To a Mountain in Tibet(42)
But by late afternoon, with the ceremonies over, the wheeling crowds have thinned away. All round the perimeter they have looped the circling flags inwards to the pole, so that walking here you clamber through a jungle of vivid creepers, snagging underfoot or slung close above you. By dusk the pilgrims have dispersed to their camping grounds, and the place is silent. Now it seems to sag in brilliant ruin, like some game abandoned by children at evening. Its remembered rite carries with it, in spite of everything, a charge of innocent optimism, of earthy piety and trust. In the twilight a few campfires start up around the valley, and a faint perfume lingers: incense lit to feed the unhappy dead, and to please the darkening mountain.
Few beliefs are older than the notion that heaven and earth were once conjoined, and that gods and men moved up and down a celestial ladder–or a rope or vine–and mingled at ease. Some primeval disaster severed this conduit for ever, but it is remembered all through Asia and beyond in the devotion to ritual poles and ladders: the tree by which the Brahmin priest climbs to make sacrifice, the stairs that carry shamans to the sky, even the tent pole of Mongoloid herdsmen, the ‘sky pillar’ that becomes the focus of their worship. Such cults rise from a vast, archaic hinterland, from the world pillars of early Egypt and Babylon and the ascension mysteries of Mithras, to the heaven-reaching trees of ancient China and Germany, even to Jacob’s angel-travelled ladder that ascended from the centre of the world.
These concepts, which spread in part from Mesopotamia, have in common that their life-giving stair or vine, by which sanctity replenishes the earth, exists at the world’s heart, the axus mundi; and in the sacred pole of Kailas, erected at the heart of the Hindu-Buddhist cosmos, they find a classic exemplar. Its raising was a timeless ceremony–intermittently performed–that marked the Buddha’s shallow victory over the Bon, the region’s primal faith. For the Bon, Kailas was itself a sky ladder, linking Elysium to earth. The idea of a heaven-connecting rope is old in Tibetan belief, whose first kings descended from the sky by cords of light attached to their heads. By such ropes too it was thought the dead might climb to paradise.
Even in Buddhist myth there is something changing and fragile in the relationship between Kailas and its faithful. For all its mass, the mountain is light. In Tibetan folklore it flew here from another, unknown country–many of Tibet’s mountains fly–and was staked in place by prayer banners and chains before devils could pull it underground. Then, to prevent the celestial gods from lifting it up and returning it to where it came from, the Buddha nailed it down with four of his footprints.
But now, they say, it is the age of Kaliyuga, of degeneration, and at any moment the mountain could fly away again.
The mystery of the white-clad figure with a cross is resolved at nightfall. I find him camped among the tents by the Lha river, his monstrous crucifix propped against a lorry. He turns out to be a Russian German, born in Kazakhstan, where Stalin deported his people during the Second World War. He stands gauntly tall, and talks as if delivering a holy ultimatum. Somehow he has blundered here across the complicated borders in his lorry, innocently confident.
I ask in amazement: ‘You’ve had no trouble?’
‘Everyone has been good to me. Everyone has welcomed me!’ His blue eyes shine cloudless from a gush of ginger hair and beard.
‘You’re Russian Orthodox?’
‘I’m an evangelist.’
His cross is covered with arcane images. A symbol of the world’s mouth gapes on the headpiece; at its base a black sheep, signed with skull and crossbones, is pointing hell-wards; while in the centre hangs the figure most puzzling to Tibetans: a crucified god.
The evangelist explains these symbols to me in a gruff litany, but I sense in him no expectation of my believing, and I wonder about his journey here, the incomprehension he has suffered. It is more than two centuries since any missionary preached in central Tibet. And now he launches into a credo so jumbled and esoteric that my remembered Russian fails. He has an idea that the people of Atlantis and the world will converge in Christ. ‘And the earth’s power lines run through the Sphinx–everybody knows this–which faces east towards Kailas, and Kailas…’
He goes on and on. His New Age clichés are bathed not only in Jesus but in an old Slavophile dream. The West is mired in materialism, but Russia is pure soul. Russia will be the saviour of the world…
‘Even now, even under Putin?’ I mumble.
‘Yes, Putin, Medvedev, they are returning Russia to herself.’
He stands beside his cross, the prophet incarnate, the owner of truth. He craves the world’s peace, a perfect ecumenism. If only people would listen. The Buddhists are all right, he says, but they have no Christ. He is bringing them the Russian Christ.
‘But they don’t understand me. They speak nothing.’ It is his presence alone, with his towering cross, that must beam to others the redemption in his mind. How is his Christian trinity of gods received? I wonder. And God’s son, walking in history? But he does not know. The generous Tibetan pantheon, I imagine, might superficially incorporate them. But they, together with the swarm of Buddhas and godlings, must vanish at last like a superstitious mist before nirvana’s absolute.
Would he go deeper into China? I ask. But somehow I do not fear for him.
‘No. Kailas is my end.’ He shakes his head: his hair makes a fiery halo. ‘I will be going home now.’