To a Mountain in Tibet(21)

On the far side of the river a tortuous and faded trail takes its own way to Tibet westwards above the dwindling Kumuchhiya. It was by this route that Gyato Wangdu, the last Khampa freedom fighter against the Chinese, led his tiny force towards the safety of India. The Khampa warrior tribesmen of eastern Tibet had fought the Chinese occupation ever since 1956, and retreated at last to guerrilla bases over the Nepalese border, nurtured by the CIA. But as the Western rapprochement with China began, the United States withdrew its support, and in July 1974 the Dalai Lama asked the depleted warriors to lay down their arms to the Nepalese army. They did so with proud reluctance. Some of them preferred suicide by drowning or slitting their throats. Only their charismatic leader Wangdu, with a handful of followers, made as if to obey, then rode defiantly away. The Chinese and Nepalese armies hunted him down, and it was by the goat track climbing westwards from where we walked that he opted for a drastic short cut to India and safety. Some twenty miles beyond, and barely five miles from the border, he was ambushed by the Nepalese and fell in a hail of bullets: the last, hopeless spark of his people’s armed resistance.

Now at the track’s foot the village of Yari is soft with fields of barley and millet. It is a tiny, scattered place where the Bhotia squaws and their ruffianly men, sporting scant turbans, have cleared the earth for crops, piling the excavated rocks alongside, and the valley higher up alternates tilled brown fields with tracts of brilliant green, where wooden conduits bring down water.

After a mile this oasis falls behind. We are approaching 13,000 feet, and a chill wind is blowing fine dust up the valley behind us. Our way snakes across balding scrublands. The track is seared to rubble. Above us the last rivulets drop from the high snows, nudging stones down slopes already cobwebbed with shale. Once we hear goatherds whistling to their flocks far below.

As we go higher, the horizon ahead starts to mesmerise. The snowfields that gleam through the valley cleft resemble an isolated mountain (in fact they are part of a range) and bring a surge of excitement. By the time we pitch our tents under the Nara pass, a heady expectation has set in. For this 15,000-foot defile is our last barrier before Tibet. Now a cold, light rain comes down. I lie in my tent, waiting for it to pass, and imagining the view from the summit of the Nara-la tomorrow. The intimation of change that frontiers bring, a whisper even of revelation, is heightened in this rarefied air by the unearthly aura still shed from Tibet. All myth, I know, should have been wiped from the despoiled country long ago. Yet under this last, formidable pass the afterglow continues of a land breathing an air of its own, and entered through a mystic gap in the mountains and a breach in time. I open my map to see how close we are. The rain clatters like hail on the tent roof. Even on the map’s large scale the frontier is only a little finger’s breadth away.

This feel of entering a sanctuary has not only moved travellers but has haunted the Tibetans themselves. For centuries they have envisaged a holy land of their own, invisible or inaccessibly remote. The precise location of this kingdom of Shambala is uncertain, but it is said to lie encircled by impassable snow peaks somewhere north of Kailas. Yogis have thought it a three-month journey beyond the mountain, but the path is so elusive that pilgrims find themselves wandering hopelessly. Some even have a notion that Shambala floats in another dimension of time, as if through a galactic wormhole, and can be accessed only by ice doors in the Himalaya. Patterned like an eight-petalled lotus, radiating tributary kingdoms, it has been ruled for two and a half millennia by a dynasty of godly kings who reside in a jewel-built palace, as at the heart of a gorgeous mandala. No word for ‘enemy’ or ‘war’ is known here. Its founding king was taught by the Buddha himself, and as his subjects grew more selfless, so their country faded from human sight. Yet its rulers continue to watch over the human world, and after 400 years, as that world falls deeper into ruin, the last redeemer king will ride out from his sanctum to institute a golden age.

In the West, even before the fictional creation of Shangri-La, people toyed with the idea that Shambala geographically existed. The nineteenth-century Hungarian scholar de K?r?s reckoned he had pinpointed it by astronomic calculation, and in the late 1920s the Russian Nicholas Roerich undertook a long, earnest expedition in constant apprehension of it.

The origins of the myth may lie in the memory of some lost homeland, perhaps the kingdom of Shang-shung around Kailas, subsumed by war in the eighth century. But more likely it entered Tibet from India two and a half centuries later, in the mystical scripture called the Kalacakra Tantra, which details the meditational pathway to Shambala. This teaching, long precious to Tibetan Buddhism, has today accrued a poignant promise. To some, the Chinese ruin of their homeland portends the coming salvation. The Dalai Lama, who believes that a hidden Shambala actually exists, has many times given the Kalacakra initiation in public, gathering souls towards a paradise of several meanings. To those with purified eyes, Shambala exists on earth, while tantric adepts reach its holy land in meditation. But still others imagine it an empire of the future, to be established in the year 2425, when the peace-spreading armies of the last king burst from their mountain cloister.

Meanwhile other sanctuaries pervade the land. The secret entrances to these beyul, it is said, were described in buried treasure texts by Padmasambhava, and will be revealed in times of peril. A few beyul have already been discovered and settled by expectant communities in the remote Himalaya. To the mundane eye they are no more than tranquil valleys; but to the initiate they shimmer with mystic potential. After the Chinese invasion, it is said, certain lamas led their disciples into the wastelands in search of these beyul, following the abstruse directions of sacred texts. Some gave up in despair, but others, it was rumoured, entered cliffs and waterfalls, and vanished beyond human time for ever.