urinated in the street; the women simply squatted; they wore nothing under their outer robes, or I hoped they did not. Sometimes a larger than ordinary heap of dung in the street would stir feebly, and I would see that it was a human being laid out to die, usually a very old man or woman.
My Mongol escorts confided to me that the Bho, in former times, disposed of their old folks by eating their corpses—on the theory that the dead could wish no finer resting place than the guts of their own get—and had discontinued that practice only after Potaism became the prevailing religion, because the Pota-Buddha had frowned on the eating of meat. The only relic of the former custom was that families now conserved the skulls of their dead and made them into drinking bowls or little drums, so that the departed could still partake of holiday feasts and music making. Nowadays the Bho observed four other methods of sepulture. They burned the dead on mountaintops, or left them there for the birds, or they threw them into the rivers and ponds from which they got their drinking water, or they cut the corpses into pieces and fed them to dogs. The latter was the method most preferred, because that hastened the dissolution of the flesh, and until the old flesh was gone, its habitant soul was marooned in a sort of Purgatory between death here and rebirth elsewhere. The bodies of the poor were merely thrown to the packs of street curs, but the bodies of the rich were conveyed to special lamasarais which maintained kennels of sanctified mastiffs.
Those practices doubtless accounted for To-Bhot’s teeming population of scavenger vultures and ravens and magpies and dogs, but they also accounted for more humans’ dying than necessary. The dogs were so many that they were exceedingly liable to the canine madness, and in their fits they bit people as well as each other. More of the Bho were slain by the canine infection than by all the vile diseases engendered by their own squalor. Often, the heap in the street would be not just feebly stirring, but writhing and contorting and howling like a dog, in the terrible death agonies of that madness.
Because I had no wish to be bitten, and because I was on my way to war, I procured a bow and arrows and began to improve my aim and my arm by shooting every stray dog that came within range. That earned me black looks from the religious and the lay Potaists alike, who would rather that people die for no reason than that people should kill for good reason. However, since I carried the Khakhan’s plaque, no one dared to do more than scowl and mutter, and I became quite proficient with both the broad-head and narrow-head arrows, and I hope I effected some small improvement in that wretched land, but I doubt it. I doubt that anyone or anything could.
On our arrival in any Bho community, my escorts and I climbed as quickly as we could to the Pota-la on top, where we honored visitors were always put up, it affording the best of local accommodations. That meant only that we did not get excreted on from above—though, if we had, it could not have made the rooms and the bedding and the food and the company much filthier. Before leaving Kithai, I had heard a Han gentleman quote a contemptuous saying of his people—that the three national products of To-Bhot were lamas, women and dogs—and now I believed him. It was apparent that the disproportionate number of women in the town down the hill was owing to the fact that at least a third of their men had taken holy orders and residence in some lamasarai. Having seen the Bho women, I could not much fault the Bho men for having fled, but I did think that they might have fled to some existence better than a living embalmment.
Entering a Pota-la courtyard, we were greeted first by the creaking, fluttering and clattering of prayer mills, prayer flags and prayer bones, then by the roars and snarls of the savage yellow To-Bhot mastiffs, which in those places were at least kept chained to the walls. Also along those walls, in every least niche, there was incense or a juniper sprig burning, but its perfume was insufficient to mask the overall miasma of yak-dung fires, putrid yak butter and unwashed religiosity. After meeting the noise and the stench, we met a number of monks and a few priests plodding majestically toward us, each of them holding out across his palms the khata, the pale blue silk scarf with which (instead of his tongue) every upper-class Bho salutes an equal or superior. They addressed me as Kungo, which means “Highness,” and I properly addressed each lama as Kundun, “Presence,” and each trapa as Rimpoche, “Treasured One”—though it nearly gagged me to utter such honorific lies. I could see nothing treasurable about any of them. Their robes, which had first seemed to be of ecclesiastically sedate colors, could be seen up close to have been originally bright red, and were dark only from years of accumulated dirt. Their faces, hands and shaved heads were blotched with a brown plant-sap they daubed on their various skin diseases, and their chins and chops were shiny with the yak butter that drenched everything they ate.
In the matter of foods at the lamasarais, we were most often served Potaist vegetable meals, of course— tsampa, boiled nettles, ferns—and a strange, stringy, slimy, bright-pink stalk of some plant unknown to me. I suspect that the holy men ate it only because it made one’s urine pink for days afterward, and that effluent trickle no doubt awed the people downhill of the lamasarai. But the Bho had a peculiar selectivity about the Potaist injunction against eating meat. They would not slaughter domestic fowl or cattle, but would allow the slaying of game pheasants and antelope. So the lamas and trapas sometimes provided those venisons for us, as an excuse for them to enjoy the meats as well. (I am not unjustly scoffing at their hypocrite austerities. One lama was introduced to me as “a most holy of holy men” because he subsisted on “absolutely no nourishment except a few bowls of cha a day.” Out of skeptic curiosity, I kept a close eye on that lama, and eventually caught him in the preparation of his mealtime bowl. It was not cha leaves he used in the steeping, but cha-like shreds of dried meat.)
However un-Potaistly lavish our meals sometimes were, they were never very elegant. We being honored guests, we were always seated to dine in the Pota-la’s “chanting hall,” so we had the mealtime entertainment of several dozen trapas dolefully chanting while they thumped skull drums and rattled prayer bones. Among the serving platters and eating bowls, the banquet table bore an array of spittoons, and the holy men used them to the point of overflow. All about the dark hall stood statues of the Pota and his numerous disciple godlings and the numerous adversary demons, and every one of them was visible even in the gloom, because it gleamed with its slathering of yak butter. Where we Christians would light a candle to a saint, or perhaps leave with him a taoleta, it was the Bho’s practice to smear their idols with yak butter, and the thick and ancient layers reeked of rancid decay. Whether the Pota and the other images were gratified by that, I do not know, but I can attest that the local vermin were. Even when the hall was full of noisy diners and chanters, I could hear the squeaks and snickers of mice and rats as they—plus cockroaches, centipedes and God knows what else—scurried foraging up and down the statues. Most nauseating of all, we and our dinner hosts always sat on what I at first took to be a low dais built up above the floor level. It felt rather spongy under me, so I furtively investigated to see what it was made of—and discovered that we were seated atop nothing but a mound of compacted food droppings, the detritus of decades or maybe centuries of the holy men’s slovenly drool-ings and slobberings of their meals.
When their mouths were not masticating or otherwise occupied, the holy men chanted almost continuously, in concert at the top of their lungs, in solitude under their breaths. One chant went like this: “Lha so so, khi ho ho,” which meant more or less, “Come gods, begone demons!” A shorter one went like this: “Lha gyelo,” meaning “The gods are victorious!” But the chant that was heard most often and interminably and everywhere in To-Bhot went like this: “Om mani peme hum.” The opening and closing noises of it were always intoned in a drawn-out manner, so: “O-o-o-om” and “Hu-u-u-um,” and they constituted just a sort of “amen.” The other two words meant, literally, “the jewel in the lotus,” in the same sense that those terms are used in the Han lexicon of sex. In other words, the holy men were chanting, “Amen, the male organ is inside the female’s! Amen!”
Now, one of the Han religions prevailing back in Kithai, the one they call Tao, “the Way,” has an unashamed connection with sex. In Taoism, the male essence is called yang and the female’s is yin, and everything else in the universe—whether material, intangible, spiritual, whatever—is regarded as being either yang or yin, hence totally discrete and opposite (as men and women are) or complementary and necessary to each other (as men and women are). Thus active things are called yang, passive ones yin. Heat and cold, the heavens and the earth, sun and moon, light and darkness, fire and water, they are all respectively yang and yin, or, as anyone can recognize, inextricably yang-yin. At the most basic level of human behavior, when a man couples with a woman and absorbs her female yin by means of his male yang, he is not in any sense tinged with effeminacy, but becomes more of a
It may be that some Han Taoist, wandering into To-Bhot long ago, when the natives still worshiped the Old Peacock, kindly tried to explain to them his amiable religion. The Bho could hardly have misunderstood the universal act of putting male organ into female—or jewel into lotus, as the Han would have expressed it—or mani into peme, in their language. But such oafs would have been baffled by the higher significances of yang and yin, so all they ever retained of Tao was that preposterous chant of “Om mani peme hum.” Still, not even the Bho could have built much of a religion on a prayer that had no loftier meaning than “Amen, stick it in her! Amen!” So, as they later and
