When he finally stood he saw that Lokesh had not moved. Shan walked to his friend's side and sat again. Lokesh's hands were bent in a mudra as well, the thumb and index finger of both hands touching to form a circle, the remaining fingers of each hand extended upward. Shan studied it a moment, confused. It was the dharmachakra, the wheel-turning mudra, a mudra used by teachers to invoke the union of wisdom and action which was the goal of Buddhist learning.
"I didn't know," his friend said after several minutes, his voice cracking with emotion. "No one mentioned a name for this place where we were going. Rapjung gompa is its name. That plain is a holy place. Metoktang it is called." It meant the Plain of Flowers.
"You were here before?"
Lokesh nodded. "I didn't recognize it. Who could have recognized it, after what they did?" He shook his head forlornly. "I always came on a trail that led from the south, not from the west like we came. There were so many buildings, beautiful buildings. And the slopes were covered with trees then, beautiful tall evergreens and rhododendron. I heard the Chinese had taken the forests. I didn't know they meant like this. Not a twig left except that little grove of junipers."
"Did you come for the government?" Shan asked.
"Before that. Rapjung was famous for its medicine lamas," Lokesh said, his voice cracking again. "Not just doctors, but scholars of medicine, those who first found awareness in Buddha and then dedicated their lives to understanding the connection between the health of men and the natural world around them. This plain has great spiritual power. Students came from all over Tibet, from Nepal and India even, to learn about herbs and mixing medicines. There was one lama who taught only about the hour of mixing."
Shan remembered the strange haunted feeling he had experienced out on the plain. "The hour?"
Lokesh nodded his head solemnly. "There were times of the year when certain medicines should never be mixed, times of the day when certain mixtures were best made, when they would be most potent, certain places where mixing worked best." He stared down at the barren earth at his feet. "Special medicine plants grew here, on the grounds and out on the plain and in the mountains nearby, that grew nowhere else," he said, surveying the stark ground of the ruins with haunted eyes. His mouth opened and shut several times, but no words came, and his eyes grew moist. The Chinese had poisoned the earth with salt.
"It was such a joyful place in the summers," Lokesh continued after a moment, an intense longing entering his voice. "The lamas took us on the plain or into the mountains and we pitched tents so we could collect wild plants and study them, and sometimes collect big sacks of herbs to send to the medicine makers. There were special songs they sang to invoke the healing power of the plants and special foods they ate. When I was here there were a dozen lamas of over one hundred years. I asked one of them whether he lived so long because of the special herbs here. He grew very solemn and said, no it wasn't the herbs, it was the songs, because the songs kept them connected to all the deities that lived in the land here. They knew teaching songs that would be sung all day without repeating a verse."
Teaching songs. Lokesh meant special recitations of ancient texts, memorized by the lamas, sometimes done to the accompaniment of horns and cymbals and drums.
"They're lost now, you know," Lokesh said in a small voice. "Some of them are lost forever." His voice shook, and he looked up to Shan as if asking why. "Gone," he said, his voice cracking with emotion.
The songs were lost, Lokesh meant. Because the lamas who had memorized them had been killed, with no chance to teach them to another generation.
"Why here?" Shan asked after a moment. "You came to this particular spot."
Lokesh looked up with a sad smile. "There was a lama here, named Chigu. A hundred and five when I last saw him. He had been abbot for many years but had left office when he was seventy-five to spend all his time meditating and making medicines. There was a small courtyard here, with wisteria vines"- Lokesh paused and pointed in the direction of the reconstructed buildings- "where he taught the drying and chopping of herbs and roots. There were big cleavers, and sometimes students lost fingers." Lokesh paused again. He was adrift in a flood of memory. "Each summer he and I would go out on the plain, only the two of us, walking on game trails, for a week at a time. We gathered herbs and prayed and at night stared at the heavens. There were places high up on flat rocks where we sat, where you could see nothing of the earth, only the heavens, so that we called it sitting in the sky. He told me things his own teacher had told him. His teacher had been one hundred fifteen when he died, in 1903, the Water Hare Year. Chigu Rinpoche told me things from his lips that his teacher had told him from his lips, of things he experienced in the years of the Eighth Dalai Lama," Lokesh said, wonder in his eyes now. The Eighth Dalai Lama had died in the eighteenth century. "To sit in the night, in the wilderness, and to be connected to the years of the Eighth by a chain of only two tongues, it burned something into my soul," he said, looking into the patch of empty earth before him. "This is where he lived, these are the chambers where I would come to meet him when arriving each summer." The last words choked in his throat as Lokesh was overcome with emotion.
They sat a long time, silent, listening to the wind. Shan let his awareness float, experiencing the holy place, thinking more than once that he heard the deep, spine-pinching sound of a mantra recited by monks in assembly. He closed his eyes and imagined the smell of fragrant juniper burning in a samkang, one of the ceremonial braziers that would have been scattered across the grounds of such a gompa, then became aware that he was alone and stirred back to full wakefulness to see Lokesh walking slowly toward the three restored structures.
Five minutes later Shan caught up with his friend, standing inside the small three-sided courtyard formed by the buildings, wearing his lopsided grin. Shan had not imagined the scent of juniper. A four-foot-high, four-legged iron samkang sat at the open end of the courtyard, juniper smoldering inside it. Under the overhanging roof of the center building was mounted a keg-sized prayer wheel crafted of copper and silver. A young Tibetan girl, no more than six, her cheeks smeared with red doja cream, stood at the wheel, turning it with a solemn expression. The building had a heavy door of expertly joined wood, painted a dark ochre enamel. As Shan watched, Lokesh gave the door a tentative push and stepped inside. He followed him into a small assembly room, a dhakang, lined with smooth flag stones and containing three tattered old thangkas, cloth paintings, depicting scenes from the life of the revered teacher Guru Rinpoche. One of the paintings was ripped and crudely sewn back together. Another was so faded the images were almost impossible to discern.
Shan thought of the barren land surrounding the ruins. Small as the buildings were, their erection had constituted a mammoth task. Every board, every stone flag, every nail had to have been brought in, from outside, from down in the world, probably from one of the towns on the northern highway, if not farther.
They explored the two adjacent buildings and found one to be a gonkang shrine, for a protector deity, the other a small lhakang, a chapel. Both structures were built with the same fine attention to detail as the dhakang. In the chapel was an altar made of split logs, bearing an eight-inch-high bronze statue of the Compassionate Buddha and the seven traditional offering bowls, all different, all carved of wood except one of chipped porcelain. At the back of the gonkang was a half-completed statue of Tara, the protectress deity, one of her hands resting on a lotus blossom. Wood chips were on the floor beside it, and a mallet and several chisels lay on a nearby bench. Shan remembered the man who had been brought from the building by the boy when they had arrived. The caretaker.