To a Mountain in Tibet(50)
Yesterday I wondered why the pilgrims seemed so few, but now I realise. Many start long before dawn, and complete the kora in less than two days. Sometimes they camp among the rocks. And already by early morning other pilgrims are coming up the snow valley behind me. They climb in scattered groups of two or three, old people marching with sticks and prayer wheels, nomads driving laden yaks. They go in a motley of novelty and tradition, some in long coats that sag open at the throat and bulk above sashed waists, others in peaked caps and quilted jackets. They look unquenchably happy. Sometimes they greet me as they pass, as if their faith was mine. They tramp over these stones in cheap trainers and slipper-thin shoes. Makeshift bundles hang across their shoulders on fraying rope. You marvel at their speed, their delight: they, who have suffered the dislocation of everything they value. The old, especially. You think of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese war on faith, and you wonder what they have suffered, what inflicted. But their smiles, when they break, seem those of children. Among the women a slash of vivid apron may show, or a glint of smothered jewellery. Some carry babies on their backs–inert under bobble hats–or shepherd children tenderly beside them.
What they are seeing, I cannot tell. Some murmur their Om mani padme hum like an urgent pulse, and the prayer beads tremble through their fingers. Most go undeviating, as if the kora contains its own meaning, beyond articulation. Buddhist lore claims that if the eyes are purified, the land transforms. In a small gap between stones–so runs a sacred guidebook–the high lama may perceive a great city, a lesser yogi a fine hut, and the ordinary eye a patch of rock and scrub. A perfect adept might gaze up at Kailas and discern the palace of Demchog with sixteen attendant goddess mountains, but he transfigures this view inwardly to a mandala peopled by bodhisattvas, the goddesses multiply to sixty-two, and he is guided to other knowledge as if layers of illusion have peeled away.
But little of this touches the pilgrims overtaking me. Their world is close at hand, more sensory. The earth under their feet may yield medicinal herbs. The self-shaped stones are obviously gods, or at least sites of divine indwelling. Kailas may be a king, and its foothills his ministers. And a horde of lesser spirits besiege the pilgrim’s way. Sky-dancers and mountain godlings are only just out of sight.
Knowledge of these half-seen inhabitants–their whereabouts and power–was codified in pilgrim guidebooks as early as the thirteenth century. A few are still in use. Their narratives have trickled down orally from educated pilgrims to illiterate ones, who seal them with reported miracles. These are the Baedekers of the pious. They lay a tracing paper over the physical landscape, transforming it with stories, ordering it into sanctity. So Kailas becomes symmetrical. It deploys four prostration sites, and its humble gompas are seen as shining temples at its cardinal points. Their statues and treasures are reverently inventoried. Every peak and hummock now assumes a Buddhist title. Meditation caves overflow with the visions of named ascetics, even to within living memory. Any abnormality of cliff or boulder–a chance stain, a weird hollow–is identified with the passage of a saint, or the deed of a local hero. And this terrestrial path to merit may be buttressed by mundane directions for reaching one site from another, including calculated times of travel and the matter-of-fact assessment of virtue that will accrue.
The fullest pilgrim guide to Kailas was composed by a Kagyu monk over a century ago. He listened to oral traditions and copied earlier texts. No pilgrim can visit half the sites he names. His early chapters describe the creation of the world from assembled winds and rain, then move on to the inchoate battles of spirits and demons, and the conversion of Kailas’s gods to Buddhism. The author mentions another authority who claims that Demchog does not reside on Kailas. This he piously refutes. Then follows a step-by-step guide packed with marvels in the practical language of long-established truth. In a single, short side-alley ahead of us, the footprint of a tantric master mingles with those of five sky-dancer families, and a self-created image of Demchog’s consort is followed by one of a wrathful protector. Then comes the petrified nipple of a demoness and a cave sacred to Avalokitesvara, which will cure leprosy, and at last the footprints in stone of Kagyupa lamas, to which the author somehow adds his own. Finally he warns: ‘As for my assertions that “This is a deity, and this is its palace,” it is inappropriate to hold heretical views which consider these to be exaggerated merely for the reason that they are invisible to ordinary perception.’
As we ascend, the Drolma-la river clatters the other way, broken from its ice shell; the valleysides heap up with fractured granite and the unseen spirits are saluted by multiplying cairns and rock-carved mantras. Diverging to our south, an ill-defined track called the Secret Path of the Dakinis, forbidden to common pilgrims, follows a stream-let between mountains. Its way is higher and shorter than ours, rejoining it five miles farther; but few dare travel it. The sky-dancers are both benign fairies and mountain protectors. Their knowledge is ancient, probably pre-Buddhist. They grant the power to fly or pass through rock, and teach the language of birds. But they may suddenly take hideous forms, like the porcine muse that had shocked me at Drira Phuk, and they may go on to wreak death.
Beyond their path, where Kailas hangs clouded and other mountains start to barge in, our way levels out along the river bank, and we are suddenly tramping through a rubbish tip. Iced and rotted clothes lie snarled in a sprawling mound, or strewn over the surrounding rocks. But their disorder is not random. The bleached garments, even the sloughed shoes, were mostly laid here whole and almost new. There are bags, boots, socks, hats. For a hundred yards up the nearby slope the boulders are clothed with pullovers and caps. One wears a necklace, another a new silk scarf. Yet another is glued with a tuft of human hair.