To a Mountain in Tibet(17)
Then our trail drops to the river. Steel cables carry us over a thin plank bridge, and we mount the far side at last to the scattered houses of Muchu. High on its hill a tiny old man in spectacles is trying to rotate the bald prayer drum in the temple porch, while a frail-looking monk struggles up the slope to unlock its doors. I do not know what to expect. Compared to the monastery complex near Yalbang, the temple is small and solitary. What could have survived in this wilderness, overrun for years by atheist partisans?
The doors open on dereliction. In the pallor falling from a narrow skylight, we are walking not into ransacked disorder but a scene of helpless decay. The temple must have fallen desolate piecemeal, over years of neglect. Framed by rough pillars and low, makeshift tables, its altar is a rotting shelf where a line of butter lamps burnt out long ago. In the wall behind, the niches gape empty or glower with blackened figurines that I cannot decipher. A cascade of soiled ceremonial scarves dangles from the foremost statues, whose stucco faces of pink and gold grin out in ruin. In other niches the holy scriptures are piled in confusion, and Padmasambhava sits surrounded by his wives, all drunkenly aslant. Everywhere the paint is peeling or gone, and at the centre, in a crimson alcove aswirl with faded dragons, Chenresig, the Tibetan god of mercy, towers over a photograph of the scandalous tulku reincarnation whose story I had heard at Yalbang, and who died in this village.
The monk has padded after us, with the old man whirling his own prayer wheel. The statue of Chenresig, he murmurs, was discovered miraculously in a nearby river; the others the villagers made with their own hands. I can discern no difference. Chenresig’s golden head bulges with blank eyes. His raised hand dribbles strings of amulets and old coins. Other statues are crammed together in pious anarchy, waving tridents or cradling bowls. What power they might once have owned has blurred to a shared corrosion, as if they were starting to revert to the chalk from which they came.
I ask the monk how old this temple is, but he does not know. There are eighteen monks in the village, he says, and they take turns tending the temple. ‘When the Maoists came, we formed a committee of villagers, and they left us alone.’
‘The police ran away.’ The old man fixes me with cloudless eyes. ‘But we banded together’–he motions at the altar–‘and saved everything.’
I am not seeing the shrine as they are, I know. For them this derelict barn is a place of redemption, cleansed by its crossfire of gazing Buddhas. Only Iswor mutters: ‘How poor…how poor…’
On the walls, the damp stucco is bellying out and the murals falling in wholesale chunks. The Buddhas of the Past, Present and Future levitate across the dark in green haloes and thickets of painted roses, but are peeling away. Even Yama, the lord of death, is dimming in the plaster to the transience he himself ordains, together with the demon counterparts of kindlier gods.
These so-called wrathful deities infiltrate the Tibetan pantheon with terror. The old man’s prayer wheel spins faster when he passes one. For some reason here they look more threatening in decay than when complete. They haunt every temple like a bitter shadow world. Some are mundane spirits with specialist powers, demanding tribute; others have been coopted as guardians of the Buddhist law. But most prominent are the alter egos of benign bodhisattvas, who don awesome forms to fight ignorance and evil. It is as if these saints had exploded out of tranquil repression into insensate fury. They throw away their lotuses and begging bowls and snatch up cleavers and flaying knives. Their eyes swell from peaceful slivers to jutting orbs, and their once-folded legs break free into stomping columns that squash Hindu gods underfoot. Sometimes they put on living serpents and tiger skins, and their brows sprout tiaras of skulls. Their jewellery is human bones. One and all, their mouths gape open on flame-like tongues and rows of feral teeth that end in wicked little tusks. Some are still attached to their consorts, who have turned vicious and unsexed.
The interpretation of these monsters is conflicted. Classically they are said to echo abstract forces as surely as their serene counterparts, and liberate those who realise their truth. Even Yama–who rampages bull-faced and pitch black in a halo of fire and demons–is only an emanation of the merciful bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. But other scholars believe these inverted gods are psychic reactions to a harsh landscape and brutal cold; while yet others claim that they are the shamanic leftovers of an older Tibet, still vengeful and unassimilated.
The number and power of such divinities is echoed in the demon-ridden life of everyday Tibet. But the origins of the most formidable are not found there at all, but in the warm plains and tantric texts of India. The Hindu god Shiva himself, who meditates eternally on the summit of Mount Kailas, finds his savage mirror image in his own consort, Kali.
In the dark valley of Dakshinkali, south of Kathmandu, the Hindu goddess has her sanctuary where two rivers meet. Every Saturday, pilgrims in their hundreds circle down the wooded gorge to feed her. Women mostly, brilliant in their best saris, carry split coconuts, marigolds, and cockerels with trussed legs. Often they lead unwary goats, and even buffaloes. The sounds of celebration rise from the valley: chattering cries and laughter, broken chanting, the clash of bells. Holy men inscribe the pilgrims’ foreheads with tikas of rice and vermilion; cooking fires flicker on the terraces. As I descend, the pilgrims slow to a clamorous queue, and I glimpse on the valley floor an open temple dripping with maroon hangings and overarched by four gilded serpents.