There Is to Be Chanting and Incense and Candles

The night before the ceremony I feel my brother calling me to his quarters. Unlike the rest of us, who sleep eight to a room, Mun occupies a series of rooms by himself that include a separate chamber for his private meditation as well as a side room with an altar that stretches from floor to ceiling. Even the Rinpoche sleeps in a small nook cluttered with books, his room more of a storage space for the things he reclaims along his journey toward reopening the monastery. Despite all the work the Rinpoche does to rekindle the flame of Buddhism in this area, at eight years old, Mun is the senior monk at Yatuu Gol. While they are both Precious Ones, Mun’s lineage is older.

I leave my bed and walk along the empty halls. A few of the old masters who travel from abroad are sitting in the main hall. They meditate all night and into the morning, the butter lamps burning, making the air smell sweet, the altar piled high with offerings of store-bought biscuits, cookies, liters of soft drinks and fruit juices, tögrög crammed in the offering bowls.

I enter my brother’s chambers and find him sitting in his altar room among his booty. I’m not allowed to keep it, he says. All week gifts pour in. Stuffed animals, sports equipment, electronics, candy. It is all to be whisked away tomorrow and donated to the local school, places where children are allowed to be children.

And so my brother and I spend the night playing with objects we don’t even know exist until now. One is a remote-control truck that has a siren on top that flashes red and blue lights, washing the walls with color. Tomorrow my brother is to don the gold brocade lama hat like a horse’s mane. He is to be carried on an open-air litter through the crowds, the sangha of the whole country and beyond gathered so that the community here at Yatuu Gol looks robust and plentiful, the monks rocking back and forth, lifting the great horns to their lips, beating the drums, sending a wall of sound up into the eternal blue.

I am to sit off to the side on a platform in a place of honor with my father and his new wife and her three children, two girls and a little boy who wriggles in the woman’s arms like a fat slug. It is October since I last see my father. He looks both thinner and more worried. I wonder if, besides my shaved head, I look different to him. The people come and bow down to Aav and lay items at his feet, my father a simple herder. I can tell that the people think this woman at his side is our mother. Each time they bow to her it makes me want to scream.

There is to be chanting and incense and candles. Walking around the altar in the same direction the sun moves through the heavens, a stick of incense clasped between the palms. Heads bowed, food eaten. Old women crying at the return of the faith of their childhoods.

Tomorrow our father may bow to us, his sons, and touch his forehead to ours. As always, we do not hug. But tonight we are two little boys playing among a pile of treasure the world mysteriously brings into our lives.

My brother and I are different people. This is evident to me during our life on the steppe. The way I sit on my horse, body square and balanced, and the way he rides as if about to fall off. Still, I understand why he is about to do what he is planning. Perhaps if our roles ever reverse, I might do the same.

Don’t go, I say out loud. I can tell what my twin is thinking. That at first light he is planning to wrap himself in a simple robe and head out to the stables where he finds a good strong horse and rides it to the ends of the earth and beyond, out into the larger world he dreams of seeing. Don’t, I repeat, but the toy truck with the colorful siren drowns me out.

Some months ago when we are still living with my father out on the grasslands, the Rinpoche visits to finalize plans for our entering the monastery. After everything is decided and the adults go to bed, I intuit Mun’s childish thoughts. How he is planning to make the incision in Bazar’s chest and slip his arm inside to pinch the artery that gives life, as if killing a grown man is as easy as killing a sheep. Perhaps the fire first burns uncontrollably inside my twin that night when I go out after him with Övöö’s old hunting rifle. Maybe Mun foresees the life that awaits us here in Yatuu Gol—him burdened with the happiness of all living beings, and me burdened by him. Maybe I should allow him to slip into the ger. Maybe I should trust that this is only for show, a way for my twin to express his feelings of powerlessness. Somewhere deep inside I know that my brother is not capable of such darkness. All the same, I raise the rifle. Mun glares at me, the knife glinting in his hand. Go away, he commands. I close my eyes. The sound of the blast scares the clouds off the face of the moon. When the smoke clears, my twin is still standing. Our father and Bazar come running.

There’s a wolf about, I lie. The two men eye us suspiciously.

This is what I am capable of. Of rising in the night and taking a gun, of aiming it at my twin. Of ruining his deepest plans. Of betraying him.

Since arriving at Yatuu Gol my brother trains with a Precious One from India. He is receiving advanced tantric instruction I do not have access to. Tantric practice is an important part of Tibetan Buddhism. There are endless levels of tantric study. One must spend thousands of hours with a teacher in order to ascend to the highest levels of practice in which one learns to manipulate energy itself by entering the state of what we call foundational clear light mind that most beings can only access at death. Through mastering such states, one can, when needed, learn to generate within oneself the energy of wrathful deities, enlightened beings who incarnate in ferocious forms in order to lead others to enlightenment. In tantric practice, one’s teacher often decides on a wrathful deity that is already in alignment with one’s personality, and that deity becomes one’s protector. Mun’s wrathful deity is Hayagrīva, the Horse-Necked One. Sometimes Hayagrīva is depicted with three faces, each of his mouths filled with fangs, his sword raised to cut through the fog of delusion and ego. Though still a novice, when Mun tries to summon the energy of Hayagrīva, his eyes burn.

Each day my twin is learning to focus, to shut out the world entirely. I am of the world. Tomorrow after his ordination, a spot gradually opens inside my brother, a hole like the vastness of outer space but filled with fire. If I try to enter it with my mind, instantly a searing pain rages between my eyes as if looking directly at the sun.

Tomorrow everything is to be different. But tonight in his chambers piled with gifts he has yet to perfect this inner burning.

Don’t go, I say a third time. Don’t, but it is the beginning of something new between us. If he is ever to escape this life, he must keep secrets, even from me. As the toy truck rampages around the room, siren wailing, I can feel my brother testing the limits of his ability to shut me out.

When Mun gets up at dawn to put his plan into action, he finds the stables locked, one of the old monks sleeping in front of the doors as the Rinpoche orders. I have no defense, no hidden spaces inside me. The icy white sheet is not enough. My brother knows the actions I take. How after leaving him with his toys to return to my room, I stop in the Rinpoche’s quarters. All the while my eyes locked on the ground as I speak with the Rinpoche of my twin’s plans.

As the sun rises on the day of my twin’s ordination, I wake to a sudden pang, a conflagration in the front of my skull, a feeling as if the whole world is burning. I sit up in bed. I am not able to catch my breath until late into the morning. By the time I do, it is done. We both have new names.