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deep sadness. It was the way the Tibetans defended themselves, taking virtuous positions against impossible odds. In the original war against the Chinese invaders thousands of Tibetans had charged machine guns with muskets and swords, or holding only prayers in their hands. Coming to Zhoka was Surya’s way of doing the same thing. “Lha gyal lo,” Shan said at last in a tight voice.
    The old lama nodded somberly.
    “Why now?” Shan asked.
    Gendun waved his hand toward the ruins. “Zhoka was a very important place once, a place of great miracles. There are many things to learn here, things that must be revived.”
    Shan surveyed the abandoned gompa. The deep bowl in which the monastery had been built was over five hundred yards across at its base, and the ruins spilled up the slopes. Many of the rock walls that had defined courtyards and gardens had survived, even a number of the building walls stood, though none could be called intact. One huge wall, the end of what must have been an assembly hall, towered nearly twenty feet high, with a jagged six-foot hole in its center. Charred floor and roof timbers jutted from walls that leaned precariously. Shan knew little about Zhoka, except that it had been famed for its artists. Many of Zhoka’s remaining walls bore fragments of paintings like the broken image of a deer Surya had held. Surya was Yerpa’s most accomplished artist, the creator of magnificent thangkas, traditional Tibetan cloth paintings, and murals that graced the walls of the hermitage. For Surya, Lokesh had once said, his art was the way he prayed. But Gendun was sending him to live in a place where all the art had died.
    They sat in silence and listened to the distant throat chant.
    “What can be said to all these people, who have never been inside a temple?” Shan asked at last. “To those whose fear has been so great they have never even spoken with a monk?” There was to be a meal at noon, when Gendun meant to address the gathering.
    Gendun smiled. “We will teach them to begin falling with their eyes open.” It was one of the old teaching riddles, one Gendun had used with Shan in Shan’s first days at Yerpa. What is the way of human life, the student asked. An open-eyed man falling down a well, the master replied. As jarring as the words seemed at first, Shan had come to recognize them as the perfect caption for the lives of those who lived at Yerpa. The spirit was jostled through many life forms in its development, Surya had told Shan during his early days at Yerpa, and could expect to live a brief human incarnation only after a thousand other incarnations. Life was so short, and the human incarnation so precious, that the hermits of Yerpa devoted every moment to enriching it, not only through their religious teachings but by creating wondrous works of art, illuminating manuscripts, writing histories, composing poetry and creating beauty in the ways that translated the teachings of compassion into the smallest of actions. Once you recognized the well you were tumbling into, Gendun was fond of saying, what else could you do?
    Gendun knew as well as Shan that one informant, one errant patrol on this day, could mean the end of Yerpa, which had sheltered monks, scholars, and hermits for nearly five hundred years. The end of a place Shan had come to view as one of the great treasures of the planet, a brilliant gem on the crust of a drab world.
    “I have brought what you will need, Shan,” Gendun said, gesturing toward a tattered canvas drawstring bag with faded, once elegant Tibetan script depicting the mani mantra, the traditional invocation of compassion. “Lokesh can show you the way this evening. There is a full moon.”
    Gendun and Shan had solemnly packed the bag the day before as Gendun spoke of ancient hermits and recited poems the hermits had written. In the excitement of the day Shan had forgotten that he was about to leave on a solitary month-long hermitage in a cave deep in the