In the peculiar time span known as the 2020s, the residents of a dying nation known as the United States—who’d been oversaturated and over-traumatized with information—elected as their leader a manic-depressive failed actor turned reality TV star. With an oversized ego, a broken heart, and no real experience or interest in governing, the first millennial president made the secret decision to devote all the powers of his office to building “the Path,” a contiguous footpath that would circle the entire planet. The goal of the Path was twofold: to deliver unity and enlightenment to an atomized world, and to rewin the allegiance of the President’s ex. 

To better know, feel connected to, and eventually manipulate his people, the President would privately turn to an anonymous social media account, which consisted of either utopian or dystopian travelogues about the new cities that were allegedly emerging beyond the President’s ability to see from his self-isolation in the nation’s capital. Wanting, naturally, to capture the source of the travelogues’ insight, the President located and kidnapped their author, an urban nomad and former Buddhist monk called the Tourist, whom the President would adopt as a secret spiritual advisor. In those brief moments between the collapse of one pillar of the American dream and the next, the Tourist would soothe the President’s existential dread by telling him stories of the so-called “New American Cities.”

These are the stories of Sunyata Woods and Sankhara Rapids.

Sunyata Woods—City of Somethingness

After fleeing Cohenville in terror—chased by a man in traditional black samue, swinging a perfectly rounded white stone in a leather sling above his head, with a disturbingly untroubled look that made me realize I was not as nonattached to my physical survival as I had previously thought—I resolved to get as far from that city as I could. Whether I succeeded or not can be debated, as before long I found myself arriving in Sunyata Woods, Cohenville’s sister city and rival for the title of the Zen capital of the empire. 

For all their uniquenesses, cities do have kin—rivals, antagonists, soulmates—bound together by culture and karma and markets. But while Cohenville sought to shun and punish tourists, Sunyata Woods embraced them. And why? Why does Sunyata Woods advertise her attractions and her citizens’ meditative achievements on televisions across the empire, during bodysurfing competitions and reality shows about modern gold miners, no less? 

It is said that, for all the Sunyatans’ excellence in the sport of emptiness, they do cling to a certain ember of self, which makes them more relatable to us than the Cohens, and safer to visit. Sunyatans have names and living wills, the barest minima of personalities and bank accounts. 

If you visit Sunyata Woods, you can ask the citizens (they are a curious people, who maintain no defenses against the curiosity of others): if you accept the teaching of the mind’s innate emptiness, and of the self as an illusion that inevitably perpetuates suffering, why do you not go as far as the Cohens? Why do you not strive to eliminate or surrender every trace of a self, by any means necessary? What advantage does maintaining a self offer the true seeker, who is a tourist toward liberation, who dreams of no destination more than whatever place or nonplace is beyond suffering?

The Sunyatans will happily elaborate upon the differences in their and the Cohens’ understanding. Cohens say they prize emptiness, but if you follow their logic upstream, you’ll find it flowing from a belief in the opposite of emptiness—that the universe is completely saturated with being, which fills even the spaces between the things that make up the things that make up the atoms. Cohens believe that by emptying the self, which serves to separate the inner world from the outer, that the unification of those two realms can be achieved. When the self is dissolved, the world floods in to fill the space with itself, subsuming the emptiness. 

To the Sunyatans, this is an abomination, for Sunyatans believe in actual emptiness as the original and final thing, and this is what they’re after. They grant the Cohens the supposition that there’s an innate somethingness to being, which like the most invasive species or gas or government colonizes even the smallest spaces, in between even whatever it is that space is made of. But for the Sunyatans, the self isn’t only an illusion. It occupies some liminal category between something and nothing that, when sufficiently thickened and purified, can keep the two from interpenetrating. A perfectly cultivated self, the Sunyatans’ mythology says, creates a kind of border around the only true emptiness there is. Without such a self, there’s no quarantine to effectively frame and contain the holy vacuum, to keep the somethingness of the world from flooding in. 

These dogmatic fineries will mean little to the Tourist, except that the Sunyatans can’t really be known except through their passion about them. The Sunyatans use their selves—and bodies and relationships, jobs and possessions—as instruments to advance the collective evacuation. Above all—and this is what really separates them from the Cohens—they use their children. While Cohens are morally forbidden from creating and legally forbidden from raising children, Sunyatans are equally compelled to create this deepest form of attachment, which makes for them, as it does everyone, the worst sufferings of mind, which go on to encapsulate the profoundest blisses of emptiness when sitting in meditation.

The meditation the Sunyatans practice and rigorously drill their children in is also unique. Rather than surrendering thoughts of self, from birth young Sunyatans are trained to cling to them with all the grip-strength of competitive rock climbers. The little Zensters spend all their days at elite self-academies, where they learn to achieve ever more rapid, resilient, sustained, and artful generations of self-cultivation, so strong that none of its inner nothingness will be converted to somethingness by the generative power of witness. 

It will be unsurprising, then, to learn that it’s from Sunyata Woods that all the Zen Champions of recent memory have emerged. Certain wunderkind, tracked from an early age for achievement and fame, receive corporate sponsorship, and even private tutelage from the great masters. They demonstrate their aptitude in meditation Olympiads, in which they’re subjected not just to raucous crowds and live international broadcasts but also the latest in biofeedback and neural imaging, which yields True Emptiness Scores across the most imaginative of tortures and disturbances—frozen mats, needle pricks, and cigarette burns to their knees on the block, other mortifications of the flesh, insults offered from one’s own parents and romantic interests, shaming and exile from one’s community—none of which, when all goes well, corrupts the wall of self or the victorious emptiness the children protect inside. Observe the Sunyatan champion celebrating his supremacy on the podium, the ring of fire around the pupils that have narrowed to the point of vanishing, inside which is contained the unspoiled emptiness that is his true and only prize.

Sankhara Rapids—Where the People Cannot Remember

Just as many cities share the same name—we have many Franklins and Washingtons and Greenvilles—there are also many cities in this amnesiac land known (and forgotten) as places without memory. But only in Sankhara Rapids is that forgetting codified by writ of law. It’s not that the Sankharans are neurophysically unable to remember, nor that they don’t want to. Rather, to engage in any act of memory is seen as a kind of violence against the authority of the present moment—like poisoning yourself with some terrible drug, which disgraces not only the individual citizen’s body and mind but also their entire vibrational field, spreading ripples of destruction into the lives of everyone else. 

So the Sankharans shame and repress the memory impulse, just as many other cultures shame and repress the human’s impulses toward combat, sex, and other forms of fun. Any Sankharan found engaging in an act of public remembering is immediately confronted, by all within earshot and stone’s throw, until the sinner repents, begs forgiveness and the mercy of exile, and insists on the supremacy of the now. 

The citizen and the tourist are both expected to obey the mandate against remembering even in private, even alone, when memory is most dangerous and least avoidable. Schoolchildren are taught an escalating sequence of self-flagellations, obliterating their attention’s natural wanderlust with pain. Remedial students and repeat offenders who have grown immune to such stimuli are prescribed special medicines and mantras to be administered before bed, to suppress the remembering-engine of dream consciousness. (Forgetting to self-administer these treatments is considered a sign of healing.) All Sankharans sleep tangled in hammocks that are actually human-sized dream catchers, lofted protectively above the groundwaters of memory. But all the repressed histories are like demons—cunning, determined, with no need for sleep or rest. They find and exploit any path of escape to the mind’s surfaces, moving through the slightest cracks in its defenses like air. Despite all the energy that goes toward sealing these cracks, all systems fail eventually, and the demons inevitably succeed in remembering themselves into being through the citizens’ minds, without the citizens ever becoming aware they are reenacting not only their own individual memories—regrets, losses, heartbreaks, triumphs—but also all the buried sins on which the city was founded. For Sankhara Rapids, like most cities, was taken in blood, and built in bone. 

The forgettingness imposes certain limits on commerce and property ownership, which promotes a culture of taking and sharing as each moment dictates, with the model citizen often forgetting whether they identify as a generous or selfish person, empathetic or pitiless, employed or penniless, single or partnered or polyamorous. But certain spontaneous structures do emerge. At some point in my stay—I couldn’t (cognitively or legally) have said how long I’d been there—I found myself in a building that had that day decided or discovered itself to be a diner. I was studying the ways of all the ghosts of the foundational tortures, who brought themselves back into being through the oblivious locals as they unconsciously mutilated their paper napkins, impaled their breakfast potatoes with primal glee, slurped their spilled yolks through a straw. Then I saw someone burning an auroch onto the underside of her avocado toast with a lighter, and I half-realized it was her. It was the clearest view of her face I’d had in months, and yet my mind refused to fully carve the image for future retrieval, nor to understand who exactly this person was. I was compelled to sit and watch for what might’ve been hours—I’d forgotten about time—as she seemed to wonder what she was doing there in that place, as that person. I found myself following her as she left at dusk, as the day changed to night and all the violent spirits took their evening constitutionals through the people who would never remember becoming the remembering of that which they refused to remember. I watched the way she seemed to be walking nowhere but to inevitably be walking away, always away, cutting an almost drunken wave as her feet went out of their way to fall on insects and flowers without seeming to recognize them or to remember she’d ever felt any preference for sparing life rather than destroying it, maybe forgetting there was any difference between life and death at all.

⧫

Get the full story by reading the first installment, New American Cities: Cohenville, as well as more, at Fiction on Trike Daily.

The post New American Cities: Sunyata Woods and Sankhara Rapids appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the peculiar timespan known as the 2020s, the residents of a dying nation known as the United States—who’d been oversaturated and over traumatized with information, especially about the decay of their government, the geopolitical order, and the living Earth—elected as their leader a manic-depressive failed actor turned reality TV star. With an oversized ego, a broken heart, and no real experience or interest in governing, the first millennial President made the secret decision to devote all the powers of his office to building “the Path,” a contiguous footpath that would circle the entire planet. The goal of the Path was two-fold: to deliver unity and enlightenment to an atomized world, and to re-win the allegiance of the President’s ex. 

To better know, feel connected to, and eventually manipulate his people, the President would privately turn to an anonymous social media account, which consisted of either utopian or dystopian travelogues about the new cities that were allegedly emerging beyond the President’s ability to see from his self-isolation in the nation’s capital. Wanting, naturally, to capture the source of the travelogues’ insight, the President located and kidnapped their author, an urban nomad and former Buddhist monk called the Tourist, whom the President would adopt as a secret spiritual advisor. In those brief moments between the collapse of one pillar of the American dream and the next, the Tourist would soothe the President’s existential dread by telling him stories of the so-called “New American Cities.”

This is the story of Cohenville.

Cohenville—City of Nothingness

There are enough Zen cities throughout the empire—formed in the slow chaotic years since the first masters and suzukis came to spread their gospel of nothingness—that you could walk a path from one end to the other and never miss a daily sitting.

These Zen cities take as their fundamental premise that the mind’s natural state is nothingness. And of course, there can only be one nothingness, so in this sense, it can be said that all the Zen cities are united—in some ways, even, the same city, or the same no-city. But one stands out from the others. You may have heard its name carried on the winds of gossip and reputation, or probably you’ve seen a video posted about it. I’m talking about Cohenville, that great Sparta of nothingness: an entire society devoted to the project of emptying its citizens’ minds.

Cohenville is named for one Zen’s most famous practitioners, Leonard Cohen, who’s said to have inaugurated the city when he one night sleepwalked AWOL from a West Coast monastery, experienced a possibly acid-assisted astral projection to the desert where Cohenville now sits, endured a medium-length eternity of temptations both orgiastic and suicidal, and woke up chin-deep back in the monastery’s frigid mountain stream in unprecedentedly full lotus. All of this was interpreted by one of Cohenville’s first surveyors, a Cohen fanatic, who pieced the story together from a bootleg of Cohen’s secret dream journals, a millennia-old star chart from a now-extinct tribe once indigenous to the land, and the massive mandala the surveyor found carved in the overcooked casserole of the desert floor, its fractaled petals emanating of thousand-breasted succubi and barbiturate nebulae. The surveyor went mad for 24 hours, swinging his plumb bob like David’s slingshot at anyone who approached the mandala, then woke up in satori and immediately started churning the mandala back into formless sand with his prism pole, repeating to himself with an unblinking smirk, “It means nothing. It means nothing.”  

In modern Cohenville, almost all the worldly demands of being alive are taken care of on the citizen’s behalf. From automated food prep to robotic day labor, from produce selection to mate selection, the decisions and thoughts that used to be required of all humans are ceded to the greater judgment of Cohenville’s systems.

When not sitting in meditation, local Cohens inhabit the simplest of dwellings, designed according to the latest in Realm Theory precepts to be noticed as little as possible. There is minimal furniture, with walls painted black and empty of decoration. These negative aesthetics—the muting of public and private space—extend to the citizens’ bodies themselves, which are clothed only in unfitted matte khaki. The clothes were black like the walls until it was discovered that everyone looked sexier than intended, sexiness being a huge obstacle on the path to mind-emptiness.  

But clothes have not been the only obstacle. If the passage of Cohenville’s generations have taught us anything, it’s how much the human injects decoration, individuation, and mind into even the smallest mandates and minutiae of being alive. In an effort to weed out all possible thought-triggers, the Authorities have established standards and laws in the fields of bathing, transportation, relationships, work, speech, and food, all designed to discourage decision, consideration, competition, artifice, invention, desire, and ego-investment of any kind in the world or the self, the loin-stirrer of the storytelling machine.

It’s said many Cohens go entire lifetimes without seeing real color, even in the eyes of other humans, the pupils of which are lasered black, a technique adapted from the empire’s prison population (which has long been an underrecognized font of innovation in the areas of meditation, liberation, and transcendence).  

Children are not assigned names. Nor is there any social capital winnable by charm: every joke, affectation, and flamboyance disappears into an ether of silence. There’s no cuisine, no literature, no mathematics, no history, no community, no idea of self, no humor, and little acknowledgment of suffering, though there is inevitably some birth and death. There’s no being in love, but there is rumored to be something like dreaming—vague senses of dark endless oceans under a black sky, beneath which some report hearing a faint, pulsing sonar that pokes at a kind of primordial bottom-self, which all the city’s engineering has been unable to eradicate.

Cohenville has been in the news lately because its government—which, because Cohenville has no politics, is really just an AI-imbued mayor-computer called cohen.cohen—has recently enacted stricter enforcement of the city’s perfectly circular border, though the citizens are generally unaware of this development. But how and why is it that they don’t know? Especially in this moment, when public interest in the old Zen masters, not to mention tourism to the cities grown from these masters’ footprints, has never been higher?

You’ve answered your own question, you see. The intrusion of tourists has thrown off the entire emptiness equilibrium that Cohenville has worked so hard to cultivate. The tourists come thinking themselves pilgrims. They wear their most neutral garments, it’s true—but even the mutest tones are blindingly fluorescent to the native Cohen. It’s not just that the visitors disturb the Cohens’ Zen practice, but that in doing so the tourists force the Cohens to think. And like demons kicked up in the dust, these thoughts condense the Cohens into moments of self. And these selves—brought into the world in moments of annoyance and soon hatred—come filled with the full weight of the fall from the blissful unity of nothingness into the degradation of thinking. The disturbed Cohens have been known to inflict extremely creative atrocities on the invading tourists themselves, betraying no guilt at all, nor even disgust at the gore, as they’ve been heard to utter: this too is zazen. 

The post New American Cities: Cohenville appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

ONE

Just as the bedridden Gendün Dargyé was calmly reciting his ninety-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hun­dred and ninety-ninth mani he was struck by a sudden, intense pain, and without even having a moment to realize it, he was taken into the next life. At around the same time, Gendün Dargyé’s sole sworn brother, Tsering Samdrup, had the sensation that he wasn’t long for this world, and, folding his hands over his heart, mur­mured, “May the six classes of sentient beings that have been our mothers attain liberation and reach the level of omniscience. I pray that humanity may have equality, freedom, and peace. Om mani padme hum,” immediately after which he drifted off as if into a peaceful sleep and set out on the narrow path to the netherworld.

Among the teeming throng of tens of thousands of transiting souls, Gendün Dargyé and Tsering Samdrup were reunited. 

“Haha! It’s really true what they say—even in the afterlife sworn brothers will be brought together.” Tsering Samdrup, grin­ning broadly and looking completely carefree, approached Gendün Dargyé and grasped his hand, just like he used to when they were still in the land of the living. But Gendün Dargyé simply stood there expressionless his face drained of all color, shaking his head.

“What’s the matter, my brother?” asked Tsering Samdrup as put his arm around Gendün Dargyé and helped him to the side of the road.

Gendün Dargyé continued to shake his head sorrowfully. “A shame . . . what a shame, I . . . I must be cursed,” he said finally, now on the verge of tears.

“Ah ho, my brother, what on earth has happened to you?”

“Don’t they say that if you recite one hundred million manis you’re sure to go to the Blissful Realm?”

“Yeah, I think that’s what they say. Why?”

“Eh,” he said, sighing, “do you know how many manis I did?”

“You’re always reciting your manis, aren’t you? You’ve done a lot by now, I’d guess, maybe even a hundred million. You should be happy!”

“Eh,” he said, sighing again, “let me tell you: I recited ninety-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine manis—I was short of a hundred million by just one. You tell me, do I have bad karma or what?”

“Hahahaha! So that’s what you’re worried about?”

“Yes! It’s no laughing matter.”

“In that case, you can set your mind at ease.”

“?”

“Well, as you know, I pretty much wasted my life away goofing around. I was never able to save up any money, and I never did any chanting or spiritual practices either. But, just before I died, I recited one mani. I’ll give you that mani.”

“Wh . . . what? Did I hear that right? Say that one more time.”

“I’m giving you my only mani.”

“You . . . you . . . you’ve always been a kidder, haven’t you? It’s not right for you to make fun of me over such an important thing.”

“Ah ya, you’re so . . . It’s just one mani. We’re sworn brothers­—what’s one mani?”

“Brother, my wonderful brother!” Gendün Dargyé, deeply moved, tears welling in his eyes, embraced Tsering Samdrup. “You know that when I was still in the human world you were my only sworn brother—no others—and it was absolutely the right choice. This must be my good karma.”

“That it must. Ah . . . who knows if we two brothers will get another chance to meet after this. Why don’t we recount some of our stories, remember the happy times together?”

“Yes, that’d be nice, but . . . I’m still not feeling completely comfortable about this. What’ll we do if the Lord of Death says your mani can’t be transferred to my account? So . . . so wouldn’t it be best if we went to see the Lord of Death now and explained the situation to him?”

“Oh, yes—let’s do that. The bardo path isn’t a very nice place to be, either.”

“I recited ninety-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine manis—I was short of a hundred million by just one. You tell me, do I have bad karma or what?”

Truly, it was a murky, ashen-colored place, a place that was nei­ther dark nor light. Apart from the countless masses of mistlike dead, there wasn’t a sentient being or living thing to be seen. It was a realm that evoked feelings of terror and loathing at the same time.

The two of them rejoined the ranks of the tens of thousands of departed souls. Like a mother guiding her naughty child, Gendün Dargyé led Tsering Samdrup through the wavelike crowds, never letting go of his hand even for a second.

TWO

The Lord of Death’s offices were located in a newly built Western­ style high-rise next to the former law courts. The building was divided into five large departments. Each employee had a computer in front of them, and each computer formed part of an online net­work with access to a database that exhaustively recorded and calculated all the virtues and vices and good and evil thoughts of all the departed souls from the five continents of the earth. It is said that on average each employee could process the virtues and vices and good and evil thoughts of one departed soul and send them to the appropriate destination—be that the Blissful Western Realm or the worlds of the Six Beings—within thirty seconds. Despite this, there were still tens of thousands of departed souls arranged into numerous lines, all waiting to register in a huge hall bigger than a football field.

On the walls of the great hall were a number of large color screens. Some were showing video footage of the achievements of political and religious leaders who had made contributions to the freedom of humankind; of the accomplishments of scientists, thinkers, artists, charity workers, environmental activists, animal rights activists, and others who had worked toward the spiritual and material well-being of humankind; and of how, after death, they were encircled by beautiful deities and escorted to Shambhala, or back to a developed democratic country where they could continue to achieve great things. The other screens were showing video footage of the crimes of dictators, deployers of nuclear weapons, destroyers of the environment, corrupt officials, drug dealers, and others who had incited wars or trampled on the rights of races, nations, and individual human beings, and of how, after death, they were taken to the hell realms, where they suffered unspeakable torments.

Gendün Dargyé finally managed to guide Tsering Samdrup to the registration desk, where he gave a detailed account of his situation. The case was perhaps a bit too complicated for the employee on duty—at least, he said that it was beyond his authority to decide and he would have to pass it up to his superiors, and he informed them that he had transferred the file containing their vices and virtues and good and evil thoughts to the Lord of Death’s computer. Much to their surprise, Bullhead and Boarhead, the Lord of Death’s messengers, arrived on the spot to bring Gendün Dargyé and Tsering Samdrup directly before the Great Lord himself.

“Is this true?” asked the Lord of Death, deeply moved and completely dumbfounded, as he partly arose off the throne from which he had never arisen before, then sat himself down again.

Gendün Dargyé and Tsering Samdrup, rather unsure of what was going on, looked at each other for a moment, then turned back to face the Lord of Death.

The Lord of Death took a look at his computer screen. “So, Tsering Samdrup wishes to donate the only mani that he recited in his entire life to Gendün Dargyé, is that right?”

Tsering Samdrup answered him without giving it a second thought: “Yes, that’s correct.”

The Lord of Death said, “Have you heard the Tibetan proverb ‘As rare as a mani in the next life?'”

“Of course I have.”

“Then you understand the meaning of this saying?”

“Well, I think it means something incredibly valuable, something very hard to come by.”

“And yet you still consent to bequeath your sole mani to another, without hesitation?”

“Of course. Gendün Dargyé and I are sworn brothers. If I weren’t even willing to give up a single mani, wouldn’t ‘sworn brothers’ be an empty title?”

“How marvelous! You are a man of true virtue!” The Lord of Death leaped suddenly from his seat and rushed over to shake Tsering Samdrup’s hand, then led him insistently to his throne, upon which he seated him. Picking up the phone, he announced, “A man of true virtue has arrived. Escort him immediately to the Blissful Realm—no, prepare a banquet—after we have dined I shall accompany him myself!”

Tsering Samdrup, feeling very uncomfortable now, rose to his feet. “Great King, this is too . . .” he began, but the Lord of Death placed a hand on his shoulder and forced him back into the chair. “Eh. The people of Earth are becoming more self-centered with each passing day—just look at Gendün Dargyé. Gendün Dargyé, let me ask you: you have all these manis, and yet not only do you not give any to your sworn brother, you have no qualms about taking his sole mani for yourself, is that so?”

“That’s . . . that’s . . .” said Gendün Dargyé in a feeble voice, apart from which he was unable to muster any other response.

“Have you no shame?” boomed the Lord of Death as he beat his fist on the table.

Gendün Dargyé lowered his head.

The Lord of Death paced back and forth. “I truly have no idea whether or not you held in your heart the sentient beings that have been your mothers as you were chanting all those manis. There­fore, I also have no idea whither I should send you.”

“Great King, Great King, it seems that I have harmed my sworn brother . . .” said Tsering Samdrup in a fluster, but the Lord of Death cut him off. “No no no. This has nothing to do with you. All his vices and virtues and his good and evil thoughts are recorded in his file. Whither he should be sent is also clearly stipulated in the Lord of Death’s legal code. I am simply reminding him. To be truthful, Gendün Dargyé has committed no great sin, bar his excessive selfishness. In any case, he still recited all those manis, so he shan’t be sent to the hell realms,” he said, breaking into a smile.

“Oh, that’s good, that’s good.”

“Now let us dine!”

“Ah . . . Great King, I have a request . . .”

“By all means.”

“May I be permitted to have this last meal with my sworn brother?”

“How marvelous! Pure friendship, friendship of purity! Once again you have touched this old man’s heart. Come, come, please come!”

The Lord of Death threw his arms around the shoulders of the two sworn brothers, and together they marched across the thick green carpet toward the banquet hall.

♦

Excerpted from The Handsome Monk and Other Stories by Tsering Döndrup. Copyright © 2019 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

The post One Mani appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Once upon a time, a young monk and his teacher lived in Sera Monastery. One day the teacher told the young monk to buy some meat at Tromsikhang, one of the busiest markets in Lhasa. But before the young monk left, his teacher warned him sternly, “Go and buy a few pounds of meat, but take only what the meat seller gives you and don’t ask for more!”

At sunrise next morning, the young monk took off, walking so briskly that when he arrived at the market, his forehead was wet with perspiration. He went straight to the meat seller woman. After she’d weighed the meat and handed it to him, he sensed the meat’s weight did not equal the measurement on the scale. 

Clearing his throat, he stuck out his tongue and rubbed his head. Dissatisfied, he said, “Meat seller Ama-la, this meat is not enough!” 

Annoyed, the woman added a little more meat. 

Still, the young monk felt it was not enough, and said again, “Meat seller Ama-la, this meat is still not enough.” 

She again added a little more. 

And still, the young monk was dissatisfied. “Meat seller Ama-la, there is still not enough meat.” He persisted: she was skimping him. 

Finally, the meat seller woman brought out another slice of meat. Lividly, she passed him the meat and said, “Ya! There you go! If you need more, then just take this one!” 

Confident his teacher would be thrilled with this extra meat, the monk returned to the monastery with a smile on his face. He told his teacher, “Today I bought some good meat. I will cook whatever delicious dishes you wish.” The young monk went on and on about how clever he was. 

“Oh, that’s good,” his teacher said. “But did you do as I told you to do?” 

“Yes, I did!” the young monk replied. “The saleswoman did not give me enough meat for the price she asked. So I kept asking for more, and that is how I got this much.” He chattered on proudly. 

His teacher’s jaw dropped. “Ah kha kha, what a shame! You didn’t obey me. Now you’re in big trouble. Show me your hand.” 

The young monk felt odd as he extended his hand. His teacher examined it carefully and found that there was a new mark there. “Oh, this is terrible! Didn’t I tell you to take whatever the seller gave you? You made a huge mistake! What shall we do?” The teacher looked sorrowful and his breathing became labored. 

Upset, the young monk asked the teacher what was the matter.

The teacher said, “This is a mark given by an evil human demoness. It means that you will be food tonight. There is nothing left to do now but to die.” 

Seeing his teacher’s expression and hearing his words, the monk grew apprehensive and short of breath. After a pause, he burst out, “Dear Genla, dear teacher, please save me! Please tell me how I can be saved. Please!” He begged his teacher over and over.

The teacher said to him, “I cannot save you! But . . . if you do exactly as I say, there may be a way you can save your life. Will you do as I say?” 

“I will do whatever you say to save my life,” the young monk answered. 

“You must go to Lhasa now. There is an old woman in her 80s who lives in a beggar’s tent near the Ramoche Temple. Ask for her help, and be serious. Give her some Tsampa ba, buttered barley-flour dough. Ask her to spend a night there with her. If she consents, ultimately your life can be saved. Otherwise, even if you hide on the Jowo statue’s lap tonight, there is no way to save you. So, listen up. Don’t squander your day on mindless things. If you are careless this time, you will lose your life.” 

The young monk followed his teacher’s instructions and left for Lhasa that afternoon. Once he arrived, he looked carefully for the place his teacher had described until he finally found the tent and the old woman. 

He spoke to her: “Ama-la, it is very late tonight and I don’t know this place or anyone here. Please, let me stay here with you tonight.” Although he pleaded pitifully, the old woman ignored his request. 

He then took out some dried cheese and butter, added it to some tsampa, and made some delicious ba, which he then offered to her. Surprised, the old woman asked him why he did this. Without leaving anything out, he told her what had happened to him in the marketplace. Then he begged her, “Please, save my life!”  

Although the old woman had initially ignored him, his pitiful, sorrowful pleas evoked her compassion, and she agreed to let him stay the night. To save his life, he was to hide quietly in a large clay pot used to store barley beer. The old woman made two small holes in the pot and tied down the cover with a length of chimiggudri (chee-meek-gu-dri), a woven rope of nine eyes. She tied it around the neck of the pot with nine knots. 

As dusk fell, the old woman sat astride the clay pot. With a shak shak shak sound, she rode the pot across the ground toward an old tree where all kinds of evil spirits and demons had gathered. When the young monk managed to overcome his fear just enough to peek out of the two holes, he could barely believe his eyes. All around him, packs of evil spirits gamboled about—some rode horses; some mules; others brooms and fire pokers; some donkeys; and there were even some riding roosters, pigs, and other animals. They were riding all kinds of things. Some of the evil spirits breathed fire. Some had just one eye and were missing the other. Some had right legs but no left arms. Some were missing half their hides. Some had open backs, out of which their organs and intestines spilled and dragged on the ground. Though the young monk grew terrified seeing all these terrible things. He knew he could do nothing but heed the words of the old woman who told him to be still and stay in the pot as quietly as he could. 

After a while, the old woman suddenly moved, riding the clay pot—shak shak shak!—and kicking up a cloud of dust as she approached. The evil spirits parted to courteously greet her. Finding a seat before the gathering, she said loudly, “Yah, yah, all right then! Who is the meat-bringer, the shagel, tonight? Bring your meat up!”

At that moment, one human demoness spoke up: “Gopön la, Chief of the Gathering, I am the one with meat duty tonight. Please wait a moment, everyone. Tonight I have prepared a unique meat for you all. I will go and get it right away.” Then she straddled a broom and flew out with a cloud of dust, disappearing. 

Some time passed. She still hadn’t shown up with the meat and all the waiting ghosts and demons screeched with hunger. The young monk, still hiding inside the clay pot, listened terrified: 

“When the duty meat arrives, I am going to skin the body and eat the flesh.” 

“I am going suck his hot blood.” 

“I am going to eat his eyeballs.” 

All the cries and shouts from these hungry ghosts terrified the young monk so much that he nearly soiled himself. He bit his lip and repeated to himself, “I must restrain myself tonight. Otherwise, I will lose my life.” 

Eventually, the human demoness returned. Embarrassed, she stuck out her tongue pathetically and said, “Respectable Chief, the duty meat that I had marked for tonight is nowhere to be found in the whole of Lhasa. Not even on the lap of the Jowo statue! I cannot find him anywhere. Except—the only place I haven’t checked is your clay pot. If you would please give me permission to look . . .” 

The old woman replied, “Of course, you can check.” 

“Thank you, the meat duty demoness said. “I will shout out nine times with different cries, and if the meat is still not revealed, I will find another to replace him.” 

The old woman ordered, “Shout out only eight times to reveal the meat, not nine.” 

Agreeing, the meat duty demoness began to call out, and with each shout, one knot after another unraveled. As the human demoness cried out, the clay pot swayed and trembled, and then began to crack. Petrified, the young monk’s mind raced: What should I do? I will definitely lose my life if they find out that I am here. But he continued to sit silently in the pot as he had been told. After the eighth shout, when the meat still had not appeared, the human demoness with that night’s meat duty became anxious and fretful. 

She turned to the old woman and said, “Please wait for me just for a while, I will bring my duty flesh immediately.” Again she got on her broom and flew off, returning after a while, dragging a large, corpulent man behind her. When she threw the body in front of the gathering, the demons and ghosts jumped on it, devouring their favorite parts: some liked to eat the flesh, some liked the bones, some the blood, and some liked to eat the legs. They ate the flesh with relish. 

The old woman on the clay pot was reserved the most important, most prized, and most delicious parts, like the liver and heart. Soon the evil flesh-lovers’ hands and mouths were soaked with blood. Fire blew out of their mouths and stomachs as they fought over the leftovers. All the while, the frightened young monk stayed hidden in the pot. 

After some time passed, all the spirits went off on their own ways, the young monk’s life just barely saved in the old evil woman’s cracked pot. 

Having just escaped death, the young monk thanked the old woman profusely. Curious, he asked her about the living and dead spirits he had seen. 

The old woman said, “All my companions are evil spirits. I have lived with them for so many years. But once in a while I reflect on compassion. This time I was compassionate and decided to save your life. Actually, I would love to eat your flesh, as you are a living being and seem as though you would be delicious. But as I was feeling maudlin, this time I’ll let you go. There will not be a next time, though. If you’re in the same situation again, I’ll definitely eat you.” 

She continued, “My companions are from all over, as you heard and saw last night. They all speak different languages and have different customs. They might not share my compassion. So it will be impossible to earn my help next time. Look at my barley beer pot: it’s about to shatter!” 

The young monk’s fear only intensified as he listened to this old woman, this human demoness. 

Day was just breaking when he returned to Sera Monastery. His teacher was overjoyed to see he had returned safely. The young monk told his teacher about what he experienced, of hiding in the clay pot and the horrors he’d witnessed. He also told him that the old woman living in the beggers tent turned out to be an evil human demoness; the one who had saved his life was the most powerful of the evil spirits. He described all the different ghouls he had seen: how fire spit out of their mouths, and how, when they blinked, flames fell from their eyes—dzi dzi dzi . . . Some had fleshy right cheeks and left cheeks made only of bone. When they laughed, their bones opened up, and you could see all their internal organs. Others had nails so long and strong that they ground the soil into smoke. He told his teacher everything he had seen, and the teacher, though frightened at the thought of these terrible evil spirits, had little to say but “Oh, how pitiful!”

Then, the teacher told the young monk, “You should go to Tromsikkhang market right now and see what has come of that meat seller woman.” 

The young monk left right away. When he got to the market, he saw the meat seller woman at her stall. 

Distraught, she wailed, “My husband! What has happened to my husband? When he went to bed last night he was fine. But this morning, he wouldn’t wake up! What has happened to him?” 

The young monk realized now that she was the one who had the meat duty at the numinous gathering last night, that the body she had brought to fulfill her duty, the one the evil demons and spirits feasted upon, was none other than her husband. And his mouth opened wide with shock.

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