He inked another slab and printed a new piece of paper.
"If you put that on your house your guests will always be happy."
But as with the first one, the message was incomprehensible to him.
I went to the Meditation Hall and was almost overcome from the smell of yak butter. I went to the kitchen. It had the look of a tannery — full of deep vats, each one about seven feet across.
"This kitchen was last used in 1958," Mr. Xun said. "Those cauldrons could cook thirteen yaks at a time. The whole monastery could be fed in this kitchen."
The remains of the 3rd Dalai Lama are at this monastery, in a temple called The Nine-Roomed Hall. This man, Bsod-nams-rgya-mtsho, was the first to be called "Dalai." The Mongol chief Altan Khan conferred this title on him when he visited the Khan's court in the sixteenth century. Dalai means ocean in Mongol and it implies boundless wisdom. But the special features of The Nine-Roomed Hall are not the bones of this holy man. Interest in the place is usually centered on two tall demons.
"Notice the curtains?" Mr. Xun said.
Dusty drapes covered the bases of the statues.
"They have put them there so that you cannot see the figures beneath them."
"Why would they cover those figures?" I asked.
"One is an ox having sexual intercourse with a lady," Mr. Xun said.
"What sort of lady would have intercourse with an ox?"
"I don't know," Mr. Xun said, "because it is covered up."
The buildings were not beautiful, nor even pretty, but they had a rough mountain charm, and some of the carved pillars looked both godly and weird. The attractiveness of the place was in its life, its pilgrims and monks, the novice monks fetching water and eating Popsicles, and penitents draping the white and yellow gauze on the statues, and burning butter, and whirling prayer wheels, and prostrating themselves in a sort of religious athleticism that was very impressive — they are required to flatten themselves against the ground 100,000 times a year. It is not a fastidious kowtowing but a calisthenic so vigorous they wear mitts and knee pads to prevent bruising.
Mr. Xun and I walked down the road, past the souvenir stalls and the little shops, and had lunch in a restaurant that was otherwise empty. We had grilled yak meat, melon, squash, pig fat, buns, seaweed soup and french fries. The yak meat stuffed into the buns was my Dish of the Day, and I entered it into my notebook under dumplings and smoked duck and all the rest of the dishes I had favored.
We were sitting near a Franklin stove with a ten foot tin chimney. Mr. Xun said that he had visited the United States the previous year. He had been an interpreter for a trade delegation. In order to secure this job he had had to pass a competitive exam in English. He said he had traveled all over.
"I went to San Francisco," he said, and smiling, he told me how much he had hated Chinatown. He regarded the very word as insulting, but also he had found it all hackneyed, ridiculous and embarrassing. "And the food was bad," he said.
"What did you think the first time you saw New York?"
"Not as nice as Vancouver."
I then asked him what he had bought in the United States to take back to China.
"A pen. A book of stories. A photograph album."
He had no money. But what things he would have bought if he had had the cash! A refrigerator, a motorcycle, a television, an electric noodle maker!
We talked about Tibetans.
"They have black and red faces," Mr. Xun said. "The Hans are white and red. You can tell the Hans by their red cheeks. And the Tibetans are very dirty."
"There isn't much water around here," I said.
"On the grasslands in the west of Qinghai there is no water at all. The people wash their hands in yak's milk. And they never take a bath in their whole life."
"How about the Hans?"
"We wash once a week."
Mr. Xun said he usually went to a public bathhouse in Xining for a bath — on Fridays. He lived in a three-room apartment on the outskirts of the town, with his family.
Without warning, Mr. Xun said, "'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife…' "
"You read Jane Austen, Mr. Xun?"
"My favorite book is Pride and Prejudice."
A very Chinese title, when you come to think of it. He also liked Dickens and Thackeray. There was apparently plenty of time out here on the high plains of central Asia for the plump and populous English novel. He said that he also read religious texts. After middle school he had decided to become a Buddhist. "I wanted good fortune in my life," he said. He was now a firm believer.
"Want one of these?"
"Oh, yes," he said, gratefully accepting a portrait of the exiled Dalai Lama.
I had brought fifty pictures of the Dalai Lama with me. I had been told that they were impossible to obtain in China and that I was likely to win friends among people in this region if I handed them over. It was a simple expedient. I had no personal objection to presenting pictures of this solemn bespectacled incarnation of Buddha; and it seemed to work.
On the way back to the monastery we ran into a pilgrim who said he was a yak herd — he had about thirty of them. They sold for about $100 each (but Chris Bonington was paying $8 a day just to rent them), and he had had to sell two of his yaks to pay for this pilgrimage to Taer'si with his wife and two small children. The Chinese word for yak meant "hairy cow" (mao niu). It is a lovely long-haired animal, like a cow on its way to the opera.
Taer Monastery is known for its butter sculptures, and as yak butter is the medium they are pungent works of art. A hall about forty yards long held statues and friezes of multicolored flowers, cherubs, trees, temples, little animals, and gods and goddesses. One of the largest statues was of Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy. But the Yellow Sect interprets this deity as having thirty-six forms, and in this yak-butter statue she was a mustached man.
The monk watching over the butter sculpture took the portrait of the Dalai Lama I offered him and folded it into his robes. Then he gave me a surreptitious blessing.
"You have made him happy," Mr. Xun said.
This present Dalai Lama, number fourteen, was born not far away from here at Hong Nei Village in Pingan County, in 1935. He came to Taer Monastery at the age of two, borne on a sacred white yak and guided by three lamas from Lhasa who had gone in search of him.
It happened in this way. After the death of the 13th Dalai Lama, the corpse was found to be facing east. The head was repositioned, but soon after, it moved again, to face northeast. The state oracle put on his mask and went into a trance and he too faced northeast. The three lamas set out for the northeast to find the new Dalai Lama. They interviewed the parents of three or four children. One was Lhamo Dhondrub. His family was very poor. But there had been portents at his birth, in particular the strange visitations of crows in a place where there had never been any crows. Still, the lamas were not convinced. It takes a while for a Dalai Lama to be proven. But this child passed all the crucial tests, chose the correct beads when they were offered, answered all the questions, and was physically the Holy One: had oversize ears, sorrowful eyes, "tiger stripes" on his legs, and the rest of the eight bodily marks. He was brought to Taer'si and then to Lhasa. He was named: Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshi Tenzin Gyatso — Holy Lord, Gentle Glory, Eloquent, Compassionate, Learned Defender of the Faith, Ocean of Wisdom.
"When he was here in Taer'si he stayed over there, in a house."
The monk was pointing at nothing.
"I don't see anything."
"His house was wrecked by the Red Guards."
This monk was one of the few people I met in China who refused to talk to me about the Cultural Revolution. He was not afraid; he was simply furious and disgusted. He lived in the stables of Taer'si, in a small cell, with another monk. On the walls of his cell were pictures of Buddha. He had a teapot, a little brazier, a pallet and a faded quilt. It was not austere, but it was very simple. Over his tiny bed was a poster of a tiger. This monk too had a large can of yak butter.