The Snows in Lhasa

April and the most sumptuous day of my life arrives.

Just last year the 9th Jetsun Dampa, the head of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia, is enthroned in Ulaanbaatar after a lifetime of living in hiding. But because there is no ordination of a tulku in this part of the country in almost eighty years, the celebration starts a full week before the ceremony. People travel from all over the region to the nearby outpost of Bor-Urt. A small ger city begins to sprout. All week the faithful trek up the rocky slopes of Yatuu Gol to make an offering to the ovoo. All week, Mun is fitted and poked, measured, rehearsed, quizzed, bribed when necessary, reminded that he is an ancient light in our new country in a new millennium of hope. Each day I feel him grow more resigned, more listless, the fire in his heart slowly dying until all that is left is an orange glow in his eyes, the rage of Hayagrīva, the horse-necked deity whose energy he is learning to generate within himself, a deep burning, a resentment that is never extinguished.

It is in the days before he is saddled with his title that I first feel the new intensity of the fire in my brother. As herders we roam over the grasslands, our thoughts moving freely between us until sometimes I cannot distinguish which thoughts are Mun’s and which are mine. Perhaps this is only logical. On the grasslands we share a life. There is little difference in our experiences. Now all that is changed. I can only experience secondhand what it is to have old men pull me onto their lap and talk about the snows in Lhasa, or to suddenly be expected to be the paragon of goodness and compassion every day when one is anything but. Most tulku are discovered at a much younger age, often before they are five years old and sometimes as young as toddlers, when the personality is still malleable. Perhaps as we are eight, almost nine, it is too much to expect my brother to conform to his new life.

Instinctively, I think the Rinpoche knows this. After discovering Mun, he flies to Dharamshala to consult with the Dalai Lama’s council. He is warned that in a culture long deprived of a tradition of tulku, it might be difficult to get the seed to take in one so old. The Rinpoche listens respectfully, but the wheel of Dharma is already set in motion. April arrives, and my twin and I both receive our new names.