Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

wasn’t enough to shake their chakras. To get a real reaction, you pretty much had to poleax one of them with a fighting staff, and if he heard the staff whistling through the air, there was a good chance he’d catch it, take it away from you, and pound you into damp pulp with it. So, no, they weren’t surprised when Joshua delivered the fuzz harvest unscathed.)
    “How?” I asked, that being pretty much what I wanted to know.
    “I told her what I was doing,” said Joshua. “She stood perfectly still.”
    “You just told her what you were going to do?”
    “Yes.”
    “She wasn’t afraid, so she didn’t resist. All fear comes from trying to see the future, Biff. If you know what is coming, you aren’t afraid.”
    “That’s not true. I knew what was coming—namely that you were going to get stomped by the yak and that I’m not nearly as good at healing as you are—and I was afraid.”
    “Oh, then I’m wrong. Sorry. She must just not like you.”
    “That’s more like it,” I said, vindicated. Joshua sat on the floor across from me. Like me, he wasn’t permitted to eat anything, but we were allowed tea. “Hungry?”
    “Yes, you?”
    “Starving. How did you sleep last night, without your blanket, I mean?”
    “It was cold, but I used the training and I was able to sleep.”
    “I tried, but I shivered all night long. It’s not even winter yet, Josh. When the snow falls we’ll freeze to death without a blanket. I hate the cold.”
    “You have to be the cold,” said Joshua.
    “I liked you better before you got enlightened,” I said.

    Now Gaspar started to oversee our training personally. He was there every second as we leapt from post to post, and he drilled us mercilessly through the complex hand and foot movements we practiced as part of our kung fu regimen. (I had a funny feeling that I’d seen the movements before as he taught them to us, then I remembered Joy doing her complex dances in Balthasar’s fortress. Had Gaspar taught the wizard, or vice versa?) As we sat in meditation, sometimes all through the night, he stood behind us with his bamboo rod and periodically struck us on the back of the head for no reason I could discern.
    “Why’s he keep doing that? I didn’t do anything,” I complained to Joshua over tea.
    “He’s not hitting you to punish you, he’s hitting you to keep you in the moment.”
    “Well, I’m in the moment now, and at the moment I’d like to beat the crap out of him.”
    “You don’t mean that.”
    “Oh, what? I’m supposed to want to be the crap I beat out of him?”
    “Yes, Biff,” Joshua said somberly. “You must be the crap.” But he couldn’t keep a straight face and he started to snicker as he sipped his tea, finally spraying the hot liquid out his nostrils and collapsing into a fit of laughter. All of the other monks, who evidently had been listening in, started giggling as well. A couple of them rolled around on the floor holding their sides.
    It’s very difficult to stay angry when a room full of bald guys in orange robes start giggling. Buddhism.

    Gaspar made us wait two months before taking us on the special meditation pilgrimage, so it was well into winter before we made that monumental trek. Snow fell so deep on the mountainside that we literally had to tunnel our way out to the courtyard every morning for exercise. Before we were allowed to begin, Joshua and I had to shovel all of the snow out of the courtyard, which meant that some days it was well past noon before we were able to start drilling. Other days the wind whipped down out of the mountains so viciously that we couldn’t see more than a few inches past our faces, and Gaspar would devise exercises that we could practice inside.
    Joshua and I were not given our blankets back, so I, for one, spent every night shivering myself to sleep. Although the high windows were shuttered and charcoal braziers were lit in the rooms that were occupied, there was never anything approaching physical comfort during the winter. To my relief, the other monks were not unaffected by the cold, and I noticed that the accepted posture for breakfast was to wrap your entire body around your steaming cup of tea, so not so much as a mote of precious heat might escape. Someone entering the dining hall, seeing us all balled up in our orange robes, might have thought he stumbled into a steaming patch of giant pumpkins. At least the others, including Joshua, seemed to find some relief from the