Genetech Researcj And Development

But when you perceive, by the resoluteness of your

will, the Buddhanature in all things, and when every one of your thoughts goes back to that fountain in

your memory, that will be the time you arrive at Spirit Mountain.

-

The Journey to the West

ONE

Another journey west, Bold and Psin find an empty land;

Temur is displeased, and the chapter has a stormy end.

Monkey never dies. He keeps coming back to help us in times of trouble, just as he helped Tripitaka

through the dangers of the first journey to the west, to bring Buddhism back from India to China.

Now he had taken on the form of a small Mongol named Bold Bardash, horseman in the army of Temur

the Lame. Son of a Tibetan salt trader and a Mongol innkeeper and spirit woman, and thus a traveller

from before the day of his birth, up and down and back and forth, over mountains and rivers, across

deserts and steppes, crisscrossing always the heartland of the world. At the time of our story he was

already old: square face, bent nose, grey plaited hair, four chin whiskers for a beard. He knew this would

be Temur's last campaign, and wondered if it would be his too.

One day, scouting ahead of the army, a small group of them rode out of dark hills at dusk. Bold was

getting skittish at the quiet. Of course it was not truly quiet, forests were always noisy compared to the

steppe; there was a big river ahead, spilling its sounds through the wind in the trees; but something was

missing. Birdsong perhaps, or some other sound Bold could not quite identify. The horses snickered as

the men kneed them on. It did not help that the weather was changing, long mares' tails wisping orange in

the highest part of the sky, wind gusting up, air damp a storm rolling in from the west. Under the big sky

of the steppe it would have been obvious. Here in the forested hills there was less sky to be seen, and the

winds were fluky, but the signs were still there.

They ride by fields that lay rank with unharvested crops. Barley fallen over itself, Apple trees with apples

dry in the branches, Or black on the ground. No cart tracks or hoof prints or footprints In the dust of the

road. Sun sets, The gibbous moon misshapen overhead. Owl dips over field. A sudden gust: How big the

world seems in a wind. Horses are tense, Monkey too.

They came to an empty bridge and crossed it, hooves thwocking the planks. Now they came upon some

wooden buildings with thatched roofs. But no fires, no lantern light. They moved on. More buildings

appeared through the trees, but still no people. The dark land was empty.

Psin urged them on, and more buildings stood on each side of the widening road. They followed a turn

out of the hills onto a plain, and before them lay a black silent city. No lights, no voices; only the wind,

rubbing branches together over sheeting surfaces of the big black flowing river. The city was empty.

Of course we are reborn many times. We fill our bodies like air in bubbles, and when the bubbles pop

we puff away into the bardo, wandering until we are blown into some new life, somewhere back in the

world. This knowledge had often been a comfort to Bold as he stumbled exhausted over battlefields in

the aftermath, the ground littered with broken bodies like empty coats.

But it was different to come on a town where there had been no battle, and find everyone there alreadydead. Long dead; bodies dried; in the dusk and moonlight they could see the gleam of exposed bones,

scattered by wolves and crows. Bold repeated the Heart Sutra to himself. 'Form is emptiness, emptiness

form. Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. 0, what an Awakening! All hail!'

The horses stalled on the outskirts of the town. Aside from the cluck and hiss of the river, all was still.

The squinted eye of the moon gleamed on dressed stone, there in the middle of all the wooden buildings.

A very big stone building, among smaller stone buildings.

Psin ordered them to put cloths over their faces, to avoid touching

anything, to stay on their horses, and to keep the horses from touching anything but the ground with their

hooves. Slowly they rode through narrow streets, walled by wooden buildings two or three storeys high,

leaning together as in Chinese cities. The horses were unhappy but did not refuse outright.

They came into a paved central square near the river, and stopped before the great stone building. It was

huge. Many of the local people had come to it to die. Their lamasery, no doubt, but roofless, open to the

sky unfinished business. As if these people had only come to religion in their last days; but too late; the

place was a boneyard. Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. Nothing moved, and it

occurred to Bold that the pass in the mountains they had ridden through had perhaps been the wrong

one, the one to that other west which is the land of the dead. For an instant he remembered something, a

brief glimpse of another life a town much smaller than this one, a village wiped out by some great rush

over their heads, sending them all to the bardo together. Hours in a room, waiting for death; this was why

he so often felt he recognized the people he met. Their existences were a shared fate.

'Plague,' Psin said. 'Let's get out of here.'

His eyes glinted as he looked at Bold, his face was hard; he looked like one of the stone officers in the

imperial tombs.

Bold shuddered. 'I wonder why they didn't leave,' he said.

'Maybe there was nowhere to go.'

Plague had struck in India a few years before. Mongols rarely caught it, only a baby now and then. Turks

and Indians were more susceptible, and of course Temur had all kinds in his army, Persians, Turks,

Mongols, Tibetans, Indians, Tajiks, Arabs, Georgians. Plague could kill them, any of them, or all of them.

If that was truly what had felled these people. There was no way to be sure.

'Let's get back and tell them,' Psin said.

The others nodded, pleased that it was Psin's decision. Temur had told them to scout the Magyar Plain

and what lay beyond, west for four days' ride. He didn't like it when scouting detachments returned

without fulfilling orders, even if they were composed of his oldest qa'uchin. But Psin could face him.

Back through moonlight they rode, camping briefly when the horses

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