Pema and the Yak: A Journey into Exile

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Preface When I first saw Lama O, he was picking the dirt out of a donkey's hoof. His nose was wrinkled and his eyes squinted behind his brass rimmed spectacles, his teeth ware bared as he cleaned, insistently, every scrap of dirt from this donkey's hoof. I did not know who he was, this man is burgundy robes outside the old, ramshackle stables of the house. When I arrived, he heard the crunch of my shoes on the gravel drive. He turned around, waved his pick in the air, and the shine of his white teeth flashed out at me, across the lawn.

I came up to him and he shook my hand, placing the warm, slightly clammy palm of his second hand overmine. Then he took it back, wiped his nose and picked up the hoof pick again. I saw the donkey reflected in his spectacles, gloomy, waiting for his master to complete his manicure. His master. Who was he? A lama? Probably, since this was a Buddhist centre, one to which I had fled to escape the fuming menace of Dublin. Somebody had said "There's this place by a lake in Country Cavan" and he had gone there out of curiosity and stress. To Godforsaken Cavan, where they ate their dinners out of their drawers, where there was a lake for every day of the year, and dubious activities in border ditches. But a Lama? In Cavan?

I started to visit this Tibetan Buddhist centre the odd weekend weeding the vegetable patches and cooking gruel soups for supper. I got to know Lama O. He used to teach me Tibetan words as I chopped vegetables for the evening soup. He would stay with us sometimes, at the round table after supper, and tell us about the cost of living in Mongolia or India or a story of some great sage who stayed in cave for years or about the lama he knew in Lhasa who was so fat and lazy that when he was called to the Dalai Lama's palace for tea the horse that was meant to carry him there collapsed under the weight of him. Lama O could talk about any thing from politics to cooking to the finer aspects of Buddhist philosophy. But I knew so little about him, and the story of his exiled people.

Once when I saw cooking the soup, he came up and tapped the pot, muttering something in Tibetan. I thought he was criticising my cooking -he would often add something to my soups, a pinch of solt some chilli or a dried up piece of seaweed, which was good for his diabetes. This time, however, he repeated what he had said: "Pum ba dak ba me." " I don't understand." "Pot," and he tapped it again, "is impermanent."

He walked away out the kitchen door, giggling to himself. I understood and yet I did not understand, as if what he said reminded me of something I once knew, long ago, and a slither of the memory of it had just resurfaced. But it was like a dream that had dissolved too soon. Later I would find out of it was an old edict of Buddhist logic, thrashed out in the courtyards of monasteries in dialectical debates.

There were other things like that, in the beginning, that I couldn't fathom. Like the deity Margery told me lived in the garden. Margery was the woman who ran the Buddhist centre, assistant in all things to Lama O, a woman as strong as a Yak and one of the best listeners I have ever met. She understood my curiosity about Lama O. One afternoon we were in the walled garden, and she was pushing a wheelbarrow full of brambles and weeds to the compost heap, and I was holding a pair of rusty secateurs, trying to wrench some nettles out of the ground.

I would be in Indian that I would come to know who he really was. I would learn his language, and I would climb the mountains and meet his people, the Tibetans, who had begun their slow, Painful exile in 1959. And I would wish, like anything, that one of them would tell me where on earth you could find Shambhala.

Back of the Book

Pema and the Yak is the fascinating story of a journey through the Himalaya along the Indo Tibetan border into the heart of Tibet in Exile. Encounters with oracles, lamas, ex-political prisoners, Tibetan doctors, D Js, nomads guerilla fighters, painters, poets, missionaries and Himalayan royalty paint a vibrant picture of Tibetans living in exile today.

Siofra O'Donovan was born is Dublin and educated at University College Dublin and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Her first novel, Malinski, was published in Ireland and Poland in 2003.

Contents

	PART ONE
	The Foothills	1
	Into Exile	3
	Pema and the Yak	12
	Tenzin's Flight	18
	Lobsang and the Water Buffalo	27
	Lhamo away on the Horse	38
	Thenpa the Gurrilla	49
	Daga the Painter	58
	The Nun and the Little Red Book	67
	Lost Nomads	74
	The Laughing Lama	81
	PART TWO
	The Hills	89
	The Queen of Spiti	91
	Temples on the Hill	98
	The House of the Builder	106
	Tashi and the Fish	112
	The Witches of Spiti	120
	Lhalong Lama	128
	The Oracle of Dankhar	137
	The Protectress of Tabo	148
	The king of Spiti	161
	PART THREE
	Over the Hills	171
	The Death of the Abbot	173
	The Queen of Ladakh	181
	Amnye and the Yeti	188
	Shambhala at War	197
	The Mani Cho Khor	206
	Chang Thang Nomads	212
	Pema and the Yak	221
	Lama O	228
	Epilogue	233

Sample Pages