For several days, Wen did not speak. Zhuoma tried to console her by telling her that they were bound to find someone else who knew more about the local legend of the Chinese menba, but Wen was unable to answer. It was as if the endless succession of blows and disappointments had robbed her of all her powers of expression.
It was Tiananmen who roused her. Early one morning, he and Zhuoma saddled the horses and encouraged Wen to join them on a ride to a nearby mountainside.
“I would like to take you to see a sky burial site,” said Tiananmen quietly.
A SKY burial had just taken place when the three friends arrived on the mountaintop. White khata scarves and streamers were fluttering in the breeze; little scraps of paper money danced and turned on the ground like snowflakes. They found themselves in a large gated enclosure in the center of which was a sunken area paved with stone. There was a walkway flanked by two stone altars.
As they stood talking, a man walked up to them and introduced himself as the sky burial master. He asked if he could help. Tiananmen stepped forward and bowed.
“We would like to learn about sky burial,” he said.
Although the sky burial master looked a little surprised to be asked such a thing, he was not unwilling to grant their request.
“Humans are part of nature,” he began. “We arrive in the world naturally and we leave it naturally. Life and death are part of a wheel of reincarnation. Death is not to be feared. We look forward eagerly to our next life. When a smoking fire of mulberry branches is lit in a sky burial site, it rolls out a five-colored road between heaven and earth, which entices the spirits down to the altar. The corpse becomes an offering to the spirits and we call upon them to carry the soul up to heaven. The mulberry smoke draws down eagles, vultures, and other sacred scavengers, who feed upon the corpse. This is done in imitation of the Buddha Sakyamuni, who sacrificed himself to feed the tigers.”
Wen quietly asked the master to explain in detail how the corpse was laid out for the vultures.
“First the body is washed,” he said, “and shaved of all head and body hair. Then it is wrapped in a shroud of white cloth and placed in a sitting position with its head bowed on its knees. When an auspicious day has been chosen, the corpse is carried on the back of a special bearer to the sky burial altar. Lamas come from the local monastery to send the spirit on its way and, as they chant the scriptures that release the soul from purgatory, the sky burial master blows a horn, lights the mulberry fire to summon the vultures, and dismembers the body, smashing the bones in an order prescribed by ritual. The body is dismembered in different ways, according to the cause of death, but, whichever way is chosen, the knife work must be flawless, otherwise demons will come to steal the spirit.”
A memory of the dissection classes at her university passed before Wen’s mind, but she forced herself to continue listening.
“Do the birds ever refuse to eat a body?” she asked.
“Because the vultures prefer eating the flesh to the bones,” the sky burial master replied, “we feed the bones to the birds first. Sometimes we mix the smashed bone with yak butter. When somebody has taken a lot of herbal medicine, his body will taste strongly of that medicine and the vultures don’t like it. Butter and other additions help make it more palatable. It is essential that the whole body be eaten. Otherwise the corpse will be taken over by demons.”
Wen stood and looked at the sky burial site for some time. She heard Tiananmen ask the sky burial master whether it was true that one sky burial master had kept back the heads of all the corpses brought to him and built them into a vast wall of skulls because he had witnessed a murder when he was a child and wanted to keep the ghost of the murderer at bay. She didn’t listen to the master’s answer. She was trying to reconcile herself to the idea of allowing the sharp, ravenous beak of a vulture to break into the flesh of a loved one. In the time she had been in Tibet, she had grown to understand many of the things that had, at first, horrified and disgusted her. The Buddhist faith was now a part of her life. Why, then, was it so difficult for her to believe, as Zhuoma and Tiananmen did, that sky burial was a natural and sacred rite and not an act of barbarity? If Kejun was the Chinese menba people spoke of, would she be able to bear it?
As they were leaving, she turned to the sky burial master.
“Have you ever performed a sky burial for a Chinese?” she asked.
The master looked at her curiously. “Never,” he said. “But Old Hermit Qiangba, who sits beside Lake Zhaling, sings of such a thing.”
BACK AT Lake Zhaling, the three friends pitched their tent near the place where Qiangba used to sing so that they could ask the people who came there to collect water whether they knew what had happened to the hermit. Some people told them that Qiangba had walked away over the waves, singing as he went. Others said that his chanting had called the spirits to him and they had summoned him to heaven. But the three of them refused to believe that Qiangba had gone forever, taking their hopes with him.
On the point of despair, they decided to go and make an offering of a mani stone in the hope that it would bring them good fortune. Just as they were making preparations to go, a tall man galloped up to their tent.
“Are you the people looking for Old Hermit Qiangba?”
The three of them nodded in assent, all completely taken aback.
“Then come with me.”
Before the words were out, the man had steered his horse back around and whipped it on. With no pause for thought, Wen and the others threw down their bags, jumped onto their horses, and set off in pursuit of the stranger.
Soon they arrived at a tent. They handed their horses’ reins to a woman waiting outside and followed the man in. Next to the stove they saw someone sleeping, a thick quilt wrapped around him. Only his pale face was visible.
“Qiangba!” Wen whispered. From the sound of the hermit’s breathing, she could tell that his lungs were very weak.
The Tibetan man gestured at them to stay quiet, then took them outside. He guessed from their anxious expressions what it was they were about to ask, and he told them to sit down on the grass.
“Don’t worry, I’ll explain. One morning a week or so ago, my two daughters came back from fetching water from the lake and said that Old Hermit Qiangba was just sitting there, not singing. My wife thought this unusual and suggested I go and see for myself. So that very day, I rode with my daughters to the lakeside. As they’d said, the hermit was just sitting there in silence, his head bent right over. I walked up to him, shouting his name, but he didn’t move or respond in any way. He didn’t look well, so I tried shaking him, but he just slumped over. I saw that both of his eyes were screwed shut, and that his forehead and hands were very hot, so I carried him back here on my horse. We have tried giving him some herbal medicine, but it doesn’t seem to have had much effect. Although his fever has gone down, he just sleeps all the time and doesn’t say anything. We were thinking of sending him to the monastery nearby to be treated by the lamas.
“Today, when my daughter came back from fetching water, she said she’d heard you’d been staying by the lake for several days, asking after the hermit, so I came looking for you.” He glanced inside the tent. “Although everyone around here loves and reveres Old Hermit Qiangba, no one knows where he comes from. All we know is that twenty years ago, he miraculously appeared here and began watching over the lake and singing about King Gesar, Mount Anyemaqen, and our great Tibetan spirits. Sometimes he also sings about how a Chinese menba stopped the fighting between Chinese and Tibetans in this region. People fetching water bring him food, but none of us knows where he lives. Sometimes, people see him talking to lamas from the nearby monastery. Some say that the lamas know all about his past, but I’m not sure. We only come to the Hundred Lakes for the spring and summer.”