To a Mountain in Tibet(45)

At first I can make out nothing. A single butter lamp is burning beneath a drift of white, and a slit window frames Kailas, but sheds no light. The room looks poor as an outhouse, its clay floors cracked. The monk is nervous, girlish. He waits near the door. I discern an altar of plain wood where the white silks hang, and some money thrown beneath. I step up to it. And out of the clouding scarves a red demon’s face leers, straggled in red hair. It is glaring at the floor in eerie fixation, its teeth bared and eyes popping and inflamed. Of its body, if it has one, I can see nothing. But it wears a green crown, like a child’s paper hat, and dangles a chunky amulet. The altar is flanked by two four-foot elephant tusks, and other faces are grinning from the silks beside it. Buddhists say that these ancient Bon wreckers have been converted to guardians of the faith, but this one seems to exist in angry exile, like a troubling unconscious, and all the gifts bestowed on him to no avail. It was this misanthrope, presumably, who chucked down a boulder on the monastery a century ago.

A group of Khampa pilgrims has crowded in after me, not knowing, I think, what will be here, but fervent to worship. Their women remain outside. The old men buy more scarves to heap beneath Kangri Latsen, beseeching in their gratitude, stooped before the young monk, praying. I watch from the dark in fascinated estrangement, until they file away. Perhaps these raucous local gods–lords of the wind and the avalanche–are easier to comprehend than the otherworldly Buddhas, and more prudent to propitiate on this hardest of all pilgrimages.



The Lha Chu, the River of the Spirits, guides us for five miles more along a corridor of paling sandstone. For 3,000 feet on either side its walls unfurl in towering curtains of pink and copper red. Some softness in the stone pulls it into fissured terraces that cut across the vertical cracks of the cliffs, until the whole rock face splinters to Cyclopean building blocks that travel unbroken for hundreds of yards. Then, high up, torn by wind, the strata thin and grow detached. They ascend to a filigree of turrets and palisades, pierced by the illusion of high-arched doors, until the skyline fills with wrecked palaces and temples. Where the rock turns shell pink, especially, these silhouettes seem to glow in another ether. In between, frozen waterfalls drop out of gullies, or tip over the cliff summits in flashes of ice. When these at last reach the valley at our feet, they melt into tributaries that barely flow, choking the Lha river with splinters.

The mountaintop palaces, of course, are the residencies of Buddha deities, and every oddity of crag or boulder becomes a sign of their habitation, or is the spontaneous self-shaping of some sacred prodigy. In the valley side facing Choku the monks descry sixteen saints clustered in rock, while on the summit floats the silk tent of Kangri Latsen. Beyond these, as we walk, a mystic stream carries down rainbow light from the mountain, and a rock cupola to the east is the fortress of the Hindu demon Ravana, converted to Buddhism, complete with his yak and his dog. The boulder that projects nearby is the crystal reliquary of the saint Nyo Lhanangpa, enclosing his vision of the Buddha, and beyond this the monkey god Hanuman kneels to offer incense to Kailas. Behind us to the east the tail of the wonderful horse of Gesar of Ling, Tibet’s epic king, spills from the heights in an icy cascade, and his seven brothers inhabit seven rock pinnacles along our way. To the west, on three towering 20,000-foot peaks, dwell the three great bodhisattvas of longevity, and a granite boulder beside our track is a serpent-quelling Buddha made manifest. Everywhere, for those with sight, the stone throbs with life. And on Kailas itself gleam the glacial portals to the heart of Demchog’s citadel.

In this complex topography Buddhist, Hindu and unregenerate Bon deities and spirits throng the path in overlapping regiments. There are literally thousands of them. Often I can locate a site only by some solitary pilgrim, prostrated where the hand or footprint of a Buddha has burnt like sulphur into the rock. Some of the gods and bodhisattvas fly confusingly between abodes. Others reside in several eyries at once. But always, in some sense, they are corporeal with their petrified dwellings, to which the pilgrim turns to pray. The great lama Gotsampa, searching for hearthstones on which to brew his tea, found none that he could use: for all the stones around him were the self-manifest images of Buddhas, or inscribed with their speech.

Wherever a cave scoops out a cliff and a hermit is remembered, feats of past piety soak into the rock, and the saints continue there in mystic body long after their death. The kora of every pious pilgrim adds its mite to this bank of invisible virtue, and the years-long meditation of a revered saint–Milarepa, Padmasambhava, even the ousted Bonchung–saturates the mountain with its mana. Yet neither devoted ascetics nor conquering Buddha have quite eradicated a suspicion of darker gods. Most of these ancient troublemakers have been converted to meditation deities and protectors like Kangri Latsen, but sometimes their conversion looks shaky, and they backslide. Ranked in tiers up the slopes of Kailas, the lha sky gods fight the surrounding lhamain (who are destined for hell), and their passions condemn them at last to bitter cycles of rebirth. The common demons that plague Tibetan lives–the sadak ‘lords of the earth’, the black snakes of the klu lurking beneath the waters, the terrible armoured tsen on their flying red horses–wither to Buddhist servants in the shadow of Kailas, but the mountain’s capricious moods–its sudden storms and rock falls–stir countervailing fears and nervous rites of propitiation.

The pilgrims who pass us are few now. They go fast, intent and smiling. Many cover the hard, thirty-two-mile path in thirty-six hours; some will complete it in a single day. And hardship is of the essence. The kora ahead follows an intense trajectory of purification, mounting past sites for the ritual cleansing of sin to the fearsome pass, sacred to Tara, and its climax of redemption. Even these deep-lunged pilgrims may falter in exhaustion on the way. Meanwhile the pulse of the stone footprint under their anointing fingers, of their body prone against the ground, of the gaze of the mountain itself, generate a deep, sensory exchange. You gather empowered earth and pluck healing herbs. You sip divine water. Sin is cleaned like sweat from the body. Your prayers, too, are spoken aloud into the listening air–I hear, but cannot distinguish them–prayers inherited from family maybe, or the mantra murmured like breathing as you go. And at some time you utter the plea that your pilgrimage may aid the enlightenment of all sentient beings.