The whole great maze was humming with preparations. In the main courtyard the steps of the great temple were being extended to left and right with wooden staging at various levels; new banners and hangings fluttered from archways or dangled in gaudy streams down the fronts of buildings. It was all very well for Major Price-Evans to claim that the dances were unrehearsed, but now there was hardly an open space that didn’t swirl with troupes of performers or echo with strange music; passing one of the kitchens Theodore saw through an open door a rickety scaffolding at whose centre was a weird grey bulbous mass, over ten feet high. Two men were perched on the scaffolding painting the object, which seemed to Theodore wholly out of place in a kitchen until, some time after he’d walked on, he realized that what he’d seen had been an early stage in the creation of the dough-giant which in a few days’ time Yamantaka, Death and Slayer of Death, would hack to pieces and fling to the attendant worshippers to eat. An echo of human sacrifice, Major Price-Evans had said, and also an echo of the Lord’s Table. Theodore shuddered, not at the blasphemy but at the dough giant itself, cretinous, cold, grotesque, a parody of flesh. He decided to go early for his call on Major Price-Evans.
Usually Theodore didn’t argue with the Major about Buddhism – it didn’t seem polite, for one thing; for another, as Lung had found, there was no way of winning such arguments; and for a third, till now Theodore had felt ashamed to pretend he held his beliefs with the through-and-through simplicity of the Major’s faith. There was always that numbness and emptiness at the centre, which had been there since the Settlement had been destroyed and Father had died. He was not in his heart sure that he had been doing any more than acting his belief, in the way Mrs Jones had said she was acting hers, or that his prayers and Bible-reading had been anything other than habits. But in the last week, since that spurt of faith when he had answered ‘Yes’ to the Major’s question about the gods, he had changed. He felt he was moving, just as the whole life of the monastery was moving, towards a turning-point. Of course until last night this turning-point had seemed to be the escape from Dong Pe, but though that had come to nothing the sense of movement was still there. Perhaps it was this which made him tell the old man not simply that he had seen the dough giant but what he had felt about it.
‘See what you mean, me boy,’ said the Major affably. ‘You’ve got to remember that flesh is illusion, so old Yidam’s only an illusion of illusion. Perhaps that’s what you really felt.’
‘No it isn’t. And anyway flesh isn’t an illusion. My Father said that everything God made is holy, so how can it be illusion?’
‘Ah, well, perhaps that’s true too – only another way of looking at it.’
‘Something’s either an illusion or it isn’t. To say anything else is nonsense – the words don’t mean anything.’
‘Now that’s where we differ. I don’t like saying anything’s nonsense, because when you think about it a bit more it often turns out to be sense. A lot of what you’re saying is just what I used to think, but then I found I was wrong about one thing, and then another thing, and so on, and now I’ve given up judging. Judge not that you be not judged, don’t you know.’
(The Major was a great quoter from the Bible, which he knew just as well as Theodore. But he also knew the Koran, and the Talmud, and a lot of other sacred books.)
‘Jesus was talking about judging people,’ said Theodore.
‘Quite right, me boy, but all these things mean more than just one thing, you know.’
‘Look, if you’re not allowed to say something’s nonsense – not allowed to think it even – it means you can believe anything you want to. The Earth’s flat! The moon is green cheese! Pigs fly!’
‘I heard about a lady the other side of Tibet who could turn herself into a pig. Abbess of one of the great nunneries. I don’t know whether she could fly, but some of them can levitate, you know.’
‘Oh, sure!’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘In any case, supposing it’s true, what’s it all for? These tricks they say they do are all so useless. Floating about in the air, or sitting by a frozen lake drying out towels with your body, just to prove you can do it!’
‘Jesus walked on the water.’
‘He had to. His disciples were scared. They thought the boat was sinking. He didn’t like doing miracles, and he didn’t do them to show off. They were useful. He fed people. He healed people.’
‘Lot of Lamas do healing, you know. But it’s interesting, isn’t it – shows a difference in attitude. Wheels, now. In the west we talk about the invention of the wheel as a great thing because it’s so useful. Here you aren’t allowed to use it at all. Same with miracles – I don’t think the Lamas would want to do them if they were useful. They are spiritual exercises, you know. They prove the Lama’s mastery over illusion. That’s one of the reasons we know we can believe what the Lamas tell us.’
‘My father saw men walking on live coals,’ said Theodore. ‘Do you mean he ought to have believed them if they told him the moon was cheese?’
‘I don’t know about that – seen that trick meself, you know, in Java. Wish I’d had the nerve to try it, too. But if a fellow like that started talking about the way the mind and the body fit together, I’d be interested to hear what he had to say, at least. Hey?’
The argument rambled on for a while, getting nowhere near any conclusion but covering all the amazing feats the Major had heard of Lamas achieving – prodigious marches over pathless country in impossible times, vast leaps, healings, trances – and then on to other countries, rope tricks, year-long burials, strange digestive feats, water-walking, and so on. The visit fell into its usual routine, and Theodore left as soon as the oracle-priest came to perform his morning ritual.
Having nothing better to do, Theodore took the trouble to cook the midday meal with special care, but Lung would not touch it; he lay huddled on his cot, groaning from time to time, and once or twice beating his clenched fist against his thigh. In the afternoon Theodore took Sir Nigel for a ride along the mountainside; the superb creature, fully rested now and used to steep places, moved with a sprightly energy and took Theodore further from the monastery than he had ever been, down among the tiny meadows where men and women toiled stripped to the waist in the surprising warmth, and right to the steep woods which clothed the lower flanks of the Dome of Purest Light. But all the time Theodore could feel Dong Pe calling him back; it was not safe to be so far away; something had still to happen.
Once back he longed to be away. Lung’s fury and grief filled the little room like smoke, and that night the monster Yidam Yamantaka blundered through Theodore’s dreams. At one point he woke, convinced that the dough giant was actually in the room, and saw a weird shape, dim in the moonlight, against the far wall. It took several frozen seconds before he recognized the thing as the monk’s robe which Lung had pinned to the beam with his sword. He tiptoed across the room and took it down, but when he returned from exercising the ponies next evening he found that Lung had summoned the energy to replace it.