began collecting stories like these because I planned to write an article on the importance of superstition in Asia, but I also wanted to dispel my doubts and to convince myself that I was right to change my life for a reason that had absolutely nothing rational about it. But was that not true of much of the life around me? Especially in Thailand, I had only to use my eyes.
In Thailand it is common for important political declarations to be made on days considered auspicious, and for politicians to reassure public opinion about the state of the economy or national security by quoting astrologers. In the middle of the Gulf War, when Thailand feared attacks from Islamic terrorists because of its pro-American stance, Prime Minister Chatichai called a press conference and said: ‘There is nothing to worry about. Thailand will be spared. My astrologer says so.’ Nobody laughed. Everyone knew that he was serious. A couple of months previously he had had a mole removed from under his left eye because his astrologer had told him it would bring him bad luck.
In February 1991 Chatichai was overthrown by one of the usual military coups, but after a few months of peaceful exile in London he came back to live in Bangkok. Even in that coup, the occult seems to have played no small role. The generals who seized power had just returned from a secret trip to Burma. In Rangoon they had made offerings in the temple where their Burmese colleagues had made theirs before their successful coup of 1988. Then, taking care not to ‘discharge’ their energy – which meant never touching the earth, always walking on a red carpet – they went to the car, to the helicopter, to the plane, and at last to the Bangkok general command post. There, still ‘charged’, they launched their putsch, the success of which many in Bangkok believed was due to the Burmese energy.
A year after the coup, General Suchinda, who had become Prime Minister, gave the army orders to fire on a crowd of demonstrators. There were several hundred victims. The crisis was resolved by the intervention of the king. General Suchinda resigned, but not before declaring a general amnesty, thanks to which he and the others responsible for the massacre were granted immunity from any legal action. The deaths, said Suchinda, could not be laid at his door: it had been the demonstrators’ karma to die. Most people let it go at that, but a group of implacable democrats found it intolerable that no one should be punished for the deaths of so many people. For justice they turned to black magic.
One Sunday morning, on the great Sanam Luang Square in front of the Royal Palace, a strange ceremony took place. The names and photographs of Suchinda and the other two generals of the junta were placed in an old coffin, and the widows of some of the victims burned peppers and salt in broken begging bowls. Coffins, widows and broken crockery are symbols of great misfortune, and the ceremony was meant to put the evil eye on the three generals and destroy them.
The generals took the matter very seriously. Suchinda went to a famous monk to have his name changed, so that the evil eye would fall on the one he no longer bore; one of the other generals, also on the advice of a monk, changed his spectacle frames, shaved off his moustache and ate a piece of gold leaf so as to make his speeches more popular; the third had a surgeon remove some wrinkles that were bringing him bad luck, and then, to be on the safe side, took his mistress and went to Paris to run a restaurant.
No history book, especially if written by a foreigner, will ever give that version of the coup and the Bangkok massacre. But that is how most people in Thailand experienced them.
One encounter that greatly encouraged me to hold to my plan was with some researchers at the Ecole Francaise de l’Extreme Orient. For the first time in its history the school had organized a meeting of all its scholars, in Thailand. I went to hear about their work and discovered, to my great surprise, that some of them were studying the subjects in which I had become interested.
One ethnologist gave a paper investigating the revival of occult Taoist practices in the Chinese province of Fukien. He told how one night, under a full moon, he had witnessed a ceremony in which a man immobilized by ropes had suddenly shot like an arrow across the rice fields, drawing after him the whole population of the village, including the local Communist Party secretary.
The story resembled some of those recounted by Alexandra David-Neel about Tibet in the 1930s. Only this was China in 1993, and the narrator was a scholar who could hardly be suspected of exaggeration.
There was something in the air that told me I had made the right decision.
CHAPTER SEVEN Dreams of a Monk
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 non-existent. Chance, in short, is ourselves.
At the end of February the Dalai Lama came to Bangkok on a lightning visit. During his few hours in the city he held a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club on the twenty-first floor of the Hotel Dusit Thani. Before the largest crowd of journalists ever assembled in that room, he appealed for the liberation of Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned heroine of the Burmese democracy movement. He spoke of goodness, love, purity of heart and peace.
His speech left me very disappointed, and I drew no comfort from the fact that as he was leaving the room, in his kindly, smiling way he stopped when he reached me, as if my face were familiar. His hands met in front of his chest, and when I returned his greeting in like manner, he seized my wrists in a firm grasp and shook them, expressing the warmest good wishes and some sort of blessing.
‘Is he always so down-to-earth, so utterly simple? He talked like a country priest,’ I said to one of the monks who was hurrying after him. He was dressed like the others in a handsome purple robe trimmed with red and yellow, but his face was that of a Westerner, pale and short-sighted, with small spectacles. I had been watching him the whole time as he stood motionless, with a joyful smile, apparently absorbing the Dalai Lama’s words as if they were the truest and most beautiful he had ever heard.
Still smiling serenely, the monk replied, ‘Greatness may also be manifested in simplicity. This is the greatness of the Dalai Lama.’
His English was perfect, but I realized from his accent that he was not Anglo-Saxon.
‘No, no, no. I’m Italian.’
‘Italian? So am I!’
This was no chance meeting – I had been looking for this very man! He was Stefano Brunori, aged fifty, born in Florence, an ex-journalist who for the past twenty years had been a Tibetan monk with the name of Gelong Karma Chang Choub. Too many coincidences to be mere chance! He normally lived in a monastery in Katmandu, but his teachers (this word definitely caught my fancy; to have teachers must be wonderful – I haven’t had one for a long time) had allowed him to come to Thailand. He needed treatment for gastritis, caused by the ultra-strict vegetarian monastic diet. Next door to our home was an excellent hospital where he could have all the tests he needed. Thus it was that Karma Chang Choub came to stay in Turtle House.
We spent three days together, talking from morning to night. In our lives there were so many correspondences and parallels that each of us, without saying so (for it was only too obvious), could see in the other what he might have been. In that delicate play of mirrors it was easy to become friends, and perhaps to get to know each other a little.
We had both left Florence and travelled about the world, and in 1971 we both arrived in Asia. I came with Angela, two suitcases and two babies, without a job but determined to become a journalist. He too had brought a foreign wife with him, but no children, and as regards work he was already in a crisis. He was more ‘on the road’, as they used to say of those who have no clearer aim than to travel from Europe to Asia, taking pot luck when it came to transport. Usually such people would eventually disappear into some Indian ashram, or would finish up on the beaches of Goa, or in Bali, or with hepatitis in a Salvation Army hostel. In Chang Choub’s case the road had led to Nepal. In Katmandu, he said, something had happened inside him. He parted from his wife, entered a Tibetan monastery as