A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East

by Tiziano Terzani

According to popular belief, when a person dies violently his spirit does not rest in peace. And if, in the moment of death, the body is mutilated, decapitated, crushed or torn to pieces, that spirit becomes particularly restless; unless the prescribed rites are quickly performed it goes to join the enormous army of “wandering spirits.” These spirits, along with the evil phii, constitute one of the great problems of today’s Bangkok. Hence the importance of the “body snatchers,” volunteers from Buddhist associations who cruise around the city collecting the bodies of people who have died violently. They put the pieces together and perform the appropriate rites so that the souls may depart in peace, and not hang about playing tricks on the living.

This is one aspect of a reporter’s job that never ceases to fascinate and disturb me: facts that go unreported do not exist. How many massacres, how many earthquakes happen in the world, how many ships sink, how many volcanoes erupt, and how many people are persecuted, tortured and killed. Yet if no one is there to see, to write, to take a photograph, it is as if these facts had never occurred, this suffering has no importance, no place in history. Because history exists only if someone relates it. It is sad, but such is life; and perhaps it is precisely this idea—the idea that with every little description of a thing observed one can leave a seed in the soil of memory—that keeps me tied to my profession.

After a few miles Andrew told the driver to stop near a pile of timber at the side of the road. We had scarcely got out of the jeep when we heard a strange clanking sound from the brushwood, like chains being dragged. Yes—chains they were. They were around the ankles of about twenty emaciated ghosts of men, some shaking with fever, all in dusty rags, moving wearily in unison like an enormous centipede, with a long tree trunk on their shoulders. The chains on their feet were joined to another around their waists. The two soldiers accompanying the prisoners made us a sign with their rifles to drop our cameras. “They’re missionaries. Don’t worry,” said Andrew. It worked. A couple of cigarettes added conviction. The prisoners put down the trunk and stopped. One of them said he was from Pegu, another from Mandalay. Both had been arrested five years before, during the great demonstrations for democracy: political prisoners, doing forced labor. It is strange to stand before such an atrocity, be obliged to take mental notes and discreetly snap a few photos, trying to avoid risks and not to give those poor devils more problems than they already had; and then to realize that you have not even had the time to feel compassion, to exchange a word of simple humanity. You suddenly find yourself looking into an abyss of pain, you try to imagine its depths, and all you can think of asking is, “And those?” pointing to the chains.

There was nothing physically breathtaking about Kengtung—no particularly impressive monument, temple or palace. Its touching charm lay in its atmosphere, in its tranquillity, in the timeless pace of life without stress. Is it strange to find all this beautiful? Is it absurd to worry that it is changing? In appearance everything is fine these days in Asia. The wars are over, and peace—even ideological peace—reigns, with very few exceptions, over the whole continent. Everywhere people speak of nothing but economic growth. And yet this great, ancient world of diversity is about to succumb. The Trojan horse is “modernization.”

I find it tragic to see this continent so gaily committing suicide. But nobody talks about it, nobody protests—least of all the Asians. In the past, when Europe was beating at the doors of Asia, firing cannonballs from her gunboats and seeking to open ports, to obtain concessions and colonies, when her soldiers were disdainfully sacking and burning the Summer Palace in Peking, the Asians, one way or another, resisted. The Vietnamese began their war of liberation the moment the first French troops landed on their territory; that war lasted more than a hundred years, and only ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975. The Chinese fought in the Opium Wars, and in the end trusted to time to free themselves from the foreigners who ruled with the force of their more efficient weapons. (The last two pieces of Chinese territory still in foreign hands, Hong Kong and Macao, are returning to Peking’s sovereignty in 1997 and 1999 respectively.) Japan, on the other hand, reacted like a chameleon. It made itself externally Western, copied everything it could from the West—from students’ uniforms to cannons, from the architecture of railway stations to the idea of the state—but inwardly strove to become more and more Japanese, inculcating in its people the idea of their uniqueness. One after another the countries of Asia have managed to free themselves from the colonial yoke and show the West the door. But now the West is climbing back in by the window and conquering Asia at last, no longer ...

We should all ask ourselves—always—if what we are doing improves and enriches our lives. Or have we all, through some monstrous deformation, lost the instinct for what life should be: first and foremost, an opportunity to be happy.

Are the inhabitants happier today, gathered in families chatting over supper, or will they be happier when they too spend their evenings mute and stupefied in front of a television screen? I am well aware that if we were to ask them, they would say that in front of a television is better! And that is precisely why I should like to see at least a place like Kengtung ruled by a philosopher-king, by an enlightened monk, by some visionary who would seek a middle way between isolation-cum-stagnation and openness-cum-destruction, rather than by the generals now holding Burma’s fate in their hands.

Obviously the reason why the famine, the right-wing uprising, the expulsion of the president and the assassination attempt did not happen was—how shall I put it?—that they were not going to happen, not that they were averted thanks to prophecies. But that is not the logic by which the Asians—especially the Burmese—look on life. Prescience is in itself creation. An event, once announced, exists. It is fact, and although it is still to come it is more real and more significant than something that has already happened. In Asia, the future is much more important than the past, and much more energy is devoted to prophecy than to history.

People born into a family of poor peasants at the beginning of the century, in Cernusco or anywhere else in Italy, could not dream of having the moon: their choices were extremely limited, which meant that they had a “destiny.” Today almost everyone has many alternatives, and can aspire to anything whatsoever—with the consequence that no one is any longer “predestined” to anything. Perhaps this is why people are more and more disorientated and uncertain about the meaning of their lives.

Tiananmen

Is there such a thing as chance? I was coming to believe that a lot of what seems to happen “by chance” is in fact our own doing: once we look at the world through different glasses we see things which previously escaped us, and which we therefore believed to be nonexistent. Chance, in short, is ourselves.

“Satori.”

Khmer

“The ideal for you is to be always on the move. If you stay in the same place for long your brain will stop working.” (Very true. I am at my best when I am dumped in a place I know nothing about; curiosity is my best motivation.)

Travel is an art, and one must practice it in a relaxed way, with passion, with love. I realized that after years of going about in airplanes I had unlearned that art—the only one I care about!

Bugis,

Ching Ming,

For some people, the sight of the world rushing ever more blindly toward materialism reinforces the belief that only some dreadful event, like a plague or a great famine, can restore order and give men back a sense of life. With the end of the millennium so near, such ideas readily find followers, especially among idealists looking for a cause. The current resurgence of religious fundamentalism, in its different versions, can also be seen in this light.

Every place is a gold mine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passersby, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread—a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you have just met—and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theater of humanity.

What a fantastic combination of stars there must have been in the fifth century before Christ! So many great spirits, all born at the same time: Sophocles, Pericles, Plato and Aristotle in Greece; Zoroaster in Persia; Buddha in India; Lao Tse and Confucius in China. All, more or less, in the space of a hundred years. Today many, many more people are born, but not a single one who can measure up to those. Why? Is the reason in the stars?

I would probably never again have a chance of seeing a dukun close to death, so I ventured to ask the question that had been on my mind since I stepped inside the house: “Are you afraid of death?” “I don’t know … I know only that in the course of my life I’ve seen spirits of all types. I’ve seen spirits of old women with long white hair, I’ve seen the ghosts of animals, I’ve seen the ghosts of the sea that sometimes invade the bodies of fishermen when they are out on their boats. I’ve seen many strange things, and I expect to see more … even after,” he replied.

Hurray for ships! With their puffing and sighing and shuddering as they meet the caress of the waves, the embrace of the sea, ships have a human feel. Let us keep them alive as a token of love, to make the last romantics happy. Let us use them to cure the depressed. Let us prescribe sea journeys for those who can no longer bear the burden of life, who feel suffocated and see no reason to carry on. Think what we shall save on pills—no more Valium and Prozac!

The more one looks around, the more one sees that our way of living is becoming more and more senseless. Everyone is running, but where to? And why? Many believe that in this race for material things we are losing our old pleasures. But who has the courage to say: “Stop! Let’s look for another way”? If anyone did, most people—themselves depressed—would take him for a madman. If we were lost in a forest or a desert we would surely start looking for a way out. Why not do the same with this blessed progress, that lengthens our lives, makes us richer, healthier and better-looking, but deep down less and less happy?

The chain of cause and effect that links human affairs is endless, and that means they remain without a real explanation. I was on that ship as the result of an infinite series of “becauses,” of which it was impossible to establish the first. That is the maddening thing about destiny—and the wonderful thing. There is always an inexplicable bridge of San Luis Rey, where different people with different stories, coming from different places, meet by chance at the moment when the bridge collapses, to die together in the abyss. But the first step of each of the journeys which end in that assignation cannot be retraced.

“Travel makes sense only if you come back with an answer in your baggage,” said Leopold.

On the lintel of a door, an ancient hand had chiseled a message that Pich Keo translated: “The wise man knows that life is nothing but a small flame shaken by a violent wind.”

had said goodbye to everyone and was already feeling the familiar thrill of beginning a journey, the sense of relief that always fills me when I know that I cannot be reached, that I am not booked or expected anywhere, that I have no commitments except those created by chance. How wonderful it is to mix with a crowd as an ordinary traveler, free from one’s own role, from one’s self-image, which at times can be a cage as tight as that of the body; to be sure you won’t meet anyone with whom you will have to make conversation, and to feel free to send to the devil the first person who tries to start one.

“Life is not yours, and it can be taken from you at any moment. Reflect on this.”

At every station a forest of skinny arms reached up toward the windows. Some of them offered things for sale: ragged youngsters sold hot water from battered aluminum teapots covered with straw, little girls offered pieces of sugarcane. Most offered empty hands. Amputees boarded the train to display their stumps, the blind to chant their singsong tales of woe. The police drove them all out again. They were undoubtedly victims of the war, but nowadays in Vietnam only the dead are honored as heroes. For them there is a monument in every town and every village. For the lame there is nothing but contempt: they are a burden.

As we passed through the Guilin region I saw the famous mountains, but what struck me most, as in Vietnam, were the rice fields and the accumulated labor embodied in them. Everywhere I go, agriculture gives me a sense of strength; I have the impression that these countries hold together because the peasants hold out.

Gobi Desert,

Genghis

But isn’t life always like that? You go running after something with high hopes, and then once you get it you find it is never as good as the running and hoping. Even in my quest for fortune-tellers, it was the search that meant the most to me.

Even the gigantic gilt bronze Buddha who sat in the lotus position at the center of the ancient Gandan Temple on the high plateau is gone: he was donated to the Soviet motherland to make cannons in the Second World War. Ossendowski tells us that Ungern never liked that statue: it was of recent origin, and its face had not come to wear those tears of sorrow and joy which only time can bestow. How right he was, that bloodthirsty but cultured baron! New things lack that ballast of history which always adds to the pathos of an object.

On impulse I put Ossendowski on the ground and sat cross-legged before the throne to speak to him. “I’ve kept my promise. We’re here.” The air was motionless; then a breath of wind, stirring the fillets of colored silk hung beside a tanka, seemed to conjure a vision of other times. I felt the presence of Hutuktu on the throne, the presence of Ungern and Ossendowski, with others, behind. Of course in seeing and hearing these things I was playing a game, but it brought home to me how easily suggestion can work on a receptive mind, and how places and objects have a hidden life that opens before those who know their history.

Only Ossendowski was still with me. With my intense interest, I had redeemed his book from death, made it something more than a mere object. Was that not how the Malaysian kris acquired a soul? Was it not also the message of a Tibetan story told by Alexandra David-Neel? A merchant goes to India, and his mother asks him to bring her a relic. He forgets. On his next journey he forgets again. The third time, when he is about to return home yet again without the relic his mother desires, he pulls a tooth from a dog’s skeleton lying by the roadside and brings it to her, saying it belonged to a great holy man. The mother is delighted, and venerates the tooth; other women come to pray before it, and in the end they all see rays of light emanating from that “relic.” Hence the Tibetan proverb: “If there is veneration even a dog’s tooth gives forth light.”

sibylline

The session went on for some time longer, with other questions and other answers of little import. The whole ceremony had left me cold and disappointed. Not for a moment had I felt the mystery which had so fascinated Ossendowski, and me too as I read his book. Perhaps it was because his was a time of great events, when people lived and died more dramatically; but whatever the reason, that rite performed for me in a yurt in Ulan Bator had lost all the meaning it had had for him in the old city of Urga. The procedure, the gestures, formulae and invocations were probably the same. What I missed was all the rest: the collective consciousness of a people, its fear, its faith in the occult, its hope for some kind of salvation. My dalchin lacked the spirit of the time.

Karakorum,

King of Agharti,

Baron von Ungern

tankas.

Such is the strange destiny of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Built as a line of defense against China a hundred years ago, at the height of Russia’s imperial ambitions, it has now become the supply line which enables the poor Russians, defeated by history, to dress in trashy Chinese clothes.

taiga

Soon I was home. I unpacked my bag and distributed all the oils, powders, envelopes, magic cards and other lucky charms I had accumulated en route. What I could not get rid of was the disquieting memory of those huge masses of humanity—desperate, disorientated, angry and ravenous—which, from Vietnam to China, from Mongolia to Russia, I had left in my wake. If I had traveled by air I would have seen none of it.

I interrupted again and asked him if he believed the things he said he saw in the cards. “Not 100 percent, otherwise we would no longer have any responsibility for our actions,” he said. “The cards read the shadows of things, of events. What I can do is help people to change the position of the light, and then, with free will, they can change the shadows. That I really do believe: you can change the shadows.”

Elbe.

The Hong Kong fortune-teller, after all these years, continued to shower me with blessings. The next were eighteen long, restful days of silence and solitude on board a ship sailing from Europe to Asia, crossing the great seas of history: the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean. For some strange reason we tend to think of human events as taking place on land. We see the past in the physical solidity of monuments, in things that have been built, in the remains of things destroyed, in tombs. But much of history—often the most dramatic part—is written on the seas, where men have left no record of themselves, where everything has sunk without trace, and the water is just as it was a thousand or a hundred thousand years ago: illegible. The sea has inspired man’s dreams of conquest; on the sea the fates of civilizations and empires have been played out. It was the promise of unknown lands beyond the sea that spurred the great navigators to entrust their lives to the waves.

La Spezia

Every conversation in the salon ended with a lament for all that had changed in ships, and for the poetry which technology has stolen from life at sea.