The Breath of God (6 page)

Tim paused the scratching of his forehead. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Elizabeth peeking around the edge of her cubicle, her nose wrinkled in disgust. He opened the metal drawer an inch and dropped the pen cap inside. For some reason, Duncan still hovered over his shoulder. His boss seemed suspicious, checking on him.

Then a delicious thought sprang to his mind. A thought that caused him to lick his chapped lips, tasting the waxy strawberry flavor. A thought that caused him to forget his itchy skin.

Duncan was close enough to stick with the eight-inch commando knife Tim kept in the back of his desk drawer, behind his Chapstick. In seconds he could gut his boss, just like he'd done with the hog after he'd shot it.
Would Duncan's innards stink as bad as the boar's had?

But then, Tim knew that killing his boss wasn't part of God's plan for him. No, God had something much bigger in mind. After three months of preparations, all the pieces were finally in place.

I
'VE GOT TO GET OUT OF HERE
, Grant thought as he dropped the handmade wooden crutches on the stone floor. Supporting his weight on his quivering left leg, he placed both hands on the bed, twisted his body, and swung the bulky cast up and over the thin mattress. He collapsed on the bed, grunting from the exertion as well as the throbbing in his lower body. His T-shirt was soaked through the back, and he'd only crutched down the narrow hallway once. Karma had finally acquiesced and allowed Grant to use the crutches for the fist time that morning, three weeks since the accident. According to the doctor, Grant was a week ahead of schedule, but that wasn't good enough for Grant.

Karma had spoken to Professor Harold Billingsly several times, updating Grant's concerned mentor on his condition. Billingsly offered to fly over to help with Grant's recovery, but Grant had relayed, through Karma, that he'd prefer the professor use his efforts to obtain funds to extend Grant's dissertation deadline, again.

Grant knew that Billingsly didn't hold out much hope. Most of their colleagues believed he was on some kind of Holy Grail search. Their lack of faith didn't discourage him, though. Like his father's admonitions when he was younger, their resistance only made him want it more.

He pushed himself into a seated position, folded his thin pillow in half behind his back, and took his laptop from the table. The doctor had been beyond helpful, bringing him his laptop, making the necessary calls to cancel
his credit cards, and retrieving his passport from the hotel's registration desk, where he'd left it for safekeeping the day of the kayaking trip.

While Grant waited for his computer to boot up, he reflected on the hours he spent each day talking with his new friend Kinley. The monk entertained him with ancient Bhutanese tales. Grant's favorite was one about the Buddhist master who flew on the back of a tiger to a mountainside cave. Their conversations were often like epic tennis matches with ideas being hit back and forth like a ball crossing the net at Wimbledon. Kinley continued to enjoy Grant's frustration, however, getting that same twinkle in his eye every time Grant complained about the vagueness of a particular parable or a koan—his Buddhist riddles with no real answers.

Grant imagined Kinley was trying to shock his mind into sudden understanding, but they approached their main topic of conversation, religion, from two very different angles. Whereas Kinley emphasized the importance of one's personal experience of one's religion, Grant viewed this approach as putting too much emphasis on subjective psychological states. The mystical, in his opinion, was only a step away from the supernatural. Instead, Grant believed that the historical and cultural study of religion better explained the competing doctrines of the various religions of the world. Grant had been raised in the church, his father a preacher, but ever since his teen years, he'd rejected the emphasis on the supernatural that was too often present in his own tradition.

What Grant understood now was that he was tantalizingly close to uncovering the key to his research and his future career. After his initial shock at having disclosed in his sleep his reasons for being in Bhutan, he'd been rewarded when Kinley told him several stories he'd never heard before about the mysterious Indian saint Issa. Grant could barely contain his excitement, but when he asked Kinley how he knew these stories, Kinley avoided answering. Yet something in the way Kinley told the stories caught his attention. It was as if Kinley were speaking from firsthand knowledge.

Grant recalled when he first learned the legend of Issa during his second year of graduate school. Russian journalist Nicholas Notovitch, who was traveling in northern India near Kashmir in 1887, made an extraordinary discovery at the Himis monastery in the town of Ladakh—the same monastery
Grant had visited before coming to Bhutan. The ancient manuscript he saw told the story of Issa, who left his home as a teenager to explore the secret wisdom of the sages in the Himalayas. It was said that these wise men knew the mystery behind life and death. After Notovitch returned to the West and published a translation of the text, the original disappeared from the monastery. Notovitch was then portrayed as a fraud and pilloried by the academic community, and the story faded into obscurity.

Grant had wondered if anyone had ever followed up on this disappearance, and he made it his quest to uncover whatever became of the text, but none of the scholars he consulted could recall any further investigation. The whole story had been buried. Based on his original research and the tip he'd learned in India, Grant hypothesized that the Issa manuscript had been moved to another Buddhist monastery sometime after the publication of Notovitch's book in 1894, in order to prevent the world limelight from shining on bucolic Himis. The thought that the treasure may have been moved to Bhutan—to this monastery even—started to torture him. He needed to be up, mobile, and investigating the grounds.

Grant deliberated over whether to come right out and tell Kinley how important the Issa story was to him. But as kind as Kinley had been, could he really trust him? He suspected that Kinley knew more than he was saying, and he was different from the monks at Himis. As an Oxford grad, he understood the workings of Western scholarship, and he had to realize the effect that the Issa legend would have on millions of people. Grant would keep working on him.

A gentle knock on the door interrupted his thoughts. “Come in.”

Kinley entered, dressed in neat orange robes and carrying a small fern in a clay pot. “Since you cannot venture outside yet, I brought some of it to you.”

“Who knows when I'll be able to climb down those treacherous steps of yours. I can barely hobble down the hallway.” Grant was grateful for his friend's attention to the small things, but it was not his style to be overcomplimentary.

Kinley placed the plant on the wooden desk by the small window. “Old buildings in Bhutan used ladders between floors because they took up less
space than true steps. When our people began constructing staircases, they built them like the ladders to which they were accustomed, steep and narrow.”

“How did you carry me up here?”

“You were unconscious.” Kinley chuckled.

Something on the fern caught Kinley's eye. He bent close to the plant, tilting his head. He then extended his hand, gently touching one of the leaves. Next, Kinley brought his fingers to his face, rotating them as he studied the curiosity. After a minute, he walked to the window, extended his hand, and waved it slowly. Once his ritual was complete, he turned to Grant. “Ladybug,” he said.

“Oh.” Grant shrugged. He watched the monk pinch off a couple of dead leaves from the fern and then turn the pot so that the fullest side faced the bed.

“Making lists again?” Kinley asked.

Grant placed the laptop back on the table. He knew he shouldn't take the bait, but he said, “I can't just lie here all day long and watch my breath.” Grant admitted to himself that he'd been enjoying learning the tenets of Buddhism in much greater depth than he'd studied at Emory. In addition to filling the long days, his lessons with Kinley had stimulated his insatiable intellectual curiosity. But he found many of the meditation exercises Kinley suggested pointless. “I mean, I have to
do
something,” he said, a sentiment he'd shared more than a few times.

“What is it you have to do?”

“Well, my research for one thing.” He resisted adding that his research was directly related to the Issa legend, which Kinley seemed to be keeping from him, but then he suspected that Kinley knew exactly what he was talking about.

“And when you achieve that goal, what next?”

“Simple. I'll set new ones, just larger. Publish books. Tenure.”

“This will bring you happiness?”

“Without our goals and the plans to reach them, we would still be chasing antelope across the savannah.” Reaching forward, he tucked a blanket underneath his cast to elevate his leg. It was starting to throb.

“You are in pain today.”

“I do have a broken leg that is set in this nineteenth-century-looking cast.” Grant knew Kinley well enough by now to know he could poke fun at the rudimentary cast that made his leg look like a log swaddled in tattered sheets.

But rather than smile, Kinley narrowed his eyes and said, “I wasn't speaking of your leg.”

Grant remained silent.

Kinley paced the room, his hands clasped behind his back. He moved not with the nervous energy characteristic of pacing, but with grace, like a dancer gliding across the floor. “One day a student came to his master and asked, ‘When the leaves fall from the tree, what then?' The master replied, ‘The body is exposed in the autumn wind.'”

Grant knew better by now than to try to dissuade Kinley from delivering one of his koans. He sighed deeply and turned to Kinley.

“Do I bore you?” Kinley asked.

“Look, I've been lying here for weeks.”

“You are a superb student, Grant, but your problem is not that you are missing information. You don't need to be taught more. You need to be taught less. You don't need to think more, you need to learn to think less.”

“Pretty anti-intellectual of you. Not what I'd expect from an Oxford grad.”

“Buddhism is not just about learning the teachings of the Buddha. It's not about believing in a doctrine. The Chinese have a saying—”

“I'm sure they do,” Grant quipped, picking at the plaster on his cast.

Kinley chuckled and continued, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”

Grant began to respond and then closed his mouth. After a moment of contemplation, he said, “The teachings and doctrine are not the ultimate truth, they are just a sign pointing in the direction of the truth?”

Kinley smiled. “You want to know more about Issa, correct?”

Grant's heart rate accelerated, but he kept his face passive.

“Issa too struggled with the teachings he learned on his journey through the Himalayas. What he learned differed greatly from what he'd been taught as a child in his homeland. Although his sharp mind quickly comprehended
the essence of the teachings, it was only after he practiced what he learned for many months that he reached enlightenment.”

Kinley paused when he reached the desk by the window, staring at the fern. “One particular story ... but my memory is fuzzy on the details. Over twenty years have passed since I read the manuscripts.”

“Manuscripts!” The word escaped Grant's mouth in a gasp. “You've seen writings about Issa?”

“We have several.”

“Here in the monastery?”

An electricity originating in Grant's core spread through his body. He felt it send pins and needles to his hands and feet.

The monk nodded. Grant thought he detected a spark in his dark eyes. Did his new friend understand the magnitude of what he claimed? Grant longed to talk to Kinley about his theories, but he wasn't ready yet. Instead, he indulged himself by playing out the scenario of how he'd be received back home. All the problems he'd faced since his undergrad years. He could regain the respect of the board, which had admitted him only because of Billingsly. This was the kind of discovery that happened once a generation. He would have his pick at tenure opportunities—Harvard, Princeton, Yale.

The thoughts swirled in Grant's mind like a tornado picking up debris. If Kinley was right, then Grant's theory about Nicholas Notovitch's discovery a hundred and twenty years ago would be proved. Grant's professors at Emory, even Billingsly, all regarded Issa as just one more in a series of quaint legends, but something about the story had always resonated with Grant, something about the teenager searching for answers that eluded him. Grant sided with the common people he encountered in India who believed in the popular legend of Issa over the majority of Western scholars who rejected it. Grant thought back to his own upbringing in his fundamentalist household: the teachings that other religions were the dark work of Satan, that three-quarters of the world's population was going to hell because they didn't “believe in Jesus”—the “my God versus yours” attitude that made Christianity seem like more of an exclusive country club than a religion based on love and tolerance. Now Grant had an opportunity to show the ultimate fallacy of this line of
thinking. He would uncover the mystery that would show not just a compatibility among the world's great religions, but a direct historical link.

Then another thought stopped him. He sat up straighter. Kinley referred to
manuscripts
in the plural, but Nicholas Notovitch wrote about a single
text
he'd seen at the Himis monastery, a large book written in Tibetan with an ornate cover.