Nine Lives(61)

“Five families would collect their herds, and head together into the mountains. We would walk all the way, driving the animals in front of us. Yaks are very good-tempered, and I always felt safe with them. They seemed to enjoy the journey and my grandmother was especially good at handling them. She knew them all by name and would talk to each one as she milked them in the evening. Every evening, all the families in the migration would gather together to have dinner, and recite prayers to the goddess Tara.

“Once we reached the summer pastures the different families would separate and we would each head to our own camp. My job would be to take the yak up to the high green pastures each morning, and to stop the mountain wolves from attacking them. At first I was scared of the wolves, but it soon became clear that they were more scared of us than we were of them—at least during the day. Only when they were hungry in winter were they really dangerous. All you had to do was to shout, and maybe fire a warning shot, and the entire pack would run away. Occasionally I would have to fire at them, but I was too young to handle a rifle in those days, and I never managed to hit one. There were stories of yetis up in the mountains, but I never saw one. A much bigger threat were the dremong—fierce brown bears—which sometimes attacked the yaks, usually as you led them down for the night.

“On my third summer in the mountains, my great-uncle came with us. He was a monk, though he no longer lived within a monastery, and it was he who persuaded me to become a monk too. My mother had taught me to read and write a little Tibetan, and he thought that I was a promising boy who might benefit from a monastic education. Every day he would sit with me and teach me to write on a slate, or on the bark of a dwarf oak, as of course there was no paper in the mountains. He also loved history, and was very good at telling stories. As we tended the animals, he would tell me long stories about Songtsan Gampo and the kings and heroes of Tibet.

“But his main love was the dharma, and he told me that if I continued to lead the life of a layman I might acquire many yaks, but would have nothing to take with me when I died. He also said that married life was a very complicated business, full of responsibilities, difficulties and distractions, and that the life of a monk was much easier. He said that it gave you more time and opportunities to practise your religion. I was always a religious child, and I thought about what he said.

“By the end of the summer I had decided that I would like to try monastic life. I thought that if I really dedicated myself to religion I would have a better chance of a good rebirth in my next life, and have the opportunity to gain Nirvana. My uncle and I guessed that my parents would forbid me from becoming a monk, so we decided that I should join the monastery first, and only later inform the family. At the end of the summer, when we came down from the passes, my uncle and I went ahead to Dakpa monastery, and there he handed me over to the abbot.

“I was worried I would miss the freedom of the mountains. But as it turned out, in the monastery I was happier than I had ever been. In my life as a herdsman, I had to worry about the wolves, and my yaks, and to look after my grandparents—life was full of anxieties. But as a monk you have only to practise your prayers and meditation, and to hope and work for Enlightenment.

“Also, the life in the mountains, for all its beauty, was quite lonely. In Dakpa there were nearly 500 monks, and many boys of my own age. Very soon I made many friends. I knew I had made the right decision. Before long even my parents became reconciled to what I had done.

“How you start your life as a monk can determine the rest of your life. One of our scriptures says, ‘Men who have not gained spiritual treasures in their youth perish like old herons in a lake without fish.’ I worked very hard at memorising the scriptures and proved to be good at remembering them.

“The main struggle, especially when you are young, is to avoid four things: desire, greed, pride and attachment. Of course you can’t do this completely—no human being can—but there are techniques for diverting the mind. They stop you from thinking of yaks, or money, or beautiful women, and teach you to concentrate instead on the gods and goddesses. The lamas who taught us trained us to focus on these things. We were taught how to concentrate—to stare at a statue of the Lord Buddha or Guru Rinpoche, and to absorb the details of the object, the colour, the posture and so on, reflecting back all we knew of their teachings. Slowly you go deeper, to visualise the hand, the leg and the vajra in his hand, closing your eyes and trying to travel inwards. The more you concentrate on a deity, the more you are diverted from worldly thoughts. As it says in our scriptures: