Well, so much for the holy men. The influence of Potaism on the lay population of To-Bhot was about equally elevating. The men had learned to twirl any prayer mill they encountered, and the women had learned to screw up their hair into one hundred and eight braids, and both men and women were careful always, when walking past any holy edifice, to walk to the left of it and keep it always on their right hand. I do not know exactly why, except that there was a saying, “Beware the demons on the left,” and there were to be found in the countryside a great many stone walls and piled-up heaps of stone that had some indiscernible religious significance, and the road always divided around them, so that a traveler from either direction could keep the holiness on his right.
At every twilight, all the men, women and children of every community would leave off their day’s occupations, if any, and squat in the town streets or on their own rooftops, while they were led by the lamas and trapas of the Pota-lá overhead, in chanting their evening appeal for oblivion, “Om mani pémé hum,” over and over again. I might have been impressed by what was at least an example of popular solidarity and unabashed religiosity—in contrast to Venice, say, where my sophisticated townsfolk would blush to make even the sign of the cross in any gathering more public than a church service—but I simply could not admire a people’s devotion to a religion that did no good for them, or anyone.
Presumably it prepared them for the oblivion of Nirvana, but it made them so phlegmatic in this life, and so oblivious to this world, that I could not imagine how they would recognize the other oblivion when they got there. Most religions, I think, inspire their followers to an occasional activity and enterprise. Even the detestable Hindus sometimes bestir themselves, if only to butcher each other. But the Potaists had not enough initiative to kill a rabid dog, or even bother to step out of its way when it lunged. As well as I could tell, the Bho evinced one sole ambition: to break out of their constitutional torpor only long enough to advance into absolute and eternal coma.
Regard just one example of Bho apathy. In a land where so many men had retreated into celibacy and there was a consequent abundance of women, I would have expected to find the normal men enjoying a paradise: taking their pick of the females and taking as many as they wished. Not so. It was the females who did the picking and collecting. The women followed the custom I had earlier encountered: casually coupling before marriage with as many passersby as possible, and extorting a memento coin from each, so that, at marriageable age, the female laden with the most coins was the most desirable wife-to-be. But she did not simply take for husband the most eligible man in her community; she took several of them. Instead of each man being the Shah of a whole anderun of wives and concubines, every marriageable woman possessed a whole anderun of men, and the legions of her less comely sisters were doomed to spinsterhood.
One might say, well, that at least showed some enterprise on the part of at least a few women. But it was a poor showing, because what sort of eligible men could a woman choose her consorts from?
All those males with enough ambition and energy to walk uphill had done exactly that, and vanished into the Pota-lá. Of the remainder, the only ones with any verifiable manhood and livelihood were usually those committed to the carrying-on of an established family farm or herd or trade. So a woman who could take her pick of men did so, not by marrying into one of those “best families,” but by marrying the whole family—anyway, the male members of it. That made for some complex conjugalities. I met one woman who was married to two brothers and to a son of each of them, and had children by all. Another woman was married to three brothers, while her daughter by one of them was married to the two others of them, plus another man she had procured somewhere outside the house.
How anybody in those tangled and inbred unions ever knew whose children were whose, I have no notion, and I suspect that none of them cared to know. I have concluded that the Bho people’s atrocious marital customs accounted for their general feeblemindedness, and also for their Potaist travesty of the Buddhist religion, and their continued sapless adherence to it, and their laughable belief that Potaism represented the accumulation of “all the wisdom of all the ages.” I came to that conclusion when, much later, I talked about the Bho to some distinguished Han physicians. They told me that generations of close inbreeding—common to mountain communities, and inevitable in those fanatically faith-bound —must produce a people of physical lethargy and diminished brain. If that is true, and I am convinced it is, then Potaism represents To-Bhot’s accumulation of all the imbecility of all the ages.
3
“YOUR Royal Father Kubilai prides himself on ruling peoples of quality,” I said to the Wang Ukuruji. “Why did he ever trouble to conquer and annex this miserable land of To-Bhot?”
“For its gold,” said Ukuruji, without great enthusiasm. “Gold dust can be panned from almost any river or creek bed in this country. We could get a lot more of it, of course, if I could make the wretched Bho dig and mine the sources of it. But they have been persuaded by their cursed lamas that gold nuggets and veins are the roots of the metal. Those must be left undisturbed, or they will not produce the gold dust, which is their pollen.” He laughed, and ruefully wagged his head. “Vakh!”
“One more evidence of the Bho intellect,” I said. “The land may be worth something, but the people are not. Why did Kubilai condemn his own son to govern them?”
“Somebody has to,” he said, with a resigned shrug. “The lamas would probably tell you that I must have committed some vile crime in some former existence, to deserve being made ruler of the Drok and the Bho. They might be right.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “your father will give you Yun-nan to rule instead —or in addition to To-Bhot.”
“That is what I devoutly hope,” he said. “Which is why I removed my court from the capital to this garrison town, to be close to the Yun-nan war zone, and await here the war’s outcome.”
This garrison town, actually a trade-route market city named Ba-Tang, was where my escorts and I had ended our long journey from Khanbalik, and found the Wang Ukuruji, alerted by our advance riders, awaiting our arrival. Ba-Tang was in To-Bhot, but was the largest city conveniently close to the Yun-nan frontier of the Sung Empire. So this was where the Orlok Bayan had chosen to set his headquarters, and from which he repeatedly led or sent incursions southward against the Yi people. Ba-Tang had not been evacuated of its Bho inhabitants, but they were almost outnumbered by the Mongols occupying the city and its outskirts and the valley roundabout—five tomans of troops and their camp-follower women, the Orlok and his numerous staff, the Wang and his courtiers.
“I am ready and eager to move on again at a moment’s notice,” Ukuruji continued, “if ever Bayan succeeds in taking Yun-nan, and if my father gives me leave to go there. The Yi people will naturally be inimical to a Mongol overlord at first, but I had rather go among raging enemies than stay among the blighted Bho.”
“You mentioned your capital, Wang. I assume you mean the city of Lha-Ssa.”
“No. Why?”
“I was told that there dwells the Holiest of Lamas, the Sovereign Presence. I took it to be the chief city of the nation.”
He laughed. “Yes, there is the Holiest of Lamas at Lha-Ssa. There is another Holiest of Lamas at a place called Dri-Kung, and another at Pak-Dup, and another at Tsal, and others in other places. Vakh! You must understand that there is not just a single noxious Potaism, but innumerable rival sects of it, no one to be any more admired or abominated than another, and every one recognizing a different Holiest Lama at its head. For convenience, I recognize a Holiest Lama named Phags-pa, whose lamasarai is at the city of Shigat-Se, so that is where I have located the capital. Nominally at least, the venerable Phags-pa and I are co-governors of the country, he of its spiritual aspects, I of the temporal. He is a despicable old fraud, but no worse than any of the other Holiest Lamas, I suspect.”