The Song of King Gesar, page 35
As he spoke, a clear voice came from the heavens: ‘Thosba Gawa, son of the deities. You comprehend the meaning behind the yin and the yang, the real and the illusory. This wisdom will lead you to the truth.’
Gesar looked up and saw a bright cloud at the edge of the sky. The Guanyin Bodhisattva was sitting upon it, precious vase in hand. Gesar felt as if he had been glued to the saddle. ‘Guanyin Bodhisattva.’ The Bodhisattva smiled. ‘Why did you go to Yama?’ she asked.
‘To rescue my consort.’
‘She was a demon.’
‘But she pledged her allegiance . . .’
‘I will not interfere with Yama’s affairs. You must speak to Padmasambhava, Master Lotus. But for now, go home. You have offended Yama and you will fall ill. When you are well again, go to Master Lotus.’
As she spoke, the Bodhisattva’s figure faded away.
Gesar did indeed fall ill upon his return to the palace. He prayed to Heaven: ‘Supreme Deity, please do not let me die, but let me go to Heaven with dignity.’
He heard only thunder that sounded like a dragon singing.
Within a month he had recovered, and told Brugmo that he was going to see Padmasambhava.
In the past, whenever Gesar left, Brugmo had tried to stop him. Now she felt a sharp pain, like lightning, tear through her. She prostrated herself before him and said, ‘If the king is leaving, he should take Brugmo with him or she will die from a broken heart.’
‘Why must you try to stop me every time I embark on a journey?’ Gesar asked unhappily.
‘My husband, I was wrong in the past when I stood in your way – it was because of my selfish love for you. But now I am afraid that you are returning to Heaven, and that you will leave me alone in this world.’
‘I do not know how long this trip will take, but I am not going to Heaven.’
Brugmo bowed her head.
Gesar then summoned his ministers. ‘I am going to consult with Padmasambhava. While I am away, you must keep the peace. The hunters must put away their bows and arrows, and the fishermen leave their nets to dry in the sun. Remember this.’
He transformed himself into a twinkle of bright light and flew into the western sky.
Master Lotus lived in the Country of Yaksas, a land crossed by treacherous paths through valleys of thorn-covered trees and poison-oozing rocks. Gesar was astonished that the master ruled such a terrifying place. But the palace itself was different. Its walls shone like crystal in the sunlight. Something that might have been music and might have been fragrance swirled in the air. Gesar suddenly smelt his own scent – the odour of a corpse, of rivers of blood flowing on a battlefield. The white-clad attendant lifted an urn and poured the blessed water of compassion over his head to purify him, and then his skin carried only the strange scent of the sandalwood tree.
Master Lotus appeared. ‘Other than this small palace, all else about this country is worse than the Gling of many years ago.’ He laughed. ‘If I had not been so tired, you would have had less to do.’
‘The Guanyin Bodhisattva said you could offer guidance.’
‘The Bodhisattva is never content to see me idle. But what can I do for you?’
‘I am here to ask if you will tell me how to rescue my consort.’
‘You are over-zealous in coming so far to save the former princess of a demon country,’ the master said. ‘Think hard. Is there anything else you wish to ask me?’ His voice grew softer. He took the urn from his attendant and flicked some water into Gesar’s face.
Gesar heard himself say, ‘I wish to know how much longer I will stay in Gling, and how the black-haired people of Gling can continue to live in peace.’
The master sent spokes of light from his body and through Gesar. Rising from his throne he sang a Buddhist hymn.
‘The fine steed must gallop often,
The weapon of wisdom must be polished,
Karma must protect the body like armour.
Gling will live in peace.’
With these words the master vanished, along with the palace. It took Gesar nearly three years to return home.
Gesar could not see the chief minister among those who came to welcome him home, and went to find him.
‘May the king pardon your old minister for not going to welcome him,’ Rongtsa Khragan said weakly.
‘Has the physician examined you?’
‘Great King, I am not ill. I am more than a hundred years old. I have seen how Gling was born and how it has prospered, and I do not want to leave, but soon I must.’
Gesar clasped Rongtsa Khragan’s hands.
‘Why did it take us so long to get back?’ Gesar asked his horse, after leaving the chief minister.
‘On the way home you went to a distant country,’ the horse replied.
‘Where did I go?’
‘You were there in your dreams as you rode on my back. You went to the future.’
The Storyteller
The Future
Jigmed’s constant wandering was getting harder. But he trudged on, for he was on his way to Khampa, where Gesar was revered.
One night he came to a post office in a small town. The clerk told him he could use the phone, and was shocked when Jigmed didn’t know how. Jigmed took out an impossibly wrinkled business card and gave it to the clerk so that he could dial the number. When he was handed the receiver, he heard only the buzz of static. Then the old scholar’s voice spoke: ‘Hello?’
Jigmed found it hard to talk to someone he could not see.
‘Hello?’ the voice asked again.
‘It’s me.’
‘It didn’t take you long to look me up.’ The old scholar was laughing.
‘Walking is becoming harder for me. But I’m not weary. I just feel an ache in my back.’
‘Then see a doctor.’ Before hanging up, the old scholar told him to memorise the phone number. Then Jigmed went to the town’s clinic, where a doctor made him stand before a machine to X-ray his back. He told him he had healthy bones.
‘Is there anything in my back besides my bones?’ Jigmed asked.
‘What else do you think is there?’
‘An arrow.’
On the road once again, he felt the arrow in him, from his neck to his crotch, making it hard to walk. He wondered why, after so many years, it had begun to hurt. Gazing into the sky, he was reminded of what King Yama had said to Gesar in the story: ‘Looking up, the blue sky is empty.’
Deity, do you plan to retrieve your arrow? he asked silently. The thought brought gloom to his heart. Deity, do you plan to take back your story with the arrow?
After he had walked for some time, he reached an intersection where the air was full of dust from passing trucks. He asked a passer-by where the three roads led.
‘Grungkan, this one is for you. It will take you to the Ashug grassland,’ the man said, pointing to the quietest road.
The Ashug grassland: the birthplace of King Gesar.
That night he spent the night on the grassland. The Yalong river roared in his ears and the stars sparkled above him. When he woke the next morning, he knew he had not dreamed. The invisible arrow, which he could neither touch nor see, was still there, making the trek painful and difficult.
At sunset he arrived at a temple, where the lamas were rehearsing a play about Gesar, under the direction of a Living Buddha. The young lamas, whose faces were painted and who wore gaudy costumes, came onstage amid rhythmic drumbeats. Lamas playing immortals began to dance gracefully around Gesar, who wore his golden helmet and golden armour.
‘Which scene is this? The one in which the king returns to Heaven?’ Jigmed asked.
‘This is the hero’s birthplace, so the people enjoy watching his birth,’ the Living Buddha said. ‘But I could make arrangements for you to sing about the king returning to Heaven.’ The Living Buddha did not take off his dark glasses, but Jigmed could feel his sharp gaze on him. ‘Grungkan, you carry a smell with you.’
‘A smell?’
‘A smell of the end.’
‘Am I about to die?’
‘I sense the end of the story. Will you sing the last part, the end of the hero’s story, for us here?’
The play was still going on when the sun set and the first stars leaped onto the canopy of the heavens. That night, the Living Buddha brought Jigmed’s meal and invited him to tea. Jigmed told him about the place where he had been chased away by lamas for performing Atag Lhamo’s disrespectful words about monks. The Living Buddha smiled but did not comment. But he asked Jigmed, ‘Are you sure you are ready to perform the ending?’
‘I cannot walk any longer.’
Then they spoke of how many grungkans were reluctant to sing the last scene of the hero’s story, because they feared that once they did, the story would leave them. Jigmed told the Living Buddha that if he took his story to the city and recorded his songs the government would look after him for the rest of his life, and then he spoke of the female storyteller: how they had met at the radio station and their recent encounter. He even mentioned her gold tooth and how the old lady had kissed him before he had left. Jigmed laughed. ‘The story she recorded isn’t complete either. A cat ruined the tape, and she can’t re-record what was lost.’
They sat quietly as they watched the moon break through the clouds in the eastern sky.
Once again, Jigmed did not dream.
The next day, as noon approached, he still did not know whether he would sing. The Living Buddha took him to see the temple’s newly constructed Hall of Gesar. They started on the second floor, where many portraits of Gesar were displayed. Some were painted on canvas while others were carved from stone. He was portrayed galloping on horseback, stretching his bow to shoot an arrow, swinging his sword to kill a demon, frolicking with beauties. There were relics, too: saddles, a helmet, quivers, steel bows, bronze swords and magic implements, all collected by the Living Buddha, who claimed that they were the tools Gesar had used in the human world. Jigmed asked if he could touch the objects, for with his bad eyesight he could not see them. They were cold and hard, and he could not sense whether they were true relics.
In the centre of the dimly lit hall, Jigmed stood before a golden statue of Gesar flanked by the generals who had helped him to build Gling. He called their names one by one: Rongtsa Khragan, Prince Gralha, General Danma, the old general Xinba Muiraze, Prince Yulha Thoggyur of Jang, Princess Atag Lhamo of the demon country and Gyatsa Zhakar, who had died too young. The hall seemed to tremble when he said the last name, so he repeated it, but this time nothing happened.
Then Jigmed turned to Gesar, to the glittering statue of the deity, the hero of his story and the decider of his destiny. ‘Great King!’
Gesar, riding Rkayngkar Perpo back to the palace city, thought he heard the call. He straightened in his saddle, and this time heard it clearly: ‘My destiny, my king.’
He knew it was the storyteller. As he listened, his body rose into the air, though his horse kept trotting. Gesar heard Jigmed ask, ‘Haven’t you always wanted to know the end of the story? The moment has come.’
Then Gesar found himself in the Ashug grassland thousands of years later, in his future. He did not know how he could have come there, but it was familiar, this place of his birth. He saw the lamas, dressed in red robes, playing brass horns as they enacted what he had done after coming to the human world. Then he saw his own statue, and the storyteller touching its feet with his forehead.
He heard Jigmed ask, ‘Will I end the story? If so, take away the pain you have caused in me. I’m old – I can no longer bear it.’
‘What pain?’ Gesar asked.
‘Did you forget the arrow you put in my body?’
‘Arrow?’
‘I can’t hear what you’re saying,’ said the Living Buddha.
Jigmed turned and smiled at the Living Buddha. ‘I’m begging the deity for mercy.’
Later the Living Buddha would tell of how he saw with his own eyes the statue raise its hand and gently brush Jigmed’s back. And he told them of the clink of steel on the stone floor as the arrow fell from Jigmed’s body – the arrow would become the most sacred relic of the temple. As it fell, Jigmed felt the story begin to leave him; like dust stirred by a strong wind, it flew into the sky. He knew he must sing. He picked up his lute, put on his storyteller’s hat, and walked onto the stage where the monks were still busy rehearsing. Everyone held their breath.
Jigmed sang once more before the story left him. As the last words left his lips, his mind went blank. He did not even remember to look up to see if the human king still lingered. But the Living Buddha had caught the last of his song on a small tape recorder.
The half-blind grungkan stayed in the temple on the grassland, and every morning he groped his way to the hall to sweep around the statue of Gling’s king and his ministers. He grew old there. When there were visitors, the temple played the final passage he had sung, and he would raise his face to listen intently. And sometimes, when the great hall was quiet, he would touch the arrow, and feel the chill and heft of steel.
The Story
The Lion Returns to Heaven
Gesar’s birth mother had died during the three years he was away.
Brugmo fell on her knees before him when he returned, but Gesar sighed. ‘I must know where her soul went.’
His magic had grown in the years since his visit to Master Lotus and the Bodhisattvas, and now he summoned the soul-snatcher from King Yama’s realm, who told him that his birth mother had also been sent to Hell.
Gesar returned to Yama’s hall.
‘You, Yama, are unable to tell right from wrong. My mother lived a life of compassion, but you send her to Hell.’
King Yama rose from his throne. ‘Lion-like King, whose fame and power reach far and wide in the human world, you had Heaven’s blessing to kill demons in the human world, but you have killed humans. There was not one war that did not take human lives or cause the people to lose their homes.’
‘But that was my crime, not my mother’s.’
‘The rule of karma dictates that your mother suffer for you.’
Gesar raised his sword but the blade passed harmlessly through Yama and his attendants. Then he recalled the incantation that Master Lotus had given him, and he sheathed his sword. As he spoke the secret words, Yama disappeared, and the cast-iron gate to Hell rumbled open. Inside he saw thousands of suffering souls, but not his mother or Atag Lhamo. So many souls had sunk into Hell that they were piled in heaps, filling the narrow passageways. Gesar raised his sword to clear a way through.
‘Weapons from the human world are useless here.’ One of the guardians of Hell had approached him.
‘But I must find my mother.’
‘To do that you must deliver all of the souls.’
Gesar saw that the torture the souls suffered far exceeded just punishment for the crimes they had committed, and he was filled with compassion. He prayed to Padmasambhava, Guanyin Bodhisattva and all the Buddhas in the Western Heaven for the souls to be released from their suffering and to enter the Pure Land in the west.
As he finished his prayer, the souls rose out of the abyss of darkness and up into the sky on their way to the Pure Land. Among them he saw his mother and Atag Lhamo, but they did not recognise him, and disappeared in a ray of celestial light.
King Yama reappeared. ‘Thank you, King Gesar. So many years have passed but not a single person has ever accumulated as many good deeds as it takes to deliver all of the souls that crowded Hell. For at least the next thousand years I will not have to concern myself with making space for new ones.’
Gesar could not understand why he had been unable to rescue his consort when he had come the first time, yet now he had succeeded in saving all of the souls.
Waving his hands, Yama said, ‘Ask Padmasambhava.’
Gesar rode back to Gling. He had only just dismounted when his horse, without waiting for its saddle to be removed, ran to the mountain to join the horses grazing there. A message from the chief minister was relayed to Gesar: ‘I dreamed that on Gling’s sacred mountain the feather of a hawk was ruffled by the wind. If that feather should fall, would the greenfinch show compassion and care?’
Then the king knew that Rongtsa Khragan’s time in the human world was nearly done. He went to his bedside, where others had already gathered. A light glowed in Rongtsa Khragan’s dim eyes when he saw the king. ‘Gesar, allow me to address you not as my king but as my dear nephew.’
‘Uncle, please tell me what is in your mind.’
‘I have enjoyed more glory than anyone in all the generations of the three branches of Gling, and that is because I have followed you. Great King of Gling! My last wish is for the people of Gling to enjoy everlasting peace and prosperity.’
At these words his eyes closed. Gesar and the others stayed by his bedside as he spent his last hours in the human world. Just before daybreak he awoke, and gazed at the faces of the people with whom he had spent his life. As the sun lit the peak of the sacred snowcapped mountain, he smiled and breathed his last. In that moment, a white horse galloped out of the radiant light in the sky, then disappeared, like the faint glow of a rainbow. When the people turned back to look at the bed, Rongtsa Khragan had vanished, leaving only his clothes and the fading warmth of his body.
Counting on his fingers, Gesar realised he himself had been in the human world for eighty-one years. It was time to return to Heaven. He ordered that all the treasure be taken from the palace and distributed throughout the country. After three days of feasting and music at the palace, he summoned Prince Gralha, who came with an offering of a longevity hada and with a plea: ‘The king is not bound by a life span, like the rest of the humans. Please, remain for ever with us.’
