In India we see seas of monks; pilgrims en route by truck, foot, or body (hurling themselves to the ground, getting up, genuflecting, ad infinitum); the sick rubbing their backs against a column supposedly blessed with healing powers; and a monk defending his dissertation on the nature of reality?a lively debate full of forceful palm smacking that stretches into the evening.

Thumbnail portraits stand out: One monk, from a region of Mongolia so remote that it requires two translators to his dialect, has belly flopped his way to Bodh Gaya, a three-and-a-half-year undertaking that created odd bone spurs and a forehead wound that won't heal. In Austria, a wizened Tibetan jailed by the Chinese for over three decades, able to see the Dalai Lama for the first time, has a minor crisis: Wearing eyeglasses is considered disrespectful, but the former prisoner is blind without them. Patient and fascinated, but never succumbing to abstraction, Wheel of Time can be seen as the middle installment of a trilogy against nature.