To a Mountain in Tibet(46)
Behind me in the valley I am startled to see three men walking towards me counterclockwise. I imagine they are Bon, whose older faithful circumambulate this way, against the Buddhist stream, and I tentatively call a greeting. But they pass by with their faces retracted into hoods, averted, as if ashamed, leaving me mystified.
Before the Buddha came, and before Demchog, this was their mountain. Millennia ago, the Bonpo say, their founder Shenrab, sired by a cuckoo, alighted here from heaven, conquered the local demons, and gave the mountain to 360 gods named gekkos, reflecting the lunar cycle of the year. The chief, Gekko, for all his lizardish name, was a terrifying predecessor of Demchog and Shiva, with nine arms and blue-black skin, snorting out blizzards and thunder. His Kailas was a rock-crystal mountain, the earthly emanation of a celestial palace, which would survive the destruction of the world. If the Bonpo’s universe was conceived as a tent, Kailas stood as its central pole, piercing the opening that illumined the sun and stars circling within, and the worlds beneath. To the Bonpo this ‘Nine-Stacked Swastika Mountain’ is inscribed with the emblem of fortune (rotating anticlockwise) and the footprints of their saints are all about it.
Buddhists contend that Bon is the leftover of a demon-ridden past. But the Bonpo claim that theirs is the primal faith, received from Persia, perhaps, or Central Asia, long before Buddhism. The historical Buddha, they concede, may be an incarnation of their own Shenrab. Their beliefs, in fact, go back to a time when the region around Kailas, the kingdom of Shang-shung, was the first, royal cradle of Tibetan culture. They were priests to the early kings and their practices were rife with sorcery, spirit control and the guidance of the dead. Yogis tower through Bon legends. They hang their clothes on sunbeams and turn into eagles. For at least two centuries this diffused faith fought with an incoming Buddhism and was slowly transformed by it, to re-emerge a thousand years ago as a religion whose tenets were often indistinguishable from the Buddha’s.
Buddhism, in turn, imbibed many Bon gods and practices, including sacred dances and prayer flags. And both faiths, it seems, were influenced by the rites and spirits of nameless cults that preceded them. Tibetan Buddhists accept the ‘white’ Bon uneasily, whose temple statues are yet more savage than theirs, and whose embrace of magic is more wholesale. (The ‘black’ Bon remain an unmentionable fringe of shamanistic outcasts.) So the interfused faiths coexist, even in Lhasa’s holy of holies. Right up to the Chinese invasion a Buddhist official would depart each year to a shrine near the Yarlung valley, cemetery of Tibet’s kings, and there burn butter lamps and scatter grain in a plea to the cuckoo, the holy bird of the Bon, to fly back to Tibet.
He was an old man now, far into his eighties. He sat among cushions in a room high in the Kathmandu monastery he had founded: a simple cell, his bed folded nearby. A monk had placed a tiny cushion on the carpet before him, where I knelt. From the hill opposite, the noises of a Hindu temple–overrun by tourists, mangy monkeys and vermilion-daubed statues–were blurred to rumours in the sultry air.
Nothing in the Rinpoche’s face, where the gentle eyes and still-dark eyebrows seemed touched in as afterthoughts, betrayed the long strain of travels fostering Bon communities–he had become a holy figure to them–or his year in a Chinese prison. In 1961 he had tried to escape Tibet with a group of lamas from his monastery, carrying sacred texts and relics.
‘Yes, it was very dangerous. Chinese soldiers found us, and many of our blessed ones were killed. I was shot myself…’ Wounded, he was left for dead. But a nearby family hid him, and he crossed the border to Mustang after twenty-two days, walking by night.
He dismissed all this as long ago. Since then he had outlived his monastery, obliterated by Red Guards, and founded it anew on this green hill in exile. Time was long here. Like the Dalai Lama (who was ten years younger) he meditated alone for hours every day. He looked grounded and content. ‘We Bon are older than Buddhism,’ he said, ‘far older. We go back to the time of shamanism, and nobody knows when that began. And long before Buddhism came to Tibet in the eighth century, these were our texts, our culture…’
I forgot, for a moment, that Kailas–once the mountain temple of his faith–had been annexed to Buddhism (there are famous legends reflecting this). Lulled by the Rinpoche’s fluent, careful English, by the monastic peace and memory of the mountain, I asked how he perceived its holiness now, and he spoke as he must have taught hundreds in exile, remembering a lost Tibet.
‘In the beginning Kailas was just rock–rocks and stones. Without spirit. Then the gods came down with their entourages and settled there. They may not exactly live there now, but they have left their energy, and the place is full of spirits. The best way to describe the gods, I think, is as colonisers. Each one settled his special region, his peaks and ranges, and there his spirits rested after him. And these became places of power.’
No hint of Western rationale, it seemed, inhibited this story. He spoke of gods as he might of urban politics or nomad settlements, with bald certainty. ‘Kailas was only ice at first,’ he went on, ‘then it became a conch shell, pure white, and one day it will be a desert, everything in transition…All the same, you know, it is a place for the others. There is a different mountain more sacred to us Bonpo. It is farther to the east, named Mount Bonri. That’s where you will find us, yes, circumambulating counterclockwise. Although there is nothing important in this. It is just our custom.’