To a Mountain in Tibet(33)

In this deepest recess of the cave, where the light has shrunk to a glimmer, the rock shape of a giant’s footprint is hanging from the wall. Darkened by smoke and veneration, its stone glints faintly through the soil of pious hands. It seems to be dangling free from a ceremonial ribbon. But when I touch it, I realise it is an outcrop of the cave wall itself: shaped like a huge sandal. The monk has forgotten me, and is chanting at it with bewondered eyes. Padmasambhava, it seems, left such imprints all over Tibet, as if out of a sacred earth the stone recognised him.

He descends in a history florid with legend. In the eighth century, perhaps, he came from the Swat valley in today’s Pakistan, where Buddhism already lay in ruins. In Tibet too, the older, Bon religion had regained the land, and Buddhism was fading. But popular histories are replete with Padmasambhava’s miracles. Piously his life parallels the Buddha’s. Born from a lotus, he is the adoptive son of a north Indian king, and attains enlightenment in exile, haunting the cremation grounds dear to tantric yogis. In Tibet he is tutored by the dakini sky-dancers. He traverses the mountains converting kings, war gods and devils alike. Twice he escapes immolation on pyres by turning them to water or sesame oil, appearing in the flames enthroned on a calm lake. The outsize hand-and footprints of his passing cover the land. An emanation, at last, of the Amitabha Buddha, he becomes immortal in death, and in a crescendo of attribution he leaves behind prescient treasure texts and writes the Book of the Dead.

The sect of Nyingma, the Ancient Ones, whose monastery I had visited at Yalbang, hail him as a second Buddha. It is he, they say, who retrieved the country’s lost knowledge, and they who most rigorously guard it.

But as the histories grow earlier, so Padmasambhava fades. It seems he may stand in for a whole crowd of Indian yogis who reached Tibet around the eighth century. The monastery of Chiu, where I crouch beneath his sandal print, may be less than three centuries old. And in the earliest record of all, the saint dwindles to an itinerant water-diviner, who converted nobody.

None of this, of course, troubles the Kagyu monks who inhabit Chiu, any more than dubious saints disturb the Christian faithful. Slowly the old man leads me out of the cave where Padmasambhava meditated, or did not, and I put money on its altar. It is hard to know, from his aged face and tortoise movements, or from his brethren chanting in the temple, how wise or indolent these monks are.

For foreigners this has always been so. Long before the Chinese invasion, travellers recorded monasteries dulled by apathy and rote-learning. Over a century ago the Japanese monk Kawaguchi recoiled from their immorality (the scriptures were even used as lavatory paper, he said), and Swami Pranavananda, who visited some fifty monasteries over many years, mentioned only two lamas whom he esteemed.

But as the old man gazes at me, whispering and smiling, I long to know what he is saying. Western fantasies about Tibet’s secret wisdom surface unbidden into my mind. His words rasp and fade. I stare hopelessly back at him. Is something important lurking behind those simple-seeming eyes? I question him in halting Mandarin, but he speaks none. I search for signs of use in the dusty tiers of scripture–the Kangyur and Tengyur–on the temple shelves; but they seem to be kept less for study than for veneration.



The tin door rattles shut behind me, and the monk is gone. The dusk is cold and clear. Below me I see the half-lit channel of Ganga Chu, carved by the golden fish as it made for Rakshas Tal. Its intermittent flow depends on the will of the serpent king, of course; it brings about the mystic intercourse of the lakes–or fails–and its fluctuation tells the future of Tibet. For thirty years after the Chinese invasion the channel was saline or bone dry. Now it oozes again beneath me in slow shallows out of Manasarovar, trickling to where Rakshas Tal lies palely to the west, but never arriving. Near its bed, the outlandish bubbling of hot springs has become a pilgrim bathhouse. But the channel’s waters barely tremble. Brackish and uncertain, they idle unconsummated to the foot of a low dam.

This periodic flow was the bane of explorers hunting for the headwaters of the Indian rivers. Even now the source of the Sutlej, the giant tributary of the Indus, is variously placed here or at the rivulets seeping from the slopes south-west of Kailas. To Hindus especially such waters rise by divine intent, and in the ancient Puranas the four world rivers find their birthplace on the mystic slopes of Mount Meru. The holy Ganges itself descends from the sky, flowing through the locks of Shiva, or circles Brahma’s heavenly city before splitting into four and flooding down from Meru to mankind.

By a freak of geography, which knit Kailas indissolubly to Meru, the four chief rivers of the Indian subcontinent rise within seventy miles of its summit. The Karnali, the highest source of the Ganges, has drifted to the west of us now, to find its birth beyond Rakshas Tal. Tibetans, who gave the rivers sonorous names, call it Magcha-Khambab, ‘the River that flows from the Peacock’s Mouth’, while the Sutlej is Langchan-Khambab and flows from ‘the Elephant’s Mouth’. The Indus, the lion-mouth river, rises from scattered sources on the north flank of the Kailas massif itself, and the horse-mouth Brahmaputra in an obscure glacier a few miles to the east. These two titans then diverge along almost 2,000 miles each to clamp the whole Indian sub continent in stupendous pincers. In their course they crash through the Himalaya in fearful gorges–the Brahmaputra falls through the deepest canyon on earth–then ease south into vast, slumbering estuaries. The Indus descends the length of modern Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, its waters still cloudy with the silt of Tibet and the Karakoram; the Brahmaputra spills into the Bay of Bengal after mingling with the Ganges among the mangroves and crocodiles of the world’s widest delta.