Part 5 (1/2)

A lean figure at the hill's foot turns out to be Ram, who has wandered here alone. He is gazing at the monastery in puzzlement or unease, so that I wonder what faith he follows. But he says: 'My people know nothing of religion. They are very poor.' His English comes shy and halting. 'They hardly know if they are Hindus or Buddhists. In my village it is all mixed.'

'You have no temple?'

'There is one lama started try to build a temple. He covered half of walls with tanka tankas, then no more money...'

His village is remote, he says, somewhere east of Everest, and his parents are old, his mother sixty-seven, his father sixty-two. 'My father is sick, with pains around his chest. But my mother very strong. They grow some barley and vegetables in exchange for rice. That is what we have.' He smiles hardily. 'And I have a little girl...'

'And your wife?'

'My wife is twenty-five.'

I say, half-laughing, as if to hide indelicacy: 'There is time for more children.'

But he answers gravely: 'No. We don't want more. We think one is enough. In Nepal families grow big, and it becomes hard to eat.'

Fleetingly I wonder at this unexpectedness: Iswor who will not marry until forty, Ram who does not want a son. The wind is stretching the prayer flags above us, the sun dipping. I say: 'Are you going into the monastery?'

But he only answers: 'There is nothing I want ask for,' and turns back.

A rough path winds among the prayer-hung crags and fissures. I climb into a courtyard and a temple hall where a novice is chanting. A century ago the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, examining the frescoes in Trugo monastery nearby, identified the muralled G.o.d of the lake, riding a pink horse, and the fish G.o.d rearing from the waves to greet him, his head gus.h.i.+ng snakes and his body tapering to a dolphin's tail. But everything I see is newno fresco has escaped the Red Guardsand the novice breaks off his prayer to usher me away and point out another path. It slides close under the crags. The lake below is darkening towards dusk, but Kailas is rising clear beyond it, and light clouds sailing above.

A monk emerges on the path in front of me, and waits. He is whiskered and frail, his face battered to teak by the wind. He opens a tin-bound gate labelled '2', which almost falls from its hinges. Beyond it a double doorstartlingly richs.h.i.+nes vermilion in the rock. Its leaves are bossed in bra.s.s and dripping with scarves. Beyond it, a now-familiar dark descends. I can barely see my way. The ceiling of the deepening cave falls close and soot-blackened. Lamps gutter in pools of isolated fire. Deep in his niche I can discern the gold glimmer of Padmasambhava, his hands clasping a thunderbolt.

This is his cave. It is believed that here, with his consort Yeshe Tsogyal beside him, Tibet's greatest saint pa.s.sed the last seven days of his life in sacred trance. Then he 'took rainbow body', leaving behind only his hair and fingernailsand his faithful widow, who settled down to pen his biography. Beside me the old monk is murmuring and glaring half-blindly into my eyes, but I cannot understand him. Once he gestures at a statue enshrined in the niche beside the saint and whispers: 'Yeshe Tsogyal!' But I make out only a shape painted dusty blue or grey, out of whose swathing pearls taper mandarin fingernails touched in blessing.

In this deepest recess of the cave, where the light has shrunk to a glimmer, the rock shape of a giant's footprint is hanging from the wall. Darkened by smoke and veneration, its stone glints faintly through the soil of pious hands. It seems to be dangling free from a ceremonial ribbon. But when I touch it, I realise it is an outcrop of the cave wall itself: shaped like a huge sandal. The monk has forgotten me, and is chanting at it with bewondered eyes. Padmasambhava, it seems, left such imprints all over Tibet, as if out of a sacred earth the stone recognised him.

He descends in a history florid with legend. In the eighth century, perhaps, he came from the Swat valley in today's Pakistan, where Buddhism already lay in ruins. In Tibet too, the older, Bon religion had regained the land, and Buddhism was fading. But popular histories are replete with Padmasambhava's miracles. Piously his life parallels the Buddha's. Born from a lotus, he is the adoptive son of a north Indian king, and attains enlightenment in exile, haunting the cremation grounds dear to tantric yogis. In Tibet he is tutored by the dakini dakini sky-dancers. He traverses the mountains converting kings, war G.o.ds and devils alike. Twice he escapes immolation on pyres by turning them to water or sesame oil, appearing in the flames enthroned on a calm lake. The outsize hand-and footprints of his pa.s.sing cover the land. An emanation, at last, of the Amitabha Buddha, he becomes immortal in death, and in a crescendo of attribution he leaves behind prescient treasure texts and writes the Book of the Dead. sky-dancers. He traverses the mountains converting kings, war G.o.ds and devils alike. Twice he escapes immolation on pyres by turning them to water or sesame oil, appearing in the flames enthroned on a calm lake. The outsize hand-and footprints of his pa.s.sing cover the land. An emanation, at last, of the Amitabha Buddha, he becomes immortal in death, and in a crescendo of attribution he leaves behind prescient treasure texts and writes the Book of the Dead.

The sect of Nyingma, the Ancient Ones, whose monastery I had visited at Yalbang, hail him as a second Buddha. It is he, they say, who retrieved the country's lost knowledge, and they who most rigorously guard it.

But as the histories grow earlier, so Padmasambhava fades. It seems he may stand in for a whole crowd of Indian yogis who reached Tibet around the eighth century. The monastery of Chiu, where I crouch beneath his sandal print, may be less than three centuries old. And in the earliest record of all, the saint dwindles to an itinerant water-diviner, who converted n.o.body.

None of this, of course, troubles the Kagyu monks who inhabit Chiu, any more than dubious saints disturb the Christian faithful. Slowly the old man leads me out of the cave where Padmasambhava meditated, or did not, and I put money on its altar. It is hard to know, from his aged face and tortoise movements, or from his brethren chanting in the temple, how wise or indolent these monks are.

For foreigners this has always been so. Long before the Chinese invasion, travellers recorded monasteries dulled by apathy and rote-learning. Over a century ago the j.a.panese monk Kawaguchi recoiled from their immorality (the scriptures were even used as lavatory paper, he said), and Swami Pranavananda, who visited some fifty monasteries over many years, mentioned only two lamas whom he esteemed.

But as the old man gazes at me, whispering and smiling, I long to know what he is saying. Western fantasies about Tibet's secret wisdom surface unbidden into my mind. His words rasp and fade. I stare hopelessly back at him. Is something important lurking behind those simple-seeming eyes? I question him in halting Mandarin, but he speaks none. I search for signs of use in the dusty tiers of scripturethe Kangyur and Tengyuron the temple shelves; but they seem to be kept less for study than for veneration.

The tin door rattles shut behind me, and the monk is gone. The dusk is cold and clear. Below me I see the half-lit channel of Ganga Chu, carved by the golden fish as it made for Rakshas Tal. Its intermittent flow depends on the will of the serpent king, of course; it brings about the mystic intercourse of the lakesor failsand its fluctuation tells the future of Tibet. For thirty years after the Chinese invasion the channel was saline or bone dry. Now it oozes again beneath me in slow shallows out of Manasarovar, trickling to where Rakshas Tal lies palely to the west, but never arriving. Near its bed, the outlandish bubbling of hot springs has become a pilgrim bathhouse. But the channel's waters barely tremble. Brackish and uncertain, they idle unconsummated to the foot of a low dam.

This periodic flow was the bane of explorers hunting for the headwaters of the Indian rivers. Even now the source of the Sutlej, the giant tributary of the Indus, is variously placed here or at the rivulets seeping from the slopes south-west of Kailas. To Hindus especially such waters rise by divine intent, and in the ancient Puranas the four world rivers find their birthplace on the mystic slopes of Mount Meru. The holy Ganges itself descends from the sky, flowing through the locks of s.h.i.+va, or circles Brahma's heavenly city before splitting into four and flooding down from Meru to mankind.

By a freak of geography, which knit Kailas indissolubly to Meru, the four chief rivers of the Indian subcontinent rise within seventy miles of its summit. The Karnali, the highest source of the Ganges, has drifted to the west of us now, to find its birth beyond Rakshas Tal. Tibetans, who gave the rivers sonorous names, call it Magcha-Khambab, 'the River that flows from the Peac.o.c.k's Mouth', while the Sutlej is Langchan-Khambab and flows from 'the Elephant's Mouth'. The Indus, the lion-mouth river, rises from scattered sources on the north flank of the Kailas ma.s.sif itself, and the horse-mouth Brahmaputra in an obscure glacier a few miles to the east. These two t.i.tans then diverge along almost 2,000 miles each to clamp the whole Indian sub continent in stupendous pincers. In their course they crash through the Himalaya in fearful gorgesthe Brahmaputra falls through the deepest canyon on earththen ease south into vast, slumbering estuaries. The Indus descends the length of modern Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, its waters still cloudy with the silt of Tibet and the Karakoram; the Brahmaputra spills into the Bay of Bengal after mingling with the Ganges among the mangroves and crocodiles of the world's widest delta.

The origin of these rivers baffled explorers for centuries. Ironically the first European to reach Kailas, the Jesuit Desideri, evaluated them more accurately than anyone who followed him for a century and a half (although he misplaced the source of the Ganges). Even the a.s.siduous William Moorcroft was deceived by the vanis.h.i.+ng channel of Ganga Chu.

But the explorer who bestrode the whole region was the remorselessly driven Sven Hedin. At once impelled and flawed by a l.u.s.t for adulation, he cast himself in the mould of a sublime hero. He allowed nothingnot official prohibition, sub-zero temperatures nor the death of men and beaststo divert his course. In 1907 he reached Manasarovar from the east after an illicit journey that filled in 65,000 square miles on the blank map of Tibet. Within a few weeks all but six of his hundred pack mules and ponies had perished. When at last he caught sight of the blue sheen of Manasarovar, he burst into tears. He spent a month on its sh.o.r.es in an investigative frenzy. To the dismay of the Tibetans, he a.s.sembled a c.o.c.klesh.e.l.l boat and launched on to the water. The G.o.d of the lake would pull him under, they said. They believed that at its centre Manasarovar bulged into a transparent dome, and that even if Hedin mounted it he would capsize in the waterfall beyond. Instead, he took soundings on both Manasarovar and Rakshas Tal, cruising for hours. He imagined himself the first to sail here. He knew nothing of the Scotsman whose debut in a rubber dinghy had caused the death of the local governor fifty years before.

When at last he returned to Europe, trumpeting his discovery of India's river sources, and of the mountains he named Trans-Himalaya, Hedin received a mauling from the society that had once most ardently supported him, the world's premier body of geographers, the Royal Geographic Society in London. He defended his claims with magisterial arrogance, and partial success. But only his siting of the Indus source proved indisputable (the Brahmaputra had been located by a jaunty British hunting party forty years before), and his mountains were redefined as a broken and nebulous ma.s.sif unworthy of a Himalayan name.

In the cold British gaze Hedin had undermined his own achievements by exalting them. He retired to Stockholm, bruised and furious. He publicly supported Kaiser Wilhelm through the First World War, and Adolf Hitler in the Second, losing the love of his Swedish compatriots. He secured the release of several concentration camp victims, yet remained unrepentant of his n.a.z.i sympathies. His fame darkened, and faded, and he died in near-obscurity in 1952, bequeathing his research to his estranged countrymen.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

At night, the silence of the lake is p.r.i.c.ked only by the faint cries of water birds in their sleep. The sky is white with stars, and with the waxing moon of Saga Dawa, the Buddhist holy month, which frosts our scattered camp. Hindus say the shooting stars are sky G.o.ds who descend to bathe in Manasarovar. An Indian pilgrim tells me later that her night was disrupted by flas.h.i.+ng lights and strange cries.

Towards dawn I wake breathless to a world turned crimson. From one horizon to another the lake is a long slash of fire, and the sky lightening with lurid strata of red and pale gold. Easy to imagine this an apocalyptic fracture in the order of things, a portent of sacred chaos, or at least a fanfare for the dawning holy month. I stand outside my tent, distracted by some dream I have forgotten. Far to the south, over Gurla Mandhata, the clouds are congealed black, as if it were a zone of clogged, perpetual night, and all along the sh.o.r.eline the grebes and sandpipers float or stand in the molten water, half of them still asleep.

The sky is paling to common day as I walk south along the littoral. Redshanks skitter about the sands, and the black-headed gulls fly back and forth and fuss in the shallows. Here and there the cliffs above me are pocked with caves. For centuries hermits have meditated around the lake, drawn to its lonely power. The whole region is riddled with their dwellings. I scramble up and find an entrance framed by rough-layered stones. Inside the cave is empty, but half ceilinged by timbers, and three votive scarves, quite new, hang on the rocks outside.

In the scarp above I glimpse a dwarfish doorway closed in plastered stones. A flurry of rock pigeons startles upwards as I clamber higher. The lake tilts and gleams below. A wafer-thin door swings in the cave entrance, once closed by a twist of wire that has dropped into the dust. As I edge it open, I feel suddenly uneasy. There are rumours of yogis still caverned round the lakenear Cherkip a solitary nun has only just left. I peer into half-darkness. I wonder momentarily if somebody has died here. By my hand a rusted stove is wedged deep in the cave wall, its chimney pipe wobbling up to a hole in the rock. But the cave is deserted. Its ceiling glints black like the vault of a coal mine. The smells are of dust, and the only noise is the slos.h.i.+ng of waves below. On a rock ledge deeper inside I come upon a bag of rice and another of salt, and a torch without a battery. Nearby lies a pouch of salinated earth, reverently gathered from the sh.o.r.es of the lake. Whoever was here, I realise, intended to return. But that, I think, was long ago.

The only clue hangs on a sheet of cardboard torn from a noodle carton propped against one wall. Some photographs of monks sag from its peeling sellotape, and beneath them dangles the notice of a 'heart return' ceremony in Nepal in the year 2000 for a Karmapa lama'Jamgon Kongtrul the Great'who had pa.s.sed into nirvana a century before.

So the hermit, perhaps, had belonged to the Kagyu sect, whose monks start meditating young, and which had once produced austere ascetics. I stare down from the cave entrance, imagining him climbing the cliff towards me, but the sh.o.r.e stretches empty. In such solitudes advanced yogis deepened their powers. And they were not precisely alone. Their discipline had been pa.s.sed down, teacher to pupil, in long lineages of arcane knowledge, and all around them abandoned caves blazed with the holiness of their predecessors. Their near-magic practice arrived from India as early as the eighth century, and it became the heart of Tibetan faith. Their path was called vajrayana vajrayana, the Thunderbolt or Diamond Vehicle, named from the hard swiftness with which it dispelled ignorance, and its scriptures were the esoteric texts named tantra. Its yogiswhether monk or laymanbecame a religious elite; but theirs was a dangerous and half-secret way. Within a single lifetimea shockingly brief span to conventional Buddhiststhe adept might overleap the toil of reincarnations and enter nirvana.

At times a belief that all experiencehowever mundane or immoralcould be channelled towards enlightenment licensed grotesque extremes. Matt-haired adepts haunted cremation grounds, pouring over themselves the dust of the dead, or sublimated taboos by orgiastic s.e.x, downing alcohol and slaughtering animals. The world, after all, was illusory. Nothing was of itself impure. They could seem like licentious criminals. The Moghul emperor Akbar, most tolerant of rulers, had his tantric yogis torn to bits by elephants.

But the cla.s.sic practicehowever disrupted by Chinese persecutioninvolves a lone and rigorous self-transformation. Guided by his guru, the novice selects a tutelary Buddha or divinitya yidam yidamand by an intense practice of identification achieves an imagined fusion with him. It is this divinity, often, who is portrayed with his consort in the s.e.xual union that the abbot of Yalbang had extolled: compa.s.sion joined with wisdom. Over months and years of rapt visualisation, the adept starts to a.s.similate to the yidam yidam, enthroned, perhaps, in his mandala palace. As his mind awakens, he experiences the mandala as real. Sometimes the G.o.d himself may be conjured to inhabit it. In time the yogi can summon or dissolve the picture at will. And slowly, at will, he becomes the G.o.d. Mentally he takes on his appearance, his language (in oft-repeated mantras) and even his mind. He experiences his own body as a microcosm of the secret body of the universe. The world becomes a mandala. Seated upright, in union with Meru-Kailas, his breathing regulates and stills. At last he feels his body thinning into illusion, he merges with the Buddha, and it is time to depart.

'The world disappears. This is our peace.'

In his temple courtyard in Kathmandu, the genial monk Tas.h.i.+, who had studied tantra for three years now, refused to call it a philosophy, still less a faith. 'We have no G.o.d.'

The G.o.ds were only guides to the enlightenment that would erase them. His arms unfolded impotently from his chest, trying to explain. 'I think it is a science. Anyone can do it. I think you can do it.'

I tried to imagine this, but the wrong words swam into my mind: rejected life, self-hypnosis, the obliteration of loved difference. Premature death. But tantrism was a way to be lived, Tas.h.i.+ said, not a doctrine to be learnt. You could not know it until you experienced it. Though by then, perhaps, it would be too late to return.

He said: 'In this meditation you find above all great strength, and eventual peace, the peace we all seek. Once you start out, yes, you know it will be foolish to give up. You will lose too much...nothing would be left.'

Soon he would be going into retreat for three years, and he longed for this. 'I could travel to my village in Bhutan and find a hut, but my family would give me no peace.' He laughed. 'I'd ask them to visit me just once a month, and they wouldn't understand...' So he did not know where he would gothat depended on his teacherand in meditation it was this teacher he envisaged more than his yidam yidam, imagining the man a Buddha. 'That is how it is with us. Even if your teacher is a poor one, you revere him.'