To a Mountain in Tibet(32)
It is Hindus who venerate the lake most deeply. Yet most of them gave up its parikrama–its ritual circuit–long ago. Perhaps because Manasarovar was born from the mind of Brahma, whose paradise is transient, they rather seek their final deliverance in Kailas, the abode of Shiva, whose worship leads them through incarnations to eternal peace. But they still bathe fervently in the lake’s shallows, which release them from the sins of past lives.
Beyond the ruins I come upon a hundred-foot-long mani wall, cresting the bluff above the lake. Its slatey stones are layered pell-mell on a base of rocks, some of their prayers elaborately inscribed. Even the Red Guards, it seems, despaired of destroying this interminable mass, and monks had rescued the stones years later, fractured and whole together, then gone away. Now the stones spread strangely through the silence. Their slate is blue-grey, grey-green, smoother than a blackboard. Under their broken voices the waves are falling heavier on the headland now, and the wind hardening.
As I reach the promontory of white boulders, I realise they are not rocks at all, but hillocks of gleaming ice. I touch their congested cold, astonished. The June sun blazes down, and they are hard as steel. They might have been cast up from another age. I have forgotten that as late as May the whole lake is a battlefield of colliding ice. In winter the water level drops beneath a frozen carapace that periodically collapses under its own weight. Then the tumult freezes again, until the surface has splintered into a turquoise geometry of six-foot ridges. On shore, wrote the Indian swami Pranavananda, who studied the lake in winter seventy years ago, blinding snowstorms bury flocks and herds together, and wild asses die on all fours beneath the drifts. In the lake shallows, hundreds of fish lie frozen in transparent ice, and even swans perish with their cygnets, sandwiched by fracturing floes. A few days before it melts, the lake explodes into roars and groans, mixed with sounds like human cries and musical instruments. The icy slabs and prisms clash and heave upwards, and the surface yawns with six-foot cracks. Close to shore, ice blocks as big as fifty cubic feet are hurled from the lake to land yards inshore, still towering and erect, as on this worn headland, taller than I am, and mysteriously whole.
A mile from my camp, an isolated hill rises like a termites’ nest. Its crags are disintegrating into scree, but around its crest the monastery of Chiu, ‘the Little Bird’, is plastered into clefts and caves, where its whitewashed chapels and cells look coeval with the rock. Stony paths and stairways meander about it, and strings of prayer flags, moored to cairns and boulders, billow from its summit like rigging in the wind.
A lean figure at the hill’s foot turns out to be Ram, who has wandered here alone. He is gazing at the monastery in puzzlement or unease, so that I wonder what faith he follows. But he says: ‘My people know nothing of religion. They are very poor.’ His English comes shy and halting. ‘They hardly know if they are Hindus or Buddhists. In my village it is all mixed.’
‘You have no temple?’
‘There is one lama started try to build a temple. He covered half of walls with tankas, then no more money…’
His village is remote, he says, somewhere east of Everest, and his parents are old, his mother sixty-seven, his father sixty-two. ‘My father is sick, with pains around his chest. But my mother very strong. They grow some barley and vegetables in exchange for rice. That is what we have.’ He smiles hardily. ‘And I have a little girl…’
‘And your wife?’
‘My wife is twenty-five.’
I say, half-laughing, as if to hide indelicacy: ‘There is time for more children.’
But he answers gravely: ‘No. We don’t want more. We think one is enough. In Nepal families grow big, and it becomes hard to eat.’
Fleetingly I wonder at this unexpectedness: Iswor who will not marry until forty, Ram who does not want a son. The wind is stretching the prayer flags above us, the sun dipping. I say: ‘Are you going into the monastery?’
But he only answers: ‘There is nothing I want ask for,’ and turns back.
A rough path winds among the prayer-hung crags and fissures. I climb into a courtyard and a temple hall where a novice is chanting. A century ago the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, examining the frescoes in Trugo monastery nearby, identified the muralled god of the lake, riding a pink horse, and the fish god rearing from the waves to greet him, his head gushing snakes and his body tapering to a dolphin’s tail. But everything I see is new–no fresco has escaped the Red Guards–and the novice breaks off his prayer to usher me away and point out another path. It slides close under the crags. The lake below is darkening towards dusk, but Kailas is rising clear beyond it, and light clouds sailing above.
A monk emerges on the path in front of me, and waits. He is whiskered and frail, his face battered to teak by the wind. He opens a tin-bound gate labelled ‘2’, which almost falls from its hinges. Beyond it a double door–startlingly rich–shines vermilion in the rock. Its leaves are bossed in brass and dripping with scarves. Beyond it, a now-familiar dark descends. I can barely see my way. The ceiling of the deepening cave falls close and soot-blackened. Lamps gutter in pools of isolated fire. Deep in his niche I can discern the gold glimmer of Padmasambhava, his hands clasping a thunderbolt.
This is his cave. It is believed that here, with his consort Yeshe Tsogyal beside him, Tibet’s greatest saint passed the last seven days of his life in sacred trance. Then he ‘took rainbow body’, leaving behind only his hair and fingernails–and his faithful widow, who settled down to pen his biography. Beside me the old monk is murmuring and glaring half-blindly into my eyes, but I cannot understand him. Once he gestures at a statue enshrined in the niche beside the saint and whispers: ‘Yeshe Tsogyal!’ But I make out only a shape painted dusty blue or grey, out of whose swathing pearls taper mandarin fingernails touched in blessing.