I would grow used to his tendency to talk about events of more than a hundred years ago as if they happened yesterday. And they say we Thais have no sense of time. But I wasn’t prepared for his erudition. I had vaguely come across Madam Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner while surfing the Net: two early Western prophets of Oriental wisdom whose work was largely lost in that cosmic catastrophe called the Twentieth Century. I was out of my depth and knew it. I found myself wondering how my fetal psyche was going to adapt to this new reality.
Now Tietsin turned away from the window again and suddenly stared at me with the full force of his developed mind. “Then in ’59, after the Chinese invasion, His Holiness went into exile and brought our spiritual science, if you want to call it that, to a world which had been at least partially prepared.”
He paused again and frowned. “We’ve invaded the world. But we’ve lost Tibet.”
There could be no doubt that this last phrase was meant for me. Suddenly it seemed everyone was following his eyes and staring at me. I nodded in full agreement with whatever the underlying meaning might have been, at the same time wondering what it all had to do with the price of smack. But you couldn’t help but be riveted by the man himself. I was assuming he’d crossed the fifteen-thousand-foot pass on foot from Tibet to Dharamsala at some stage in his life. With the courage of a giant he managed to use his disabilities to project a spirit freer than an Olympic gymnast’s. But it was his eyes: the speed of their movement together with the sharpness of focus indicated decades of meditation which cannot be faked.
There was nothing to do but listen while he expounded on the Chinese invasion: its barbaric cruelty, Tibetans reduced to slavery, forced to participate in the rape and pillage of their country, all in the name of glorious Socialism; young women forced into prostitution in Lhasa for the entertainment of Chinese soldiers-rough and brutalized peasant lads for the most part, children and grandchildren of Mao Tse-tung’s holocaust, called the Cultural Revolution.
It was pretty somber stuff and not the sort of thing your average Western backpacker comes to the Himalayas to hear about. But they seemed to be all attention, gripped by this maimed hero. For my part I think I would have been fascinated if he’d been giving a lecture on reinforced concrete; it was all about the man, and the man knew it.
Exactly as I was thinking this thought, Tietsin focused on me with such intensity I experienced it as a passing headache. I looked up in astonishment at that rugged face, which betrayed no loving-kindness. Indeed, for that moment it did not seem human at all; perhaps it wasn’t. Then he looked away again.
After his unusual account of Tibetan history, Tietsin’s summary of the principles of Buddhism was surprisingly standard. He took us through explications of the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha in the usual order, simplifying for the farang audience. When he’d finished, everyone clapped politely and started to leave. I watched them, five white women and three white men, all of them under thirty. I could not tell if they were European, American, or Australian; they all looked innocent enough: travelers without commitment. Maybe Tietsin was aiming his discourse at the people they would be a couple of lifetimes hence. None of them looked like they were going to rush to ordain as monks and nuns. All of a sudden I was alone with the Doctor himself, who was staring out the window at the two great eyes on the stupa and ignoring me. I coughed.
He turned with a grin, came over, and twisted a chair around so he could sit and stare into my eyes. Finally he held out his right hand, the one with the missing fingers, and clasped my own between the two remaining digits. He held on until I had to tug to get my hand back. Those remaining fingers were extra strong. Now he jerked a chin at me, daring me to speak.
“Did you lose your fingers when you crossed the mountains to Dharmasala?”
“No. I lost them in Chamdo.”
“I have no idea where that is.”
“Extreme east of Tibet. Where the Chinese started the invasion.”
I found myself nodding slowly while information I had absorbed in a vague way years ago began to filter through the memory cells. Somewhere the biocomputer was going through its elaborate calculations, which ended with a brief flash of inspiration on my part. “You were in the resistance?”
He inhaled deeply, then exhaled. “Thousands of us voluntarily disrobed so we could fight for our country. It didn’t seem such a stupid thing to do; after all, we had America on our side, in the form of the CIA.”
“Yes,” I said. “I read about it somewhere. You were betrayed.”
He shrugged. “You could put it like that. Or you could simply call it a flaw in democracy. America voted for Nixon.”
I remembered now. The president with the meatloaf mind saw China as a useful counterbalance to the Soviet Union -and to hell with human rights, which, as a part-time burglar himself, he’d never had any time for anyway. As soon as he got into power he ordered the CIA to hold back on support for the Tibetan resistance.
“But you must have been very young,” I said.
“Fifteen. I’d already been in the robes for seven years. When I heard that my father and all the men in my home village had gone to fight, I joined the other monks who disrobed at that time. Of course, the Chinese slaughtered us. But that wasn’t the point. Was it?” He stopped, waited for my question.
“You escaped to Dharamsala?”
He puckered his lips. “Maybe it’s better you don’t know what I did next.” Another pause. “Sure, in the end I got to Dharamsala, paid my respects to His Holiness, accepted his gracious offer to find me a place in a monastery there so I could continue my religious studies.”
Again a pause, as if he were calculating exactly how much information to let out. “But when the time came to take my vows again, I couldn’t do it. In my soul the Chinese had replaced the Buddha with hatred. Things that happen when you’re still young are hard to overcome.” He sighed. “So I found a girl.” He smiled. “Or, I should say, a girl found me. A Westerner, of course. A natural born do-gooder, which is the same as saying someone blind to their own badness. It was her notion that love and marriage would heal me. I believed her. I was so new to the West, so disillusioned with everything else, I assumed she had the right answer. That’s how naïve I was.”
He looked at me with a comic expression. “I had a well-trained mind from my monastic studies, so I went through the usual third-world thing of collecting qualifications. I ended up with a doctorate in Tibetan history-really useful for joining corporate America, right? Naturally, love and marriage failed in the end, as they always must. The wife who would have died for me on day one was starting to think about having me bumped off by day one thousand. I had been brought up to take vows seriously, so there was no way I was ever going to leave her.” Here he let a few beats pass while he contemplated me. “But when the self-righteous, hypochondriacal, self-pitying, life-fearing, man-resenting, competitive, criminal-minded, infantile bitch dumped me I wept with relief. Thank Buddha there were no children.” He held up both hands, one deformed, the other whole. “Me voilà.” He cocked an eyebrow.
“You are a misogynist?”
“Nope. It can happen to anyone. Let’s say the aspect she offered of her multifaceted humanity was pretty unvarying toward the end.”
I stopped short. “The whole of humanity is that bad?”
“Actually, I was going easy on her. And the rest of us. I left out ‘homicidal.’”
It would be a characteristic of his conversation that I seemed frequently to find myself at the receiving end of some kind of spiritual revelation when I thought we were having a normal chat. He leaned closer to me to whisper, “Do you really think that in the future it will be nations alone fighting for scarce resources? Don’t be so naïve, we’ll be fighting each other, all against all, down to the last square inch of commercially viable dust. Actually, that is what we’re doing already. Without spiritual aspiration we revert, do you see? Not merely to the monkey state, that wouldn’t be so bad. No, all the way back down the evolutionary spiral. Those are the stakes. How would you like to be worker number ten million and twelve in a termite nest?”