Sometimes Faith Is the Only Medicine

An hour passes. In another, the summer sun begins to dawn in the eternal blue sky. In the corner by the radio, the boy falls asleep sitting up, his rifle lying at his feet like a beloved pet. His sisters are curled together on one of the brightly painted chests that serve as beds. In sleep the girl with her hair in coils murmurs softly to herself as though singing. Their mother lies among the floor pillows, her forehead creased with what I now know is sorrow, behind her closed eyes her pupils racing back and forth. At Yatuu Gol at this dark hour I would be waking for first salutations in the room I share with eight others, everywhere the red wooden shutters of the monastery thrown open to the cold summer air.

Then someone is untying my hands. I feel the blood course back into my veins. When I turn to look the grandmother signals for me to remain silent. Wordlessly she scrambles over to the altar and lifts the handkerchief, revealing a man in his mid-thirties as he poses with a shiny new motorbike. She looks at me with hope. I am familiar with such looks. During the summer when Mun and I first enter the monastery, a woman gazes on the Rinpoche in this same manner as she holds her sick infant out to him along the road to Bor-Urt. The child looks to be in its final hours. The Rinpoche leans in and places his palm on its forehead. Sometimes faith is the only medicine available. Then the woman smiles and backs away bowing, confidant that, with the Rinpoche’s blessing, the child is guaranteed to return to this earth in a higher state.

I rub my hands together, the skin marked from the extension cord. The old woman points at the picture. I nod and crawl toward her. I wonder how old she is, if she is indeed old enough to remember the purges, the time when the communists destroy the monasteries, the monks driven out into the winter snows to die. It comforts me to think that like our brothers the Tibetans, we Mongolians manage to hold on to our faith through dark times. The histories of our two nations are intertwined, as it is the descendants of Chinggis Khaan who help establish Buddhism in Tibet. The whole world knows of His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama. Few know that the title Dalai Lama is a compound of the Mongolian word for “ocean” and the Tibetan word for “teacher,” each of the fourteen dalai lamas an Ocean of Compassion.

I take the stick of incense the old woman holds out to me and light it in a candle. Then I clap my palms together and bow my head three times. With folded hands I beseech the Buddha of All Directions to shine the lamp of His being for all bewildered in the gloom of misery. Gently I place the burning stick in a small bowl filled with ash. The smoke spires up off the tip and fills the room. The girl with the beautiful hair is now unmistakably singing in her sleep though it is not a song I know.

Silently I push a small chest out of the way. The old woman moves a stool. Together we proceed in unison, our bodies heaving up and down, back and forth like pendulums. Despite her age she moves through the poses with agility. By the time the police arrive in a battered truck, we have each done more than fifty prostrations. I feel a bruise on the verge of taking root on my forehead as over and over in my guilt I press my face hard into the floor. Conversely, the old woman remains unmarked, without flaw.