Part 6 (1/2)
It was this Red Hat sect, in the twelfth century, that instigated around Kailas the practice of sky burial. Perhaps, as some say, the Tibetans' is a death-haunted culture. Certainly their death cults haunt others. When I escape from the clamour of the monk-filled hut, I see before me, above the ground where the enormous pole will rise tomorrow, an empty plateau against the valley wall. On this Drachom Ngagye Durtro the sky burial of monks and nomads continues. The remorseless G.o.d Demchog, who dances out on Kailas the promise and terror of dissolution, imbues the Durtro with an ambivalent power. Like s.h.i.+va, whose ash-blue skin and skull garlands he shares, Demchog is lord of the charnel house, and his followers in the past have inhabited cremation grounds (they occasionally still do) to meditate on the impermanence of life and achieve the truth of emptiness. It is to such places, especially in this propitious month of Saga Dawa, that people may go to lie down and enact their own pa.s.sing. So the durtro durtros become sites of liberation. Rainbows link them to the eight holiest cremation grounds of India, whose power is mystically translated to Tibet.
A land of frozen earth, almost treeless, can barely absorb its dead. Holy law confines to burial only the plague-dead and the criminal: to seal them underground is to prevent their reincarnation and to eliminate their kind for ever. The corpses tipped into Tibet's rivers are those solely of the dest.i.tute. Embalmment is granted to the highest lamas alone, while the less grand are cremated and their ashes encased in stupas.
For the rest, the way is sky burial. For several days after clinical death, the soul still roams the body, which is treated tenderly, washed by monks in scented water and wrapped in a white shroud. A lama reads to it the Liberation by Hearing, known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by which the soul is steered towards a higher incarnation. An astrologer appoints the time of leaving. Then the corpse's back is broken and it is folded into a foetal bundle. Sometimes this sad packetsurprisingly smallis carried by a friend to the sky burial site, sometimes it is laid on a palanquin and preceded by a retinue of monks, the last man trailing a scarf behind him to signal to the dead the way they are going.
As the corpse approaches, the sky master blows his horn, and a fire of juniper twigs summons the vultures. The master and his rogyapa rogyapa corpse-dissectors then open the body from the back. They remove the organs, amputate the limbs and cut the flesh into small pieces, which they lay nearby. The bones are pulverised with a rock. The master mixes their dust with yak b.u.t.ter or corpse-dissectors then open the body from the back. They remove the organs, amputate the limbs and cut the flesh into small pieces, which they lay nearby. The bones are pulverised with a rock. The master mixes their dust with yak b.u.t.ter or tsampa, tsampa, roasted barley roasted barley, and then rolls it into b.a.l.l.s. Finally the skull too is smashed and becomes a morsel with its brains. One by one these are tossed on to a platformthe bones first, for they are the least appetisingand the vultures crowd in. and then rolls it into b.a.l.l.s. Finally the skull too is smashed and becomes a morsel with its brains. One by one these are tossed on to a platformthe bones first, for they are the least appetisingand the vultures crowd in.
These birds are sacred. On the burial platform above me they are thought to be emanations of white dakini dakinis, the peaceful sky-dancers who inhabit the place. Their fore-knowledge of a meal is uncanny. In his journals my father noted the mysterious speed with which they congregated, and speculated that they signalled to one another in flight by some system of their own. The submission of a corpse to them is the last charity of its owner, and lightens the karma of the dead. The birds themselves are never seen to pollute the earth. They defecate in the sky. Tibetans say that even in death they keep flying upwards until the sun and wind take them apart.
As I climb to the Durtro plateau, it shows no sign of life. A healing spring flows near its foot, and a white segment of Kailas s.h.i.+nes above. My path winds up into light-blown dust. Beside me the cliff is the colour of old rose, scored by vertical cracks. The sun is dipping as the way levels into an aerial desolation. It is scattered with inchoate rocks, which may be those of rude memorials, makes.h.i.+ft altars, or of nothing. An icy wind is raking across it. The slabs for dissection are merely platforms, smoothed from the reddish stone and carved with mantras. People have left hair and clothing here, even teeth and fingernails, like hostages or a.s.sents to their death. I see a woman's silk waistcoat, and a child's toy. Some of the boulders are clumsily clothed. A folded stretcher lies abandoned. And now the wind is wrenching at all ephemera and bundling it awayfaded garments, old vulture feathers, tresses of hairto decay at last under rock shelves.
For a while I see n.o.body but an old couple wandering the perimeter. They move as if blind, huddled against the cold. Then I become aware of a man lying prostrate fifty yards away. As I look, he gets to his feet and hurls handfuls of tsampa tsampa into the wind, crying out. I make out a young face, circled in black locks. The wind stifles his words. He seems to be praying not to Kailas.h.i.+s back is turned to itbut to the cemetery itself. Perhaps he is addressing the into the wind, crying out. I make out a young face, circled in black locks. The wind stifles his words. He seems to be praying not to Kailas.h.i.+s back is turned to itbut to the cemetery itself. Perhaps he is addressing the dakini dakinis, but more likely he is invoking the gompo gompos, the Dark Lords who inhabit all cemeteries. The followers of these gompo gompos are the dregs of the spirit world: the hungry ghosts, the flesh-eaters, the rolang rolang undead. By the rite of undead. By the rite of chodpa chodpa the yogi invites them to devour his ego, hurrying him to salvation. And suddenly the man's the yogi invites them to devour his ego, hurrying him to salvation. And suddenly the man's tsampa tsampa has finished and he is rolling in the dust. His hair spins about him. He makes no sound. This is no pious grovel but a headlong rotation over the ground, inhaling the dead. Then he lies still. has finished and he is rolling in the dust. His hair spins about him. He makes no sound. This is no pious grovel but a headlong rotation over the ground, inhaling the dead. Then he lies still.
After he leaves, I go over to the terrace where he had been. Among the boulders I see two long, wide-bladed knives, then the ashes of a fire where a charred hacksaw lies. Then I come with alarm to the centre of the platform. A wooden board is there, scarred by blades. There are other knives, quite new, and an axe. They seem to have been discarded. And beneath the board, two bones are lying togetherthe arm bones of a humanwith dried blood and flesh still on them.
I walk away. I feel a wrenching revulsion, and a shamed excitement at the forbidden. I had heard that sky masters were artists of their kind, heirs to a strict profession. To leave one human piece uneaten will invite demons into the body: they will reanimate it as a rolang rolang, a living corpse, and steal its spirit.
But everything on the Durtro betrays crude carelessness. Perhaps its sky master has grown bitter. As with butchers and blacksmiths, the stench of uncleanness clings to these rogyapa rogyapas. Called 'black bones', they are shunned in their community. If one should eat in your home, his plate is thrown away. Their daughters rarely marry. Sometimes, too, their rules are transgressed. Tantric yogis even now, seeking stuff by which to brood on death, find human thigh bones for their trumpets, and skulls are offered them as ritual cups.
I cross the plateau in numb recoil. Only a belief in reincarnation might alleviate this bleak dismay. Without it, the once-incarnate dead become uniquely precious, and break the heart.
At sky burials the grief of relatives is said to disrupt the pa.s.sage of the soul, and sometimes none attend. Instead a monk is sent in advance to the cemetery, to ask its spirits to comfort the corpse as its body is dismembered. But generally the mourners come: it is important, they may think, to confront evanescence, and witness liberation. At some funerals, so onlookers claim, the mourners display no sorrow. They have learnt the lesson of impermanence, and look with equanimity at the pa.s.sing of the appearances they know.
But others say they lie on the ground, weeping.
Ram has pitched camp by the Lha river, where the humped tents of German and Austrian trekkersarrived overland from Lhasaseem suddenly a mult.i.tude beside us. Everybody is hunting for yaks or jhaboo jhaboos or ponies to carry their baggage, and perhaps themselves, around the mountain. But all these beasts are too few. And the kora confronts us with another 3,500-foot ascent, much of it steep. Iswor and I decide to jettison everything superfluous tomorrow and carry a single tent, with iron rations.
Late that night I wake to the soft, insistent ring of a mobile phone. I grope outside into the dark, listening for its source. But the nearest tent is out of earshot, and now there is no more sound. I wait, suddenly desolate. I feel sick at some imagined loneliness. Someone was trying to reach me, and I did not answer. Perhaps it is the hallucinatory shortage of oxygen, the starved brain, that summons this dream, and its incommensurate sadness.
I try to dispel it by walking. The Saga Dawa moon is full and s.h.i.+ning on the river, and the sky dense with stars. In this thin air their constellations multiply and blur together like mist. The orange ones are probably long dead, their light arriving in posthumous and detached rays out of nowhere, while others are being born invisibly in the dark.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
The pilgrims circling the flagpole in the valley might be mimicking the greater kora of Kailas. They must ritually keep sacred objects on their right, so they orbit clockwise from early morning, in an aura of triumph. Viewed from the hillock where I stand, this seems an act not only of faith but of possession, as tigers mark out their territory at night, and I have the notion that Tibetans, by repeated holy circuitsof mountains, monasteries, templesare unconsciously reclaiming their sacred land.
Whether in the ritual of pilgrimage, the cycles of reincarnation or the revolution of the Buddhist Wheel, the circle is here the shape of the sacred. In folklore, G.o.ds, demons and even reptiles perform the kora. By this dignity of walking (and in Tibetan speech a human may be an 'erect goer' or 'the precious going one'), pilgrims acquire future merit and earthly happiness, and sometimes whole families pour round Kailas with their herds and dogsall sentient creatures will accrue meritafter travelling here for hundreds of miles.
As the morning wears on, the crowds thicken. A thousand pilgrims there may be, wheeling round the mast like planets round a sun. They go fast, buoyantly, as if on pious holiday. In this biting air the sheepskin coats still dangle from their shoulders in ground-trailing sleeves; the ear flaps fly free from women's bonnets, and the men's s.h.a.ggy or cowhand hats are tilted at any angle. Sometimes, in ragged age, the people prod their way forward with sticks, their prayer wheels spinning. Among them the tribal nomads march in a multi-coloured flood. All that the women have seems on display, and a playful courts.h.i.+p is in the air. Their belts are embossed silver and seamed with cowrie sh.e.l.ls, and sometimes dangle amulets or bells. They are bold and laughing. Necklaces of amber and coral cl.u.s.ter at their throats, their brows are crossed by turquoise-studded headbands and their waists gorgeously sashed. There are groups of local Dropka herdspeople, and hardy Khampas from the east, whose hair is twined with crimson cloth. And here and there gleam fantastical silk jacketspink, purple and gold, embroidered with dragons or flowers.
Ringed by Chinese soldiers, the flagpole stays monstrously aslant, dripping with prayer flags, waiting. The celebratory pennants fly everywhere, in colours too synthetic for the elements they symbolise, their yellow brighter than any earth, their green too vivid for water. Examining them, I recognise only Padmasambhava, stamped in woodblock, and the sacred wind horse, saddled with holy fire. On the outmost perimeter other prayers hang in faded waterfalls, printed on white cloth twice the height of a man. Bundled into diaphanous swags, they fall ma.s.sed and unreadable, like folded books. But every year they are a.s.sembled here, their draped forms fidgeting like ghosts in the wind, to bestow the protection of their sutras, the magic of words.
On a hillock above, the police scan the valley through binoculars, and officers are coordinating patrols through a walkie-talkie. Their telescopic video camera whirrs on a tripod, waiting to record troublemakers. The soldiers remain at attention in their cordon round the pole and other squadsswinging truncheons and riot s.h.i.+eldsswagger anticlockwise against the pilgrims or stand in units of five or six beyond the hanging prayers. But the Tibetans look straight through them, as if they had no meaning. All morning a helmeted Chinese fire officer stands alone and rigid, fulfilling some regulation, with a canister on either side of him and nothing flammable in sight.
The northern clouds have thinned away, and the tip of Kailas rises beyond the charnel ground. A few pilgrims are facing it now, lifting their joined hands to their foreheads. They call the mountain not the Sanskrit Kailas but Kang Rinpoche, 'the Precious One of Snow'. They may imagine on its crest the palace of Demchog, but even this Buddhist blessing cannot quite dispel a sense of ancient and impersonal sanct.i.ty, as if the mountain's power were inherently its own. This is the stuff of magic. In the eyes of the faithful its mana is intensified wondrously through all those who have meditated here, so that the kora is rife with their strength. A single mountain circuit, it is said, if walked in piety, will dispel the defilement of a lifetime, and bring requital for the murder of even a lama or a parent, while 108 such koras lift the pilgrim into Buddhahood.
These mathematics weigh the mountain's magic against the pilgrims' spirit. In the past the rich might pay a proxy to undertake the circuit, the virtue dividing between them; and even now, if a pilgrim rides a yak or pony, half the merit goes to the beast. Both yak and human are subject to earthly contamination, drib drib, which like a stain or shadow acc.u.mulates alongside outright sins. Pilgrimage cleanses these. The way of tantric meditation, which dismantles the illusions of difference, is only for the few, and those around me, slowed now to gaze at the raising of the pole, will rack up merit by an earthier journey tomorrow.
A century ago Sven Hedin, the first Westerner to complete the kora, wrote that its pilgrims' motives were simple. They hoped in a future life to be allowed to sit near Demchog; but they had other, more material concerns. Even now the remote workings of karma fade before the day-to-day. The pilgrim prays for disease to leave his cattle, for a higher price for his b.u.t.ter, for luck in s.e.x or gambling. She wants a radio, and a child. Such matters belong to the Buddhas and tutelary spirits of a place. In the lonely hermitages, the gompa gompas, around Kailas, they will offer the spirits incense to smell, a little rice to eat, a bowl of pure water. And somewhere in these wilds they may whisper to the fierce mountain G.o.ds to bring back the Dalai Lama to Lhasa, and drive the Chinese out.
A slight, saffron-clad figure stands before the flagpole. Tiny and quaint under a ta.s.selled crimson hat, he is the master of ceremonies, piping orders through a megaphone. Two hefty gangs, thirty strong each, start heaving on long ropes attached high up the mast, while a pair of lorries, their front b.u.mpers bound to it by cables, go slowly into reverse. A shout of expectation goes up, and paper prayers are hurled into the wind. The pole begins to lurch upwards. The rods that have supported it aslant drop away, and its strands of tethered prayer flags are dragged upwards in harlequin arcs. Then the pole judders to a stop, hanging at a forty-five-degree diagonal, like a gun barrel pointing at Kailas. The spectators are shouting in a tense half-chant, their hands clasped together. The master of ceremonies runs from side to side, guiding the rope gangs. If the pole does not slot bolt upright in its socket of stones, ill luck will befall Tibet for the coming year. For two decades until 1981 the ceremony was banned, while the country suffered. And now the guy ropes are taut and equal, the saffron figure shouts, and the pole glides upwards until all support is gone. The carnival streamers unfurl like petals around it, and the great tree stands miraculously upright, held only by these frail garlands of colour. The sky-blue silk at its summit, by design or chance, slips down to reveal the golden orb that crowns it, and the crowd bursts into triumphant cries of Lha-gyel-lo-so-so! Lha-so-so! Lha-so-so! Lha-gyel-lo-so-so! Lha-so-so! Lha-so-so! Victory to the G.o.ds! They shower fistfuls of Victory to the G.o.ds! They shower fistfuls of tsampa tsampa into the air, over and over, exploding it in pale clouds towards the mountain. They delve into bags br.i.m.m.i.n.g with prayer leaves, which soon become a snowstorm. A ceremonial oven, built of clay brick and stoked with yak dung and juniper, becomes a repository for more thrown prayers and incense sticks, until the air fills with a dense white blossom of benedictionscent, blown barley, paperthat falls round the boots of the Chinese soldiers, still impa.s.sively at attention, and floats on like mist towards Kailas. into the air, over and over, exploding it in pale clouds towards the mountain. They delve into bags br.i.m.m.i.n.g with prayer leaves, which soon become a snowstorm. A ceremonial oven, built of clay brick and stoked with yak dung and juniper, becomes a repository for more thrown prayers and incense sticks, until the air fills with a dense white blossom of benedictionscent, blown barley, paperthat falls round the boots of the Chinese soldiers, still impa.s.sively at attention, and floats on like mist towards Kailas.
At this moment something strange happens. High above, on the rim of the charnel ground, a white-robed figure raises a wooden cross. He descends towards us like a mystic Christ returning from Calvary, a tiny Buddhist monk fussing behind him, and vanishes into the crowds. But soon this enigma is lost among the pilgrims, who are revolving again like a great coloured wheel around the flag-fluttering tree, infectiously happy. Some reach its foot to touch their foreheads to its stem; others have thrown themselves on the stony earth, their arms stretched towards the mountain, palms joined. Even the police are photographing one another.
The monks, who have been praying in a seated line for hours, advance in a consecrating procession. Led by the abbot of Gyangdrak monastery from a valley under Kailas, they move in shambling pomp, puffing horns and conch sh.e.l.ls, clas.h.i.+ng cymbals. Small and benign in his thin-rimmed spectacles, the abbot holds up sticks of smouldering incense, while behind him the saffron banners fall in tiers of folded silk, like softly collapsed paG.o.das. Behind these again the ten-foot horns, too heavy to be carried by one monk, move stertorously forward, their bell-flares attached by cords to the man in front. Other monks, shouldering big drums painted furiously with dragons, follow in a jostle of wizardish red hats, while a venerable elder brings up the rear, cradling a silver tray of utensils and a bottle of Pepsi-Cola.
But by late afternoon, with the ceremonies over, the wheeling crowds have thinned away. All round the perimeter they have looped the circling flags inwards to the pole, so that walking here you clamber through a jungle of vivid creepers, snagging underfoot or slung close above you. By dusk the pilgrims have dispersed to their camping grounds, and the place is silent. Now it seems to sag in brilliant ruin, like some game abandoned by children at evening. Its remembered rite carries with it, in spite of everything, a charge of innocent optimism, of earthy piety and trust. In the twilight a few campfires start up around the valley, and a faint perfume lingers: incense lit to feed the unhappy dead, and to please the darkening mountain.
Few beliefs are older than the notion that heaven and earth were once conjoined, and that G.o.ds and men moved up and down a celestial ladderor a rope or vineand mingled at ease. Some primeval disaster severed this conduit for ever, but it is remembered all through Asia and beyond in the devotion to ritual poles and ladders: the tree by which the Brahmin priest climbs to make sacrifice, the stairs that carry shamans to the sky, even the tent pole of Mongoloid herdsmen, the 'sky pillar' that becomes the focus of their wors.h.i.+p. Such cults rise from a vast, archaic hinterland, from the world pillars of early Egypt and Babylon and the ascension mysteries of Mithras, to the heaven-reaching trees of ancient China and Germany, even to Jacob's angel-travelled ladder that ascended from the centre of the world.
These concepts, which spread in part from Mesopotamia, have in common that their life-giving stair or vine, by which sanct.i.ty replenishes the earth, exists at the world's heart, the axus mundi axus mundi; and in the sacred pole of Kailas, erected at the heart of the Hindu-Buddhist cosmos, they find a cla.s.sic exemplar. Its raising was a timeless ceremonyintermittently performedthat marked the Buddha's shallow victory over the Bon, the region's primal faith. For the Bon, Kailas was itself a sky ladder, linking Elysium to earth. The idea of a heaven-connecting rope is old in Tibetan belief, whose first kings descended from the sky by cords of light attached to their heads. By such ropes too it was thought the dead might climb to paradise.
Even in Buddhist myth there is something changing and fragile in the relations.h.i.+p between Kailas and its faithful. For all its ma.s.s, the mountain is light. In Tibetan folklore it flew here from another, unknown countrymany of Tibet's mountains flyand was staked in place by prayer banners and chains before devils could pull it underground. Then, to prevent the celestial G.o.ds from lifting it up and returning it to where it came from, the Buddha nailed it down with four of his footprints.
But now, they say, it is the age of Kaliyuga, of degeneration, and at any moment the mountain could fly away again.
The mystery of the white-clad figure with a cross is resolved at nightfall. I find him camped among the tents by the Lha river, his monstrous crucifix propped against a lorry. He turns out to be a Russian German, born in Kazakhstan, where Stalin deported his people during the Second World War. He stands gauntly tall, and talks as if delivering a holy ultimatum. Somehow he has blundered here across the complicated borders in his lorry, innocently confident.
I ask in amazement: 'You've had no trouble?'
'Everyone has been good to me. Everyone has welcomed me!' His blue eyes s.h.i.+ne cloudless from a gush of ginger hair and beard.
'You're Russian Orthodox?'
'I'm an evangelist.'
His cross is covered with arcane images. A symbol of the world's mouth gapes on the headpiece; at its base a black sheep, signed with skull and crossbones, is pointing h.e.l.l-wards; while in the centre hangs the figure most puzzling to Tibetans: a crucified G.o.d.
The evangelist explains these symbols to me in a gruff litany, but I sense in him no expectation of my believing, and I wonder about his journey here, the incomprehension he has suffered. It is more than two centuries since any missionary preached in central Tibet. And now he launches into a credo so jumbled and esoteric that my remembered Russian fails. He has an idea that the people of Atlantis and the world will converge in Christ. 'And the earth's power lines run through the Sphinxeverybody knows thiswhich faces east towards Kailas, and Kailas...'
He goes on and on. His New Age cliches are bathed not only in Jesus but in an old Slavophile dream. The West is mired in materialism, but Russia is pure soul. Russia will be the saviour of the world...
'Even now, even under Putin?' I mumble.