To a Mountain in Tibet(44)
As we go north, these chasms are still out of sight, hidden by intervening cliffs, and even the granite plinth from which the summit rises is barely visible. In this valley where we go–the valley of Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Light–the sandstone pales to fawn and amber and rushes up near-vertically in friable bluffs. As the valley narrows, the advance of the prehistoric glacier that carved out its moraine becomes grimly palpable. Tiny and high against one precipice, the first of the four hermitages that ring the mountain seems little more than a barn, built half-invisibly of the precipice stone. Prayer flags pour from its walls like celestial telegraph to the monstrous gully behind. It was from here, perhaps, that a boulder smashed the monastery five years before Hedin came.
We cross a low bridge downriver and struggle up towards Choku Gompa’s walls. The crevices around are pocked with concealed caves, where Padmasambhava hid treasure texts, or Milarepa sat. As we go up, the cliff face across the river rears behind us, indented with seeming castles where a frozen waterfall hangs. Around us the earth is furred with white plants like salinated grass, and there are butter-yellow flowers among the boulders. Far below, the Lha river rushes green, and a train of yaks trickles across the grass-tinged valley floor. A mile away, the ant-like silhouette of Ram is moving north under his double load to a camping site we don’t yet know; while to the south a black hyphen seems not to move at all, where the girl pilgrim is inching towards salvation.
Close by, the hermitage might be any age, although a television aerial and satellite dish stick above its roofs. In fact its thirteenth-century predecessor was levelled to the rocks by Red Guards, who destroyed every monastery around the mountain, and every chorten. By the time some Indian pilgrims reached Choku again in 1983, its ruins were attracting legends. It was said to have been vast, sheltering hundreds of travellers at night, and to have housed the arms of the near-mythic Zoravar Singh. In reality the gompa had been small and unkempt, like this one. Kawaguchi found it quaintly subject to the ruler of Bhutan, with only four lamas living here.
I discover its monks nested like swallows in little cells whose windows gaze on Kailas. Their lavatory encloses makeshift holes hanging fifty feet above the valley. There are three men only, who speak nothing I understand, and two rumbustious dogs wearing scarlet ruffs, for they too are holy. At the gates of the prayer hall pilgrims are scraping up its dust and stones into pouches. Inside, some 200 candles, each swimming in its cup of oil, draw down a curtain of fiery light. The fumes of yak butter that once reeked through Tibetan shrines have thinned away–replaced by imported plant oil–but the money that pilgrims pay for replenishing the lamps is piled with fruit on the altar. Beyond the pillars the dimming ranks of saints and Buddhas people the shadows with their protection: the Buddhas of Past, Present and Future, the Buddha of Long Life cradling nectar, the Buddha of Wisdom wielding his flaming sword. Here too is the Avalokitesvara of compassion, whose thousand all-seeing arms halo him like a peacock’s tail, and the mother goddess Tara, born from his tears, whose great rock crowns the pass ahead tomorrow, the zenith of the pilgrimage, at 18,600 feet.
But the statue most enshrined in pilgrims’ awe is barely discernible. Less than quarter lifesize, and so swagged in jewellery that no arm or even neck emerges, the white marble image of the Amitabha Buddha is the oldest and most precious of Kailas. Under its mandarin crown the pale face gazes, emptied of expression. Its eyes seem closed, its smile barely starting. It is said to be ‘self-manifest’, shaped by its own will from the stone, and to have flown here from its birthplace in the milky waters of an Indian lake. Encased beside it is the white conch shell blown by the saint Naropa a thousand years ago, and near the altar a huge cauldron of chased copper, floating with lights, is the pot where he brewed his tea.
These three relics are treasured as the body, mind and speech of the Buddha. In the seventeenth century the army of the pious king of neighbouring Guge carried them all away, but the statue grew so heavy that it could not be moved from the valley, the conch shell flew into the air, and the cauldron poured out blood, until the army retreated empty-handed. Soon afterwards the statue, lying among rocks, requested of an old man that he return it to Choku, and he carried it back, light as a cloud.
In the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, the old patronage of Bhutan may have saved the relics, but this is unsure. Already in the nineteenth century a Tibetan pilgrim reported the statue too damaged to assess, and the first cauldron was very likely melted down. In 1991 sixteen artefacts were stolen from the gompa for the Western art market; and the conch shell, for all its embossed silver, looks spanking new.
A Tibetan pilgrim, who speaks cautious Mandarin, questions a cheery monk for me. All the relics are old, the monk says, and came here by magic. Sometimes the conch shell is taken to bereaved homes and sounded in the ear of the dead. ‘It will light up their way! It will guide them. Sometimes the dead are brought up to the monastery for this.’ He speaks with breathy certitude. ‘The statue? It is self-made. In former times, it used to speak. It is the Buddha of learning and light. Students with difficulties have come here to learn and recite his mantra…’
But when I ask about Kangri Latsen, the monk turns cold. Latsen is the wild, autochthonous god of the heights to which Choku clings, converted to Buddhism, but older and darker, and kept separate, as if secret. But I badger a younger monk with the god’s repeated name until he leads me down from the temple terrace through a storeroom and unlocks a door into the near-dark.