As the “golden domes like tongues of fire,” the holy palace from ancient times appeared with increasing clarity within my own eyes, I could not resist putting my palms together and praying for my own little wish. At the same time, I clearly felt how that originally minor portion of my Han Chinese blood had unnoticedly transformed me during the past twenty years and almost completely dominated my outer appearance as well as my mind. In other words, I returned to the place of my birth as a stranger.
In fact, this small seed was born one late summer night in 1966, when the seemingly unintentional but always ceaseless wind of karma blew it, with its mighty breath, into the human world right at the moment when the noisy and clamorous revolution swept the old holy city of Lhasa and changed its face forever. The four-year-old girl looking at me from old photographs, wearing a traditional Tibetan long dress, was always standing on a lush green lawn with the ancient palace in the background, making different gestures and poses so typical for those red childhood years (Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book and badges were the most necessary props). Her red cheeks, burnt by the scorching, high-altitude sun, appear prominently even in those old black-and-white photographs. What a genuinely Tibetan girl she was back then, yet she was a child already marked by the imprint of those turbulent years.
However, after being able to finally mount the metallic silver wings and come back to Lhasa after twenty years, as she had always wished, she was now hardly able to keep her eyes open. As if the myriad rays radiating from the giant blazing sphere turned into thousands of small invisible silver needles piercing her skin. At first, she felt a sharp pain, but it soon numbed. “Such a little wound is hard to detect,” she would write in every single letter she sent back to inland China. And the wind that spring was raising whirlwinds of sand! When she looked out of the window, it seemed that all of Lhasa was immersed in a scary gray disaster. A huge invisible demon was howling and weeping crazily, sweeping away everything. How many lives did it catch and smash into pieces in order to swallow their red pulsing hearts? She felt desperate and could not help but sigh:
Is this the most beautiful garden?
Blinded by the scorching sun,
kids are crawling everywhere,
but none of the old houses around provide any shade,
only mad dogs are barking . . .
As the dust hits your face,
run quickly, you sad lady.
Is this the place to which you want to entrust your life?
Is this the place, where you want to die in the end?
Walking so fast that your silhouette seems to fly,
through which strange lands do you still want to pass?
But on that day, as heavy clouds closed the horizon from all four directions, a miracle happened. During the day, the howling of the storm slowly ceased and the air filled with the dense fragrant smoke of burnt juniper. I, for the first time, entered Tibet’s holiest place, a holy place in the holy land, the Jokhang Temple.
The sunset clouds gathered on the horizon, forming fantastic moving images, so incredibly beautiful. In the square, devotees who came here to pray, leading their sheep liberated during the “saving of life” ritual, mingled with traders and their customers, but no one seemed to be disturbed by each other. Several dogs with hair so long that it swept the ground were running around, lightly barking. A group of village kids held hands and started to sing and dance as they happily watched the hat that they had laid on the ground fill with coins and small one-mao banknotes. Nearby sat a few nuns with crossed legs, sounding bells and beating drums, reciting their sutras in low voices. All of them looked very young, maybe around twenty, and their torn monastic robes could not hide their clear and calm eyes. Looking up, beyond their nicely shaped bold heads, high up on the temple roof, I saw a pair of golden deer kneeling toward each other with warm and comforting expressions, as if they were listening to something. Between them, they were holding the wheel of Dharma, the symbol of never-ending Samsara. Everything was bathed in the sunset light.
I asked for a snow-white khatag from an old man and, with the stream of devotees, entered the temple. Suddenly, I was struck by a strange, complex feeling that slowly filled my heart, like a drop of ink falling on a piece of absorbent paper. My eyes welled with tears, and there was a lump in my throat. At the same time, my rationality was telling me how ridiculous my emotions were. Thinking about it now, in that big and dark temple hall, I was taken by the enigmatic power of all those blinking butter lamps, the sounds of people’s prayers, and the silence of Buddhist statues and images. And, of course, by the strong scent of yak butter, barley, and incense! But still, what was it that hit me with such intensity?
I watched those people, shepherds, peasants, and city folk of the same blood as me; the common people sharing the same fate of being trapped in the never-ending circle of life and death. They put the palms of their hands together, touched the top of their head, then the forehead and chest, knelt down, and prostrated on the ground, repeating this three or more times. Crowds of people kept coming to the altar with offerings of clear water and butter lamps, their feet approaching the shrine lightly as they touched the brim of the ancient altar, lustered by thousands of hands, with their right hands and then softly, but with immense weight, leaned their foreheads toward the image of the Jowo Rinpoche. In the blink of an eye, I could no longer hold my tears and they started running down my face!
I even whined silently!
Oh, never in my life had I felt this kind of pain!
What an impure Tibetan I am! Even when I had already arrived in this place closest to heaven, and even when I already heard that voice from my dreams, the voice suddenly seemed meaningless, because I was so unconscious, so deaf.
Will I ever be able to become like them, to pray from the bottom of my heart and silently, calmly bear everything in this life, just one of the innumerous lives in the long circle of rebirths?
Tibetans would reply: When a bird lands on a rock, it has reached the horizon.
—But I don’t know how to fly, so how can I land?
—Therefore, in the beginning, I could only fly in the dark night.
I put a mala, or Tibetan prayer beads, on my left wrist: one hundred and eight beads, predestined, round. In my bag, I put some prayer flags, a pack of lungta (small papers with printed prayers and images of a “wind horse” to fly the prayers into the sky) and sang (fragrant juniper wood for incense offerings) and with excitement started my kora (pilgrimage circuit). It was very cold as the sky was still dark, but my heart was scalding. I knew that I was completely pure: I had taken a ritual bath in clean water and made a good wish ritual in front of my brand-new small shrine at home. I felt as if I had never grown up, or as if I had transformed into a completely new person.
I kept walking. At first, I thought I was walking alone. But the feeling of walking all alone in the dark night was, for me, who was short-sighted from an early age and thus had very sharp ears, almost unbearable. I was overwhelmed by the sounds of the night, sounds that were completely inaudible during the day, which was monopolized by industrial noises. I heard loud cries and roars from wild animals, sad and shrill, sometimes even fierce. Other sounds were like those of some unknown creatures roaming around ceaselessly with a gloomy murmuring, like lonely souls or ghosts. After a wave of remorse, indescribable terror besieged my heart and, for a moment, I lost the courage to go on. But I had already gone too far and there would still be the same hidden dangers on the way back. Very naturally, a simple mantra came to my mind, the six-syllable mantra that every single Tibetan knows by heart from early childhood. I started to silently recite it and tried hard to evoke an inner image of Bodhisattva Chenrezig’s smiling face.
In a moment, someone appeared behind me, almost like a ghost. He was holding a butter lamp with a tiny quivering flame and his other hand kept spinning a big, heavy prayer wheel. He was a very old man, but his steps were still light and noiseless. Gusts of wind were strong enough to blow down the tiny flame—but why was it still burning? Did that old, greasy Tibetan-style chupa he was wearing have the power to block the wind? I followed the light brought by the old man and my previously restless heart gained some comfort. I could finally see through the darkness. The darkness was spinning like a whirlwind, spreading and deepening further, swallowing innumerous little pleadings and cries of the human world. It seemed as if the old man was intentionally guiding me—who was he? An ordinary city inhabitant with intrinsic qualities equal to kelong (Buddhist monk, bikshu)? Or a poor pilgrim coming to Lhasa from a remote village somewhere in Tibet? Or was he perhaps the emanation of Bodhisattva Chenrezig himself?
I kept walking. I felt immense gratitude to this companion of mine. And the indestructible ancient palace twinkled in the distance with several scattered lights, which only emphasized its loneliness and immense vastness. Tears filled my eyes again. They were the first tears of that year! I kept walking. I could finally see the slow, but unstoppable pace of light. Suddenly, many people came out of the dark night, like a meandering river. I joined the stream and entered a new life with a different flavor.
All the living creatures are driven by the same aspirations and move in the same direction: going clockwise, they make one kora after another, without ever stopping. The sound of prayers becomes louder and clearer—and the light! The radiance of this extraordinary glow is turning every single gesture of prayer, every single prostration into a beautiful flower in full bloom!
I remember one cold winter night, when I and several strangers were sitting on the back of an old, shabby truck, traveling from one lost and desperate place to another, which did not have much to offer either. The sky was dark, the road was bumpy, and I wanted to talk to someone, but had no idea how to start a conversation with those strangers. All the deep scars of the past pressed heavily upon us and hurt my insides so much that I started to squirm. At that moment, suddenly, we heard a thunder-like sound and a whirling; a dazzling fiery ball descended from the sky, rolling so close to me that I could almost touch it. I exclaimed in shock and subconsciously hid my face. Gradually, I noticed in its dim light how my fellow passengers’ eyes glittered with tears. What was it that moved our hearts like this?
(In fact, this is not fiction. In reality, it was July, at an altitude of four thousand meters in the grasslands of the northern Tibetan Plateau. Maybe I embellished the scene a bit; maybe it was only my own eyes that filled with tears and not everybody’s. Nevertheless, I believe that something exceptional really happened there, deep in everyone’s heart. We did not speak to each other, because it was impossible to express what we wanted to say, and it wasn’t because we did not know each other. Anyway, the whirling and dazzling fiery ball was so beautiful that it brightened the Changtang grassland which was previously concealed in darkness.)
As I was walking the clockwise kora—with a secret on my right-hand side, in that extraordinary light of Tibet—I experienced another such encounter. A larger-than-life secret encompassing several beads of mantras passed on for generations, a fleeting silhouette of someone silently weeping at midnight, several flower-like handprints, and a handful of oxidized gemstones descending from heaven.
When I pronounce—in my non-Lhasa accent—the two words, Bö (Tibet) and Woeser (Ray of Light), they are like birds with brand new wings (their feathers are so beautiful, so rare to see—are they perhaps the holy birds revered by Tibetans, the vultures?), carrying an invisible substance closely related to the soul, to the most perfect and most mysterious place!
Now, let me go in the footprints of those birds, following the line they left in the air that casts a shadow on the ground, leaving behind an indistinct path, dotted by traditional houses resembling myriad stars. Built in a simple style, but in bright colors, the houses look like precious corals or, even more, like marks, guiding those who are longing to free themselves from the worldly worries and pursue enlightenment. The vast Land of Snows is itself a huge natural temple!
In other words, when you are already on the road, if your heart leads you toward the light, the secret is already waiting for an encounter! At least I have finally understood this.
And so . . . let me go now.
May 1999, Lhasa
