"Who says so?" Acuo asked again. He had realised that over the last few days, whether it was his parents or outsiders, whoever saw him adopted the same posture as his father. Even Headman Wangzhu, who had once thrashed him so viciously and had brought a great amount of presents to their family yesterday, had done the same.
"We revere the Three Jewels of Buddhism: the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha. This is the will of the gods and it is due to the virtue that we have accumulated in front of the bodhisattvas in our past lives." His father's eyes shone with tears.
Acuo didn't understand where the will of the deities had come from, but he had the hazy notion that he was to become a lama. This meant that after today, he would never again endure bullying, would never again go to the pastures and struggle against the elements or have to deal with wild animals and eagles. For a child in Tibet, becoming a lama was a path that many people yearned for. From now on, his family would be respected, from now on his life would be without cares or worries, and moreover, there were many other playmates the same age as him inside the temple. Everybody would read scripture together, learn Tibetan and study to become a respected master. This was his reward in this life for the virtue of a previous life. For most children from poor families, it was not as if they could say that they wanted to become a lama and then all followed their wishes. At the time, Acuo also was unaware that his future path would be much more glorious than an ordinary lama's.
Acuo saw the figure of Sister Yangzong flash past the tent entrance. He reached out his hands for the yak meat in the bowl, but his mother quickly stopped him, "First wash your hands, look, your hands are dirty."
Acuo quickly grabbed a big lump of yak meat and escaped as slippery as an eel.
"For you, Yangzong." He tried to squeeze it into her hands. This was the first time that he had given Yangzong something to eat and he felt very proud.
Yangzong lowered her head and bowed at the waist. In her hands she lifted a hada. She raised it high but did not dare to look Acuo in the eye.
"Quickly take it, Yangzong!" He took the hada and stuffed the yak meat into her hands.
Yangzong still did not look up as she retreated backwards, still bowing. Only then did Acuo realise that behind her stood her mother and a few people from the village. Old and young, all were bowing and sticking out their tongues in a salute to him.[17]
Acuo suddenly felt that although in this changed world he had enough to eat and drink, he was still restrained. In the past he had run here and there making a racket at the side of these adults, and nobody had watched him. They would never have adopted this kind of bearing to pay their reverence to him. Rather than this awe being a sign of respect to him, he rather felt that it made him feel stiff and overcautious. He didn't understand why Yangzong was no longer acting as she did on the pastureland, always telling him this, always teaching him that or singing him a song or telling him the stories of the gods. He also didn't understand why his parents always wanted to make him wash his hands and bathe many times a day. In the past his hands had always been black. Well, he was a child on the pastureland and whatever he grabbed or whatever he ate, nobody would care. This was all probably because of the words spoken yesterday in the temple by that master lama, which had changed everything. That master lama said to Acuo's parents that they should not give their child anything dirty to eat, that his clothes needed to be washed and cleaned, that before he ate he should wash his hands, before he went outside they must check that there was no wind or rain, when walking they needed to check that there were no holes or ditches underfoot, dogs should be tied up far away and they should not let their child walk the roads at night. A firepit in a tent warms the members of a family and the sun in the sky warms all living beings. Remember, Acuo isn't a firepit, he is the sun. Exhortation came after exhortation, as if Acuo's parents had never raised a child before. The master lama also said that on the fifteenth day, the temple would welcome the Eleventh Tulku Jianggong's spirit child.
4
Every morning in the temple the first drums followed the quiet rise of Venus in the east and rang out punctually. In the cold winter, the drums seemed to shiver in the cold wind. The frost on the ground was like the teeth of devils, biting at the bare feet of the young novices as they hurried to the main temple hall. Their little feet were red from the cold as they frantically rushed back and forth over the frozen ground. Before the senior monks of the temple entered the hall, these early-rising novices were responsible for replacing the holy water in the bowls arranged in front of the Buddha with clean dew and lighting all the butter lamps.
The reincarnated spirit child of the Eleventh Tulku Jianggong was no longer the Acuo from the pasture lands, but was already one of the novices busying themselves in the temple hall. Even though he had already been welcomed into Qiari Temple and had been ordained as an official monk, before he took part in the enthronement ceremony, he needed to undergo a period of stringent study of the sutras and rigorous Tulka training.
"Little Tulku Jianggong" , as people had already become accustomed to calling him, was today responsible for pouring out the previous day's water from the bowl of holy water and cleaning it. The other lamas would pour fresh holy water into the bowl. He was small so he needed to stand on a bench in order to reach the altar. The water from the previous day had frozen into a lump of ice and was at one with the copper bowl. As soon as Little Tulku Jianggong's hand touched the bowl it was as if it had been bitten. It stuck on the side of the bowl and he couldn't pull it away. He frowned and rapped the copper bowl lightly on the altar, but the ice would not be knocked out. A little novice handed him a Tibetan knife. "Pry it out." He gestured the action.
