"Move over, Evita," the Bunji was heard to sing.
This was not so easily translated, and became a point of much contention to Buddhist scholars in the next century.
"Bunji! Bunji!" they cried. "Give us your blessings, O Bunji!'
Squirrelly Chicane heard the calls, but did not understand the words. She did not need to understand. It was her public calling, her new public, and she could not ignore them.
Swathed in her saffron robes, her peaked lama's cap making her seem taller than her diminutive dancer's stature, she stepped out onto the great balcony where the Dalai Lama held his audiences.
She was blowing kisses to the wild approval of the crowd when Lobsang appeared at her side.
"What are they saying?" she asked.
"They wish only to drink in your wisdom, Buddha Sent," Lobsang said.
"I'll pontificate, you translate," Squirrelly said. Lifting her voice, she said, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life."
Lobsang recast the words into Tibetan and then Hindi.
"Squeeze the day!" Squirrelly added.
The crowd gasped. They began to prostrate themselves, throwing their bodies to the ground and bumping their foreheads on the dirt. It looked wonderfully aerobic.
"They are with you, Bunji," Lobsang said.
"Great! Tell them-oh, tell them life is just a bowl of cherries."
Lobsang translated. The prostrating abruptly ceased. Blinking, dubious eyes lifted toward the Bunji Lama.
"What's wrong?" Squirrelly asked.
"They do not understand cherries."
"What's to understand? A cherry is a cherry."
"They are poor and have never seen a cherry, much less eaten one."
"Then tell them life is a bowl of tsampa. "
After Lobsang translated this, a sea of foreheads began bumping the ground again.
"You know," Squirrelly said as she basked in the strenuous worship of her new public, "I can see an exercise video coming out of this-Bumping with the Bunji."
WHEN THE SUN CAME up, the gilt palanquin of the Dalai was brought from storage. The Tibetans wept to see it. It had been used to bear the Dalai into exile and now it was to carry the greatest lama of all time back to Lhasa, where she would seize the lion Throne and cast out the cruel Han Chinese.
They lined the road leading to the mountain pass. All the way to the border they stood side by side like human flowers.
Some were fortunate enough to witness the Bunji emerge from the house of the Dalai Lama. They gaped to see the Dalai prostrate himself six times to the Bunji and the Bunji did not bow back once.
Then, with stately majesty, the Bunji stepped into the palanquin, and the bearers lifted it with not a grunt of complaint.
It was as if the Bunji weighed less than a snapdragon.
The palanquin lurched forward. A ferocious Mongol walked ahead of it, glowering and searching the faces of the crowd for would-be assassins. He carried high the saffron parasol of the Dalai Lama, signifying that a torch had been passed to a new spiritual leader.
The regent of the Bunji strode beside the palanquin. Lobsang Drom walked proud with his head held high, but no one had eyes for him.
All eyes were fixed on the Bunji Lama.
"The Bunji has as sweet a face as any woman's," it was said. All noticed the Bunji's saffron robes. Even the Bunji's nails, long and tapered, were saffron. Truly, people whispered, this was the god-king of the old days returned.
As the palanquin moved closer to the border, the crowds began to follow. They formed a tail, a thousand people long. They were Tibetans and Indians, Khampas and Nepalese.
In their individual languages, they cried out their joy and their hopes.
"Bunji Lama zindabad!" cried the Indians in Hindi. "Long live the Bunji Lama."
"Lama kieno!" shouted the Tibetans. "Know it, O Lama!"
"We're gonna kick Chinese butt," the Bunji shouted back, and although no one in those days knew what it meant, the cry of the Bunji Lama was taken up by the lips of all worshipers, regardless of nationality. Apart for centuries, they were united by the Light That had Come.
"We're gonna kick Chinese butt!" they chanted over and over, few understanding their own words.
"Your people are with you, Presence," Kula the Mongol boomed out in his thunderous voice.
"This," the Bunji was overheard to say, "is only the first reel."
INTO THE MOUNTAINOUS frontier of what the Chinese authorities called the Tibetan Autonomous Region, a man came running. He wore the dark turban and bushy beard of a Sikh hill man.
Panting, he approached the checkpoint where People's Liberation Army border troops guarded the narrow pass that the Dalai Lama had taken into ignominious exile decades before. Beyond it lay the snowy dome called Mt. Kailas, and at its foot the impossibly blue sky-mirrors of Lakes Manasarowar and Rakas Tal.
For over an hour the nervous PLA soldiers detected a growing mutter to the west, very disturbing to the ears. There were rumors of the Bunji Lama's return, but being Chinese, they knew not what it meant.
"Do not shoot! Do not shoot! I am Han! Like you, I am Han!"
The Han soldiers of Beijing held their fire. The hill man came ripping off his beard and turban to show that he was of their blood and color. A Chinese.
"I am Wangdi Chung," he said, puffing. "And I have failed to poison the Bunji Lama. She comes."
"She?"
"It is a she."
The soldiers of Beijing looked at one another in puzzlement. One woman. What was the difficulty? She would be taken into custody if her papers were not in order. And since the soldiers of Beijing were simple farmers' sons and could not read, the Bunji Lama's papers could not possibly be in order.
"You do not understand, you stupid turtle eggs!" Wangdi Chung cursed. "The Bunji Lama is followed by a thousand adherents."
The soldiers looked at one another again. There were three of them. One, the sergeant, was in charge of the other two. Each man had a Type 57 assault rifle and a side arm. The sergeant had responsibility for their bullets. He went to the steel ammunition box and checked the number of rounds. It was very low. He came back to report this to the agitated Intelligence agent.
"There are enough bullets to kill the Bunji Lama and twenty or twenty-five others if no round goes astray."
"If you kill the Bunji Lama, we will all be torn limb from limb," warned Wangdi Chung.
The soldiers of China laughed. In their years in Tibet, they had not known a Tibetan to do more than curse at an offense.
"They are Buddhists. They will not fight."
"Walking before them is a Mongol warrior as fierce as any I have ever seen."
"One Mongol?"
"One Mongol."
The faces of the Han soldiers said that was different. Very different.
"We do not have enough bullets to stop a Mongol," the sergeant said, looking at his bullets unhappily. "But what can we do? If we abandon our post, we will be executed and our relatives will be sent the bill for the very bullets that execute us."
The soldiers fretted and discussed their conundrum, while down in the hot plains of India, the mutter of human voices grew and swelled and began echoing off the mountains. It took the form of a woman singing:
"I am the Buddha, The Buddha is me. Predestination is the place to be!"
"We're gonna kick Chinese butt!" chorused a thousand voices.
After Wangdi Chung translated the English threat into Chinese, the soldiers of Beijing shot him dead and fled into the mountains.
And in this fashion did the historic train of the Bunji Lama enter the mountains that ring Tibet, and Tibet itself.
THE MINISTER of state security debated with himself the best way to communicate failure to the premier of China as he waited for the operator to connect him with the Great Hall of the People.
There was nothing in Mao's Little Red Book that fitted the circumstance. Or if there was, he could not find it.