Bigfoot and the Bodhisattva by Morrow James;

Author:Morrow, James; [Morrow, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Published: 2018-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

While Chögi Gyatso doubtless regarded me as a difficult pupil, perhaps the most exasperating he’d encountered in his present incarnation, the primary menace to his tranquility in those days remained his bitter, restless, firebrand brother. Although Dorje Lingpa had kept his promise to spend the whole of Mönlam Chenmo in profound meditation, his efforts had proved abortive, and he was now more determined than ever to strike a blow against the Han Chinese. Unenlightened being that I was, I framed Dorje Lingpa’s failure in egotistical terms. If His Holiness’s blood relatives had difficulty attaining sunyata, then I shouldn’t feel so bad about the absence of emptiness in my own life.

The intractable condition of Dorje Lingpa’s anger became apparent during our next secret pilgrimage to Lhasa. In a tone as devoid of compassion as a brick is devoid of milk, he confessed that he could not shake his mental image of “the Brahmaputra gorge swallowing a troop train like the great god Za feeding a string of sausages to the mouth embedded in his stomach.” He speculated that this vision might be “a sign from heaven,” and that Za himself was telling him “to render a divine judgment against the evil ones.”

His Holiness began to weep, the subtlest display of anguish I’d ever seen, the tears trickling softly down his face like meltwater in spring, his sobs barely audible above the guttural breathing of the seven hairy apes in the yurt. Dorje Lingpa remained adamant. The People’s Liberation Army must pay for its crimes. Changing the subject, or so it seemed at the time, he said that shortly after dawn he would like to take His Holiness on “a brief excursion in my track-inspection vehicle,” then turned to his yeti guests and declared that there would be room for one of us. I told him I would like to join the party.

Thus it happened that, shortly after sunrise, Chögi Gyatso, Dorje Lingpa, and I climbed into the open-air section-gang car and tooled eastward along the maintenance line at a brisk eighty kilometers per hour, enduring a wind chill from some frigid equivalent of hell. Dorje Lingpa wore his bomber jacket, His Holiness sat hunched beneath a yak-hide blanket, and I had wrapped myself head-to-toe in a tarp—not because I minded the cold, but because the surrounding gang car defied my usual white-on-white camouflage. Suddenly the harsh metallic bawl of a diesel horn filled the air, and then the train appeared, zooming toward us along the adjacent high-speed rails in a great sucking rush that whipped our clothing every which way like prayer flags in a gale. Each passenger coach was crammed with Han Chinese, some perhaps bound for a holiday in Lhasa but the majority surely intending to settle permanently, players in the government’s plan to marginalize the native population. Five hundred faces flew past, lined up along the windows like an abacus assembled from severed heads. Each wore an expression of nauseated misery—a syndrome probably born of the thin air,

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