To a Mountain in Tibet(48)
The valley is edging up more steeply now, the wind intensifying. The black-white scarps of Kailas glitter cruelly close. Mountains in many cultures have been coterminous with death. In Indian myth, Yama, the first man to die, climbed a mountain over ‘the high passes’, showing the way. High above me, released by some melted snow shelf, an ice-bound stream crackles into life and runs glittering down the cliff. I wonder what it means to die here. Some Buddhists say that merit is annulled if the kora is not complete, as if the anticlockwise descent were a slipping back in time. Yet perhaps the Hindu party, touched by the lake waters, feel purified. The track ahead of me is empty of anyone to ask. But as the last pilgrim drops from sight under the gleam of Kailas, the beliefs of many peoples–from ancient Egypt to aboriginal Australia–seem starkly natural. The mountain path is the road of the dead. The Assyrian word for ‘to die’ was ‘to clutch the mountain’. Many Altaic peoples imagine their souls departing up a mystic range. And in Japan, the traditional funeral cortége still departs with the cry: ‘Yamaguki! We go to the mountain!’
As the track bends north-east, the ethereal sandstone disappears. The slopes turn black with granite, and the mountain’s lower ridges break into unstable spikes and revetments. Their ribs are slashed in chiaroscuro, and their last outcrops pour towards the valley in the fluid, anthropomorphic shapes that pilgrims love. The spine and haunches of a massive stone beast, gazing at Kailas, are hailed as the Nandi bull, holy to Shiva; another rock has become the votive cake of Padmasambhava.
To the west, beneath the last black and orange cliffs of the Amitabha basin, the second chaksal gang prostration platform spreads under wind-torn flags, where the Buddha nailed Kailas to earth with a footprint that still indents the stone. Soon afterwards the trail is trickling through the meadows of Damding Donkhang, and nomad tents are pitched along the stream. Gradually the way starts bending east. A frozen tributary departs up the Wild Yak Valley, leaving the Lha contracted almost to pure ice. Now the mountain’s western face is revolving away from us, and we glimpse another face more awesome and absolute, softened for a while by the intervening crag of Vajrapari. Within an hour Iswor and I–he tired beneath his double load, uncomplaining–are clambering up to Drira Phuk Gompa, the Monastery of the Cave of the Yak Horns. Small and rough-stoned as the others, it is locked against the desolate valleyside among huge boulders, facing the mountain.
Halfway up Iswor turns with a quaint thumbs-up sign and cries out: ‘Are you happy?’
I answer, not knowing: ‘Yes! Are you?’ But I am somehow uneasy.
‘If you are happy, I am happy!’
A boy-monk hurries us in, and the harshening wind drives us from the courtyard and the flag-streaming terraces. We cannot stay here. The pilgrims’ rooms are full, although we see nobody, and Ram has pitched our tent still higher up against the snows, where we will acclimatise near 17,000 feet and try to sleep.
In the temple the familiar skylight, fringed with tankas, is darkening towards evening. The altar is crowded with miniature stupas in barley or buckwheat, some painted, left by pilgrims who have gone. The tables blaze with artificial flowers, and tiers of scalloped niches hedge the walls in faded yellow and gold. Here, banked in their toy-like casements, the divinities sit in near-darkness. I glimpse their Olympian smiles and hands hovering in blessing, the fall of necklaces. Their folded legs and torsos glimmer gold. Each niche is fringed with pilgrims’ money.
Drira Phuk was once the richest of the little monasteries round Kailas. Kawaguchi found that it housed several senior lamas, and in 1935 the scholar Giuseppe Tucci came upon a woodblock printing press here, from which the monks copied out a rare pilgrim’s guide for him. Now I find its monks curled among cushions, warmed by a yak-dung oven. Iswor tries to talk with them in Tamang, and I in Mandarin, but they speak neither. Two of them doze while another–an eerily beautiful youth with long locks and girl’s hands–brings us tea with salt and yak butter, then falls asleep.
Their monastery, in its strange way, commemorates the kora itself. In the thirteenth century the sage Gotsampa was the first to circumambulate the mountain, lured along this valley by a dri, a female yak. He followed her into the cave above us, and found the imprint of her horn on the rock where she had vanished. She was, he realised, a dakini in disguise, a fairy sky-dancer named Senge Dongpa. As he settled in the cave to meditate, she returned to minister to him, and thereafter generations of Kagyupa hermits settled here. So he became the founder of the kora.
Now the only monk awake, an eager acolyte with hedgehog hair, takes us deeper into the rock face by a passage bright with painted bodhisattvas. They gaze from blue-washed casements and float in fresco across the walls. The cave is a slanted overhang of living rock, where the saint’s seat has smoothed to an altar. Under the monk’s guiding hand, I feel in its ceiling the long, tapering groove where the dri’s horn parted the cliff. A gilded statuette of Gotsampa still meditates here, barely visible in the glow of a lone lamp. I crouch before it. The monk points to a figure encased nearby. ‘Senge Dongpa!’
I stare at her in amazement. The dakini is not the fairy seductress I had imagined, but a demon goddess with a pig’s face and lewd fangs, waving a sword. She has transformed into the Lion-faced Celestial Angel of this upper valley, as fluid as her rocks. As I turn away, an old pilgrim stoops beside us with a gift of butter to replenish the lamp, and asks–Iswor says–that he be remembered in the monk’s prayers in this place of power.