As soon as I return to Gyantse, I go to see Phuntsog, one of Gyantse's two sky burial masters. I have been introduced to him by the street committee where we rented the house, and found that I already knew him: he comes to our house on a tractor once a week to collect our rubbish. He is a small, hunched man with an extremely dark complexion — possibly a result of the many hours he spends outside. He is friendly, and has a ready smile, but he seldom speaks unless spoken to. His manner is so humble that when I hand him our bin bags, he seems to consider it a favour.
Phuntsog lives just five minutes from us. He has the simplest of mud houses, on the edge of an open space where the neighbourhood's rubbish and waste water seem to have ended up. He is sitting in the small but tidy kitchen, enjoying some chang — barley wine — after work while his wife is cooking. My arrival seems to startle him. He stands up, looking at me but not knowing what to say. I explain why I have come: I have told him before that I want to film a sky burial, and all he said was that it would be difficult. Now I really need his advice: how could we persuade the family? Might there be a way round it?
‘The trouble is it's a crucial time,’ he said. ‘The soul of the dead is still in the body. If you come to the house, if strangers come, you will disturb or even frighten the soul. That is why, when someone dies, we put a bunch of juniper twigs on the door to warn people to stay away.’
So when does the family send for him?
‘They would call the shaman or a lama first. He works out the location and the right time for the sky burial. Then they let me know. Usually it is three days after the death. They put butter lamps near the body to guide the soul; it must not wander in the dark. The close relatives have to be told, and neighbours help to get a big feast ready — meat dumplings, boiled mutton, and rice with butter and dried fruit. We think this is the dead person's last meal. All this time, there will be a lama reading out mantras beside the body, praying for the soul.’
So we cannot film during these three days?
‘No, most families won't want you there,’ he said. ‘It's too important. The soul has this one chance of finding its next life. They are not going to let you disturb it.’
What about after the three days?
‘It is still hard. We do the sky burial and then the soul wanders. It is in the bardo, that is the time between death and the next life. If it is frightened, it might get stuck there. That would be terrible.’
How long will the rebirth take?
‘It depends. It's all to do with your karma. But normally we think it takes forty-nine days.’
He sees my face fall at that, and goes on: ‘Maybe there's a family who will let you. It costs money. They want to do it properly. If they are really poor and you can help them, they might let you film. Even then you will have to do it from a long way off.’
Now I know I will not have a chance with the Rikzin family.
I leave Phuntsog and walk back to the house, passing clusters of old men and women, silent and purposeful. They are doing their evening circumambulation of the whole town: it is to accumulate merit for a better reincarnation. Outside the No. 1 High School, they mingle with students walking up and down, memorising their lessons — their way of taking care of their future. I see the old people every day, and I always wonder whether this ‘merit’ will really help them; at least they are getting some exercise, I say to myself. But after the big blow I have received, I cannot let go of my disappointment. I find myself, not for the first time, disputing in my head the whole idea of reincarnation, however essential it is for Buddhists.
It all started with my grandmother. Like most Chinese of her generation, she was a Buddhist. Her whole life was one of hardship — seven of her nine children died during a smallpox outbreak in a single year. Her sole consolation was the paradise she believed in. She used to describe it in great detail: the sun forever shining, flowers eternally in bloom, houses made of gold, no sickness, no infirmity — a world where everyone has whatever their heart desires, in which we are all reunited with those we love.
It is the Buddhist ‘Western paradise’. To get there, Grandmother was told to pray and do good and no evil. She was eternally kind to everyone, even during the Cultural Revolution, comforting the so-called ‘enemies of the people’ who no one else dared to go near. When my father, a convinced Communist, told her not to pray or do her superstitious things, she took to saying her prayers wordlessly at night. As a child I always sided with my father, influenced by him, and set against Buddhism by my atheist education. Religion was an opiate; monks and nuns were parasites; the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas were just wooden statues. Mao was the saviour; Communism would bring paradise here on earth. I made fun of her beliefs. As Father said, if her children had been vaccinated, as we were, she would not have lost them. It had nothing to do with her supposed sins.
After her death, I began to find out more about Buddhism. In 2000, I spent a year retracing the footsteps of Xuanzang, a Chinese monk who travelled in the seventh century from China to India and back, searching for the true Buddhism. I learned that Buddhism had little to do with the version I was made to swallow at school. I was appalled that I had been attacking it without really knowing what it was. For two thousand years, it has given generations of Chinese hope and solace; it has enriched every aspect of our life, our philosophy, our art, even our language. We would have little of a cultural heritage without it. I learned in particular to appreciate the centrality of the mind in Buddhism, and how it can be cultivated. This was not superstition. It was a way to transcend the suffering that is part of life. Things happen; what matters is how we react. I always remembered the story of the Chinese monk who was spat on by the Red Guards in a ‘struggle meeting’; he said to himself it was just raining. It might sound extreme, even absurd — but he did not take his life, as many did; he never even hated his tormentors. In the same way Grandmother could rise above her pain and return my ingratitude with love; she took my taunts as just words.
I still have much to learn and understand about Buddhism. But one thing makes it very hard for me to embrace it, and that is reincarnation. I have so many questions about it. What is it that migrates from this life to the next? Phuntsog calls it the soul. But Buddhism denies the existence of a permanent soul because everything is transitory. It says we are merely a heap of five elements: body, feeling, cognition, mental constructions, and consciousness. The five elements are all impermanent; they are constantly in the process of becoming and changing. When questioned by a perplexed young monk, the Buddha said only that ‘karma’ passes from one life to another. He used the light of a candle as an illustration. A flame passes from one candle to another, but they are two separate entities, neither of which is permanent. It is a beautiful image, and yet, even here, there is something that has caused the flame. Something has to reincarnate. When I get back to the house, I look in the Tibetan Book of the Dead for an answer. The book comes down to us from Padam, the Indian master credited with bringing Buddhism from India to Tibet in the eighth century. It has the most vivid, thorough descriptions of the soul's forty-nine-day journey through the bardo, but its main message is how enlightenment can still be attained every step of the way, from the moment of death.
Once enlightened, we are freed from the cycle of suffering: birth, sickness, old age, and death. In Tibetan the book is called Great Liberation by Hearing — it is hearing the book and grasping its teaching that will provide enlightenment after death. Without enlightenment, the only hope is a good rebirth.
The Book of the Dead does say that what reincarnates is the consciousness, which is really light and energy. It acquires a ‘mental body’ that can see, hear, smell, speak, run, comprehend — and all more efficiently than humans can. But I still feel lost. Being told it is light and energy does not help me much, and a mental body with all those properties is even less comprehensible. And if enlightenment is so hard to achieve, how can a ball of light and energy manage it, and just by hearing the Book?
I cannot help think of the titanic struggle by Milarepa after he unleashed the hailstorm