The last time I was inside this monastery was many years ago. That time I was driven here by someone else, racing from Edinburgh one December day like a military reconnaisance team as the surrounding hills stirred and lumbered to their winterthinned heights. (By these signs and portents I can almost remember that incarnation: I lived as a sour pauper at the Sixties Lovecourt of New Age Testimonial Princes and their grave Young Sisters of the Cosmic Dance). People were coming away from this place with reports that the disciples had split into factions of implacable enmity; that there was intrigue, calumny and eruptions of violence; that the Guru was the helpless prisoner of evil forces; that the Guru was himself the source of the evil. Each new story contradicted the last, but all agreed in the fervour of their telling, and each was a call to arms. I was on terms with people in both camps and could afford to offend neither. These were my Rulers who were at war, my duty to observe.

I sat in the back of the car gazing out at the passing landscape, which also contended, though with the weathering forces of frost and time. It was a clear, windless day, the cold sunlight giving a startling clarity of outline to everything, including the single large cloud which hung over the valley, immobile and crisply perfect. Whichever way the car turned, or climbed, or descended, the cloud never seemed to alter its shape or position, it just stood there, solidly, as imminent and irrational as a floating rock, or like something painted on the cold stretched cloth of the sky. From merely registering it I became curious, then oddly unsettled, and then truly afraid as I realised ^___with a visceral jolt^___ that while I was looking at it, it was also watching me!

Though not normally given to psychic perception of any kind, I have never doubted the truth of that experience. It produced the instinctive, knife-like stillness of one in the presence of some great and present danger. It was not the phenomenon but the personality, the being itself, that was frightening: an old, obsessive malevolence, male and powerful ^___but 'old' is not quite right. It was more a state of dry, malignant burning which knew it could never die.

A bookish and manicured evil. My soulsown, my fathering face. What interworld acid could have uncorked such a hate-filled genie?

6. Knowing the suffering of all conditioned beings

The monastery was very bleak then, with bare floors and dreary walls. The only colour was in the empty meditation hall, where fat waxen idols sat submerged in their coffin glaze, unmoved by the currents of aggression and beseechment swirling fitfully through the cold hallways. People who were little more than acquaintances rushed up and hugged me like a long-lost friend; they had hysterically bright eyes and marks of damage in their faces, and I understood that they wanted to touch my neutrality. I spent the short winter afternoon wandering where I was allowed and talking to those who would talk. Some were truculent, some worried, and one unhappy young man broke down and cried, so mysteriously stressful was the atmosphere. They seemed like abandoned sheep, harried by wolves they could not see.

As the light of day died beneath the frigid shadow of the circling hills I could feel myself slipping into a depression. I walked beside the river to let it wash away the gloom, but all I could see was a monotonous drainage of unwanted water, cold and spiritless.

A little later I went with some other people to the old Farmhouse, where my friend already lived, and the factional quarrels broke out again round the bare kitchen table. My memory of the room that night is that it was lit only by the smouldering of deep animosities, the shadows massed and restive with accusing thought. My supposed neutrality was not helpful, appearing unfeeling and supercilious beside their passion, and I longed to be away from there. While the argument was at its loudest, the kitchen door opened and there, barefooted on the cold stone floor, stood a little girl. She was sobbing and choking with incoherent alarm. No-one moved or spoke. Looking at her, I knew her dreadful journey: summoned from whatever light of dream into a concrete darkness, then descending, step by involuntary step, toward the violent-bodied gloom which lay like a pit beneath her worried sleep.

How we make the children suffer, filling their unformed purity with our loveless works. Still, that was many years ago, another lifetime, and nothing remains of that now except...

These memorised eventrails, strung in fine curves from hill to hill like tenuous, wind-distorted telegraph.



7. Discipleship

I've barely had time to introduce myself to Alie and proffer a few historical credentials when the door opens again and a couple in their late middle-age are shown in as part of their tour of the monastery. They are a noticeably similar pair, grown alike perhaps, with the same stocky figure, the same rosy, nutfed face, and even the same tweedy grey clothes. They are here because they have a daughter, or perhaps a son, who has confounded years of hard squirrelling by wormturning Buddhist at the finest hour. They feel bemused and intimidated and look everywhere with tight brows and uncertain eyes, murmuring politely at each new sight.

The young woman who conducts them is not the offspring; she has no interest in them except as they provide an opportunity to practice the Skillful Means (Upaya) of public relations. She is good, years of self-cultivation having bronzed her face into a mask of serenity, and Father and Mother are trying but they can make nothing of these alien, idolatrous figures clustered onto cloth in gilt and pastel like act-curtains of some bygone age. They hear without understanding that it can take two years to finish a large one, that it is a very rare art-form, that it develops patience and detachment, and that working on them is a kind of meditation.

They came here prepared to encounter some exotic evil, visualising their daughter drugged on mumbo-jumbo and incense, only to find everything as tame and sober as a high-street bank. There is no mystery; they can see their son clearly, like a large moth fixed under heavy glass, and this person beside them polishing, polishing, with her careful words.