhism, our view is that all things form a unity and that the various phenomena of this world, self and other, though they appear to be separate, are in fact communicating vessels. Such a view should lead us to the thought that if I cause harm to others, I cause harm to myself—and if I do good to others, I do good to myself at the same time.

It is not my intention to pass judgment here. I would only like to point out what the framing story for the zombie's tales shows so clearly: how deeply and how quickly every one of us can get caught up in a web of obsessive attachment, desire, greed, pride, jealousy, grief, or anger—to the point where we are no longer able to step back and analyze our situation accurately and no longer able to gauge the consequences of our actions.

In the story of Prince Dechö Zangpo, we learn that he was possessed of many skills and inner resources, which initially he used with destructive intent. After his meeting with the great master and his moment of realization, he managed to make significant use of these skills and inner resources on his path of transformation toward a more constructive and meaningful life. If we ourselves direct our awareness in the right direction, we will be able to see that the things that present themselves to us as problems are the very things that lead us to solutions. Thus the prince's perseverance, his courage, ingenuity, creativity, intelligence, flexibility, and even vigilance, which he initially used to satisfy his obsession with magic, in the end led him to fulfill his mission and to purify himself of his bad karma. In the functioning of a human being, everything is useful, everything is recyclable, nothing needs to be thrown away, and nothing new has to be invented. Everything is there, in front of our eyes. This is a profoundly ecological vision. If we proceed to apply it, we will find that by wasting less energy, we can reach lasting solutions to our problems and come to a more fruitful level of development and greater inner peace in our lives. This approach is within everyone's reach, regardless of ethnicity, religion, political views, or professional and social status. All we have to do to transform our weaknesses and strengths is to change our inner outlook toward things.