WHAT THE LOTUS SAID

A grumbling, finely attuned voyage—both keen and keening, pilgrimage and good-works project—into Tibet.

More than a casual spiritualist—the disciplines he has browsed comprise “a list like Homer’s catalogue of ships,” and once, “during a visit to Berkeley, I had my aura cleaned”—Swanson (The Boy in the Lake, 1999, etc.) has been a student of Tibetan Buddhism since 1995. His journey with his lama combines his own medical and logistical work with the personal agendas of his mostly American traveling band of half a dozen. Except for digestible forays into Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, to duhkha and trishna and shunyata, and neat little re-creations of a time when the adept Padmasambhava resided in a cave in the mountains of Nangchen in Tibet’s Kham region, Swanson focuses on the particulars of his journey. While he would love to reach the cave where Padmasambhava stayed, he is just as riveted by the night sky on the Tibetan Plateau—with its air that tastes almost metallic, its piercing green valleys, and its people—though he is not so joyous about the food or a certain pervasive stink. He is always aware of the irony of his spiritual quest in a land posted with signs warning “Recognition of Reincarnated Individuals Strictly Prohibited,” and having the Carpenters blaring from a boom box when he enters the sacred precincts of Kham on a bus he first encounters as it “coughs and lumbers, dragonlike,” from the depot. His spirituality, though lightly worn, is heartfelt, and his forlornness at not reaching the cave is palpable.

Swanson lives this journey like a Tibetan Buddhist, on the boundaries between here and there, at one with the everyday shuffle of finding toilet paper as he moves through the dreamscape of a land that could be “the Moon, the South Pole, the Antipodes of legend.”