To a Mountain in Tibet(31)
In fact no boat may sail here, and no one may fish its waters. There was a time when even hunting in this holy country was unknown. Visitors within living memory encountered bands of wild asses grazing–I glimpsed only one, shy and far away–and marmots and hares would watch innocently close at hand. In the past half-century, this has changed. But even now, as we reach lake level, a skein of geese flies in on an eerie rush of wings, and water birds are strutting and nesting a stone’s throw away from where we pitch camp, and speckle the shore for miles.
From here, if you stand among the birds, the whole lake stretches into view. At its southern end the shelving ridges of Gurla Mandhata ebb still snowlit even along the eastern shore, while at the other end, beyond waves of brown foothills, Kailas mushrooms into the blue. These two white summits haunt the lake. Between them its indigo void appears coldly primeval. Tibetans call it Tso Mapham, ‘the Unrivalled’, or Rinpoche, ‘the Precious’. Its hushed stillness seems to freeze it in a jewel-like concentrate of water. In both Buddhist and Hindu scripture the universe is born from such primal matter. A cosmic wind beats the water into worlds, and the god Vishnu, who dreams in the ocean near-eternally, creates diversity out of oneness by a sheer feat of will. Geology itself heightens the lake’s strangeness. For Manasarovar is a stranded fragment of the Tethys Sea, almost drained by the upthrust of the Himalaya.
To Hindus, especially, the lake is mystically wedded to the mountain, whose phallic dome is answered in the vagina of its dark waters. Already in the second century the epic Ramayana, describing the Tibetan plateau, sites Kailas beside a great lake, beyond which spreads unending night. Manasarovar, they say, was created by the mind of God. It is the flower of first consciousness. In a time before scripture, a band of seers came here to worship Shiva, the god of destruction and change, who meditates on Kailas. To empower their ablutions, Brahma, the primal lord of creation, engendered from his thought these astral waters. The lake became the nursery of the gods. Sometimes Shiva floats here as a golden swan. At its centre, unseen by common eyes, the king of the serpents and his people feast on the Tree of Life, whose fruit turns golden and drops to the waters, infusing them with immortality. By the sixth century, in the classic Puranas, Manasarovar has become a full-blown paradise. From its roots in the serpent world below, the Tree over-spreads the sky, and the lake is alive with bathing celestials and seraphic music.
It was in these pure waters that the Buddha’s mother bathed before receiving him into her womb; and here the serpent king taught enlightenment to his klu water spirits, as Hindu and Buddhist traditions seamlessly fused. When the Buddha and his 500 flying disciples surfed in on their way to Kailas, the serpent disposed them on golden thrones over the lake, where Hindu swans were already singing.
These supernatural goings-on have left their trace along the shore. In the east it is streaked with curiously heavy pebbles, polished like gems. Behind us the pits abandoned in the slopes are the leftovers of gold prospectors, whose wounding of this sacred earth was punished by a plague of smallpox. It is said that a gold nugget shaped like a dog was dug up here a century ago, then returned to the earth in fear or piety. Holy lore has turned to magic all the lake’s scanty life. Local people say that its herbs are sovereign against every disease, and when wave-battered fish are washed up dead on shore, the incense burned from them repels evil spirits. The lake’s waters, drunk by the dying, usher the soul to paradise, and its sands inserted into a corpse’s mouth prevent rebirth as an animal.
I walk like a pilgrim clockwise along the shore. The sun burns with a cleansing brilliance. The sands are grey and soft underfoot. At 15,000 feet the air feels light. My heart is beating harder, but my feet go numbly over the sand. The distances, in this clarified air, are greater than they seem. I make for a nearby headland, and two hours later I am still walking towards it. Objects look closer, but smaller, than they are. And solitary sounds–a faint cheeping and piping–only accentuate the silence. All along the waterline, between the lake’s blank blue and the yellow land, coots and terns make a fringe of shifting life, tame in their borrowed sanctity. They never fly as I pass. Soon I am walking among whole colonies of water birds, as if invisible. Black-headed gulls mince in flocks along the shoreline; sandpipers pace the shallows and redshanks needle the soft earth alongside. Just offshore, pairs of Brahminy ducks are washing their coppery plumage and calling to one another in a soft, domestic two-note, then converge chuckling. I am tempted to wade in a little, where the crested grebes sit moored on their twig rafts. At ten yards their dagger beaks and black-plumed heads, splashed with Titian red, seem an arm’s length away. Sometimes they dive suddenly, or call sadly at nothing.
As I round the headland a light wind rises, and miniature waves are breaking on the rocks. Just ahead, the promontory is heaped with white boulders that glisten unnaturally. In this dazzling air I feel oddly elated, unreal. Twenty miles away Gurla Mandhata silvers the water. At my feet slabs of stone have been prised upright and etched with prayers. What monks or pilgrims did this is impossible to know. The rock is chipped black around the words, which stand out in weathered ochre relief: Om mani padme hum, repeated like deep breathing. The slabs are canted mutely at the lake, or perhaps at Gurla Mandhata, home to the local rain goddess, and named from a legendary king who found salvation there.
High on the bluff above me ruined walls appear, and broken towers of loose-knit stones. I clamber up a slope of pure dust. There is nothing but wrecked rooms and the scent of artemisia. These, I realise, are the remains of Serkyi Cherkip, the Golden Bird monastery, where the Buddha and his disciples alighted to worship Kailas. It was gutted forty years ago in the Cultural Revolution. Until then eight small monasteries, roughly equidistant, had circled the lake like a mandala, each one symbolising a spoke of the Buddhist Wheel of Life. So pilgrims completing the lake’s encirclement turned the wheel towards salvation. Six of these devastated monasteries have been restored, but they were never populous. At Cherkip, a century ago, the community had dwindled to a single monk. Morning and evening he rang its great bronze bell over the empty water, heard by no one.