It was hard to fit her rush of speech into staid Mandarin, but Theodore did as well as he could and added the question at the end expecting to be put off again. But this time the Lama answered quite straightforwardly.
‘Yes, I will explain,’ he said. ‘Then perhaps you, who carried the signs of which the oracle spoke, will be able to tell me the next step of my search. I seek a child. It is our belief that the soul does not die with the body, but begins a new life, forgetting all that went before. Only when a soul has attained enlightenment is it freed from this endless wheel of death and re-birth and can go to join the great soul. I know that you, being Christians, do not share this belief.
‘Now, there are certain great souls who, though they have reached enlightenment, choose to continue in the world of death and birth in order that they may show their fellow creatures the path to freedom which they themselves have chosen. And these men have reached such spiritual mastery that they can overcome the forgetfulness which ordinary souls experience at death and birth. They can will their own consciousness to continue from one life into the next. Their memory does not remain whole, however. At first it is all unrelated fragments, but as they grow they can be helped to piece these fragments back into the whole it once was, so that all their lives and all their old learning become present once more to their consciousness.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard of that,’ said Mrs Jones when Theodore had finished translating. ‘They’ve got this head priest called the Dalai Lama, and when he dies they go and look for a boy born at the same time to be the new Dalai Lama, and they say it’s really the same person.’
The old man must have picked the known syllables out.
‘He whom you call the Dalai Lama,’ he said, ‘we know to be the Tulku, or reincarnation of Avalokitesvara, the Great Compassionate One. But he is not the only Tulku, and the Abbot of my own monastery of Dong Pe was also such a one, Tulku of the Siddha Asara. In his latest body he was known as the Lama Tojing Rimpoche, and though he was not yet thirty years of age, all who knew him bore witness to his spiritual mastery and holiness and wisdom and learning. But for twelve years we have not seen him. He set out on a journey to Daparang, where we rested last night, and never arrived. It was his custom to travel alone, and often to wander into waste places to perform his spiritual exercises, so we did not find his disappearance surprising. But winter came on and he had not returned, and then a rumour grew that he had been waylaid by traitor monks and sold to the Chinese.
‘I must explain that the Chinese have long claimed lordship of Tibet, and there is in Pekin the Tashi Lama, who they say is the true spiritual head of our people. Dong Pe is the nearest great monastery to the Chinese border, and if its Abbot were to acknowledge the claims of the Tashi Lama that would be a victory for the Chinese. Tojing Rimpoche, however, was always loyal to the Dalai Lama at Lhasa.’
‘That explains why he’s been looking so beady-eyed at poor Lung,’ commented Mrs Jones.
‘Now we have a famous oracle at Dong Pe,’ said the Lama, still talking as though he were discussing the most ordinary things in the world, such as weather or crops. ‘But when we consulted it, it told us nothing, not even whether Tojing Rimpoche lived or died. We sent to the State oracle at Lhasa and received only riddling answers. And so matters rested until this year, when two things happened. First a story reached us that the Chinese were preparing to announce the discovery of the Tulku of the Siddha Asara; and second our own oracle at Dong Pe spoke plainly for the first time, saying that Tojing Rimpoche was dead, and it was now time to search for the Tulku. It gave us certain signs, but did not tell us when Tojing Rimpoche had died, so that we could not know the age of the child we sought, except that he must be less than thirteen years of age – which you call twelve years of age.
‘I will tell you the signs. Towards the south-east we must search. There would be a river. There would be a guide, and symbols of lower creations. There would be three people, one of them the mother of the Tulku. And there would be danger to the Tulku. Furthermore, it is usual in such cases for the oracle to describe some point by which the house in which the Tulku is born may be recognized, but this time there was no hint of any house at all. Lastly, though in this the oracles spoke even more obscurely than in the other matters – and oracles are seldom wholly clear – it seemed that the child we sought was begotten in a foreign land. This last sign we greatly feared for it seemed to us that it might be taken to show that the child from Pekin, of whom the rumours spoke, is the true Tulku of the Siddha Asara.
‘Therefore we decided to search for our Tulku. It is normal to form a commission of several experienced Lamas to conduct this search, but in this case we decided to send only one man and to conduct the search in secret. And since it was I who had first recognized the child who became Tojing Rimpoche as the Tulku of Asara, it was thought best that I should conduct the search alone.
‘So I set out, journeying south-east, enquiring in the villages I passed for children of unusual learning. But more and more as I considered the matter, and the signs I had been given, I dwelt on the absence of any sign concerning a dwelling place. Therefore, though I had come to the last village for very many miles, I did not turn back, reasoning that I might meet the one I sought far from houses, and that a child begotten in a foreign land might dwell still in that land. And behold, at the very edge of what is now Tibet I met with a child who said he was in danger and who bore in his pocket pictures which were symbols of lower creations, a lily and a horse. Next he spoke of a foreign woman, who might well be his mother – for how else should he be travelling with her in these wild places? And it was to be surmised that the Chinese of whom he spoke was their guide. When the child told me that his name meant Gift of God I felt assured that I was near the end of my search, though the child gave me no new sign.
‘This might have troubled me earlier, but when I encountered the woman I recognized her as being a soul of great spiritual power, untamed and undirected, and I told myself that such a one might well be the mother of a Tulku and took this for a sign. It was then I decided that we must return to Dong Pe and ask the oracle whether I had read the signs correctly.
‘But during our journey I have become increasingly aware, both from outward observation and from inward searching, that the child is not the one I seek. There were many small signs of this. He felt all around him to be strange. I watched him reading from his Christian book and sensed his active dislike of all our ways and thought. I felt no echo of the Tojing Rimpoche I had known for more than thirty years, and last night the Abbot of Daparang confirmed my thought.
‘And yet the signs were so sure. Even now, though I know my reading of them to have been mistaken, I feel assured that these were the signs I was sent to seek. It is as though I had pieced together a torn sheet of paper, but done so in the wrong order, so that the message I read is not that which the scribe wrote; so I must study the scraps again to discern the true order. Reason tells me that the search is not at an end, and that with your help I may yet find the one I seek. It is possible that the woman is the guide of whom the oracle spoke, and that she will recognize the Tulku when she sees him. I do not know. I have sat here in meditation, cleansing my soul of all old thoughts, so that I may look afresh at the signs and question you further.’