To a Mountain in Tibet(56)
A wan light has broken around the tent. I have slept only fitfully. Outside, the Saga Dawa moon still hangs in the dawn, a leftover ghost above the misted valley. Beside our tent a rivulet of the Lham-chu crackles through ice-splinters; but I notice for the first time the tint of yellow shrubs familiar from Nepal trickling back between the rocks, like the return of old life.
The monastery crouches under the wind-shattered terraces that pour down from Kailas to the west. Its walls are rough-built and low, lined by small, regular windows like the gun ports of a galleon. Its history, like that of all these Kagyu outposts, is one of mixed marvel and obscurity. Founded in the 1220s, yet so poor a century ago that only a single caretaker lived here, it was razed in the Cultural Revolution, then rebuilt in 1983 as this mud-brick redoubt.
Shivering in its temple at dawn, I pass now-familiar figures–Avalokitesvara, Amitabha, Padmasambhava–seated like inquisitors in their jade-green haloes, until I reach the cave of miracles. This too is familiar: a rocky overhang, no more, where the poet-sage Milarepa meditated and sang. The imprinted stones laid on its altar preserve the passage of other saints and hermits, even the hoofprint of the steed of King Gesar of Ling. But its treasure in this place of his power is the figure of Milarepa. The original statue, it is said, was shaped from the saint’s own blood and excrement by a tantric disciple, the Divine Madman of Tsang, but this, if it ever existed, has gone. Instead another, bronze Milarepa sits on his stone altar. Of all bodhisattvas, his statues are the easiest to recognise, for he cups his right hand to his ear, listening to the whisper of the sky-dancers, perhaps, or to his own singing.
His life story, recited to a disciple before his death in 1135, is one of black magic and self-violence, rapt attachments and their sundering, ascetic tribulation and ecstasy, all told with the intimacy, even charm, of a first-person narrative that has endeared Milarepa to his people for centuries. In fact this autobiography, together with most of Milarepa’s songs, was written by a scholar 400 years after the life it recalled; but whatever its source, it casts Milarepa in a role of human poignancy.
His is a tale of fearful penitence for the murderous crimes of his youth inspired by a vengeful mother, whom he loved. For years he served the grim teacher Marpa, who put him through Sisyphean torments before he was shriven. When he returned to his former home he found the house derelict in the moonlight, shunned by villagers who still feared his memory. Inside he came upon a mound of rags and bones that he realised with horror had once been his mother, and on this he rested his head for seven days, practising the transience of all things.
For years he lived as a hermit, near-naked in isolated caves. He ate only nettles, so that in legend his skin turned green. His sister, who at last discovered him, called him a human caterpillar. In the end his appearance became so terrifying that people fled on sight of him. But he himself felt refined to pure spirit. Often he would break into extempore song. Slowly his life and his teaching attracted a core of disciples, before he died at the age of eighty-three, poisoned by a jealous rival. His life and poetry, whoever composed them, turned him into Tibet’s transcendent saint, so that long after his death a devotee claimed simply: ‘People could tread on him, use him as a road, as earth; he would always be there.’
Around Kailas, Milarepa became the agent by which Buddhism supplanted the Bon, and his mythic deeds pervade the mountain. A Bon magician became the victim of Milarepa’s greater magic, and the rocks of their contest–Milarepa pulling Bonchung round the kora clockwise–had haunted our way. In a final contest the Bon magician challenged the Buddhist mystic to reach the summit of Kailas before him, and started to fly there on his shaman’s drum. But Milarepa, travelling on a sunbeam, alighted first, and the magician’s drum, bouncing down the mountain’s south face, left the scars that mark it still. In an act of reconciliation, Milarepa gave the ousted faith another mountain, where its faithful still circle anticlockwise: the same mountain that comforted the old Bon lama in Kathmandu, and that rises snowlit over Manasarovar’s northern shore.
The Cave of Miracles, so dark that I can barely see, is rife with Milarepa’s magic. The thrust of his hands and shoulders dimples the rock ceiling where he lifted it up, and his footprint is revered on the roof above, where he tamped the ceiling down. Even his stone trident is here, although fractured by Red Guards, and a knob of rock that protects those who caress it.
An attendant monk points to fingerprints in the soot-glazed ceiling. They come cold to my touch. Milarepa shoved the living rock about to create a temperate cave. Or so the monk says. The spiritual ordeal in the saint’s tale is barely imaginable, but its human detail is gently moving: how mice are nesting on the shelves of his childhood home; how his fiancée wonderingly leaves him. On his fleeting homecoming the sale of his half-decayed books pays for the prayers for his mother’s transmigrating soul. These mildewed tomes are his last possession, and of these he rids himself. He leaves the village clutching his mother’s bones between his clothing and his chest, like the very signature of transience–his own and hers. What other comfort was there for the bereaved? Only what the limits of human awareness told him: that everything, all appearances, were mistaken.
I leave money for his butter lamps before I go, and watch them ignite under the monk’s hands.
Behind the monastery the cliffs are riddled with abandoned caves where the dawn light leaks over empty hearths and meditation platforms. All along the slopes, thousands of mani stones and carved boulders fire batteries of prayer across the valley. We turn to leave. The river flows full and blue now, bending south-west. Iswor is buoyant again, his head clear, while I go dreamily, as if days of fatigue were catching up.