There is no one to ride for us, wails Mun as our grandfather sets the bone. I know the tears running down my brother’s cheeks have nothing to do with the pain of the break.

  My grandfather sucks in his cheeks. Of course there is, he says. Chuluun is also a horseman. And he can ride my horse. I feel a door open in my heart. I try to make myself as small as possible. Övöö cinches the bindings on Mun’s splint. My brother stops crying. I feel a small stone harden in my twin’s heart.

  The night before the race I do fifty prostrations. Mun lies on the floor coldly watching me, his broken wrist bound to two wooden paddles.

  Sometimes the universe clicks into place. Everything is as it should be. At first light, out by the animal pens I throw up my breakfast of rice porridge with milk. My grandfather pretends not to notice. He helps me climb up behind him on the unnamed stallion. A great being is fearless like a yak, he says as he pulls me up, but such a being also knows that fear can be instructive. I nod. We ride the eight kilometers to where the race begins. The whole way I can feel the animal’s flanks rippling under my thighs, the animal so broad my legs stick straight out.

  At the starting line someone pours vodka on the ground and asks the Eternal Blue Sky to watch over the few dozen of us. A whistle sounds and we’re off. After the first thirty minutes across the plain, we are winnowed to a handful of riders, nobody truly in the lead, nobody lagging. I can hear someone among us singing to his horse. Another boy at my side, someone I do not recognize, rides with a face filled with an intensity that scares me. But on the way up a small ridge, his animal begins to flag, and though the boy uses his crop on it much the way my twin would, as an extension of his will, soon the boy and his horse drop out of view.

  As time goes on, others begin to drop away, the animals tiring, the riders losing focus, until it is just me and the singing boy galloping together over the grasslands. Then it happens. I feel myself riding a wave of exhilaration, Övöö’s horse beginning to edge out the boy’s, his song trailing behind me. I imagine the whole region around Bor-Urt waiting for me at the finish line, my grandfather lifting me off the hands of the cheering crowd and placing me back on earth, me, Chuluun, the new leader of ten thousand.

  Unbidden, I hear a soft voice floating to me over the wind. The singing boy is just at your shoulder, the voice says. At the foot of the next hill, head east. Do not ride up the ridge. There is another, shorter way. I do as the voice of my distant brother suggests.

  And so it begins. For the next twelve hours I wander through the grasslands utterly lost, slowly the earth growing dark under the horse’s hooves, both me and the animal thirsting, the world an endless maze, the crescent moon little help, all the while bouts of panic and then moments beyond panic and then panic again. At one point I dismount to let the horse graze. Because he is not my horse, he does not come back to me when I beckon. He simply trots away.

  There are wolves on this part of the steppe. I sit and huddle, rub my arms for warmth. A few hours before dawn I see a light moving over the grasslands. It is my grandfather riding his nameless stallion, the reins to a second horse in his hand. He comes and scoops me up in his arms.

  For the next week, Övöö still refers to me as the leader of ten thousand. Each time he does, I feel Mun tighten. Even now in my nightmares, sometimes I still hear my twin’s voice telling me there is another shorter way, don’t ride up the ridge. Even all these years later there are days when I do not know if he is trying to be helpful or if he means to lead me astray.

  A Mixture of Compassion and Fury

  We crest the first hill. The city long behind us. I can see the entirety of the dusty plain, the earth flat as an open palm. There are no structures, no ger, no wandering herds. Then we crest a second steeper hill, and the earth reveals that we are nothing but ants wandering in search of sweetness. Mun puts the shuttle bus into a higher gear. If there are just over three million citizens of Mongolia, and almost half of them live in the capital city, then it seems as if every man, woman, and child is here to witness who is to be crowned King of Horses. Later I hear reports that there are upward of fifty thousand people dotting this hillside.

  Mun parks next to an operation selling neon-orange drinks in plastic bags. Be back in an hour, he says.

  The tourists disappear down the hill, the woman with the blue toenails latching on to an Italian couple. The air smells of horses and meat being burned. Mun lights up a cigarette and locks the shuttle door. In all the madness I cannot even tell where the finish line is. It’s over there, says Mun, pointing to a spot a kilometer away on a distant hillside. As we approach, I can already see throngs of people massing, each one jockeying for position. It is yet another twenty minutes before the first animal comes into view, but the crowd is already surging. I feel myself being jostled as if at sea.

  When it happens, neither of us is surprised, though many of the westerners do not expect it. The rider is a girl. What I know now as an adult: we do not celebrate the rider but rather the horse. The noise is deafening. The horse crosses the finish line. The animal shines with sweat as if cast in glass. Sometimes the world can change in the span of a heartbeat. A moment on the verge of becoming a disaster. I try to make myself as small as possible. A hundred hands clawing the air, each one hungry for a touch of the winning beast.

  We are on the verge of a stampede. The animal wheels about. A second horse comes crashing over the finish line and a hundred hundred hands turn and reach for it. The woman next to me falls to the ground, but I pull her up. Together the crowd surges forward, arms outstretched, pulsating, wanting just one stroke, one encounter with grace. My palm lands on something hot and damp. In the presence of so much good fortune, it is all I can do to stay on my feet.

  My brother is standing on the edge of the mayhem, his earbuds plugged in his head. He thinks he is safe, that he is out of the roiling storm, but an errant rider is coming up behind him at breakneck speed, the young rider out of control as the horse panics at the size of the crowd. Move, I internally shout, filling my brother’s mind with my warning. Mun leaps out of the way just as the horse goes barreling past.

  Then at the same time we both spot her. The woman from our group with the blue nails. A horse is up on its hind legs, pawing the air with its hooves, its rider lost among the chaos. The woman stands frozen, gripping her camera. Slowly Mun and I approach the animal. I put my hand on its trembling flank, the muscle twitching like a live wire. I imagine a wave of tranquility emanating through my fingertips. Mun stands straight in the horse’s path. He summons up Hayagrīva, his ferocious deity, this wrathful god whose tantric energy my twin learns to perfect while still living at Yatuu Gol. My brother’s nostrils flare, the veins prominent in his neck. For an instant, the air around him goes stormy though only I can see it. Together through a mixture of compassion and fury we placate the animal. It stops rearing on its hind legs, lowers its head, and nuzzles Mun’s hand.

  Later, on the drive back to Ulaanbaatar, I can still smell the sweat of the horse on my palm. You guys make a good team, says the woman with the blue toenails. I feel my face flush. My hand smells like earth and grass and the summer air mixed with the mineral smell of blood. I know there is no such thing as fortune—there is only what is—though for the moment I let myself believe otherwise.

  A Golden Deer Who Can Converse With Humans

  An hour to sundown and Gandan Tegchenling, the Great Place of Complete Joy, is gleaming. Along the eastern wall the prayer wheels creak as Mun walks by, giving each a spin. The monastery is a maze of temples and courtyards and stupa. The buildings are mostly made of stucco and painted various colors. Several are topped by ornate green-and-gold Chinese-style roofs, their peaks adorned with tiles like the scales on a dragon, the roofs sweeping downward, then rising coyly at each corner the way a woman initially averts her eyes only to glance up at you as you turn from her. A group of tourists huddles in one of the courtyards. On passing I hear the guide mention that the roofs of the monastery complex, like a traditional ger, are not held together with nails but instead dovetailed like a jigsaw puzzle. She points to one roof in particular. Perched above the main entrance is a dharmachakra flanked by two deer. This is a reference to the Buddha’s first teachings near the Indian city of Varanasi more than twenty-five hundred years ago, explains the guide. She goes on to say that in one of His many previous lives, the Buddha is a golden deer who can converse with humans.

  Because today I have yet to sit as part of my formal practice, I convince Mun to arrive at the monastery early so that I might offer prayers with my fellow monks, together all of us chanting for the liberation of all beings. The courtyard outside the temple begins to fill with a sea of red. On the eastern tower two monks blow conch shells in the direction of the four winds, calling the monastery to the last puja of the day. In the fading light the two monks stand wearing the golden-crested lama hat, the yellow plume upright like the sheared mane of a horse. One of the monks holds a left-spiraling shell, the other blowing the rarer right-spiraling conch, the one symbolizing the motion of the stars and planets through the heavens. In Buddhism the right-spiraling conch is considered to be one of the auspicious symbols and has the power to awaken the believer from the sleep of the ignorant. Like a shepherd who milks his sheep, the animals feeling instant relief just at the sight of him, the call of the conch elicits a deep spirituality in the blood. Just hearing the music of the shells puts me in a state of peace.

  When we are all in place at the entrance to the temple, the Abbot of Gandan Tegchenling Monastery stands before the doors. He intones the short-offering mantra.

  For those who strive day and night to develop virtues,

  The Universal Vehicle especially is a great tide of good,

  So prepare to conceive its spirit and incomprehensible actuality,

  Then, by dedication, fully retain them.

  With that, he pushes the doors open and we enter. In his rock ’n’ roll T-shirt, Mun stays behind in the courtyard, his fedora in his hands, earbuds sprouting from his head. He has yet to enter a temple since renouncing his vows. When living as the Redeemer Who Sounds the Conch in the Darkness, he might sit in prayer, wishing for the happiness of all sentient beings, for up to seven hours a day. Now he is too busy with the trappings of life to reflect on its very nature. For the first time since I arrive in Ulaanbaatar, I sense a small bubble of wistfulness rising in him, nostalgia for another world, another lifetime, for belonging, but then it bursts and is gone if it ever even exists.

  According to the Great Liberation Through Hearing

  Listen without distraction:

  According to the Great Liberation Through Hearing, there are six types of hell where one may be reborn following one’s time in the bardo between death and rebirth. One hell is a fiery world brimming with rivers of molten lava, the blood-red sky ablaze with sparks. Despite this hell’s capaciousness, its ability to accommodate an infinite number of beings, everywhere within its lands there is a feeling of claustrophobia, of being wedged in tight places, the body slowly turning into charcoal.

  When considering this first hell, says the Abbot of Gandan Tegchenling, one should meditate on the story of the beggar who finds the leg of a tender young lamb lying by the side of the road. When the beggar asks his teacher if it is all right for him to partake of it, his teacher advises him to mark the meat with an x and to return for it later. The beggar does as he is told, using his rusty knife to carve an x in the meat, thus marking it as belonging to him, before hurrying away to prepare a fire. Later, in the dank shelter of his cave, the shadow of the flames dancing on the cave walls, the beggar feels an uneasiness come over him, a low throb beginning to spread on his chest. Slowly he lifts his tattered shirt. On the papery skin above his heart, there is a bloody x etched in his own hand. This is the parable of the fiery hell, says the Abbot. It is a hell of self-directed anger. A hell in which we spend our energy raging against our enemies, but at the end of the day we are only raging against ourselves.

  The Abbot glances at my brother. After the prayer offering in the temple ends, the Abbot tracks us down in the courtyard and motions for us to follow him to this room. Even though he is my twin, when his days on earth run their course, I believe Mun is doomed to this hell of which the Abbot speaks. I have no doubts. You can see it in his eyes. An orange aura burning around each pupil as if the iris itself is smoldering. Some days I think this is the journey he is destined to make. It is out of his control. Endlessly circling through samsara, doomed to be born in an infinite cycle from human to beast to hungry ghost until he lives every existence possible. Other days I think he is simply a fool.

  Then the Abbot of Gandan Tegchenling turns to me. There is barely enough room for the three of us crammed here in his small study, the space obviously ancient and built for private meditations. I sit facing him, Mun behind me in the corner by the door. And what of the second wintry hell, the Abbot asks.

  Like most monasteries in Mongolia, Gandan Tegchenling is a teaching monastery. The head monk serves as the Abbot. Most of the monks at Gandan Tegchenling are novices in their early to mid-twenties who, like me, have yet to take their final vows. I can hear them outside the window, a sea of robes clapping and stamping the earth as they debate the nature of the universe. For us, debate is at the heart of a monk’s pedagogic training. Evenings filled with the sound of monks seemingly raging at one another.

  I clear my throat, prepare my answer to what is essentially unanswerable.

  Do Not Travel This Path

  The second hell is a world of snow and ice, I say, coldness beyond anything imaginable.

  Why are these two hells figured in terms of opposites, asks the Abbot. Why should even the world beyond this one present itself to us as a duality when the Buddha teaches us that duality is an illusion?

  I can feel Mun’s mind cloud over with boredom. My brother is no help. Theology is not the strong suit of the Redeemer Who Sounds the Conch in the Darkness. He slouches in the corner, his earbuds silently draped around his neck. At the very least I am grateful for this small gesture of respect.

  The Abbot looks at me expectantly. A small bug the color of blood crawls along the ridge of his jaw. Hell is a projection, he says, eventually answering his own question. It is a creation of the human mind in the moment of death, he says, and as such it is subject to human error like the belief in binary systems. For a moment the small bug comes to rest on the tip of his chin. It flares its tiny wings but doesn’t take to the air.

  Like the erroneous belief that you and your brother are separate beings, the Abbot adds, when in reality there are no selves. I feel the half-finished letter tucked next to my heart begin to grow hot. Then the Abbot reaches out and places his hands on my head. Surprisingly they are the calloused hands of a herder. His nails black with work, the tip of his left index finger missing.

  The Abbot keeps his hands on my head, slows his breathing. This second wintry hell is a hell of aggression focused inward, he says, a pride that doesn’t reach out and communicate. Young brother, he admonishes. Do not travel this path. Accept your brother’s aid.

  This startles me. I look up at the Abbot. The Redeemer Who Sounds the Conch in the Darkness has yet to offer aid, I say.

  I’m waiting to be properly asked, Mun shoots back. You know, in words.

  Then the door opens and a light beyond anything on earth enters the room. My sons, says the light in a language I know mostly from reading. Please aid me in the quest to find the One for Whom the Sky Never Darkens.

  Mun sits up a little straighter, but he doesn’t bow his head. Sure, says my twin. What have we got to lose?

  The Lotus of the Deep

  We Rely on Nothing but What We Carry Inside Us

  The ridge we are aiming for shoots up out of the plain, its profile like a camel kneeling on her two front legs. Already I can tell there is no way to drive the Machine up the butte. This means we must park at the base, and then Mun must scramble to the top if he wants to get his bearings. During our first day on the journey, from time to time my twin plugs a small box into the cigarette lighter, powering up a screen. After a while, a pale blue circle appears, the thing endlessly spinning. The second time Mun plugs in the box I hear a deep chuckle emanate from the back seat. Inwardly I laugh as well. We Mongols still reconnoiter in the old ways. We look for distinguishing characteristics in the landscape. We let the sun’s position in the heavens tell us where we are. We rely on nothing but what we carry inside us, each of us a map and the world the journey. Eventually, Mun stows the box away, never looks to it again for guidance.

  For the past few hours we find ourselves riding on virgin ground, lands where no cars venture. We are three hundred kilometers from paved roads, and only the ancestors know how many more from the deep tire tracks worn in the fibrous grass by countless vehicles over time, which in Mongolia are the equivalent of highways. There is a reason this land is empty this time of year when every herder is seeking to fatten his flocks for the interminable winter ahead. It means there is no water on this part of the steppe, the ground mostly pebbly dirt, almost lunar in its starkness. If we have to, we can sleep out here in the middle of nowhere, the temperature plunging at night to the point where summer frost is possible, but it is always dangerous traveling in uninhabited wastelands such as this. If something happens to the Machine, we could be stuck out here for the rest of the summer. In Mongolia, people die this way; more people die in the hot months than in the pangs of winter. They do not die of heat, but rather from being stranded in the grasslands. Sometimes it turns out they are only a few kilometers from help.