How the Great Cobra Shelters Him

Who can say how we find them? If we find them or they find us? Our hands tell us it is them. One with a robe pulled over his head. This is Uncle. The smaller form swaddled in cloth. Tömör. I sink down beside Uncle. Mun across from me. Together the four of us form a circle, our backs to the raging world. Let all be well. And just like that, all is well.

The first camel arrives, walking out of the flying sand, and lies down at our backs. I can feel the heat of the animal through my robe. Another arrives and positions herself perpendicular to the first. Then a third, then a fourth, and our shelter is complete, the animals like a pen around us. Is it my brother’s ferocious deity Hayagrīva, the Horse-Necked One, that summons these animals to us from out of the roaring sands? At this moment are the pupils of Mun’s eyes ablaze, each one ringed with a burning corona?

I think of the story of the Buddha and the Naga, how the great cobra shelters Him with her hood when it begins to rain, spreading it over Him as He waits for enlightenment to come. In such a moment there is time to think. The four of us in the lotus position. Every grain of sand, every drop of blood, every second on the earth and beyond. All contained in this one instant.

And so the great fires are extinguished in my brother. The one he has continually banked against me all these years. What I see is both dark and light. All his hopes, his fears, his dreams. His loneliness at Yatuu Gol. Sitting on his golden cushion at the head of the assembly. Ringing the bells. Chanting the prayers. Touching strangers with his forehead. Bestowing grace upon them. And the afternoon more than a year ago when my twin disrobes. The herder and his wife in the Rinpoche’s office, their heads bowed, their daughter beside them. In Mongolia, an unexpected pregnancy is not looked down on if the man agrees to marriage. Because of the vastness of the grasslands, often there is not time for traditional courtship. If a girl falls pregnant after the chance meeting of a stranger, then the man is summoned and welcomed into the family, even if the man is a monk. Here among the burning sands my heart fills as I relive my brother’s emotions one year ago when he disrobes after a brief encounter with a local girl. I watch as one week after disrobing, my twin leaves for the capital on the eve of his wedding when he learns it is a false alarm.

Then a great secret comes unmoored. Memories whipping about in the sand. In my brother’s wayward life, there is only ever this girl and no other. The daughter of a poor herder living in the shadow of the volcano. I see my brother entering the home during an afternoon of gurem, I hear him murmur a prayer for the family, see them offer him what little they have. It’s only now I realize the truth of it: he loves her. Theirs is not some sordid encounter. He loves her ever since walking through the door with his head bowed, the girl offering him a bowl of milk tea, their fingers touching, then the secret exchange of letters, their one and only meeting out on a hilltop at night among the grasslands—the human softness, the heat, the heartache when it is all a false alarm, and the resolve to go to the capital, to make a life, to establish himself, and, when he does, to bring her to be with him, her name Sarangerel, moonlight, not our Saran but another who lights up the earth, how I know now when he looks at our Saran he sees this other, nothing more, and I finally understand the great sacrifice he makes in giving up his job to come with us in our search as this journey significantly delays his plans for their reunion.

In turn my brother sees into me more deeply than ever before. The moment like standing naked on the surface of the sun. My reservations at taking my final vows. My sadness at never knowing the full pleasures of my body. My jealousy at his forging his own path forward.

Then out of the sand, a voice says: brother monks! Shed passion and aversion, as jasmine would its withered flowers. There is a door in every mountain, a secret drawer in every chest. Open it and enter into the place of emptiness.