However un-Potaistly lavish our meals sometimes were, they were never very elegant. We being honored guests, we were always seated to dine in the Pota-lá’s “chanting hall,” so we had the mealtime entertainment of several dozen trapas dolefully chanting while they thumped skull drums and rattled prayer bones. Among the serving platters and eating bowls, the banquet table bore an array of spittoons, and the holy men used them to the point of overflow. All about the dark hall stood statues of the Pota and his numerous disciple godlings and the numerous adversary demons, and every one of them was visible even in the gloom, because it gleamed with its slathering of yak butter. Where we Christians would light a candle to a saint, or perhaps leave with him a taolèta, it was the Bho’s practice to smear their idols with yak butter, and the thick and ancient layers reeked of rancid decay. Whether the Pota and the other images were gratified by that, I do not know, but I can attest that the local vermin were. Even when the hall was full of noisy diners and chanters, I could hear the squeaks and snickers of mice and rats as they—plus cockroaches, centipedes and God knows what else—scurried foraging up and down the statues. Most nauseating of all, we and our dinner hosts always sat on what I at first took to be a low dais built up above the floor level. It felt rather spongy under me, so I furtively investigated to see what it was made of—and discovered that we were seated atop nothing but a mound of compacted food droppings, the detritus of decades or maybe centuries of the holy men’s slovenly drool-ings and slobberings of their meals.

When their mouths were not masticating or otherwise occupied, the holy men chanted almost continuously, in concert at the top of their lungs, in solitude under their breaths. One chant went like this: “Lha so so, khi ho ho,” which meant more or less, “Come gods, begone demons!” A shorter one went like this: “Lha gyelo,” meaning “The gods are victorious!” But the chant that was heard most often and interminably and everywhere in To-Bhot went like this: “Om mani pémé hum.” The opening and closing noises of it were always intoned in a drawn-out manner, so: “O-o-o-om” and “Hu-u-u-um,” and they constituted just a sort of “amen.” The other two words meant, literally, “the jewel in the lotus,” in the same sense that those terms are used in the Han lexicon of sex. In other words, the holy men were chanting, “Amen, the male organ is inside the female’s! Amen!”

Now, one of the Han religions prevailing back in Kithai, the one they call Tao, “the Way,” has an unashamed connection with sex. In Taoism, the male essence is called yang and the female’s is yin, and everything else in the universe—whether material, intangible, spiritual, whatever—is regarded as being either yang or yin, hence totally discrete and opposite (as men and women are) or complementary and necessary to each other (as men and women are). Thus active things are called yang, passive ones yin. Heat and cold, the heavens and the earth, sun and moon, light and darkness, fire and water, they are all respectively yang and yin, or, as anyone can recognize, inextricably yang-yin. At the most basic level of human behavior, when a man couples with a woman and absorbs her female yin by means of his male yang, he is not in any sense tinged with effeminacy, but becomes more of a complete man, stronger, more alive, more aware, more worthwhile. And just so, the woman becomes more of a woman by accepting his yang with her yin. From that elementary foundation, Tao proceeds up to metaphysical heights and abstractions that I cannot pretend to grasp.

It may be that some Han Taoist, wandering into To-Bhot long ago, when the natives still worshiped the Old Peacock, kindly tried to explain to them his amiable religion. The Bho could hardly have misunderstood the universal act of putting male organ into female—or jewel into lotus, as the Han would have expressed it—or mani into pémé, in their language. But such oafs would have been baffled by the higher significances of yang and yin, so all they ever retained of Tao was that preposterous chant of “Om mani pémé hum.” Still, not even the Bho could have built much of a religion on a prayer that had no loftier meaning than “Amen, stick it in her! Amen!” So, as they later and gradually adopted Buddhism from India, they must have adapted the chant to fit that religion. All they had to do was construe the “jewel” as Buddha, or Pota, because he is so often portrayed as sitting in meditation on a large lotus blossom. So the chant came to mean something like “Amen, Pota is in his place! Amen!” And then, no doubt, some later lamas—in the way that self-appointed sages always complicate even the purest faith with their unsolicited commentaries and interpretations—decided to festoon the simple chant with more abstruse aspects. So they decreed that the word mani (jewel, male genitals, Pota) would henceforth signify The Means, and the word pémé (lotus, female genitals, Pota’s place) would henceforth refer to Nirvana. Thus the chant became a prayer beseeching The Means to achieve that Nirvana oblivion which Potaists deem the highest end of life: “Amen, blot me out! Amen!”

Certainly, Potaism no longer had any laudable connection with sexual relations between men and women, because at least one of every three Bho males, at puberty or even younger, fled from the prospect of ever having to endure sex with any Bho female, and took the red robe of religion. So far as I could tell, that vow of celibacy was the only qualification necessary for entrance into a Pota-lá and eventual elevation through the ascending degrees of monkhood and priesthood. The chabis, or novices, were given nothing like a secular education or seminary instruction, and I encountered only three or four of the oldest and highest-grade lamas who could even read and write the “Om mani peme hum,” let alone the one hundred and eight books of the Kandjur scriptures, let alone the two hundred and twenty-five Tengyur books of commentary on the Kandjur. In speaking of the holy men’s celibacy, however, I should rightly have said celibacy in regard to females. Many of the lamas and trapas flagrantly flaunted their amorousness toward each other, to leave no doubt that they had forsworn sordid, ordinary, normal sex.

Potaism, however it developed, was a religion demanding only sheer quantity of devotion, not any quality of it. By that I mean a seeker of oblivion simply had to repeat “Om mani pémé hum” enough times during his life and he expected that would take him to Nirvana when he died. He did not even have to speak the words, or repeat them in any way requiring his own volition. I have mentioned prayer mills; they were everywhere in the lamasarais, and in every house, and even to be found standing in empty countryside. They were drumlike cylinders within which were wound paper scrolls on which the mani chant was written. A man had only to give the cylinder a spin with his hand and those “repetitions” of the prayer counted to his credit. Sometimes he rigged it like a waterwheel, so that a stream or cascade kept it turning and praying constantly. Or he could hoist a flag inscribed with the prayer, or a whole line of them—those were far more frequently to be seen in To-Bhot than any lines of washing hung out—and every flap the wind gave every flag was credited to him. Or he could run his hand along a line of dangling sheep shoulder blades, each bone inscribed with the mani, strung like wind chimes, and they prayed for him as long as they went on clattering.

I once came upon a trapa crouched beside a creek, flinging into it and hauling out again a tile attached to a string. He had been doing that, he said, all his adult life, and would go on doing it until he died.

“Doing what?” I asked, thinking that perhaps, in some idiotic Bho way, he was trying to emulate San Piero as a fisher of souls. The monk showed me his tile; it was engraved with the mani prayer, in the fashion of a yin seal. He explained that he was “imprinting” the prayer on the running water, stamping it there over and over again, and he was accruing piety with every invisible “impression.”