Short Story: The Man Who Tried to Stop the Sunrise

Hundreds of flickering candles danced on the altar surrounding a golden statue of the Holy One. Pabongka perched upon his cushion in deep meditation. While the other monks in the Anseris Monastery had to sweep the floors, wash the dishes and tend the gardens, it was his job to wake up before dawn each day and make sure the sun would rise.

The ritual had been handed down for thousands of years. Each morning, a monk would make offerings and prostrations to the holy beings of their ancient lineage, and ask those beings to bless them with another day of illumination and warmth.

Legend had it that the Holy One had passed the ritual down through an unbroken lineage since time without beginning. Some of the elder monks were suspicious of such tales, which were not supported by the Holy Canon.

However, the ritual continued and the sun appeared every day without fail.

The Anseris Monastery had been established nearly 1,000 years ago when the Settlers first came to Mars. The monks sought to escape ridicule and live in peace 13,000 feet above the city.

Pabongka had come to stay at the monastery when he was 12 years old. His family was killed by a meteor that fell from the sky, which turned their colony into a crater of black soot. The boy was miles away fetching water from the stream at the far edge of the Golden Valley.

Rinpoche, the abbot of Anseris, did not believe in luck and thought Pabongka to be the reincarnation of a great being, and so charged him with the sun ritual.

Geshe Lobsang had also come to the monastery as a boy. His father was exiled as a criminal and his mother wished their son to become a holy man and bring honor to their family.

Although Lobsang was a Holy Master and a senior monk, his job was to clean the altar each day and light each of the candles before Pabongka arrived to perform the sun ritual. This task angered him more than usual today.

Pabongka stretched out to prostrate to the shrine when he noticed that a few of the candles had not been lit. He stopped.

“Is something the matter, Geshe-la?” he said.

“Not at all,” Lobsang said. “We all know that this is a pointless exercise. And I am sometimes forgetful.”

Lobsang lifted one of the burning candles and waved it over the unlit ones. He struggled to light them and made it clear that he wasn’t really trying.

“Geshe-la, it’s nearly dawn,” Pabongka said. “I must perform my duties to make the sun rise.”

Lobsang continued to flail about with the candles.

“These things are so tricky,” he said. “You couldn’t spark them if a bolt of lightning struck them.”

The sun started to peek through the eastern window of the shrine. Lobsang grinned as his eyes grew wide. This confirmed his suspicion that the ancient ritual was unnecessary.

“See, there was nothing to worry about,” he said. “Now you can sweep and clean like the rest of us.”

Rinpoche walked up behind Lobsang and whacked his head with a rosary.

“You’ve much to learn,” Rinpoche said, straightening his blue robes over his shoulder. “We do not ask for the sun to rise today. That has been ensured by countless past good deeds. We pray for the sun to rise many years from now for innumerable beings on countless planets.”

Lobsang furrowed his brow as he reluctantly lit another candle.

“How can some magic words spoken by one man bring light to innumerable beings,” he asked.

Rinpoche motioned to Lobsang to follow him to the window. They looked out over the village where thousands of people exchanged goods and services. Further in the distance, laborers stooped over rice paddies and tended cattle.

A streak of black clouds crossed the sky, obscuring the sunlight. Lobsang began to have a vision.

He saw a child stab another child for a piece of bread. The bread became a beating heart that filled the canyons with blood. He saw a princess atop a stone castle as she fired a burning arrow into the the greenhouses below. He saw the structures burn like parchment as families starved and froze to death on the periphery.

A little girl, dressed in the sky-blue robes of a nun, stood out among the suffering crowd. She carefully placed a handful of seeds into the ground along the stream and watched them sprout into a field of wheat before her eyes.

Tears streaked down Lobsang’s face. He started to sob and shield his face.

“You have stopped one man from praying for something that will benefit each of these beings,” Rinpoche said. “If everyone behaves this way, there will be no future. The sun will cease to shine.”

“I see, Rinpoche,” Lobsang said, lighting the last of the candles.