To a Mountain in Tibet(40)
I walk away. I feel a wrenching revulsion, and a shamed excitement at the forbidden. I had heard that sky masters were artists of their kind, heirs to a strict profession. To leave one human piece uneaten will invite demons into the body: they will reanimate it as a rolang, a living corpse, and steal its spirit.
But everything on the Durtro betrays crude carelessness. Perhaps its sky master has grown bitter. As with butchers and blacksmiths, the stench of uncleanness clings to these rogyapas. Called ‘black bones’, they are shunned in their community. If one should eat in your home, his plate is thrown away. Their daughters rarely marry. Sometimes, too, their rules are transgressed. Tantric yogis even now, seeking stuff by which to brood on death, find human thigh bones for their trumpets, and skulls are offered them as ritual cups.
I cross the plateau in numb recoil. Only a belief in reincarnation might alleviate this bleak dismay. Without it, the once-incarnate dead become uniquely precious, and break the heart.
At sky burials the grief of relatives is said to disrupt the passage of the soul, and sometimes none attend. Instead a monk is sent in advance to the cemetery, to ask its spirits to comfort the corpse as its body is dismembered. But generally the mourners come: it is important, they may think, to confront evanescence, and witness liberation. At some funerals, so onlookers claim, the mourners display no sorrow. They have learnt the lesson of impermanence, and look with equanimity at the passing of the appearances they know.
But others say they lie on the ground, weeping.
Ram has pitched camp by the Lha river, where the humped tents of German and Austrian trekkers–arrived overland from Lhasa–seem suddenly a multitude beside us. Everybody is hunting for yaks or jhaboos or ponies to carry their baggage, and perhaps themselves, around the mountain. But all these beasts are too few. And the kora confronts us with another 3,500-foot ascent, much of it steep. Iswor and I decide to jettison everything superfluous tomorrow and carry a single tent, with iron rations.
Late that night I wake to the soft, insistent ring of a mobile phone. I grope outside into the dark, listening for its source. But the nearest tent is out of earshot, and now there is no more sound. I wait, suddenly desolate. I feel sick at some imagined loneliness. Someone was trying to reach me, and I did not answer. Perhaps it is the hallucinatory shortage of oxygen, the starved brain, that summons this dream, and its incommensurate sadness.
I try to dispel it by walking. The Saga Dawa moon is full and shining on the river, and the sky dense with stars. In this thin air their constellations multiply and blur together like mist. The orange ones are probably long dead, their light arriving in posthumous and detached rays out of nowhere, while others are being born invisibly in the dark.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The pilgrims circling the flagpole in the valley might be mimicking the greater kora of Kailas. They must ritually keep sacred objects on their right, so they orbit clockwise from early morning, in an aura of triumph. Viewed from the hillock where I stand, this seems an act not only of faith but of possession, as tigers mark out their territory at night, and I have the notion that Tibetans, by repeated holy circuits–of mountains, monasteries, temples–are unconsciously reclaiming their sacred land.
Whether in the ritual of pilgrimage, the cycles of reincarnation or the revolution of the Buddhist Wheel, the circle is here the shape of the sacred. In folklore, gods, demons and even reptiles perform the kora. By this dignity of walking (and in Tibetan speech a human may be an ‘erect goer’ or ‘the precious going one’), pilgrims acquire future merit and earthly happiness, and sometimes whole families pour round Kailas with their herds and dogs–all sentient creatures will accrue merit–after travelling here for hundreds of miles.
As the morning wears on, the crowds thicken. A thousand pilgrims there may be, wheeling round the mast like planets round a sun. They go fast, buoyantly, as if on pious holiday. In this biting air the sheepskin coats still dangle from their shoulders in ground-trailing sleeves; the ear flaps fly free from women’s bonnets, and the men’s shaggy or cowhand hats are tilted at any angle. Sometimes, in ragged age, the people prod their way forward with sticks, their prayer wheels spinning. Among them the tribal nomads march in a multi-coloured flood. All that the women have seems on display, and a playful courtship is in the air. Their belts are embossed silver and seamed with cowrie shells, and sometimes dangle amulets or bells. They are bold and laughing. Necklaces of amber and coral cluster at their throats, their brows are crossed by turquoise-studded headbands and their waists gorgeously sashed. There are groups of local Dropka herdspeople, and hardy Khampas from the east, whose hair is twined with crimson cloth. And here and there gleam fantastical silk jackets–pink, purple and gold, embroidered with dragons or flowers.
Ringed by Chinese soldiers, the flagpole stays monstrously aslant, dripping with prayer flags, waiting. The celebratory pennants fly everywhere, in colours too synthetic for the elements they symbolise, their yellow brighter than any earth, their green too vivid for water. Examining them, I recognise only Padmasambhava, stamped in woodblock, and the sacred wind horse, saddled with holy fire. On the outmost perimeter other prayers hang in faded waterfalls, printed on white cloth twice the height of a man. Bundled into diaphanous swags, they fall massed and unreadable, like folded books. But every year they are assembled here, their draped forms fidgeting like ghosts in the wind, to bestow the protection of their sutras, the magic of words.