To a Mountain in Tibet(35)
At times a belief that all experience–however mundane or immoral–could be channelled towards enlightenment licensed grotesque extremes. Matt-haired adepts haunted cremation grounds, pouring over themselves the dust of the dead, or sublimated taboos by orgiastic sex, downing alcohol and slaughtering animals. The world, after all, was illusory. Nothing was of itself impure. They could seem like licentious criminals. The Moghul emperor Akbar, most tolerant of rulers, had his tantric yogis torn to bits by elephants.
But the classic practice–however disrupted by Chinese persecution–involves a lone and rigorous self-transformation. Guided by his guru, the novice selects a tutelary Buddha or divinity–a yidam–and by an intense practice of identification achieves an imagined fusion with him. It is this divinity, often, who is portrayed with his consort in the sexual union that the abbot of Yalbang had extolled: compassion joined with wisdom. Over months and years of rapt visualisation, the adept starts to assimilate to the yidam, enthroned, perhaps, in his mandala palace. As his mind awakens, he experiences the mandala as real. Sometimes the god himself may be conjured to inhabit it. In time the yogi can summon or dissolve the picture at will. And slowly, at will, he becomes the god. Mentally he takes on his appearance, his language (in oft-repeated mantras) and even his mind. He experiences his own body as a microcosm of the secret body of the universe. The world becomes a mandala. Seated upright, in union with Meru-Kailas, his breathing regulates and stills. At last he feels his body thinning into illusion, he merges with the Buddha, and it is time to depart.
‘The world disappears. This is our peace.’
In his temple courtyard in Kathmandu, the genial monk Tashi, who had studied tantra for three years now, refused to call it a philosophy, still less a faith. ‘We have no God.’
The gods were only guides to the enlightenment that would erase them. His arms unfolded impotently from his chest, trying to explain. ‘I think it is a science. Anyone can do it. I think you can do it.’
I tried to imagine this, but the wrong words swam into my mind: rejected life, self-hypnosis, the obliteration of loved difference. Premature death. But tantrism was a way to be lived, Tashi said, not a doctrine to be learnt. You could not know it until you experienced it. Though by then, perhaps, it would be too late to return.
He said: ‘In this meditation you find above all great strength, and eventual peace, the peace we all seek. Once you start out, yes, you know it will be foolish to give up. You will lose too much…nothing would be left.’
Soon he would be going into retreat for three years, and he longed for this. ‘I could travel to my village in Bhutan and find a hut, but my family would give me no peace.’ He laughed. ‘I’d ask them to visit me just once a month, and they wouldn’t understand…’ So he did not know where he would go–that depended on his teacher–and in meditation it was this teacher he envisaged more than his yidam, imagining the man a Buddha. ‘That is how it is with us. Even if your teacher is a poor one, you revere him.’
From the temple beside us the throb of prayer and the thud of drums reverberated like a strong heart. Compared to the shaped tunes of Christian chant, this deep, rhythmic muttering was not prayer at all, but an unearthly emanation. Then came the groan of the ten-foot horns, as if a great beast was stirring underground.
Tashi said suddenly: ‘If I could come with you to Kailas, I would want to stay there. In that sacred place. Always. In solitude.’
I wondered then if hermits survived on Kailas, but Tashi did not know. ‘But you will go there,’ he said, ‘and it will be good. It will clarify your mind, give you power. You will dedicate your pilgrimage to those who have died…and they will accrue merit.’
‘They will?’ My voice sounded harsh, wary of false consolation. ‘Can you help the dead?’ Some long-surrendered faith in me recoiled. In my childhood, Anglicanism had offered no Mass for the dead, no intercession. The dead were beyond reach or comfort.
But for Tashi, the implacability of karma had been alleviated by kindlier traditions. ‘Yes, dedicate good deeds to them. If you go on such a journey with nothing in your mind, it will be empty.’
Often he seemed very simple, very practical. He tolerated contradiction better than I did, I thought. Or perhaps, for him, nothing contradicted. Sometimes he scratched his head in amusement at something–his tonsure glossed it like a tight helmet–and his fingernails made a noise like tearing paper. After a while two cows wandered into the courtyard from a nearby building site, and he went away to coax them back.
From the hermit’s cave above Manasarovar a skein of geese flies silently at eye level eastwards. I climb down to the shore again, where Kailas rises cloudless to the north. Floating above the steel horizon of the lake, the mountain has guided generations of renunciates. Buddhists say its guardian is the furious Demchog, whose ice palace is its summit. He is portrayed as a raging demon, multi-armed and skull-crowned, brandishing trident and drum, his consort Phagmo twined fast about him. But this rampant sentinel terrifies only the ignorant. He is not an indigenous mountain god at all, but a tantric variant of Shiva, and his mandala, complete with sixty-two attendant goddesses, is Kailas itself. So the god fades into his own mountain, and the mountain owns him.
The shape of Kailas–a near-perfect cone thrusting from the mist–may have attracted veneration in a time of primitive fertility worship, long before the Aryan invasions of 1500 BC. Later Hindu scriptures likened the peak to a tumescent penis or an oozing breast. Yet the early Aryans feared its future god, Shiva, as the outcast lord of renegades and thieves. The first epics–the Ramayana, the Mahabharata–place him only tentatively on Kailas, and celebrate Mount Meru as a separate, mystic country. The Himalaya then were divine territory, feared by mortal men, and few but ascetics dared penetrate them from the plains. But to follow the rivers to their source was to seek out holiness, and the rivers led to Kailas. Some time early in the second millennium, Shiva was enthroned here in a surge of Hindu piety. Mount Meru broke into the human world, converging with Kailas, and multiple paradises radiated over the slopes. Tiers of gods and spirits ascended the mountain in an ever more powerful elite. Its scarps flowered with jewels, herds of sacred elephants barged through its sandalwoods, and its air rang with celestials’ song. On its lower planes the caves gleamed with the piety of hermits, and in fragrant forests the souls of the dead awaited rebirth. The mountain enfolded all extremes. From caverns beneath it, grim titans emerged to do battle with the gods, and the abyss of hell yawned below.