The Night Sky

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. Dr Tseyang Yudron and Dr Fergus Lennox are invented, and so is the instrument they test. The observatory at Hanle in Ladakh is real, and what is said about it, about the night sky and about the prayer comes from the sources listed below.

The mountain of the telescopes

The Indian Astronomical Observatory stands on a bare ridge above the Hanle valley in Ladakh, about 4,500 metres up, not far from India's border with Tibet. From Leh it is a drive of around ten hours. The air is thin and very dry, and on most nights of the year the sky is clear.

In 2022 the land around it became India's first dark-sky reserve. Windows have heavy curtains, outdoor lamps are dim and yellow, and drivers keep their headlights low after dark. On the ridge stand several telescopes, among them a two-metre optical telescope and a great dish of mirrors, twenty-one metres across, that watches for the faint traces gamma rays leave in the upper air.

Tseyang Yudron was thirty-four, an astronomer, and on the mountain for her third autumn of night shifts. She was born in Tibet and has lived in India since she was four.

A visitor who needed to sit down

Fergus Lennox arrived in the first week of October, in the dark of the moon, when faint things are easiest to see. He was sixty-one, an instrument scientist from Edinburgh, and he had come for two weeks to test a new spectrograph on the two-metre telescope. A spectrograph spreads starlight out into its colours, so that astronomers can read what a star or a galaxy is made of and how it is moving.

He climbed the steps to the dome, said, “Good grief,” and sat down on the top one. At this height each breath holds only a little more than half the air it would by the sea. Tseyang brought him tea from a flask and told him the first day was always the worst.

Below them the valley lay gold and brown: the river curling across the plain, a few hamlets, and on its own hill the old monastery of Hanle, built in the seventeenth century under a Ladakhi king. On ordinary nights the big telescope is mostly driven from a campus near Bengaluru, more than two thousand kilometres away, over a satellite link. A new instrument needs hands on the mountain, though, and for a fortnight the hands were theirs.

Two minutes

At dusk they opened the dome. Tseyang checked the weather mast and pulled on her hat. “Give me two minutes,” she said. “I always start the night the same way.” She went out alone to the rocks behind the building.

The first stars were coming out; Vega, high in the west, was usually one of the first. She stood facing them and said the Seven-Line Prayer once, quietly, in Tibetan, as she had since she was a girl. Then she came back in, rubbed her hands, and asked for the first calibration.

Fergus waited until midnight to ask, which she thought was polite of him.

It was a prayer to Guru Rinpoche, she said, the Lotus-Born, the teacher Tibetans remember for bringing the Buddha's teaching to their country in the eighth century. The prayer itself was first revealed in the thirteenth century by a master called Guru Chökyi Wangchuk, and it is the one most widely chanted. Its lines say where he came from, how he was born in a lotus and what he attained; they give his name, picture the company around him, wish to follow him, and ask him to come and bless.

Fergus had grown up in Fife, singing psalms in a Church of Scotland pew every Sunday until he was nineteen. “Then I started measuring things for a living,” he said, “and I stopped believing. I kept the tunes.” He was not arguing. He wanted to know. “Do you think he hears it?”

Tseyang considered that the way she considered a strange line in a spectrum. “I can't answer that in your units,” she said. “I can tell you what it does. I'm about to spend twelve hours looking at things far bigger than me. I like to start by remembering I am not the middle of anything.”

Sky-goers

At two in the morning they went outside while the instrument took a long exposure. The Milky Way ran from horizon to horizon, so bright it seemed to have texture. High in the west hung a faint oval smudge: the Andromeda Galaxy, a whole galaxy of stars, one of the most distant things the unaided eye can see. Its light, Fergus said, set out about two and a half million years ago, before there were any people like us to see it.

Tseyang told him about the fifth line. It pictures Guru Rinpoche surrounded by a great gathering of dakinis. The Tibetan word for a dakini, khandro, is often explained as “sky-goer”: a female figure of awakened energy who moves freely through space. When she was small, she said, she had imagined them like this, crowded right across the night.

“Not that stars are dakinis,” she added. “I'm an astronomer. I know what stars are.”

“Hydrogen and time,” said Fergus.

“Hydrogen and time. But I still say that line looking up.”

Then she told him one more thing. In a treasure text revealed by the nineteenth-century master Jamgön Kongtrul, Guru Rinpoche is remembered as saying that countless wisdom dakinis once joined as if with one voice to call him with the melody of these seven lines. The English rendering on Rigpa Wiki says “billions” of them.

Fergus did the arithmetic aloud, because he could not help it. The Milky Way holds somewhere between a hundred and four hundred billion stars. “So the numbers are in the right range,” he said, and they both laughed, and neither of them thought it proved anything at all.

The windy night

On the sixth night the wind came over the pass too hard and they had to keep the dome shut. They sat in the control room with the curtains drawn and a pot of tea between them.

Fergus said the thing he loved about his work was that it kept telling him how small he was, and somehow that was always good news. Tseyang said the prayer did something like that for her, from another side: it reminded her how much she had been given, by how many people, before she ever reached this ridge. She did not ask him to believe anything. He did not ask her to stop.

First light

On the ninth night the spectrograph worked properly for the first time. They pointed the telescope at a faint galaxy whose light had been travelling for a few billion years, and watched its colours arrive, spread out in a thin band, with the dark lines in it that would tell them what it was made of.

Fergus said nothing for a long time. Then he hummed under his breath: the old metrical psalm about the heavens telling the glory of God, which he had sung in Fife as a boy. “I don't believe it the way my granny did,” he said. “But the tune still fits up here.”

Before dawn

A little after four one morning she took him out to see something most people never notice. Above the eastern mountains stood a faint, tilted cone of light. It was the zodiacal light: sunlight scattered by fine dust between the planets, seen best in autumn just before morning twilight, from places as dark as this one.

Fergus looked at it and thought about dust. Tseyang looked at it and thought about dust too, and about other things. They stood together a while and did not need to agree.

The last evening

On his last evening, as she pulled on her hat, Fergus asked if he could come out with her. “I won't say anything,” he said. “I'd just like to stand there.”

“Of course.”

So they stood on the rocks behind the dome in the blue cold, his hands in his pockets, hers together at her chest. She said the prayer once. He did not say it, and she did not expect him to. While she spoke, the stars came out over the ridge: one, then a handful, then too many to count, the way guests arrive at a gathering.

“Thank you,” he said afterwards, and that was all.

Morning

He left at sunrise in a white jeep that drew a line of gold dust down the valley towards Leh. Tseyang watched from the ridge until it was too small to see, and then went to bed.

That evening she opened the dome alone, checked the weather mast, pulled on her hat and went out to the rocks. She did not know whether Fergus would think of the prayer again, and it was not hers to know. She said it once, and the stars gathered as they always do, and she went in to work.