Part 6 (2/2)

'Yes, Putin, Medvedev, they are returning Russia to herself.'

He stands beside his cross, the prophet incarnate, the owner of truth. He craves the world's peace, a perfect ec.u.menism. If only people would listen. The Buddhists are all right, he says, but they have no Christ. He is bringing them the Russian Christ.

'But they don't understand me. They speak nothing.' It is his presence alone, with his towering cross, that must beam to others the redemption in his mind. How is his Christian trinity of G.o.ds received? I wonder. And G.o.d's son, walking in history? But he does not know. The generous Tibetan pantheon, I imagine, might superficially incorporate them. But they, together with the swarm of Buddhas and G.o.dlings, must vanish at last like a superst.i.tious mist before nirvana's absolute.

Would he go deeper into China? I ask. But somehow I do not fear for him.

'No. Kailas is my end.' He shakes his head: his hair makes a fiery halo. 'I will be going home now.'

'Where is home?' He is gazing up at the mountain and the charnel ground, and I wonder for a moment if he means to make an end there.

But he says: 'After perestroika my family came westwards, to Germany, where our people started.' So he was returning to the paradigm of Western materialism. 'Dusseldorf,' he murmurs.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

The true start of the kora is here, on the ridge between the great pole and the river, where the Kangri chorten isolates the mountain in its dark arch. The chorten's base is piled with stones placed by pilgrims before their leaving, and Iswor adds a pebble at dawn, then circles the site clockwise, the prayer beads loosened around his wrist, insuring against danger.

These chortens find their origins far back in the Indian stupas that enshrined the incinerated corpse of the Buddha. But in Tibet they have changed shape and taken other meanings. Some contain funerary remains, but most enfold scriptures and relics, often too damaged to be used but too sacred to destroy. Ours is a ceremonious gateway, purifying the pilgrims' path, and is built on a model now familiar, its square plinth mounting steps to a concave drum that ascends in turn to thirteen dwindling and compacted golden wheels, topped by a crescent moon cradling the sun.

These structures may be seen, predictably, in many ways. Their five chief components, from earthbound base to aerial sun, signify the Buddhist elements, as prayer flags do. But they double as the initiate's path to enlightenment, and a crowning disc on the sun's...o...b..trans.m.u.tes solar wisdom and lunar compa.s.sion into pure truth. Tantric initiates discover in the chorten an eidolon of the seated Buddha, and see its central axismost chortens enclose a vertical beamas a symbol of Meru-Kailas, or a male archetype infusing a female body.

We step through the chorten's pa.s.sage towards a vision of the mountain. Strings of yaks' teeth hang from the ceiling, brus.h.i.+ng our shoulders, and two rotting yaks' heads dangle above. Enclosed in the drum above us, invisible relics confer benediction. Then we walk out into the holy valley. Its floor is lacquered green where yaks and jhaboo jhaboos are grazing. A few pilgrims are strung like beads along it. And here, around the meadows called the Golden Basin, the cliffs start to close magnificently in. Their bluffs break into seams of tangerine and pink, then s.h.i.+ver up like ruined towers to merge with the mountain walls, pouring down shale.

Beside us, hermit caves sprinkle the heights under the charnel ground, where pilgrims are climbing, wild-haired and young. Who had meditated here? Bonchung, perhaps, the early Bon wizard; or Milarepa, the Buddhist saint who dispossessed him? But they do not know. The caves are narrow, with platforms built of loose stones. Wors.h.i.+ppers have glued money and prayer beads to the ceilings, and someone has laid her necklace on a stone.

We tramp along an easy path in high spirits. The Lha river wanders alongside, crusted with ice. Kailas looms in solitary snow to the north-east. Along the wide, pebbled valley ahead of us, a figure is inching forward, levelling its length in the dust, rising, advancing three paces, falling again, arms stretched ahead. Even when we draw alongside, I cannot at first tell if this is a youth or a girl. By these painful means, the body touching every span of the path, a pilgrim may circle the mountain in three weeks, returning each dawn to the spot abandoned, marked with a stone. When the figure rises, I see that it is protected in a leather ap.r.o.n; and the hands, which lift in prayer before each obeisance, are strapped with wooden boards. Out of the dust she turns a blackened face to me, and smiles. If she is initiate, she sees on the path in front her tutelary Buddha, and gathers virtue with every salutation. While two bent women, too old to perform this rite themselves, precede the near-child with a thermos of tea, crouching in the dust before her and willing her on.

Iswor tramps past, as bemused as I, and says only: 'Perhaps she has done something.'

We are entering a zone of such charged sanct.i.ty that any penance, or any crime, trembles with heightened force. Its few inhabitants, mostly monks, exist in a force field of intensified holiness, for their past incarnations have led them here. This domain is venerated even beyond Buddhists and Hindus. The surviving Bon wors.h.i.+p their ancestral mountain here, circling it anticlockwise, and followers of the peaceful Jain faithalthough I cannot identify anyreverence Kailas as the site where their first prophet pa.s.sed away, and circ.u.mambulate it in the Buddhist way, carrying their prayer beads in little bags.

Pilgrims who complete thirteen circuits may walk the inner kora, a short, sometimes dangerous path that approaches the south face. But this is the closest anyone may go. Kailas has never been climbed. At 22,000 feet, it is not a giant by Himalayan standards, but it stands fearsomely solitary. In 1926, a British mountaineer, a Colonel Wilson of the Indian Army, with his sherpa Satan, reconnoitred the southern approaches to the peak, which Wilson likened jauntily to a bowler hat. After toiling up sunless defiles, he thought he identified a ridge that might reach the summit. But time was short. Aghast at the near-perpendicular scarp and the shaly abysses, the two men retreated, while a freakish storm of snow and lightning exploded over them.

It was almost twenty years before another British alpinist, Major Blakeney, fancifully imagined scaling the peak armed with little more than an umbrella; but his Tibetan guide adamantly refused. Then, in the mid-1980s, the great mountaineer Reinhold Messner planned its a.s.sault, while the Chinese temporised, and the matter petered out. n.o.body since then has attempted the summit. The north face is sheer, perhaps unclimbable, and racked by avalanches, the south and west precipitous with shale and glaciers. Only the east, barely visible on the kora, mayor may notoffer a less fearful climb. But the ascent of Kailas is still interdicted above all by a people who will not disturb their G.o.ds.

As we go north, these chasms are still out of sight, hidden by intervening cliffs, and even the granite plinth from which the summit rises is barely visible. In this valley where we gothe valley of Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Lightthe sandstone pales to fawn and amber and rushes up near-vertically in friable bluffs. As the valley narrows, the advance of the prehistoric glacier that carved out its moraine becomes grimly palpable. Tiny and high against one precipice, the first of the four hermitages that ring the mountain seems little more than a barn, built half-invisibly of the precipice stone. Prayer flags pour from its walls like celestial telegraph to the monstrous gully behind. It was from here, perhaps, that a boulder smashed the monastery five years before Hedin came.

We cross a low bridge downriver and struggle up towards Choku Gompa's walls. The crevices around are pocked with concealed caves, where Padmasambhava hid treasure texts, or Milarepa sat. As we go up, the cliff face across the river rears behind us, indented with seeming castles where a frozen waterfall hangs. Around us the earth is furred with white plants like salinated gra.s.s, and there are b.u.t.ter-yellow flowers among the boulders. Far below, the Lha river rushes green, and a train of yaks trickles across the gra.s.s-tinged valley floor. A mile away, the ant-like silhouette of Ram is moving north under his double load to a camping site we don't yet know; while to the south a black hyphen seems not to move at all, where the girl pilgrim is inching towards salvation.

Close by, the hermitage might be any age, although a television aerial and satellite dish stick above its roofs. In fact its thirteenth-century predecessor was levelled to the rocks by Red Guards, who destroyed every monastery around the mountain, and every chorten. By the time some Indian pilgrims reached Choku again in 1983, its ruins were attracting legends. It was said to have been vast, sheltering hundreds of travellers at night, and to have housed the arms of the near-mythic Zoravar Singh. In reality the gompa gompa had been small and unkempt, like this one. Kawaguchi found it quaintly subject to the ruler of Bhutan, with only four lamas living here. had been small and unkempt, like this one. Kawaguchi found it quaintly subject to the ruler of Bhutan, with only four lamas living here.

I discover its monks nested like swallows in little cells whose windows gaze on Kailas. Their lavatory encloses makes.h.i.+ft holes hanging fifty feet above the valley. There are three men only, who speak nothing I understand, and two rumbustious dogs wearing scarlet ruffs, for they too are holy. At the gates of the prayer hall pilgrims are sc.r.a.ping up its dust and stones into pouches. Inside, some 200 candles, each swimming in its cup of oil, draw down a curtain of fiery light. The fumes of yak b.u.t.ter that once reeked through Tibetan shrines have thinned awayreplaced by imported plant oilbut the money that pilgrims pay for replenis.h.i.+ng the lamps is piled with fruit on the altar. Beyond the pillars the dimming ranks of saints and Buddhas people the shadows with their protection: the Buddhas of Past, Present and Future, the Buddha of Long Life cradling nectar, the Buddha of Wisdom wielding his flaming sword. Here too is the Avalokitesvara of compa.s.sion, whose thousand all-seeing arms halo him like a peac.o.c.k's tail, and the mother G.o.ddess Tara, born from his tears, whose great rock crowns the pa.s.s ahead tomorrow, the zenith of the pilgrimage, at 18,600 feet.

But the statue most enshrined in pilgrims' awe is barely discernible. Less than quarter lifesize, and so swagged in jewellery that no arm or even neck emerges, the white marble image of the Amitabha Buddha is the oldest and most precious of Kailas. Under its mandarin crown the pale face gazes, emptied of expression. Its eyes seem closed, its smile barely starting. It is said to be 'self-manifest', shaped by its own will from the stone, and to have flown here from its birthplace in the milky waters of an Indian lake. Encased beside it is the white conch sh.e.l.l blown by the saint Naropa a thousand years ago, and near the altar a huge cauldron of chased copper, floating with lights, is the pot where he brewed his tea.

These three relics are treasured as the body, mind and speech of the Buddha. In the seventeenth century the army of the pious king of neighbouring Guge carried them all away, but the statue grew so heavy that it could not be moved from the valley, the conch sh.e.l.l flew into the air, and the cauldron poured out blood, until the army retreated empty-handed. Soon afterwards the statue, lying among rocks, requested of an old man that he return it to Choku, and he carried it back, light as a cloud.

In the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, the old patronage of Bhutan may have saved the relics, but this is unsure. Already in the nineteenth century a Tibetan pilgrim reported the statue too damaged to a.s.sess, and the first cauldron was very likely melted down. In 1991 sixteen artefacts were stolen from the gompa gompa for the Western art market; and the conch sh.e.l.l, for all its embossed silver, looks spanking new. for the Western art market; and the conch sh.e.l.l, for all its embossed silver, looks spanking new.

A Tibetan pilgrim, who speaks cautious Mandarin, questions a cheery monk for me. All the relics are old, the monk says, and came here by magic. Sometimes the conch sh.e.l.l is taken to bereaved homes and sounded in the ear of the dead. 'It will light up their way! It will guide them. Sometimes the dead are brought up to the monastery for this.' He speaks with breathy cert.i.tude. 'The statue? It is self-made. In former times, it used to speak. It is the Buddha of learning and light. Students with difficulties have come here to learn and recite his mantra...'

But when I ask about Kangri Latsen, the monk turns cold. Latsen is the wild, autochthonous G.o.d of the heights to which Choku clings, converted to Buddhism, but older and darker, and kept separate, as if secret. But I badger a younger monk with the G.o.d's repeated name until he leads me down from the temple terrace through a storeroom and unlocks a door into the near-dark.

At first I can make out nothing. A single b.u.t.ter lamp is burning beneath a drift of white, and a slit window frames Kailas, but sheds no light. The room looks poor as an outhouse, its clay floors cracked. The monk is nervous, girlish. He waits near the door. I discern an altar of plain wood where the white silks hang, and some money thrown beneath. I step up to it. And out of the clouding scarves a red demon's face leers, straggled in red hair. It is glaring at the floor in eerie fixation, its teeth bared and eyes popping and inflamed. Of its body, if it has one, I can see nothing. But it wears a green crown, like a child's paper hat, and dangles a chunky amulet. The altar is flanked by two four-foot elephant tusks, and other faces are grinning from the silks beside it. Buddhists say that these ancient Bon wreckers have been converted to guardians of the faith, but this one seems to exist in angry exile, like a troubling unconscious, and all the gifts bestowed on him to no avail. It was this misanthrope, presumably, who chucked down a boulder on the monastery a century ago.

A group of Khampa pilgrims has crowded in after me, not knowing, I think, what will be here, but fervent to wors.h.i.+p. Their women remain outside. The old men buy more scarves to heap beneath Kangri Latsen, beseeching in their grat.i.tude, stooped before the young monk, praying. I watch from the dark in fascinated estrangement, until they file away. Perhaps these raucous local G.o.dslords of the wind and the avalancheare easier to comprehend than the otherworldly Buddhas, and more prudent to propitiate on this hardest of all pilgrimages.

The Lha Chu, the River of the Spirits, guides us for five miles more along a corridor of paling sandstone. For 3,000 feet on either side its walls unfurl in towering curtains of pink and copper red. Some softness in the stone pulls it into fissured terraces that cut across the vertical cracks of the cliffs, until the whole rock face splinters to Cyclopean building blocks that travel unbroken for hundreds of yards. Then, high up, torn by wind, the strata thin and grow detached. They ascend to a filigree of turrets and palisades, pierced by the illusion of high-arched doors, until the skyline fills with wrecked palaces and temples. Where the rock turns sh.e.l.l pink, especially, these silhouettes seem to glow in another ether. In between, frozen waterfalls drop out of gullies, or tip over the cliff summits in flashes of ice. When these at last reach the valley at our feet, they melt into tributaries that barely flow, choking the Lha river with splinters.

The mountaintop palaces, of course, are the residencies of Buddha deities, and every oddity of crag or boulder becomes a sign of their habitation, or is the spontaneous self-shaping of some sacred prodigy. In the valley side facing Choku the monks descry sixteen saints cl.u.s.tered in rock, while on the summit floats the silk tent of Kangri Latsen. Beyond these, as we walk, a mystic stream carries down rainbow light from the mountain, and a rock cupola to the east is the fortress of the Hindu demon Ravana, converted to Buddhism, complete with his yak and his dog. The boulder that projects nearby is the crystal reliquary of the saint Nyo Lhanangpa, enclosing his vision of the Buddha, and beyond this the monkey G.o.d Hanuman kneels to offer incense to Kailas. Behind us to the east the tail of the wonderful horse of Gesar of Ling, Tibet's epic king, spills from the heights in an icy cascade, and his seven brothers inhabit seven rock pinnacles along our way. To the west, on three towering 20,000-foot peaks, dwell the three great bodhisattvas of longevity, and a granite boulder beside our track is a serpent-quelling Buddha made manifest. Everywhere, for those with sight, the stone throbs with life. And on Kailas itself gleam the glacial portals to the heart of Demchog's citadel.

In this complex topography Buddhist, Hindu and unregenerate Bon deities and spirits throng the path in overlapping regiments. There are literally thousands of them. Often I can locate a site only by some solitary pilgrim, prostrated where the hand or footprint of a Buddha has burnt like sulphur into the rock. Some of the G.o.ds and bodhisattvas fly confusingly between abodes. Others reside in several eyries at once. But always, in some sense, they are corporeal with their petrified dwellings, to which the pilgrim turns to pray. The great lama Gotsampa, searching for hearthstones on which to brew his tea, found none that he could use: for all the stones around him were the self-manifest images of Buddhas, or inscribed with their speech.

Wherever a cave scoops out a cliff and a hermit is remembered, feats of past piety soak into the rock, and the saints continue there in mystic body long after their death. The kora of every pious pilgrim adds its mite to this bank of invisible virtue, and the years-long meditation of a revered saintMilarepa, Padmasambhava, even the ousted Bonchungsaturates the mountain with its mana. Yet neither devoted ascetics nor conquering Buddha have quite eradicated a suspicion of darker G.o.ds. Most of these ancient troublemakers have been converted to meditation deities and protectors like Kangri Latsen, but sometimes their conversion looks shaky, and they backslide. Ranked in tiers up the slopes of Kailas, the lha lha sky G.o.ds fight the surrounding sky G.o.ds fight the surrounding lhamain lhamain (who are destined for h.e.l.l), and their pa.s.sions condemn them at last to bitter cycles of rebirth. The common demons that plague Tibetan livesthe (who are destined for h.e.l.l), and their pa.s.sions condemn them at last to bitter cycles of rebirth. The common demons that plague Tibetan livesthe sadak sadak 'lords of the earth', the black snakes of the 'lords of the earth', the black snakes of the klu klu lurking beneath the waters, the terrible armoured lurking beneath the waters, the terrible armoured tsen tsen on their flying red horseswither to Buddhist servants in the shadow of Kailas, but the mountain's capricious moodsits sudden storms and rock fallsstir countervailing fears and nervous rites of propitiation. on their flying red horseswither to Buddhist servants in the shadow of Kailas, but the mountain's capricious moodsits sudden storms and rock fallsstir countervailing fears and nervous rites of propitiation.

The pilgrims who pa.s.s us are few now. They go fast, intent and smiling. Many cover the hard, thirty-two-mile path in thirty-six hours; some will complete it in a single day. And hards.h.i.+p is of the essence. The kora ahead follows an intense trajectory of purification, mounting past sites for the ritual cleansing of sin to the fearsome pa.s.s, sacred to Tara, and its climax of redemption. Even these deep-lunged pilgrims may falter in exhaustion on the way. Meanwhile the pulse of the stone footprint under their anointing fingers, of their body p.r.o.ne against the ground, of the gaze of the mountain itself, generate a deep, sensory exchange. You gather empowered earth and pluck healing herbs. You sip divine water. Sin is cleaned like sweat from the body. Your prayers, too, are spoken aloud into the listening airI hear, but cannot distinguish themprayers inherited from family maybe, or the mantra murmured like breathing as you go. And at some time you utter the plea that your pilgrimage may aid the enlightenment of all sentient beings.

Behind me in the valley I am startled to see three men walking towards me counterclockwise. I imagine they are Bon, whose older faithful circ.u.mambulate this way, against the Buddhist stream, and I tentatively call a greeting. But they pa.s.s by with their faces retracted into hoods, averted, as if ashamed, leaving me mystified.

Before the Buddha came, and before Demchog, this was their mountain. Millennia ago, the Bonpo say, their founder Shenrab, sired by a cuckoo, alighted here from heaven, conquered the local demons, and gave the mountain to 360 G.o.ds named gekkos, reflecting the lunar cycle of the year. The chief, Gekko, for all his lizardish name, was a terrifying predecessor of Demchog and s.h.i.+va, with nine arms and blue-black skin, snorting out blizzards and thunder. His Kailas was a rock-crystal mountain, the earthly emanation of a celestial palace, which would survive the destruction of the world. If the Bonpo's universe was conceived as a tent, Kailas stood as its central pole, piercing the opening that illumined the sun and stars circling within, and the worlds beneath. To the Bonpo this 'Nine-Stacked Swastika Mountain' is inscribed with the emblem of fortune (rotating anticlockwise) and the footprints of their saints are all about it.

Buddhists contend that Bon is the leftover of a demon-ridden past. But the Bonpo claim that theirs is the primal faith, received from Persia, perhaps, or Central Asia, long before Buddhism. The historical Buddha, they concede, may be an incarnation of their own Shenrab. Their beliefs, in fact, go back to a time when the region around Kailas, the kingdom of Shang-shung, was the first, royal cradle of Tibetan culture. They were priests to the early kings and their practices were rife with sorcery, spirit control and the guidance of the dead. Yogis tower through Bon legends. They hang their clothes on sunbeams and turn into eagles. For at least two centuries this diffused faith fought with an incoming Buddhism and was slowly transformed by it, to re-emerge a thousand years ago as a religion whose tenets were often indistinguishable from the Buddha's.

Buddhism, in turn, imbibed many Bon G.o.ds and practices, including sacred dances and prayer flags. And both faiths, it seems, were influenced by the rites and spirits of nameless cults that preceded them. Tibetan Buddhists accept the 'white' Bon uneasily, whose temple statues are yet more savage than theirs, and whose embrace of magic is more wholesale. (The 'black' Bon remain an unmentionable fringe of shamanistic outcasts.) So the interfused faiths coexist, even in Lhasa's holy of holies. Right up to the Chinese invasion a Buddhist official would depart each year to a shrine near the Yarlung valley, cemetery of Tibet's kings, and there burn b.u.t.ter lamps and scatter grain in a plea to the cuckoo, the holy bird of the Bon, to fly back to Tibet.

He was an old man now, far into his eighties. He sat among cus.h.i.+ons in a room high in the Kathmandu monastery he had founded: a simple cell, his bed folded nearby. A monk had placed a tiny cus.h.i.+on on the carpet before him, where I knelt. From the hill opposite, the noises of a Hindu templeoverrun by tourists, mangy monkeys and vermilion-daubed statueswere blurred to rumours in the sultry air.

Nothing in the Rinpoche's face, where the gentle eyes and still-dark eyebrows seemed touched in as afterthoughts, betrayed the long strain of travels fostering Bon communitieshe had become a holy figure to themor his year in a Chinese prison. In 1961 he had tried to escape Tibet with a group of lamas from his monastery, carrying sacred texts and relics.

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