In Siberia (24 page)

I slipped through the frail stockade into the monastery. No one was about. The roofs of its sanctuaries swung skywards in childlike bursts of colour, tossing up gold finials, and the monks lived
in prettily painted Russian cottages. I might have strayed into a playground. Guardian lions, sculpted in plaster, patted globes or scowled like soft toys from the grass. A few cows were slumbering in the porches of the shrines.

The monastery had been completed only in 1946, as an isolated concession, and had twice been rebuilt after fire. Perhaps it was this that lent it a funfair transience and gaiety. Its main temple floated up in a wedding-cake of tiered pavilions and canary-coloured roofs. In its topmost walkway a lama was blowing a conch to prayer, as if nothing had changed for two thousand years. His mournful braying seemed to deepen the quiet. One by one the monks struggled from their cottages, sandalled and robed in magenta. A smell of incense and juniper drifted up.

A few pilgrims–booted and wind-burnished cattlemen, prim urban families–were circling the compound around a gallery of prayer-wheels. Small drums and prayer-filled cylinders whirred and squealed under their fingers. The return of their faith seemed less a stormy revival than a simple restatement of identity. In one temple a man was teaching his small daughter to pray. Standing where its Buddha smiled in a thicket of candles, he drew her palms together at her breast, murmuring the timeless ‘
Om mani padme hum
', while a lone monk clashed his cymbals.

The porch of the chief temple was carved with Buddhist icons: the deer of Benares, the Wheel of the Law. But its sanctum was a tent of violent colour. Gold and crimson pillars swarmed up to a canopy of brilliant draperies and banners. Beneath, in a double aisle of low tables and benches, a few monks were chanting absent-mindedly, and an abbot meditated under his pointed cap. On a throne stood a painting of the Dalai Lama in dark glasses. He had visited Ivolginsk five times, and ordained monks. A pilgrim lay prostrate before it. A cash-register dinged in a corner, where an acolyte was selling candles.

I looked round in bewilderment. Nothing nourished my shadowy Buddhist sympathies. At the sanctuary's end, in lieu of an altar, two ranks of plaster statues gazed from a casement stretched across the whole wall. Avatars and bodhisattvas, dis
ciples and incarnations of the Buddha occupied their lotus seats and thrones like judges in some cosmic court. Reeking of rancid butter-candles, they sat sashed and crowned with paste tiaras. The pilgrims left sweets and biscuits for them. I gave a little money, but scrutinised them numbly. They cradled loaves and orbs, and lifted or lowered their hands in a lexicon of arcane comfort. Years ago I had understood this gestural language a little, but had now forgotten it. They looked like products in a shop window, their bodies wreathed in flowers and jewels. Here was the blue-skinned Buddha of Tibetan medicine, the Goddess of Mercy with her seven eyes, the Laughing Buddha scrambled round by babies. Banked up the wall behind, an audience of minute Buddhas, hundreds of them, spread like sacred wallpaper. And at the centre, seated in a mandala of peacock feathers, a single, vast, sweet-faced Buddha smiled down with cusped lips.

A few pilgrims circled the sanctuary clockwise, at home with the accoutrements crowding the statue's feet: copper horns, salvers, bells. Mysteries. The worshippers' orbit echoed their circling of the enclosure outside, returning them to the older faith, the past reproducing itself within the immense cycle of recurring Buddhas.

But during the twenties, Buddhism here had taken steps to ally itself with Moscow, declaring its philosophy a forerunner of Communism, and for a few years the diametric faiths cohabited. As I stood outside the house of the Chief Lama, I wondered what had happened to his standing. For a century and a half before the Revolution he had been elected in infancy, like the Tibetan Dalai Lama, as the incarnate soul of his predecessor.

But that was all over, said the young monk beside me. He smiled at the idea. ‘That's long past.'

I looked into a face of hesitant studiousness, its Mongol bones smoothed under pale skin and a dust of beard. ‘Our Lama sits beneath the Dalai Lama now. Tibet is important to us, and Mongolia. Most of us have studied in Mongolia.'

‘But your parents were Buddhists?'

‘Only in their ancestry, in some part of them. I was brought up without God. It was my decision to become a monk.'

I asked tentatively: ‘How was that?'

‘I don't know. At school and in the Young Pioneers it was drummed into us over and over that God did not exist.
He does not exist! He does not exist!
' He laughed gently. ‘Now it is the Young Pioneers who do not exist.' He spoke as if all this were long ago, but he was less than thirty. ‘My parents never tried to prevent me taking vows. But they didn't understand.'

Life was tranquil here, he said. The monks learnt Tibetan language, philosophy and medicine, and sometimes held theological debates. They advised people on their weddings by horoscope, and prayed at
oboos
, the shamanist cairns piled along the mountainsides to ancestral gods. ‘We say simple prayers there. It is like remembering the dead.'

‘And funerals?'

‘We sometimes attend them.' A flicker of unease. ‘Although it's difficult.'

I asked in surprise: ‘Why?'

‘Only for me. It's a personal thing, hard to explain. It's because of…pity.'

He could not bear their grief. And no, he did not know why these other monks could stand mourning, while he could not. He took me to the whitewashed stupas which marked the ashes of dead abbots, and to the greenhouse which cosseted a shoot from the bodhi tree in Bihar where the Buddha had gained enlightenment. We went to the library stacked with silk-bound scrolls, and opened the precious 108-roll illumined
Ganjur
scriptures which survived in crimson boxes.

In a circular shrine of his own, the Buddha of the Future waits. A high crown drips pearls over his forehead. His hands hold a ceremonial scarf and his chest is sprayed with jewels. He looks like a woman. ‘In July, by our calendar, we hold a three-day ceremony for him,' the monk said. ‘Then he is taken out and paraded round the monastery on a cart pulled by a green horse. And thousands of people rejoice.'

We gazed at the figure in silence. It is said he will come again, to usher in his people's golden age. ‘Maybe my son will see this,'
the monk said. ‘But I think not. Some say the Buddha will return in a thousand years. For myself, I think not so soon.'

In the temple a novice was receiving written prayers for submission to the Buddha next morning. Most were softly dictated while he wrote them down. But a pallid Russian youth inscribed his own and folded it with shaking hands.

‘Yes, the Russians come too. I think they're frightened. Capitalism is causing more problems than Communism did. Everything's failing. You see our temple too, it's crumbling.' I could not see this; only the dark hills touched it with desolation. ‘We are spread very thin–only eighteen monks here–because there are twenty little monasteries scattered about Buryatia.'

‘So Buddhism is growing?'

‘Yes. Even my parents understand me now. They were proud to see me ordained. That was my day.'

He had felt the Dalai Lama's hands on him.

 

Dusk drifts down from the hills, and the monastery closes itself away. I find a room in its guest-house, but wander out after sunset. Beneath the temple eaves, tiny bells tinkle in an icy wind, and the roofs are crusted with pigeons.

An old man walks along the avenue of prayer-wheels in near-darkness. Every time he turns one he utters the lotus prayer and flicks forward one of the 108 beads on his string, amassing multiples by a system I cannot understand. He is near the telling of a million prayers now, he says. Under his tangled hair his face has the calm burnish of a statue. ‘I do this not just for myself but for everybody. I do this for the world. For all its souls.'

I listen to him tramping down the aisle of wheels, his
Om mani padme hum
droning, repeating, fading. I wonder how he sees the soul. Is he also praying for mine? The soul leaves no tracks across the ashes of the hearth, says local shamanism, and passes noiselessly over dead leaves. Sometimes it takes the form of a bee. Sometimes it can even die.

Long after the old man has moved on, the turned prayer-drums whirr like a flock of birds taking off into the night.

 

I was woken by pigs snuffling under my window, and went out at dawn into the monastery court. The snow was falling in soft, desultory flakes, like apple blossom. The hills had vanished. From the temple summit a lama's conch began to moan like a patient.

I sat shivering in the sanctuary. The monks trickled in, doffing their pointed caps, then flattened themselves full-length before the effete Buddha. They filled fewer than half the cushioned seats, and looked wizened from the cold. At their head, beneath the Dalai Lama's throne, the abbot sat on a wide gold chair and rang a bell at intervals, while a hum of conversational prayer welled up. Along the aisles the tables were set with salvers of ceremonial bread and rice. A domestic well-being was in the air. The brothers chatted together between prayers. A novice went round with a kettle to fill their tea-cups, and the devotions swelled into a pattering hymn.

I waited without expectation. At the end of the central aisle a tiny, Gandhi-like ancient was leafing through folded notes, and I realised that these were the petitions left the day before. As his eyes scrutinised them, the old man's chant scuttled and wavered, blessing them, discarding them, in a thin, formal music. Sickness, mourning, heartbreak, all flickered through his hands and on to some listening Infinity.

By now five or six of the supplicants had crept into the temple and were sitting on benches against the wall. It was impossible to tell for what they were seeking consolation. They gazed blankly at the backs of the monks. A Buryat woman stood haggard near the entrance, kissing one of its columns, while leaf by leaf the petitions passed through the old monk's voice and into silence. Now the shaven heads gleamed closer above their books, and the chanting quickened over a pulse of drums. A few prayers, mounted on little sticks, were hurried up to the abbot, who passed a ritual candle-flame before them. Then the conches brayed through a clash of cymbals; the singing lifted to a gentle climax as the evil spirits were averted; and the supplicants, after cleansing themselves with holy water, went out into the falling snow.

 

After the mid-seventeenth century, when schism split the Russian Church, Siberia was settled by waves of religious dissenters. A campaign by the Moscow patriarch to cleanse and reform spiritual practice uncovered in western Russia a conservative mass to whom the old ways were sacrosanct. They had always crossed themselves with two fingers extended instead of the Greek three; they had honoured the Trinity with a double, not a triple, Alleluia; they had used seven loaves on the Eucharistic table instead of one; they had refused to shave their heads; and they had adhered to several other minute liturgical forms strange to the Greek Orthodox, but which had become obscurely precious.

Such things seem trivial to die for. Yet far into the eighteenth century the Old Believers were persecuted as heretics, maimed, burnt at the stake. Some sliced off their index fingers to avoid signing the three-fingered cross; others sent their own infants to paradise by killing them; and hundreds of families immolated themselves in the flames of their homes or churches.

They felt themselves on the brink of Apocalypse. It was a time of Messianic forebodings and prophecies. The divine reckoning was at hand. The double-fingered sign of the cross had entered their psyche as a surety of salvation. It was like a part of their body, a sanctifying magic. But reform augured the advance of Anti-Christ. It was linked in the common mind with contamination from the West: with profane luxuries, an assault on Russian holiness.

So the Old Believers, heavily bearded and multi-loaved, still restricting their Alleluias, either fled or were banished across the length of Siberia. They even reached Turkey and America. Only one bishop remained faithful to them, but he died before ordaining another. They debated laying his stiffened hands on the head of a successor, but his lips could not pronounce the consecrating words, so they gave up. In their forest fastness some of the Old Believers received runaway priests while others declared the whole Church and its priesthood in apostasy. So they administered the Sacraments to one another or were seen kneeling by the roadsides with their mouths gaping at the sky to receive an imagined distillation from heaven.

If the Cossacks were the cowboys of Russia's Wild East, the Old Believers were its Mennonites or Mormons. In time they split into sects or were joined by others yet more extreme. All were marked by ascetic simplicity or violent self-deprivation. They rejected baptism, churches–even prayer. The depraved ‘Wanderers' cursed the Czar as Satan, baptised their babies in lakes and buried their dead in forest glades. There were literalists who became herdsmen in obedience to holy writ, and milk-drinking Molokans thirsty for the ‘milk of the Word'. There were self-baptisers and non-baptisers, ‘Sighers' who prayed breathily in honour of the Holy Spirit, and the ‘Prayerless' who abhorred any outward observance at all. There were the pious Stundists and the
Dukhobor
‘Spirit-wrestlers', pacifists, who believed in the primacy of an indwelling spirit, turning even the Bible superfluous. There would even be a sect that deified Napoleon.

Others seemed touched by insanity. The
Khlysti
, with whom Rasputin was linked, whirled into ecstatic dance and self-flagellation crying ‘Ho Spirit, Spirit, Holy Spirit, ho, ho, ho', until they fainted to the ground. After initiation a man would bypass his wife and sleep with a spiritual partner, often all three in the same bed, and called the children from his unregenerate past ‘young cats' and ‘little sins'. As for the
Skoptsi
, they tried to destroy lust by self-mutilation, hacking off their breasts or testicles. In accordance with the Gospels they became blessedly barren, or ‘eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake'. Even at the start of the twentieth century travellers might come upon their dreamlike, emasculated villages, whose communities were dying.