Gesar and COVID-19:

An Ancient Hero Returns

to Battle the Pandemic

Chapter One

It was a cool, early spring day in Tushita Heaven and Gesar was contemplating the oneness of the universe and the cosmic truth and compelling nature of compassion, blissfully, as was his wont, unaware of the situation below. Troubles had been brewing and yes, brewing is pretty much the right word, for some months. A virus, like the SARS and MERS coronaviruses before, had begun in bat populations. It had likely passed, first to pangolins and, henceforth, to humans, and was now spreading. The pangolin, a beautiful animal, farmed and slaughtered for its exotic meat, has for the past decades been killed at the rate of about a million a year and was ready to even the score.

It was from such a meat market that the coronavirus, now known as COVID-19, first made the leap from pangolin to human. It was a woman, Dao Shin, who despite her discomfort with such a purchase was buying this pangolin steak for a meal with her in-laws, for whom she also had less than an abiding love. Nonetheless, while at the market the virus took the species leap, a feat accomplished but a scant few thousand times in the grand history of the planet’s genetic material, giving her a slight cough and runny nose that neither she, her husband, nor her husband’s parents took the slightest notice of. From there, her mother-in-law had a rather prolonged cough and fever from which she eventually recovered uneventfully, as did her housecleaner, whose husband, fully unaware of the transmission that led to him, came down with a mighty illness that led him to a hospital, then its ICU, and from there to the morgue where his body remained until the funeral arrangements were made. By then, a hundred people had been infected and from there 10,000 and from there…well you have read about it and now Gesar was apprehending the great challenge that faced the people whom he had left behind when he moved, centuries earlier, to Tushita Heaven.

It was with a strange sense of déjà vu that Gesar looked down, just as Avalokiteshvara had done so long ago and, through the power of compassion, had felt compelled to act. And so, it turns out, Gesar did just what Avalokiteshvara had done, and met with Amitabha, the buddha of compassion, to discuss what they could do to stem the tide of this horrific pandemic. Within the depth of his samadhi, Amitabha contemplated the situation and, with his heavenly melodic voice, made his pronouncement. The parallels with the turmoil of Tibet in the tenth century were many and, though there were obvious differences, still it seemed that the earth required a great hero-warrior and who better than Gesar for the role? It was one that Gesar had fulfilled during his first incarnation in the tenth century.

To this end, Amitabha instructed Gesar to head to the demonic equatorial island of Chamara to beseech the revered Buddhist master Padmasambhava to join in the fight. He indicated that Gesar should also plan to stop off in Atlantic City to enlist Gyatsha and in Buffalo (of all places) to bring Drukmo on board. Gyatsha was his beloved half-brother and fellow warrior, and Drukmo his cherished wife and consort from centuries past. Furthermore, Amitabha said that he would send a WeChat to the great sorceress Manéné, expecting that she would offer help without a moment’s hesitation,  as would Gesar’s old friends, Michung and Ne’uchung. Together, they would once again attempt to bring lasting harmony to the world. A Sisyphean task this might be, but for that very reason, one that would strangely appeal to them all.

Gesar, while understanding the importance of moving forward with help for the people of earth, thought that since he was nearly a thousand years old and a high level bodhisattva, he might be exempted from the actual fight. Amitabha corrected him saying that, though what he thought might be true in ordinary times, these were clearly not ordinary times. Gesar’s experience with struggling against myriads of demons and demonic forces was both needed and about to be severely tested. And while Gesar understood the logic of what the great compassionate buddha Amitabha was saying, he could not help but be both a bit frightened at the prospects of the coming battles as well as disappointed that after a full millennium there wasn’t someone else to take on the burden. However, all this negativity was well tempered by his bodhisattva commitment to help all sentient beings and maybe even a bit more so by the fact that after nearly a thousand years of living in an idyllic heaven a bit of rough and tumble was a welcome change. As usual, all this contemplation and thinking made Gesar a bit tired and he decided to take a nap before embarking on his journey to Chamara.

Chapter Two

Nancy Liu was staring out of the window of her empty lab in the DeLuca Biochemistry building at the University of Wisconsin, Madison overlooking the budding trees on Babcock Drive, daydreaming a bit and feeling that one good thing was that her soon to be ex-boyfriend had gone up north to help out with his older parents and that maybe this rather protracted breakup would finally be over. She should have ended it months ago but got caught up with all the viral stuff and the important part her lab was doing in piecing together the subtlety of the genetic code of the virus, looking particularly at its ability to take over a multitude of a cell’s inner machinery and the immunologic cascade that resulted. Still, she needed to focus not just for Steve’s sake, as this relationship wasn’t doing him any good either, but for her own sanity. As she continued her daydreaming she remembered the wonderful days, nearly a millennium before, in her life as Ne’uchung. She had spent most of those days with her best friend and cousin, Drukmo. Her mind then turned to memories of the dashing Gesar and their mutual friend Michung who, it must be said, reminded her of Steve, though Michung was shorter and quite a bit brighter. She wondered what they were all doing, who was incarnate, and who was in what celestial space sitting on their elderly buns contemplating the endless play of emptiness, luminosity, and compassion that burns with such intensity in our world. One might think that a time like this would compete in wretchedness with that of Gesar’s first incarnation, and she had an inkling that someone, somewhere was gearing up, accumulating their panoply of scientific weapons to prepare to fight this virus. As resourceful as she had been in that distant past, she would have expected to have been contacted already. For a few moments she stared at her cellphone, which was as quiet as the streets below.

She knew that there was nothing further that she could do in the lab today and so she packed up her laptop, strapping on her backpack, and headed out into the late spring air. Her Trek, a good Wisconsin brand (though few of their bikes are made in the states and hers was made in Germany), waited for her, locked and ready for the five mile easy ride home to the east shore of Lake Mendota and her little cottage a block or so from the lake. At least it would be quiet. Of course, everything is quiet now, even the quiet is quiet and she would probably take the whole trip and see at most ten cars and three bikes, but at least fifty crows. At least the crows were doing well. Not like the West Nile virus days: then the crows died, but most of the people were fine. Now, in retrospect, those days seem so simple, quaint really, nothing in the face of what people were living through these last months. So it was with a head full of thoughts going nowhere that she hopped on her bike and made her way home. While riding generally made her relax in her skin and feel like living, this ride home was more burden than joy as what she became one with was the unceasing depression that was filling the land.

At the very same moment that she was dismounting and locking her bike alongside the Prius in her garage, weary with the thought of the next day’s work, 1,100 miles to the east, Michung, now Dr. Michael Stone, sat in his home office contemplating his own isolated situation. Just having celebrated his fortieth birthday for the roughly twentieth time, alone and a mere few feet from where he sat now, he had much to think about. Acting dean of students at the Geisel School of Medicine in Lebanon, New Hampshire, he had risen rapidly in the academic bureaucracy and now was close to a deanship or presidency of a major medical school. Could take a few more years, but he was still young. Those who had known him the longest would comment on how he seemed not to age, after which he would age a bit and move on. He started out in infectious disease and, though he was five years away from doing any clinical work and three years from any research, the bug (no pun intended) had returned and he itched to be doing something, anything but pushing pieces of paper, hell there weren’t even pieces of paper to push anymore. He could feel himself driving deeper into the funk within which he lately spent his days. His job had devolved into talking online with frightened people, mainly senior medical students who were required to skip both their last few months of schooling as well as their graduations and head right into their internships. A fearful time, even when one’s lack of knowledge or ability wasn’t magnified by the worst pandemic in the era of modern medicine. They would be going off to the front lines as ill-equipped as any WWII grunt after their brief and intense training. He had run out of things to say, prompting his decision to begin, once again, the practice of clinical medicine. The world surely did not currently need another medical academic, but a well-trained internist with infectious disease expertise might be of some value. This perhaps would cheer him up. He closed his computer and headed to the kitchen to make himself some dinner while he poured a beer. Neither of those two things did much to boost his mood.