‘You have had a difficult time,’ the Bodhisattva said gently. ‘The evil spirits were a match for you.’
‘Bodhisattva, I should not have tired so easily.’
The Bodhisattva laughed. ‘That was because the ignorant mortals could not tell good from evil.’
So everything was visible from up here, he thought. Why, then, did they send me there?
The Bodhisattva waved a plump, soft hand and said, ‘Do not try to guess at celestial intentions. You will understand when you live here.’
‘I see. I must gather enough karmic merits.’
On that point, the Bodhisattva was clear: ‘Indeed. A human must acquire sufficient experience to become a deity.’ Then the Bodhisattva added, ‘There is no need for you to describe what you heard and saw in Gling. We see everything clearly from here, not only that which has already happened but that which is to come.’
‘Then why do you not alleviate the suffering down there?’ Master Lotus asked.
A stern look appeared on the Bodhisattva’s face. ‘All we can do is give help and guidance.’
‘Then please allow me to return and fight.’
‘You have accomplished your mission, and your karmic merits now allow you to be freed from samsara, the wheel of reincarnation. You will become a deity and take your place in the heavenly court. From now on, you will use your magic to protect the black-haired common folk who live amid the snowcapped mountains. You will never again appear in person to fight demons.’
The Bodhisattva turned and passed through the celestial gate on a pink, auspicious cloud. Master Lotus waited for a long time, long enough to burn several sticks of incense, but the Bodhisattva did not reappear. He did not know whether he could now enter the heavenly court, so he grew anxious and restless. Had he been his impatient, pre-transformation self, he would have hopped back onto the roc and returned to the mountains where he had undergone his training as a monk.
The Storyteller The Shepherd’s Dream
Yes, restless and anxious.
Those drifting, floating clouds. Anxious and restless.
The shepherd had had the same dream many times. And it always ended at the moment when the most revered Bodhisattva entered the celestial gate. Even in the dream he felt restless, that it was not the man pacing outside the gate but he himself who was anxious because he wanted to know what would happen next.
In his dream he had looked deep into the celestial court and seen a sparkling jade staircase. The steps closest to him looked sturdy, those further away soft, but the end of the staircase did not disappear into the cloud. Instead, as though unable to bear its own weight, it tipped at the top . . . but he could see no further. Once, at the edge of a summer pasture, he had climbed a five-thousand-metre sacred mountain that wore a helmet of snow and ice. There, too, the mountain had seemed to tip into the clouds that roiled beneath its cliffs. Beyond lay another world, but what that world looked like he would never know, not in this lifetime.
He dreamed that the other world would crack open before him, like a cave – those words appeared in his head. Although he was an illiterate shepherd, in his dreams he had become wiser. Strange how such a literary phrase popped into his mind just when he was waiting anxiously to see what would happen next. He heard a roar, like torrents of water sluicing down the rocky surface of steep hills when frozen rivers melted on a summer day. The noise woke him. He opened his eyes to find that he had been sleeping on a hill sheltered from the wind by Siberian cypresses. The sheep were scattered across the grassy floodplain, cropping tender grass, flaring their nostrils to capture the scents on the breeze. When they saw him, they raised their sad faces and called out to him.
Baa.
Half dreaming, compassion rose inside him: he was reminded of the people who had been manipulated by the demons.
He gazed into the sky, and the roar he had heard in his dream burst forth again, like thousands of mounted riders galloping towards him. Above him a great crevasse had opened under the thick layer of snow on the slopes of the sacred mountain, between the ice and the steel-grey rock. With a muffled rumble, the snow slid slowly down until it reached the fractured ridge where it became an avalanche, ice powder rising into the air. Wind buffeted his face, the chill purity of the air driving out the last remnant of sleep. He had been expecting an avalanche, a clear sign that summer had arrived. Purple gentians bloomed around him on the grassland, and giant buds formed on the fuzzy stalks of snow lotuses.
But he paid little attention to the flowers: he was thinking only of how tomorrow he would take his sheep closer to the foothills now that the grass was lush and green and the danger of avalanche had passed. The noise had startled the sheep, and cleared the last vestiges of his dream from his mind, but his agitation remained, like a dark cloud on the horizon. But then his dream came back to him clearly, and he saw the story that had played out on this very land. For thousands of years, bards had told the tale, on the grassland and in farming villages. He himself had heard it many times, the story of a hero, King Gesar, but from poor storytellers who could remember only fragments. Now, as he revisited his dream, he realised that he had seen the beginning of the story.
Silence reigned, yet he could hear thunderclaps in the mountains. He shuddered, as if struck by lightning, and sweat poured from his body. What power had let him witness the opening scenes that had eluded so many? Without knowing the beginning, others could not tell the whole story – the beginning, the middle and the end.
The shepherd’s uncle was one of those bards. He was a farmer in a village two hundred li from the shepherd’s home, and in his spare time, he carved sutra printing blocks from pear wood. He would sit in the lotus position under the shade of a plum tree in the middle of the yard and send wood shavings curling down between his fingers. Lines were etched ever more deeply into his face. Sometimes he would sip strong drink and sing fragments of King Gesar’s tale. His song had no beginning or end, for he knew only how to describe the hero’s mount, the weapons he wielded, the warlike helmet he wore and the powerful magic that enabled him to kill people like flies.
‘What happens next?’ the shepherd had asked his uncle many times.
‘That is all my master told me.’
‘Who taught your master?’
‘No one. He saw it in a dream. He was sick with a high fever, and babbling when he dreamed it.’
‘Could he not have dreamed the rest?’
‘Jigmed, my dear nephew, did you come all this way, nearly crippling the little donkey, only to ask me foolish questions?’
Jigmed just smiled.
In the courtyard of the farming village, with its several plum trees, he watched as his uncle placed a length of pear wood on his knees and began to carve words, reciting as he worked. Jigmed had not wanted to stay inside with his cousins. The younger one, who went to school, had told him that the gamy odour he’d brought with him from the fields was offensive. He was puzzled: he did not smell bad when he was on the pasture, but in this hot village he reeked of sheep and cows.
‘Don’t worry about the smell, Jigmed. It will be gone in a few days,’ his uncle said.
‘I want to go home.’
‘You must be disappointed by my story. But that is my master’s fault. He said he had dreamed it all but could not remember much when he awoke. He told me he could not even retell half of what he had dreamed.’
Jigmed wanted to tell his uncle that he had had a similar dream, more than once: he, too, had always forgotten it upon waking, but this time, startled by the avalanche, he could recall it all. The hero had yet to appear, so he knew he had seen the beginning of a long tale. His need to know what happened next