To a Mountain in Tibet(30)
In a land maimed since 1950 by Chinese occupation, by mass killings and displacement, the Cultural Revolution, with its wholesale destruction of all things old, struck at Tibet’s heart. Amid the executions and ‘struggle’ sessions, all public vestiges of Buddhism were erased, the Buddha denounced as a reactionary, sacred images tossed into latrines, and scriptures converted into shoes for disgraced monks. By 1976, out of more than 6,000 monasteries and temples, thirteen remained.
How much material wealth must Beijing pour into the country before it can dream of seducing this profound Buddhist identity? Where Tibetans sense spirit, the Chinese see superstition. When the Chinese demolished Shepeling monastery, they say, with its treasured scriptures and sixty-foot silken banners, they swept away the remnants of feudal sorcery, together with the skull from which the chief lama drank, and the enshrined testicle of an idolised warrior.
CHAPTER TEN
A steep road takes our Land Cruisers north. Behind us the Great Himalaya cover the skyline, while ahead opens an orange and sulphur-coloured wilderness where the Karnali withers away. The 25,000-foot massif of Gurla Mandhata, detached from the Himalaya in its own bright climate, comes shouldering down from the east, and my Tibetan driver, whose dashboard swings with the protective photos of lamas, starts softly to sing.
Near the village of Toyo to our west the most formidable nineteenth-century invader of Tibet came to grief. The Indian general Zorawar Singh, marching in the service of a lightly federated Sikh empire, had already conquered Ladakh and Baltistan, establishing one of the borders of modern India, and in spring 1841 he advanced out of Kashmir with some 500 men, seizing forts as he went. Near Taklakot he routed an 8,000-strong Tibetan army, but fatally detached himself with a small contingent to escort his wife back to the safety of Ladakh. On his return, a Sino-Tibetan force cut him off near Toyo, and his detachment was annihilated.
Such were the legends surrounding him that only a golden bullet was said to have brought him down. His corpse was hacked into morsels to be hung up in local households, and even the hair of his body, which covered it ‘like eagles’ feathers’, was plucked out for luck. Every four years, at the great monastery of Shepeling, his enshrined testicle featured in a rare tantric rite, until the artillery of the Cultural Revolution buried it. At Toyo a walled tomb once enclosed the general’s filleted bones, but when Indian pilgrims visited in 1999 they found only rubble. Now the Tibetans have reassembled its stones into a rough chorten, looped with flags, where they still murmur mantras to the invader.
As we climb higher, the sky grows light and thin. The streams peeling off Gurla Mandhata spread small, spinach-green pastures before the wilderness returns. We pass a few road builders’ camps, and a castle turning to dust. In less than an hour we have ascended 3,000 feet. Here and there a monastery stands in the wastes, and nomad flocks are grazing on nothing under the far mountains. Then at 16,000 feet, where the skyline is decked with cairns and flags, we crest the Thalladong pass and veer to a stupefied halt. We are gazing on a country of planetary strangeness. Beneath us, in a crescent of depthless silence, a huge lake curves empty out of sight. It is utterly still. In the plateau’s barren smoothness it makes a hard purity, like some elemental carving, and its colour is almost shocking: a violent peacock blue. There is no bird or wind-touched shrub to start a sound. And in the cleansed stillness high above, floating on foothills so faded that it seems isolated in the sky, shines the cone of Mount Kailas.
In this heart-stopping moment pilgrims burst into cries and prayer. Even our seasoned trekkers spill from their Land Cruisers to gaze. There seem no colours left in the world but this bare earth-brown, the snow’s white, and the sheen of mirrored sky. Everything else has been distilled away. The south face of Kailas is fluted with the illusion of a long, vertical stairway, as if for spirits to climb by. It shines fifty miles away in unearthly solitude. Void of any life, the whole region might have survived from some sacred prehistory, shorn of human complication. We have entered holy land.
Yet the lake is only precariously sacred. It is called Rakshas Tal, the lake of demons, and is inhabited by carnivor-ous Hindu spirits. Only one monastery, demolished in the Cultural Revolution, has ever touched its shores. Pilgrims shun it. Its crescent is imagined darker and more brooding than the holy lake of Manasarovar nearby, whose circle reflects the sun. It is said to be tormented by winds and ice floes, and to lie above drowned mountains. Its waters were once a dark poison. But a golden fish, swimming by chance out of Manasarovar, carved a channel into Rakshas by which the sunlit lake flowed into the black one and redeemed it. So, to the initiate, the moon-waters of Rakshas Tal become the dark complement–and psychic fulfilment–of Manasarovar.
We come down gently from the pass, and for a sterile moment the waters drop from sight. But minutes later another needle of blue–darker than the first–appears to our east, and we are descending to Manasarovar. As we pass a Hindu guest house, I feel a twinge of alarm that even in these solitudes this holiest of the world’s lakes–sacred to one fifth of humankind–might have been polluted or built upon. Then it opens before us, untouched. Its waters yawn with the same fathomless intensity as Rakshas Tal, but the peacock blue has deepened to a well of pure cobalt, edged by snow mountains that overlook it from one horizon to another. At over 15,000 feet it is the highest freshwater lake of its size on earth. Two hundred square miles of water shine in its chain of snows, so that the few pilgrims who circumambulate it must walk for fifty-four miles. No life disturbs its waters as we descend. Only here and there breezes plough the surface with tracks, as if invisible ships had passed a minute before.