To a Mountain in Tibet(51)

We are walking across the Vajra Yogini burial ground, which Indians, remembering a holy cremation site back home, call Shiva Tsal. The plateau above was once a sky burial place. The cairns that cover it appease the restless dakini whose charnel ground this is, and the corpses of those who die unknown on pilgrimage are sometimes dumped here, their merit assured. Iswor, whose faith is routine, circles the cloth heap sombrely, and climbs on ahead. I wait, catching my breath, sheltering from the risen wind, which is dragging faded garments across the stones.

This cemetery, for all its squalid aspect, is for many the heart of their kora. What is buried here is not physical corpses, but the flotsam of past lives. The shedding of clothes or hair is an offering to Yama, the god of death, that he may ease the wanderings of the dead through limbo towards their next incarnation. Pilgrims may even leave a tooth or shed some drops of blood as a surety that they be remembered when they die. I watch them pass in desultory groups. A man pauses to raise a little pile of stones, and places something beneath. A family of shepherds circumambulate the clothes, emitting faint cries, to the dakinis perhaps, or to one another. Their hair straggles under wide-brimmed hats, or flies in shaggy haloes. Their dog rolls among the clothes. A party of Japanese Buddhists photographs the place, mystified.

Later a young man walks up towards the plateau and places a garment there. He speaks cautious English, but cannot quite explain. ‘You put something precious to you. You put something close to you.’ He splays his hand. ‘Some people cut off nails from their fingers. I’ve just put my favourite shorts up there.’

I ask gently: ‘Why?’

He pauses. The question is somehow wrong. This is simply what you do. At last he points at the sky. ‘Because you will go upwards!’

I see him climbing fast along the path, where Indians are labouring up on horseback into the wind.

The meanings of this site multiply. Some pilgrims deposit a garment of their beloved dead, even a photograph or a pinch of funerary ash, and pray for them in whatever incarnation they survive. Yet the Buddhist living cannot help the deceased, whose souls do not exist. Such hopes fly in the face of karmic law, and flower through some inchoate instinct, comforting the mourner, not the mourned. For nothing cherished or even recognisable endures. In this cold, weakened air I stare a little wretched at the heap of rags, which seems to symbolise pure loss: the loss that mourns the tang of all human difference, of a herdsman’s impromptu song, perhaps, the lilt of a laugh in Grindelwald, or the fingers that caress a favourite dog. On the slopes beside me the dressed-up rocks, plucked by the wind, look like dwarfs watching.

A few yards away a bundle of clothes rises to its feet. An old man has been lying there, with closed eyes. His sash is askew, and the sheepskin lining trickles from his sleeves. Here people practise their own death. Sometimes a whole party will lie prostrate, overseen by a lama. But now there is only this old man, who grins at me and walks on. A little way above us, beneath the grim peak of Sharmari, a russet slab of rock named ‘the Mirror of the King of Death’ reflects back to the pilgrims all their past sins. Some call this a vision of hell. Armed with its warning, and with the ritual shedding of their dress, their past life, they continue upwards. This is the heart of the kora. Here it quickens into a more intense trajectory. The pilgrim has passed into ritual death. Both Hindus and Buddhists enter this state. They have a thousand feet more to climb. Their breathless ascent to the pass of Tara will release them to new life.

So we climb through the landscape of temporary death. The valley steepens around us, and its fractured granite, sometimes milky or coral, litters the floor in darkening chunks. The river rustles alongside, and a new massif is filling the horizon in parapets of rock and gullied snow.

In its shadow the pilgrims wend like ants to their mountain salvation. They are mostly poor, and the mindfulness of death may rarely be far. The passage between one incarnation and another–the journey they are enacting now–is old in their faith. The first and last teachings of the Buddha himself dwelt on impermanence, and Tibetan funerary rites are steeped in the Book of the Dead. This is their sole text familiar to the outer world. I read it in youth, and even after returning to it, disenchanted, it has touched my journey like the light of a dead star.

For its Great Liberation by Hearing charts the most stupendous voyage of all, through the country of death and resurrection. Its words are spoken aloud into the ear of the corpse, to comfort and guide it to a higher incarnation. Ideally uttered by a pious lama, this scripture brings directions from the enlightened living to the perplexed spirit. It sounds with a disturbing, hypnotic force. The reality of what it envisions–the Buddhas and deities encountered on the journey of the dead–sounds with the magisterial certainty of a voice so insistent and clinically exact that its prescriptions attain the force of proven truth. This blend of spiritual omnipotence and scientific precision has lent it a peculiar allure for the West. Jung called the book his constant companion, and floated the fancy that these ancient lamas might have twitched the veil from the greatest mystery of all. It fascinated the counterculture of R.D. Laing and William Burroughs, and in the mid-sixties Timothy Leary proposed its rite as a psychodrama fuelled by LSD.

In Tibet itself, where it forms a practical funeral rite, the Great Liberation is favoured above all by the old sects of Nyingma and Kagyu, and by the Bon. It rests on the belief that for forty-nine days after the breath has gone, the dead are not quite dead, and that instruction given to the corpse (or beside its bed or usual seat) can still be heard and acted on. For three days the dead experience a pure white radiance, which fills them with fear and bewilderment. But in their ear, out of the mortal world, sounds the voice of the Liberation: O Child of Buddha-Nature, listen! Pure inner radiance, reality itself, is now coming before you…