One Word in the Fourth Line

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account.

Every evening at about six, when the light over Kathmandu turned the colour of weak tea, Inés Ferrero closed her laptop, put on her sandals and went down three flights of stairs to walk around the stupa.

She was twenty-nine, from Córdoba in Argentina. She had spent six years at a university institute in Germany learning classical Tibetan from grammars, dictionaries and a patient professor who had never been to Nepal. Now she had lived eight months in Boudha, the Tibetan neighbourhood that has grown up around the great Boudhanath stupa on the north-eastern side of the city.

The room above the bowl shop

Her room was above a shop that sold singing bowls. It had one window, a bed, a gas ring and a desk that wobbled unless she kept a folded bus ticket under one leg. From the window, past a water tank and a tangle of cables, she could see the gilded spire of the stupa and the prayer flags running down from it in long lines.

A small translation group, three editors in three time zones, had given her an old commentary on the Seven-Line Prayer. That is the short prayer to Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century teacher whom Tibetans remember for helping Buddhism take root in their country. The commentary ran to forty pages of woodblock print, scanned a little crookedly. She had a year to put it into English.

The first three lines went well. Then she came to the fourth, which gives his name, and for nine days she did not get past one word.

One word

The name is Padmasambhava, in Sanskrit. Padma is lotus; sambhava is something like born, or come into being. The Tibetan form, Pema Jungne, carries nearly the same sense, with jungne leaning towards an arising, a source, the place a thing comes from.

So the name was also a description, and the commentary made the most of it. It spent a page and a half on what it means to be born from a lotus, and to explain that, it had to tell the story of the birth.

If she wrote "Padmasambhava", the reader got a name, a sound with no lotus in it. If she wrote "the Lotus-Born", the lotus came through, but the line stopped sounding like someone being called and began to sound like the title of a book. "Pema Jungne" was what the people downstairs said, and it would mean nothing to the reader in Ohio she was supposed to be writing for.

She made a table of the choices, with columns for what each one gained and lost. It ran to two pages. On the fifth day one of the editors wrote, kindly, "Pick one and footnote it. We all get stuck on that line." She read the email four times and picked nothing.

The circuit

So each evening she walked. The path around the stupa was always full at dusk: old men turning hand-held prayer wheels, monks checking their phones, mothers with babies tied on their backs, trekkers just down from the mountains, a dog asleep in the exact middle of the way. Everyone went clockwise, as you always do around a stupa.

The white dome rose out of the crowd, and from the gilded tower on top of it painted eyes looked out on all four sides. Inés had walked fast at first, the way people walk in Córdoba. After a month she had slowed to everyone else's pace without noticing.

The lamp table

Near one of the gates an old woman sold butter lamps from a low table: small tin cups in metal trays, a can of ghee, a box of wicks, matchboxes in a jar. People bought one or two, lit them, and set them on the ledge behind her. Everyone called her Ama Chözom. Ama means mother, and in Boudha it is how you address almost any older woman.

Ama Chözom was never not busy. She wiped the trays, straightened wicks with her thumbnail and made change from a pouch at her waist. And all the time her lips moved. Inés had noticed it months ago: the Seven-Line Prayer, said half-voiced, over and over, the way some people hum while they cook.

In one sense Inés knew that prayer better than anyone in the square. She could parse every syllable. She could name the tense of every verb and summarise three commentaries on the fifth line. She had typed it, glossed it and argued about it in seminars in two languages.

"You talk like a book"

On the ninth evening she stopped at the table and asked, in her careful classroom Tibetan, what Ama Chözom thought the name in the fourth line meant.

The old woman laughed so suddenly that a man buying a lamp looked round. "You talk like a book," she said. Then, seeing Inés's face, more gently: "It's his name. He came from a lotus. Everybody knows that."

"But when you say it," Inés asked, "are you saying the name, or what it means?"

Ama Chözom looked at her as if she had asked whether you drink from the cup or from the tea. She went on wiping the tray. "I'm calling him," she said. Then a family came up wanting four lamps, and that was the end of the conversation.

Not once

Inés walked on. She was halfway round again before she understood what had been bothering her, and when she did she stopped so abruptly that the woman behind her bumped into her and apologised.

She had never said it. Not once, not even alone. She had read the prayer a thousand times and spoken it aloud only to check how a word was pronounced. All around her, hundreds of people were walking and saying it, or other prayers, or nothing at all, and she had been studying it from outside, like a house she had drawn plans of and never gone into.

That night she sat on the bed with the light off and tried. Her voice sounded odd in the small room, like a student reading in class. At the fourth line she caught herself pausing over the very word, weighing it, and she laughed out loud at herself in the dark.

One lamp

The next evening she bought a lamp from Ama Chözom. The old woman took her coins without comment and pushed the jar of matches across the table.

Inés lit the wick and set the cup on the ledge among the others.

Then she joined the crowd. This time she said the prayer as she walked, quietly, in her bookish accent, keeping step with an old man ahead of her whose prayer wheel creaked on every turn. She got two words wrong and kept going. At the fourth line she said the name and did not stop to think about what it meant. Nobody turned round.

She went round three times. She could not have said that anything was different, except that her feet were tired and the smell of ghee had got into her sleeve.

The note

In the morning the word was still there on the desk, exactly as difficult as before.

She did not solve it. She wrote to the editors that she hadn't, set out the three choices and what each one lost, and said that the decision belonged to someone who had been saying the prayer far longer than she had. In the line itself, for now, she put the Sanskrit name. In the note beneath it she wrote, as plainly as she could, that the name means born from a lotus, and that most people who say it are not thinking about that. They are calling him.

Then she closed the laptop, though it was only eight in the morning, and went down the stairs to see whether Ama Chözom had set out her lamps yet.