To a Mountain in Tibet(41)
On a hillock above, the police scan the valley through binoculars, and officers are coordinating patrols through a walkie-talkie. Their telescopic video camera whirrs on a tripod, waiting to record troublemakers. The soldiers remain at attention in their cordon round the pole and other squads–swinging truncheons and riot shields–swagger anticlockwise against the pilgrims or stand in units of five or six beyond the hanging prayers. But the Tibetans look straight through them, as if they had no meaning. All morning a helmeted Chinese fire officer stands alone and rigid, fulfilling some regulation, with a canister on either side of him and nothing flammable in sight.
The northern clouds have thinned away, and the tip of Kailas rises beyond the charnel ground. A few pilgrims are facing it now, lifting their joined hands to their foreheads. They call the mountain not the Sanskrit Kailas but Kang Rinpoche, ‘the Precious One of Snow’. They may imagine on its crest the palace of Demchog, but even this Buddhist blessing cannot quite dispel a sense of ancient and impersonal sanctity, as if the mountain’s power were inherently its own. This is the stuff of magic. In the eyes of the faithful its mana is intensified wondrously through all those who have meditated here, so that the kora is rife with their strength. A single mountain circuit, it is said, if walked in piety, will dispel the defilement of a lifetime, and bring requital for the murder of even a lama or a parent, while 108 such koras lift the pilgrim into Buddhahood.
These mathematics weigh the mountain’s magic against the pilgrims’ spirit. In the past the rich might pay a proxy to undertake the circuit, the virtue dividing between them; and even now, if a pilgrim rides a yak or pony, half the merit goes to the beast. Both yak and human are subject to earthly contamination, drib, which like a stain or shadow accumulates alongside outright sins. Pilgrimage cleanses these. The way of tantric meditation, which dismantles the illusions of difference, is only for the few, and those around me, slowed now to gaze at the raising of the pole, will rack up merit by an earthier journey tomorrow.
A century ago Sven Hedin, the first Westerner to complete the kora, wrote that its pilgrims’ motives were simple. They hoped in a future life to be allowed to sit near Demchog; but they had other, more material concerns. Even now the remote workings of karma fade before the day-to-day. The pilgrim prays for disease to leave his cattle, for a higher price for his butter, for luck in sex or gambling. She wants a radio, and a child. Such matters belong to the Buddhas and tutelary spirits of a place. In the lonely hermitages, the gompas, around Kailas, they will offer the spirits incense to smell, a little rice to eat, a bowl of pure water. And somewhere in these wilds they may whisper to the fierce mountain gods to bring back the Dalai Lama to Lhasa, and drive the Chinese out.
A slight, saffron-clad figure stands before the flagpole. Tiny and quaint under a tasselled crimson hat, he is the master of ceremonies, piping orders through a megaphone. Two hefty gangs, thirty strong each, start heaving on long ropes attached high up the mast, while a pair of lorries, their front bumpers bound to it by cables, go slowly into reverse. A shout of expectation goes up, and paper prayers are hurled into the wind. The pole begins to lurch upwards. The rods that have supported it aslant drop away, and its strands of tethered prayer flags are dragged upwards in harlequin arcs. Then the pole judders to a stop, hanging at a forty-five-degree diagonal, like a gun barrel pointing at Kailas. The spectators are shouting in a tense half-chant, their hands clasped together. The master of ceremonies runs from side to side, guiding the rope gangs. If the pole does not slot bolt upright in its socket of stones, ill luck will befall Tibet for the coming year. For two decades until 1981 the ceremony was banned, while the country suffered. And now the guy ropes are taut and equal, the saffron figure shouts, and the pole glides upwards until all support is gone. The carnival streamers unfurl like petals around it, and the great tree stands miraculously upright, held only by these frail garlands of colour. The sky-blue silk at its summit, by design or chance, slips down to reveal the golden orb that crowns it, and the crowd bursts into triumphant cries of Lha-gyel-lo-so-so! Lha-so-so! Lha-so-so! Victory to the gods! They shower fistfuls of tsampa into the air, over and over, exploding it in pale clouds towards the mountain. They delve into bags brimming with prayer leaves, which soon become a snowstorm. A ceremonial oven, built of clay brick and stoked with yak dung and juniper, becomes a repository for more thrown prayers and incense sticks, until the air fills with a dense white blossom of benediction–scent, blown barley, paper–that falls round the boots of the Chinese soldiers, still impassively at attention, and floats on like mist towards Kailas.
At this moment something strange happens. High above, on the rim of the charnel ground, a white-robed figure raises a wooden cross. He descends towards us like a mystic Christ returning from Calvary, a tiny Buddhist monk fussing behind him, and vanishes into the crowds. But soon this enigma is lost among the pilgrims, who are revolving again like a great coloured wheel around the flag-fluttering tree, infectiously happy. Some reach its foot to touch their foreheads to its stem; others have thrown themselves on the stony earth, their arms stretched towards the mountain, palms joined. Even the police are photographing one another.
The monks, who have been praying in a seated line for hours, advance in a consecrating procession. Led by the abbot of Gyangdrak monastery from a valley under Kailas, they move in shambling pomp, puffing horns and conch shells, clashing cymbals. Small and benign in his thin-rimmed spectacles, the abbot holds up sticks of smouldering incense, while behind him the saffron banners fall in tiers of folded silk, like softly collapsed pagodas. Behind these again the ten-foot horns, too heavy to be carried by one monk, move stertorously forward, their bell-flares attached by cords to the man in front. Other monks, shouldering big drums painted furiously with dragons, follow in a jostle of wizardish red hats, while a venerable elder brings up the rear, cradling a silver tray of utensils and a bottle of Pepsi-Cola.