To a Mountain in Tibet(39)
It was this Red Hat sect, in the twelfth century, that instigated around Kailas the practice of sky burial. Perhaps, as some say, the Tibetans’ is a death-haunted culture. Certainly their death cults haunt others. When I escape from the clamour of the monk-filled hut, I see before me, above the ground where the enormous pole will rise tomorrow, an empty plateau against the valley wall. On this Drachom Ngagye Durtro the sky burial of monks and nomads continues. The remorseless god Demchog, who dances out on Kailas the promise and terror of dissolution, imbues the Durtro with an ambivalent power. Like Shiva, whose ash-blue skin and skull garlands he shares, Demchog is lord of the charnel house, and his followers in the past have inhabited cremation grounds (they occasionally still do) to meditate on the impermanence of life and achieve the truth of emptiness. It is to such places, especially in this propitious month of Saga Dawa, that people may go to lie down and enact their own passing. So the durtros become sites of liberation. Rainbows link them to the eight holiest cremation grounds of India, whose power is mystically translated to Tibet.
A land of frozen earth, almost treeless, can barely absorb its dead. Holy law confines to burial only the plague-dead and the criminal: to seal them underground is to prevent their reincarnation and to eliminate their kind for ever. The corpses tipped into Tibet’s rivers are those solely of the destitute. Embalmment is granted to the highest lamas alone, while the less grand are cremated and their ashes encased in stupas.
For the rest, the way is sky burial. For several days after clinical death, the soul still roams the body, which is treated tenderly, washed by monks in scented water and wrapped in a white shroud. A lama reads to it the Liberation by Hearing, known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by which the soul is steered towards a higher incarnation. An astrologer appoints the time of leaving. Then the corpse’s back is broken and it is folded into a foetal bundle. Sometimes this sad packet–surprisingly small–is carried by a friend to the sky burial site, sometimes it is laid on a palanquin and preceded by a retinue of monks, the last man trailing a scarf behind him to signal to the dead the way they are going.
As the corpse approaches, the sky master blows his horn, and a fire of juniper twigs summons the vultures. The master and his rogyapa corpse-dissectors then open the body from the back. They remove the organs, amputate the limbs and cut the flesh into small pieces, which they lay nearby. The bones are pulverised with a rock. The master mixes their dust with yak butter or tsampa, roasted barley, and then rolls it into balls. Finally the skull too is smashed and becomes a morsel with its brains. One by one these are tossed on to a platform–the bones first, for they are the least appetising–and the vultures crowd in.
These birds are sacred. On the burial platform above me they are thought to be emanations of white dakinis, the peaceful sky-dancers who inhabit the place. Their fore-knowledge of a meal is uncanny. In his journals my father noted the mysterious speed with which they congregated, and speculated that they signalled to one another in flight by some system of their own. The submission of a corpse to them is the last charity of its owner, and lightens the karma of the dead. The birds themselves are never seen to pollute the earth. They defecate in the sky. Tibetans say that even in death they keep flying upwards until the sun and wind take them apart.
As I climb to the Durtro plateau, it shows no sign of life. A healing spring flows near its foot, and a white segment of Kailas shines above. My path winds up into light-blown dust. Beside me the cliff is the colour of old rose, scored by vertical cracks. The sun is dipping as the way levels into an aerial desolation. It is scattered with inchoate rocks, which may be those of rude memorials, makeshift altars, or of nothing. An icy wind is raking across it. The slabs for dissection are merely platforms, smoothed from the reddish stone and carved with mantras. People have left hair and clothing here, even teeth and fingernails, like hostages or assents to their death. I see a woman’s silk waistcoat, and a child’s toy. Some of the boulders are clumsily clothed. A folded stretcher lies abandoned. And now the wind is wrenching at all ephemera and bundling it away–faded garments, old vulture feathers, tresses of hair–to decay at last under rock shelves.
For a while I see nobody but an old couple wandering the perimeter. They move as if blind, huddled against the cold. Then I become aware of a man lying prostrate fifty yards away. As I look, he gets to his feet and hurls handfuls of tsampa into the wind, crying out. I make out a young face, circled in black locks. The wind stifles his words. He seems to be praying not to Kailas–his back is turned to it–but to the cemetery itself. Perhaps he is addressing the dakinis, but more likely he is invoking the gompos, the Dark Lords who inhabit all cemeteries. The followers of these gompos are the dregs of the spirit world: the hungry ghosts, the flesh-eaters, the rolang undead. By the rite of chodpa the yogi invites them to devour his ego, hurrying him to salvation. And suddenly the man’s tsampa has finished and he is rolling in the dust. His hair spins about him. He makes no sound. This is no pious grovel but a headlong rotation over the ground, inhaling the dead. Then he lies still.
After he leaves, I go over to the terrace where he had been. Among the boulders I see two long, wide-bladed knives, then the ashes of a fire where a charred hacksaw lies. Then I come with alarm to the centre of the platform. A wooden board is there, scarred by blades. There are other knives, quite new, and an axe. They seem to have been discarded. And beneath the board, two bones are lying together–the arm bones of a human–with dried blood and flesh still on them.