"In three months these people will believe in communism," Mao had said thirty years ago, as he defrocked the monks. But the monastery has re-formed, and it is vigorously Buddhist. It seemed to me that it was so far off the beaten track that it had not received the pestering attentions of the bureaucrats. The complex of temples, stupas, courtyards, the printing works, hospital, medical college (for teaching herbal remedies), and dwellings (housing thirteen Living Buddhas and their mothers), is scattered on the brown lower slopes of the valley. A small town has grown to one side of it, down the road.
Having Mr. Xun with me was a help, and being at Taer'si on a cold winter day meant that I was seeing the place with its prayer wheels turning. We followed a procession of Tu people, who wore black hats with upturned brims, and padded jackets and high boots.
The pilgrims prostrated themselves and then entered The Lesser Temple of the Golden Roof. In its courtyard they hung little swatches of sheep's wool. For a good harvest, Mr. Xun said; but this was contradicted by my guidebook, which claimed that about-to-be-slaughtered animals received grace in this way ("similarly, sheep and cows may be led clockwise around a monastery, as their final act on earth"). In this temple, children with runny noses and wild hair were snatching at the barrellike prayer wheels. A man with a shrieking voice was chanting and beating a drum inside a locked room; the incense burners were crammed with cypress leaves and smoking fiercely, and pilgrims had glued Chinese coins to the burner's side (there was a pot of fish glue next to it). On the balconies to the right and left were two large stuffed yaks draped with gauze offerings, two stuffed goats and a stuffed brown bear—they were propped up on the rails to look like judges surveying the pilgrims below, and they had wild grinning faces, due to their stretched skin and glass eyes. It was the sort of holy place which could look only bizarre to an unbeliever, and there hung about it the stink of rancid yak butter.
That is the smell of monasteries from Mongolia to Tibet, the sour, cruddy hum of yak butter. It resembles the smell of an American family's refrigerator after a long midsummer power cut. It is the reek of old milk. But yak butter is not just a ceremonial fuel. It is used for cooking, for lamps, for sculpting, and it is good for greasing axles. Yak butter is Tibetan lubricant in a spiritual and also in an industrial sense. The pilgrim who had just finished lubricating his wagon wheels brings a can of it and deposits fat yellow lumps of it in a vat near the temple altar.
Mr. Xun said there had been lots of miracles here—not just the bodhi tree that sprouted on Zong Kapa's birthplace, but clusters of trees that appeared at the Flower Temple. They were miraculous, Mr. Xun insisted. Messages had appeared on them.
"I must see them," I said.
Mr. Xun was delighted by my fervor. He introduced me to the monk at the Flower Temple.
The monk said, "Look at the trunks of these trees. Look closely."
I looked closely. There were small scratchings, like worm tracks on the flaky bark.
"Tibetan characters," the monk said.
"Read them, please," I said.
"I cannot."
"Do they say anything?"
"We do not know. But I will tell you this. They are not man-made."
He did not mean worms. He meant something supernatural.
He saw some Chinese tourists smoking.
"Do not smoke!" he said in his Tibetan-accented Mandarin. "It's all wood, and if this catches fire, who's responsible? This temple is seven hundred years old"—it wasn't, actually, but I felt he wanted to make them feel bad—"and you don't care! All this yak butter would go right up in smoke!"
After the Chinese tourists left, the monk said, "They don't care. They smoke all the time. They throw cigarettes everywhere—even under these holy trees."
It was fairly obvious that the Tibetan monks disliked the Chinese, but they shrugged and grumbled rather than revolted. At the monastery printing works several monks told me that during the Cultural Revolution they had been sent to work at a power station.
"How did you like that?"
"It was a waste of time," one said.
This printing works was medieval in its way of working. The monk inked a slab of script and then pressed a rectangle of rough paper over it. He peeled this off and hung it to dry, a finished page of text.
One page was a ribbon of writing.
"Stick that over your door and thieves will never come in."
"What does it say?"
"It is Indian writing, Sanskrit. We don't know."
He inked another slab and printed a new piece of paper.
"If you put that on your house your guests will always be happy."
But as with the first one, the message was incomprehensible to him.
I went to the Meditation Hall and was almost overcome from the smell of yak butter. I went to the kitchen. It had the look of a tannery—full of deep vats, each one about seven feet across.
"This kitchen was last used in 1958," Mr. Xun said. "Those cauldrons could cook thirteen yaks at a time. The whole monastery could be fed in this kitchen."
The remains of the 3rd Dalai Lama are at this monastery, in a temple called The Nine-Roomed Hall. This man, Bsod-nams-rgya-mtsho, was the first to be called "Dalai." The Mongol chief Altan Khan conferred this title on him when he visited the Khan's court in the sixteenth century. Dalai means ocean in Mongol and it implies boundless wisdom. But the special features of The Nine-Roomed Hall are not the bones of this holy man. Interest in the place is usually centered on two tall demons.
"Notice the curtains?" Mr. Xun said.
Dusty drapes covered the bases of the statues.
"They have put them there so that you cannot see the figures beneath them."
"Why would they cover those figures?" I asked.
"One is an ox having sexual intercourse with a lady," Mr. Xun said.
"What sort of lady would have intercourse with an ox?"
"I don't know," Mr. Xun said, "because it is covered up."
The buildings were not beautiful, nor even pretty, but they had a rough mountain charm, and some of the carved pillars looked both godly and weird. The attractiveness of the place was in its life, its pilgrims and monks, the novice monks fetching water and eating Popsicles, and penitents draping the white and yellow gauze on the statues, and burning butter, and whirling prayer wheels, and prostrating themselves in a sort of religious athleticism that was very impressive—they are required to flatten themselves against the ground 100,000 times a year. It is not a fastidious kowtowing but a calisthenic so vigorous they wear mitts and knee pads to prevent bruising.
Mr. Xun and I walked down the road, past the souvenir stalls and the little shops, and had lunch in a restaurant that was otherwise empty. We had grilled yak meat, melon, squash, pig fat, buns, seaweed soup and french fries. The yak meat stuffed into the buns was my Dish of the Day, and I entered it into my notebook under dumplings and smoked duck and all the rest of the dishes I had favored.
We were sitting near a Franklin stove with a ten foot tin chimney. Mr. Xun said that he had visited the United States the previous year. He had been an interpreter for a trade delegation. In order to secure this job he had had to pass a competitive exam in English. He said he had traveled all over.
"I went to San Francisco," he said, and smiling, he told me how much he had hated Chinatown. He regarded the very word as insulting, but also he had found it all hackneyed, ridiculous and embarrassing. "And the food was bad," he said.
"What did you think the first time you saw New York?"
"Not as nice as Vancouver."
I then asked him what he had bought in the United States to take back to China.
"A pen. A book of stories. A photograph album."
He had no money. But what things he would have bought if he had had the cash! A refrigerator, a motorcycle, a television, an electric noodle maker!