To a Mountain in Tibet(36)
Shiva, meditating on the mountain’s summit, retains the shadow of his renegade past. He is the lord of havoc and regeneration, patron of mystics and wanderers. His face is smeared blue with the ash of the dead. He dances the world into being, and into ruin again. He brings both the hope and the desolation of change. Only the yogi can still this impermanence, who in trance imagines his body united with Meru-Kailas, and who activates its psychic energies until they float him into peace.
In early scripture Parvati, daughter of the mountain god Himalaya, seeks out Shiva and seduces him over thousands of years, by her ascetic devotions and immortal beauty. She becomes his shakti, his energising genius, and their marriage on the mountaintop is the union of thought and untamed nature. But Parvati is as changeable as he. Sometimes she is called Urna, pure light. At others she is Kali, the terrible goddess whose sacrifices had drenched my feet at Dakshinkali.
Whoever its presiding divinity, the concept of a world mountain pervaded Asia. A shadowy etymology even links Meru to ancient Sumer and the ziggurats of Babylon. Hindu temples were planned to emulate the mountain’s mystic layout–for they too are the dwellings of gods. The great eighth-century Kailasa temple at Ellora, carved from living basalt, is a conscious mirror of Meru, as is the third-century BC Buddhist stupa at Sanchi. In the Shaivite sanctuaries of south India, especially, the roofs beetle skywards in multi-tiered mountains, and their ritual water tanks echo Manasarovar. In Tibet itself the chortens are miniature Merus, while the white triangle of Kailas is daubed on countless cottage doorways. In south-east Asia the Cambodian Khmer raised their massive temples on the same pattern–Angkor Wat is a giant image of Meru–and the Meru-shaped palaces of the Burmese kings helped to sanctify their tyranny.
Two years after my father’s death, while distracting my mother with a tour of Java, we reached the largest Buddhist monument in the world. Barely a century before, the temple mountain of Borobudur had lain among volcanic ash and jungle, but now it lifted its worn stones free in nine immense, sculptured terraces to a crowning spire. We circled its galleries in wonder, their carvings enigmatic to us. Its lower tiers seemed to portray earthly life and the legends of the Buddha, but as we ascended, the bas-reliefs turned unknown. We were straying up the flanks of a vast cosmic symbol. In its concentric mass, tiered purposively from earth to nirvana, lava or jungle had preserved its panels almost pure. You read them right to left, circling clockwise, as if up some delicate initiation. This was the universe in stone imagined by the eighth-century Sailendra dynasty, ‘lords of the mountains’. Sometimes my mother paused, panting. I did not know then that in youth she had strained her heart. She never spoke of it. Perhaps she herself had forgotten. But now, in old age, its fibrillation was shortening her breath.
But she joked, in holiday mood, that we were ascending to enlightenment. On the top terrace we looked out on misted jungle, and her breathing stilled. Along these esplanades some seventy Buddhas sat in cages of latticed stone, gazing outwards. ‘So this is nirvana…’ She spoke as if inspecting somewhere fascinating but irrelevant. She might have asked (but did not) if nirvana held the tang of interesting troubles, or Dalmatians, or those she loved. Beneath us the jungle bloomed rich on volcanic earth. After a while she took my hand and asked to go down again.
The clarity of the air draws the figure closer than he is. I glimpse him, black and sharp-edged–a Hindu pilgrim, knee-deep in the lake–and see the glitter of water as he splashes his face. By the time I reach his headland he is gone. A sodden prayer book is lying on the sand, and in the waves floats a tiny votive sheaf tied with string, which I cannot touch.
Close by, sixty years ago, some of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes were scattered over the lake. Hindus more than Buddhists bathe in the icy water, drink it, carry it away. Its purifying powers deepen in their scriptures, until it washes away the sorrow of all mortal beings. To bathe in it is to be destined for Brahma’s paradise; to drink it redeems the sins of a hundred lives.
Close to shore the water comes oddly warm to my touch. The Hindu Puranas ask that pilgrims here pour out a libation to the shades of their forefathers. This rite of tarpan, it is said, eases their souls into eternity.
As I wade a few yards into the shallows, they turn cold. I cup the water in my hands. I feel a momentary, bracing emptiness. But the tarpan’s truth is not mine. Its dead are changed into other incarnations, or faded in eternity.
In a celebrated passage of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna addresses Arjuna the archer before battle: Thou hast mourned those who should not be mourned… It is impossible, he implies, to terminally kill or die. People shed one life for another.
Nor at any moment was I not,
Nor thou, nor these kings.
And not at all shall we ever come not to be…
So the two warriors pass into battle and hew down men with the exalted half-smile of Hindu gods. For they know they are killing nothing of importance. The erasure of the individual is the condition of salvation.
I still my feet in the cold water. I want to call out a name, but flinch from the expectation of silence. In these waters of Hindu consolation, people as I know them are extinguished. Like Borobudur, the lake is immense, primordially alien. I hug myself against an imaginary wind. A tightness opens in my stomach. I want to touch hands that I know have gone cold. The air feels thin.
Where are you? Among the graves of an English churchyard–so many I don’t know–my breaking voice reminds me of someone else’s. It is, of course, of yours. You exist now in the timbre of my voice.