The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (47 page)

The jade doll was unearthed by horrified Court officials, who sought to hush the matter up.

The soil beneath the thuya was found to be loose. Penetrating a little deeper they came upon a curious hollow like an air bubble, at the bottom of which the doll lay. The boards had burst apart in the middle and bulged upwards; the doll, its hands thrown up to its face, sat bending forwards. It was covered in white maggots as if it were a corpse.

A hunt ensued for Mesdames P’ei and Ying. Both had fled.

Prince Mien was found in his palace. He too tried to escape. After he had been informed by the Minister of Punishments, who had taken charge of the investigation, that until a decision could be obtained from the Emperor he was to keep to his palace, which was cordoned off, he demanded with a roar, almost bursting with rage, from whom the Minister had obtained authority to apply such measures to a prince of the blood. At the Minister’s cool reply that he would accept responsibility the raging man heaved a ceremonial sword at his head, knocking off his cap with its peacock feather. The palace guard took up positions before the victim of the assault. The prince stepped close, swore most offensively at them, soundly
boxed the ears of the captain, who did nothing to defend himself. Then looking out of the window and observing the strength of the guard around his house he withdrew quietly with venomous eyes into his bedchamber, inhaled gold leaf and suffocated.

Ch’ien-lung was receiving the Tashi-lama in Jehol when Prince Mien-k’o thus ended his life. The investigation was carried further on the orders of the Emperor, and gave rise to powerful suspicion of involvement by the princess and Prince Pu-wang.

This was the news that reached the Emperor in Jehol—where his attempts to placate his ancestors by atoning for the crime of Yangchou had come to naught—and dealt his soul a cruel blow. Letters arrived from Chia-ch’ing in which the prince consoled him, spoke of boundless affection for his father, urged that bitter misunderstandings might be permitted to be cleared up or forgotten. Ch’ien-lung, obsessed with the idea that he must soon die and stand unpurified before his ancestors, was impervious to such consolings. He fought for his position among his forefathers as he had never fought for a country. He saw himself abandoned left and right; sometimes he thought the land had spat him out. Mostly he stood solitary in a vast stony field and struggled with ghosts from which everyone fled.

He learned that Chihli was in flames from insurrection. He observed the rebellion with a cold calm face. What he wanted, his companions found out later than the court officials in Peking, whither Ch’ien-lung despatched letters, among them one conveying cool thanks to Chia-ch’ing: the Emperor desired to return speedily to Peking, in order to speak once more with the Tashilama before he set off on his homeward journey to Tibet.

In a small spruce wood north of Peking’s Tatar city lay the monastery Huang-szu. Here dwelt the holy man from Tibet.

The journey from Jehol to Peking had been one long triumphal procession. Birds of worship whirred in black flocks about his mitre. When he settled into the little monastery of Huang-szu, a thousand magnetic arms seemed to grow out from the monastery walls to beckon worshippers. On the Emperor’s orders a company of the Red Banner was stationed permanently around the exalted guest’s dwelling place. They were powerless to hold back the throng.

Incalculable streams of humanity: wagons, carts, riders, mothers with babes, beggars, noblemen, vagabonds, a clashing and uniting of all gazes, bending of every knee before the wooden sceptre that the strong, sternly smiling lama raised at the courtyard gate.

Paldan Ishe, on foot, accompanied by two learned inmates of the monastery went in the mornings through back gates, strolled like a simple yellowgowned lama in a pointed hat. He visited Tunghuang-szu to the east, monastery of the Changkya Hutuktu, made a great excursion in his palanquin to the hunting park of Hsiangshan, west of lake K’unming. In radiant delight he walked through lovely groves of elms, mulberries. Marble bridges led across gorges and green brooks; slender deer ran past close by.

Dewdrops from the trees hung from his hat as he entered the monastery of the five hundred Lohans, was welcomed by the kowtowing abbot and the numerous chapter of monks. Here in a grotto the eighteen martyrs and nine rewards glimmered magnificently in bronze.

The holy man spent one night here in the secluded monastery of the Sleeping Buddha. When evening fell, he had been already many hours sunk in contemplation before the colossal statue. When he tore himself free he enjoyed the onset of soft, warm night under the horse chestnuts in the park, among the parturient dampness of the ponds. How blessed was this eastern land. It brimmed with people; the good law made progress among them.
With remote, contented eyes the Tashi-lama surveyed the abundant beauties of these regions, without envy, like a donor, a patron who smiles and draws pleasure from the joy of others. Prayers and petitions, the secret complaints of the princes reached his ears. Even the warm air didn’t improve things; the marble bridges were as light as breath, the tall fields of sorghum, rice paddies vanished in all their lushness at the raising of hand to forehead. What a good, hardworking, inscrutable race played here; how they lorded it over neighbouring peoples. But even the Emperor, the Lord of the Yellow Earth, knew how little it meant: ten years, fifty years, a hundred, a thousand; complained. Here in this land the pure, sweet overpowering spirit of the Most Splendid Completed One was stirring. It was not yet time for the kingdom of Sakyamuni to be fulfilled; first, so went the prophesy, the afflictions of the holy lamas must increase beyond bearing.

How the passive had to suffer, these bearers of the Wu-wei of whom Ch’ien-lung complained, whose destruction was accompanied by weighty omens. Poor seekers. Buddha would find them a place among the reborn. Terrible contradiction: the Emperor suspected himself of being a nullity, and permitted the murder of those who suspected it still more deeply, who felt it more fervently.

Exuberance, beyond salvation, of births from every pond, multiplication of the world ten times, a thousand times in an instant.

If the world mountain Sumeru were not ringed around with seven seas and seven rocky girdles, lust in its wildness would burst all bounds and flood out into the void, seep into the false heaven of forms and formlessness.

How to call a halt, how not to take fright, lose one’s breath and fall panting, brow to the ground, in fear and fainting.

The lamas lived like posts in a swamp, islands in a stormy sea, happy glimpses of light, enders of the cycle, dissolvers of the ring.

More help, more candles.

And they burned so weakly in the darkness, the little wandering candles, the Truly Powerless, lay brethren, the dead in that Mongolian town.

A soft rising plaint, the croaking of frogs, became perceptible. A smug phlegmatic choir puffed itself up in the water.

On one occasion the wonderful man allowed himself a visit to the ladies of the Imperial harem. He sat in the open palanquin under a parasol of yellow silk. He held his gaze lowered so as not to sully himself with the sight of the beautiful women. They thrilled under his blessing hands and kissed one another when he had left, joyful to have seen him.

The period of his stay in Peking drew to its close. It was observed how the traveller from the Mountains of Grace grew quieter and more reserved. A tiredness pressed upon him. He sighed a lot; he emerged from his contemplations with empty, sunken eyes. No one asked him, no one let it be remarked in any way that a change had been noticed in his condition. It would have gone against spiritual insight to mourn, for the living Buddha was at liberty to change his corporeal dwelling. A human anxiety seized those around the dispenser of grace. Something seemed to oppress him. Something he said revealed the cause to the Changkya Hutuktu, to that bookworm who poked about him, catalogued him. The hot climate and the humidity characteristic of this land did not, perhaps, quite suit him; he longed for black felt tents and the snowy steppe. It was an isolated remark; the Panchen Rinpoche kept his feelings to himself.

He was not one of those pious men who are accompanied through life by lightness, gaiety. He sought little contact with children and harmless natures. The sight of a child’s round eyes froze him. He made his bed among heavy souls. There he felt easy, the
air seemed good to him; he let himself walk, let himself radiate. From childhood on he had known only the hardest and most fearful things, had seen himself besieged by victims of fate.

And now, fetched up in this vast, almost unprepared empire, there was a monstrous towering and tottering over him on all sides. Lands and peoples stretched endlessly away. He bent over in perplexity. In his perplexity he seemed to himself a peasant whose task was to till this land of the eighteen provinces, till it all by himself. An uncertain twitching, buzzing, dizziness from deep inside disturbed the skin of his head, filled his brain like a sponge. He felt a great weariness in the small of his back. His heart and lungs seemed to dangle in him like wood, clack together now and then.

For four days the doors and halls of the monastery of Huang-szu had remained closed. Paldan Ishe was ill. Many times he recalled fleetingly the monastery he had visited last, with the Sleeping Buddha. The statue had made a deep impression on his eyes. He smiled: his legs wouldn’t let him up from that position. The doctors who attended him, Tibetans and Mongols, had not yet agreed on a diagnosis. Every five hours each was honoured to feel the sick man’s pulse.

Until on the fifth day the fever broke, on the holy man’s face little buds, tender pustules appeared, and with horror the monastery’s college of doctors recognized the black pox.

At one stroke the light was torn from the throng of cardinals, priests and the pious. Men with lofty titles, Magisters, Overbrimming Ones, Princes of the Law ran in confusion, grains of sand rolling, rolling. Through corridors smoky with incense the terrible rumour crept like a black cat hugging the walls furtively, across courtyards, then with a whiplash spring of the hind paws transformed itself into a winged bat, wider, emitting shrill whistles, flying as a lumpy, sulphur yellow cloud to the horizon, covering the sky.

Chia-ch’ing took his turn with the other Imperial princes watching over the sickbed in Huang-szu. The Emperor himself, already on the road, sent orders by runner for three hundred thousand taels to be distributed to the poor of the city. In Huang-szu, close by the lodge of the feverscalded man, Masses never ceased. The courtyards still resounded to festive drums, comets, white trumpets, little bells, gongs; the garish blue-white of holy vessels arranged in display drew the light and every eye. The monks erected a wall about the monastery of devotional pennants, prayer trees, fortune streamers. The swarms of humanity surging against the monastery threw up whole abutments of prayer-inscribed stones against the walls.

Within it was quiet. The Buddha struggled with the Pox Goddess. Bishops in pointed hats and dignitaries in brocades and coloured boots ran about dull and bleary under each other’s feet. Fasting hollowed out their bodies.

Every three days in the little cupola hall of the temple the great, grim sacrificial feast of Sodchong was performed. As the trumpets of the Law sounded, the throng outside the monastery walls set itself in motion from east to west, lurched clumsily forward about the walls with a scraping of sand, clattering of wreaths,
om mani padme bum
swelling like thunder, while inside the cupola hall the monks tormented their knees, flattening the mats in long rows, yellow robe after yellow robe. Murmurs, tinkling of bells, recitations, handclapping, blaring instruments. In heavy spirits the Changkya lifted the little golden mirror from the altar, raised it aloft. The oldest Chanpo swung the beaked aspergillum, in his left hand held an embossed plate. And while the Changkya turned the mirror to catch the shade of Buddha, the Chanpo poured. The congregation swooning. The sugarsweet water ran over the surface of the mirror, dripped into the plate. The soft singing wavered; the
filled plate travelled from hand to hand. The priests smeared skull, forehead, breast, and wept.

Paldan Ishe was delirious. The sores crawled across his skin of bronze, flowed together. At first they were filled with a yellow fluid, then they began to darken, turn thick red, black.

Chia-ch’ing sat for hours at the window of the cell and watched the swollen unrecognizable face of this wisest of men, the face in which at times two quite unearthly eyes freed themselves from the constriction of encrusted lids and sent cool bright glances up to the blue ceiling, like the crystal fountains under the elms of K’unming-hu. The fat prince felt a pricking jealousy of the Tashilama, who had usurped his place in Ch’ien-lung’s confidence. But he was defenceless against the foreigner when he observed these unleashed glances. Until his illness the prince, after the one visit, had avoided the Tibetan, considering him a dangerous parasite, king of the yellow priests. The sick man’s affliction unbent the prince; he kept close by him, at last shivered at the thought that his father would lose this man. Chia-ch’ing made vows that Paldan Ishe might live.

The doctors rubbed the sick man’s body with saffron. They tied his hands together, held his elbows, and seven times burned his left side and his right with dry stalks of moxa wood dipped in hemp oil. They scrawled red signs on the paper windows, walls, threshold. As the illness developed and sores broke out even in his mouth, the doctors acquiesced in admitting six Chosskyong, simple native sorcerers favoured by the Tashi-lama.

In feathered cloaks with birds’ claws, shapeless headgear on which the fivefold death’s head grinned, they hopped in threes around the halfconscious man, whispering, convinced that today they would perform their masterpiece. They summoned the fearsome Takma.

Circling the bed they threw a fine powder into the air.

They held iron rattles in their hands. Shaking them gently they bent over the patient: “The five and fifty that are gathered on the forehead shall all disappear like blown leaves. The seven and seventy that are gathered on the throat shall all disappear like blown leaves. The nine and ninety that are gathered on the breast shall all disappear like blown leaves.” They shuffled about a good while in their alarming way, stomped out one after the other, still screeching at the threshold to a curlicued painted symbol.