The Journeyer

“Why, the holiness of my elders and superiors, of course, Highness. They are the receptacles containing all the wisdom of all the ages.”

“But, if they never teach you anything, Treasured One, whence comes that knowledge to you? You all claim to be eager to acquire it, but what is the source of it?”

“Knowledge?” he said, with lofty contempt. “Only worldly creatures like the Han fret about knowledge. We wish to acquire wisdom.”

Interesting, I thought. That same disdainful estimate had once been made of me—and by a Han. Nevertheless, I was not prepared to believe, then or now, that inertness and torpor represent the highest attainment humanity can aspire to. In my opinion, stillness is not always evidence of intelligence, and silence is not always evidence of a mind at work. Most vegetables are still and silent. In my opinion, meditation is not infallibly productive of profound ideas. I have seen vultures meditate on a full belly, and then do nothing more profound than regurgitate. In my opinion, inarticulate and obscure pronouncements are not always expressive of a wisdom so mystically sublime that only sages can comprehend it. The mouthings of the Potaist holy men were inarticulate and obscure, but so were the yappings of their lamasarai curs.

I went and found a chabi, the lowest form of life in a Pota-la, and asked how his time was spent.

“My admission here was granted on condition that I apprentice as a cleaning orderly,” he said. “But of course I pass most of my time meditating on my mantra.”

“And what is that, boy?”

“A few syllables from the Kandjur of holy scripture, assigned to me for my contemplation. When I have meditated long enough upon the mantra—some years perhaps—and it has expanded my mind sufficiently, I may be considered fit to rise to the status of trapa, and then begin to contemplate larger bits of the Kandjur.”

“Did it ever occur to you, boy, actually to spend your time in cleaning this sty, and studying ways to clean it better?”

He stared at me as if I had been rendered rabid by a dog bite. “Instead of my mantra, Highness? Whatever for? Cleaning is the lowliest of occupations, and he who would rise should look upward, not downward.”

I snorted. “Your Grand Lama does nothing but squat and contemplate the Holiest of Lamas, while his underlamas do nothing but squat and contemplate him. All the trapas do nothing but squat and contemplate the lamas. I would wager that the first apprentice who ever actually learned cleanliness could overthrow the whole regime. Become the master of this Pota-la, and then the Pope of Potaism, and eventually the Wang of all To-Bhot.”

“You have been grievously mad-bit by a dog, Highness,” he said, looking alarmed. “I will run and fetch one of our physicians—the pulse-feeler or the urine-smeller—that he may attend you in your affliction.”

Well, so much for the holy men. The influence of Potaism on the lay population of To-Bhot was about equally elevating. The men had learned to twirl any prayer mill they encountered, and the women had learned to screw up their hair into one hundred and eight braids, and both men and women were careful always, when walking past any holy edifice, to walk to the left of it and keep it always on their right hand. I do not know exactly why, except that there was a saying, “Beware the demons on the left,” and there were to be found in the countryside a great many stone walls and piled-up heaps of stone that had some indiscernible religious significance, and the road always divided around them, so that a traveler from either direction could keep the holiness on his right.

At every twilight, all the men, women and children of every community would leave off their day’s occupations, if any, and squat in the town streets or on their own rooftops, while they were led by the lamas and trapas of the Pota-la overhead, in chanting their evening appeal for oblivion, “Om mani peme hum,” over and over again. I might have been impressed by what was at least an example of popular solidarity and unabashed religiosity—in contrast to Venice, say, where my sophisticated townsfolk would blush to make even the sign of the cross in any gathering more public than a church service—but I simply could not admire a people’s devotion to a religion that did no good for them, or anyone.

Presumably it prepared them for the oblivion of Nirvana, but it made them so phlegmatic in this life, and so oblivious to this world, that I could not imagine how they would recognize the other oblivion when they got there. Most religions, I think, inspire their followers to an occasional activity and enterprise. Even the detestable Hindus sometimes bestir themselves, if only to butcher each other. But the Potaists had not enough initiative to kill a rabid dog, or even bother to step out of its way when it lunged. As well as I could tell, the Bho evinced one sole ambition: to break out of their constitutional torpor only long enough to advance into absolute and eternal coma.

Regard just one example of Bho apathy. In a land where so many men had retreated into celibacy and there was a consequent abundance of women, I would have expected to find the normal men enjoying a paradise: taking their pick of the females and taking as many as they wished. Not so. It was the females who did the picking and collecting. The women followed the custom I had earlier encountered: casually coupling before marriage with as many passersby as possible, and extorting a memento coin from each, so that, at marriageable age, the female laden with the most coins was the most desirable wife-to-be. But she did not simply take for husband the most eligible man in her community; she took several of them. Instead of each man being the Shah of a whole anderun of wives and concubines, every marriageable woman possessed a whole anderun of men, and the legions of her less comely sisters were doomed to spinsterhood.

One might say, well, that at least showed some enterprise on the part of at least a few women. But it was a poor showing, because what sort of eligible men could a woman choose her consorts from?

All those males with enough ambition and energy to walk uphill had done exactly that, and vanished into the Pota-la. Of the remainder, the only ones with any verifiable manhood and livelihood were usually those committed to the carrying-on of an established family farm or herd or trade. So a woman who could take her pick of men did so, not by marrying into one of those “best families,” but by marrying the whole family—anyway, the male members of it. That made for some complex conjugalities. I met one woman who was married to two brothers and to a son of each of them, and had children by all. Another woman was married to three brothers, while her daughter by one of them was married to the two others of them, plus another man she had procured somewhere outside the house.

How anybody in those tangled and inbred unions ever knew whose children were whose, I have no notion, and I suspect that none of them cared to know. I have concluded that the Bho people’s atrocious marital customs accounted for their general feeblemindedness, and also for their Potaist travesty of the Buddhist religion, and their continued sapless adherence to it, and their laughable belief that Potaism represented the accumulation of “all the wisdom of all the ages.” I came to that conclusion when, much later, I talked about the Bho to some distinguished Han physicians. They told me that generations of close inbreeding—common to mountain communities, and inevitable in those fanatically faith-bound —must produce a people of physical lethargy and diminished brain. If that is true, and I am convinced it is, then Potaism represents To-Bhot’s accumulation of all the imbecility of all the ages.

3

“YOUR Royal Father Kubilai prides himself on ruling peoples of quality,” I said to the Wang Ukuruji. “Why did he ever trouble to conquer and annex this miserable land of To-Bhot?”

“For its gold,” said Ukuruji, without great enthusiasm. “Gold dust can be panned from almost any river or creek bed in this country. We could get a lot more of it, of course, if I could make the wretched Bho dig and mine the sources of it. But they have been persuaded by their cursed lamas that gold nuggets and veins are the roots of the metal. Those must be left undisturbed, or they will not produce the gold dust, which is their pollen.” He laughed, and ruefully wagged his head. “Vakh!”

“One more evidence of the Bho intellect,” I said. “The land may be worth something, but the people are not. Why did Kubilai condemn his own son to govern them?”

“Somebody has to,” he said, with a resigned shrug. “The lamas would probably tell you that I must have committed some vile crime in some former existence, to deserve being made ruler of the Drok and the Bho. They might be right.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “your father will give you Yun-nan to rule instead —or in addition to To-Bhot.”

“That is what I devoutly hope,” he said. “Which is why I removed my court from the capital to this garrison town, to be close to the Yun-nan war zone, and await here the war’s outcome.”