To A Mountain In Tibet Part 8

The track is steepening. The yaks and jhaboo jhaboos that had been following the stream bed are lumbering among the pilgrims now. Often I stop against a boulder, gasping for breath, fearing the first spasm of alt.i.tude sickness, which does not come. Ahead stretches a long stadium of mountains whose rocks show black against a thickening carpet of snow. All colour has been wrung out of it. Only the sky shines intermittent blue above the flow of ridges into the valley. In this icy air the people are so swathed and goggled that among the fast-moving Tibetans, swinging their strings of prayer beads, their staffs, their thermoses of b.u.t.tered tea, it is hard to tell Indian from German, Austrian, even a pair of Russians. A herdsman has brought his two mastiffs with him, collared in red wool, for their merit.

The boulders become teeming sites of veneration. We walk through a broken labyrinth of granite: rocks the size of cottages, powder grey, sh.e.l.l pink. Milarepa defeated his Bon rival here by stacking a third giant boulder on to the wizard's second one, and left behind this toppling pillar, stamped with his footprints.

To the pilgrims there are no mute stones. They disperse and sit familiarly among them. There are boulders that they squeeze between to test their virtue, another that they crawl beneath. The rocks become the judgement of the mountain. One outcrop, named the Place of Black and White Sins, forms a crude tunnel through whose symbolic h.e.l.l the pilgrim must crush himself before returning down another pa.s.sage to a higher state. In such crevices the living stone senses the purity of any body pa.s.sing through, and may contract so violently that the guilty are half entombed.

Three pilgrims, sitting pleasantly together, remember a time when the twin rocks facing them came to judgement. They speak to Iswor haltingly in Tamang, but they cannot enter the rock pa.s.sage. It looks impa.s.sably narrow, and is blocked solid by ice. The thinnest person may be trapped here, they say. The rock knows everything. Two years ago they levered a fat friend through. 'He was as tall as you!' they cry at me, and disintegrate into helpless merriment. One of them pushed, two of them pulled, and after half an hour, they say, the man emerged thinner, sinless but bloodied and half suffocated. Could I not wait for the ice to melt?

But the track carries us up again, and the mountain valley closes unsoftened around our strange, heterogeneous trickle of beasts and humans drawn up like iron filings to the pa.s.s. We go through intermittent sunlight. Whenever it clouds, the air freezes round us. The crust of snow, printed with yaks' hooves, is crisp and hard underfoot, even in June. A sharp wind has risen. Far ahead of us, the path elongates along the hillsides, until its pilgrims become snow and granite. We are climbing through a monochrome limbo. Hundreds of cairns and inscribed rocks litter the track and bristle on the skylines. Among their boulders the scarlet scarves of women flicker and disappear again. I am barely an hour from the summit. Somewhere to our right the Drolma river has died away. Impa.s.sive trains of yaks, some with blond heads and tails, are marching up behind me, their cloven hooves smiting the rocks, and their ridersanxious Hindusclinging to padded saddles. And once a whiskered ancient in threadbare trainers, overtaking me at ease, clasps my shoulder in a shaking hand that kindles a shock of warmth.

We come to a sacred rivulet where yaks are drinking. Its tributary is sought above all by butchers, who here wash away the sin of killing animals. Iswor has stopped too, so swathed in scarves that he shows only a pair of watchful eyes. He says: 'We can't stay long at this height. My head...'

Another man is walking behind me: a pilgrim, with his wife and child and beast. Recent centuries have not touched him. He has his own. He sees with a bright, focused intensity. He has come from lake country to the north, or perhaps from farther, and the distance brings merit. He prostrates often to the G.o.d mountain, and the earth feels hot under him. The prayer's words are strong, although he does not understand them, and the G.o.ds breathe back from the summits. He has remembered everything the village shaman spoke of, and placated the klu klu in the stream, in case they are there. The water's coldness comes cleansing to the touch. He puts it in a phial for his sick mother. That is what he has come for, and for the black earth-lords to spare his barley crop, and for the calving of the third yak. These are the great things. His wife, whom he shares with his brother, has other thoughts. Women's. He knows what they are, he thinks. in the stream, in case they are there. The water's coldness comes cleansing to the touch. He puts it in a phial for his sick mother. That is what he has come for, and for the black earth-lords to spare his barley crop, and for the calving of the third yak. These are the great things. His wife, whom he shares with his brother, has other thoughts. Women's. He knows what they are, he thinks.

In the last monastery he burnt rhododendron leaves and a juniper twig while the G.o.d's eyes watched him in the lamplight: Chenresig, the many-armed (was that he?). He had offered enough tsampa tsampa to alert the G.o.d's attention, he was sure. And lit a b.u.t.ter lamp. Then he had asked that the Chinese leave Tibet; they had taken his grandfather to a camp somewhere, and returned him dead. He remembers his father crying. There was the Great Elephant Cave too, full of hermits' feats, where he poured out some to alert the G.o.d's attention, he was sure. And lit a b.u.t.ter lamp. Then he had asked that the Chinese leave Tibet; they had taken his grandfather to a camp somewhere, and returned him dead. He remembers his father crying. There was the Great Elephant Cave too, full of hermits' feats, where he poured out some chang chang from his thermos. The monk gave him a pill baked from holy clay, which cost a little. At the cemetery he snipped a woollen patch from his from his thermos. The monk gave him a pill baked from holy clay, which cost a little. At the cemetery he snipped a woollen patch from his chuba chuba, and left it there. He felt lighter after this. His wife left a bead. So the G.o.d of death might spare them worse futures. They are clean now.

Our path swerves up through glacial debris to the last ascent. The hills beneath us look rough-skinned, half-created. Their only colours are those we bring, and a sudden, copper-red stain of lichen over the boulders. My head is free of pain, but light, faint. The fear of sickness has faded, and a breathless fatigue rises instead. I climb no more than ten paces before stopping again, heaving for air. The merest extra effortto mount a ledge or overstep a stoneexacts this gasping price. I wait for the panicky breathlessness of my avalanche ascent to return, but it does not. I fix my eyes on the ground beneath me, patterned with a dull glitter of snow. My feet march like somebody else's. I steer them from rock to rock. They climb past boulders newly dressed in votive clothes, and oxygen canisters discarded in the clefts. A tuft of hairhuman or yakdrifts at my ankles. A horse's skull shines in the snow.

People die here. Many think it safer to ride than to walk. Kawaguchi, racked by headaches, and even Sven Hedin ascended the pa.s.s on yaks. The accident-p.r.o.ne Swami Hamsa was almost swept to his death in an avalanche. Others drowned in the freezing river below Drira p.h.u.k, before a new bridge was built in 1986. The Hindu dead are routinely flown back to India, but others remain on the mountain. Hedin noticed a corpse tumbled into a crevice like a bunch of rags, and recent pilgrims stumbled on the eviscerated torso of a girl.

Even the Tibetans falter sometimes, and fall forward on the boulders, the women's dark, bright-ringed hands clenching the stone. The Indians ride ashen-faced on their ponies, their mouths masked. Out of the pa.s.s ahead an ice-cold wind is blowing. Our breath rasps with weakness or prayer. It dies among the clink and shuffle of hooves and boots. I stop to write these notes, crouched on my knees. My fingers have gone numb, my handwriting broken. Now, as I try to read it, I see only words blurring like cuneiform into the damp from sleet or streaming nostrils. A pilgrim beside me cries out something, but whatever meaning I understood has faded illegibly from the page. So has my worry about Iswor, gone fast ahead. The wider landscape toothe shapes of surrounding peakshas wandered into gibberish.

The sage Gotsampa, pioneering the kora, became the first to ascend the pa.s.s. After straying along the Secret Path of the Dakinis, he was lured here by a posse of twenty-one blue wolves. As he followed them in wonder they dissolved one into another until only a single beast was left, which disappeared into the rock face on the crown of the pa.s.s. Then the hermit knew that he had been guided by a vision of the twenty-one Taras, emanations of the G.o.ddess of compa.s.sion. This was her hill of salvation. Beyond it the way plunges for over a thousand feet into the valley. But here, at the 18,600-foot zenith of the kora, in a moment of blinding transition, pilgrims might pa.s.s into purity at the axis of the world.

Now hoa.r.s.e cries sound above us in the wind, and a hillock of brilliant colour bursts from the gap above. I climb on a wave of relief. The slopes ease apart under a porcelain sky. A few minutes later I am walking through a blaze of prayer flags. They are festooned so thick on everything around that only at their top does the double summit of the boulder sacred to Tarathe Flaming Rockbreak free in a surge of granite. The poles from which the flags once flew have long crashed under their weight before the gales that fly through the pa.s.s, leaving this formless ocean of parched and vivid pennants heaped on boulders all around. Pilgrims trying to circ.u.mambulate the sacred stone flounder among ropes and shrouded rocks. Only here and there, if you part the brilliant curtain from the stone, do you glimpse the mantras blazoned in crimson and yellow, with money glued by b.u.t.ter to the surface, or hanks of hair, even people's teeth. Stubbornly I plunge across the boulders through this undergrowth. My feet snag among thrown-off clothes, shoes, dishes and animal skulls lying on half-melted ice. But an infectious victory is in the air.

Exhausted pilgrims sit in groups. They feast on tea and roasted barley. Others tear aside the flags to touch their palms and foreheads to the rock. A circle of men crouch in prayer that sounds like purring cats. Two monks sit facing one another in silence, and Hindu pilgrims are pa.s.sing round their prasada prasada sweets in dazed celebration. From time to time a new arrival breaks into a joyous shout. Prayer leaves scatter in the air and blow away. And once a pair of shamans, their torn robes fringed in scarlet and gold, their hair flying wild, leap up to hurl sweets in dazed celebration. From time to time a new arrival breaks into a joyous shout. Prayer leaves scatter in the air and blow away. And once a pair of shamans, their torn robes fringed in scarlet and gold, their hair flying wild, leap up to hurl tsampa tsampa into the wind, and cry on and on: into the wind, and cry on and on: 'Lha-so-so-so! Lha-so-so!' 'Lha-so-so-so! Lha-so-so!' Victory to the G.o.ds! Victory to the G.o.ds!

I slump between their groups, washed in their happiness. Among these stark precipices the artificial riot of flags throws up an almost violent wave of prayer, touching and defiant. Even the farther outcrops are draped in banners where the pawprint left in the rock by Gotsampa's wolf shows clear to the eye of faith.

The twenty-one dissolving wolves proclaim the G.o.ddess of the place. To the Tibetans this protean deity is Drolma, the G.o.ddess of liberation, and it is she who forgives their sins and returns them newly pure to the world below. In her favourite guises as the Green and the White Tara, the divinities of motherhood and action, she sits on a throne of lotus and moon, and sometimes extends one leg in readiness to act. But her body may go through rainbow colours, and as the twenty-one Taras (who look almost identical in fresco) she diffuses into multiple benevolence, and she has the power to descend unscathed into h.e.l.l. Above all she is the deity of pity, born from the tears of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compa.s.sion, as he wept at his powerlessness to comfort all living things. Call on her name, evoke her mandala, and she will fly in to the rescue. Her statues speak. She is the mother of the Tibetan people, and has moved through their mortal history as a pious queen or consort, so that illiterate pilgrims know her pet.i.tion, which is being breathed against her prayer-hung rock as I watch.

It is the custom to leave some object on Drolma's pa.s.s, and to take something else away. Iswor, who is waiting for me, has brought a string of prayer flags from Darchen, and together we stretch them among the others. But he is feeling vaguely ill again. Under the scarf-swathed cap, the dark gla.s.ses, the glisten of sun cream, I imagine his face too pale. He wants to go down fast, but is ashamed to abandon me. He carries a heavy pack; I, almost nothing. I urge him away.

For a while I linger, reluctant to leave, although the sun has clouded. Other pilgrims are starting to trickle away. I wait, as if something might happen. But there is only the sandpaper wind and the paling sky. The air is thinner than any I have sensed. The euphoria of those around me lifts into momentary chanting that touches me like a benign contagion.

Deep in one pocket I find the sandalwood incense-sticks that Tashi had given me to burn for him on the pa.s.s. He had said: 'I think I will never reach there myself. But you will have gone for me.'

I scrutinise the packet in the hardening wind. It reads: 'Not only to please the Buddhas and Guardian divinities, but also to satiate the ordinary beings from the six realms and pacify demons and obstacle makers (sandalwood and secret substances).'

I have forgotten to bring matches, but a fervent youthprayer beads in one hand, a camera in the otheroffers me his cigarette lighter. After a long time I ignite a sheaf and shelter it among some flags. I call up Tashi's memory in the teeth of the wind. Then I start down.

One mile and 1,400 near-vertical feet to the valley below, and I am starting too late for comfort. The trail plummets over flint-sharp rocks, down the spine of a precipitous ridge with no end in sight, nothing to soften the grey wreckage underfoot, no hint of gra.s.s or flower. The path is too steep for yaks, and the ponies go riderless.

But almost at once the tarn of Gaurikundamong the highest lakes in the worldappears in a basin just below. Dark under its cliffs, ringed by the cloudy jade of softening ice, its centre is still pure snow, and the way down to it so arduous that few pilgrims attempt it. Buddhists call it the Lake of Mercy. It is the bathing pool of the sky-dancers, and of the G.o.ddess Parvati, wife of Shiva, who seduced him by her ablutions. Only in late summer do hardy pilgrims clamber down to collect the water, and pour it over their heads as a freezing baptism.

I pa.s.s a fresh sari, beautiful in purple and gold, discarded on the path. Nearby a sad-faced Hindu lies propped among rocks, gazing at the lake. He calls out to me: 'How far is it to the valley? How many hours?'

I hazard a guess. He is an Indian from Malaysia, and has never seen anywhere like this. 'I didn't understand, I thought it would be easy. Yet here I am.' He looks finished. 'But the others have gone.'

'Gone where?'

'Only seven of our group made it, out of twenty-three.'

'But you're over the hardest now.'

'We were told that if we bathed in Manasarovar, and finished the parikrama parikrama of Kailas, everything would be all right...' of Kailas, everything would be all right...'

'That you would gain merit? Perhaps moksha?' This is the Hindu nirvana.

'Perhaps.' But the word comes so drained, so disheartened, that it seems irrelevant. It is the long descent ahead that obsesses him. 'The other six have gone in front of me.' He touches my arm. 'Will there be horses at the bottom?'

'Yes, there will be horses.' I am guessing again. 'And the way will be level.' That much I know. 'It's a river valley. Beautiful.'

He wavers to his feet as I leave him. It is long before dusk, but a deep, sunless cold is settling in. The knee-jarring descent is still dotted with pilgrims. They clasp one another's hands as they go, still praying, and even now stop to touch their fingers to rocks dented by Milarepa's feetstones smeared with cotton threads and yak b.u.t.teror add a pebble to a cairn. I glimpse Iswor, two hundred feet below me, waiting, and blunder down among loosened shale. A flotsam of empty cans and cigarette cartons strews the way, as if even litter becomes holy here. On either side the slopes sink in diagonal blades towards the Lham-chu valley, while the skyline shatters into crags. High to our right a black peak named the Axe of Karma threatens the sky, but not (it is said) the pilgrim walking in Tara's grace.

I come at last into a valley soft with evening sun. Beyond an isolated rock imprinted by the Buddha, the Lham river flows through level gra.s.slands, and nomad horses tinkle on its far side. I have eight miles to go, but the way is easy beside sliding rivulets, shielded by mountains converted to Buddhism long ago. From another prostration platform the eastern tip of Kailas momentarily breaks into view, while to my left gleams the mountain of the Medicine Buddha, whose slopes are spread with healing herbs and minerals.

The sun has set by the time I reach camp. A few stars are out, and the meadows under Zutrul p.h.u.k monastery, the Cave of Miracles, are quiet with sleeping yaks and foreign tents. Ram, who has glided ahead of us all day, augments our iron rations with warming soup. We sit silent together, while the night cold waits outside. Now that the pa.s.s is behind us, we all seem drained. We spread our sleeping bags on the hard earth as if its stones were velvet. For a while I write notes by torchlight, trying to recall the colour of pilgrims' clothes, the texture of rocks on the pa.s.s. But my fingers are stiff with cold, and I soon give up. In the minutes before sleep, a shadowy melancholy descends: the bewilderment when something long awaited has gone.

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 pa.s.s now-familiar figuresAvalokitesvara, Amitabha, Padmasambhavaseated 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 pa.s.sage 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 contestMilarepa pulling Bonchung round the kora clockwisehad 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 sh.o.r.e.

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 k.n.o.b 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 fiancee 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 transiencehis 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 b.u.t.ter 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.

The path lifts high over the river now and winds above a canyon daubed purple and black: the blood of the Devil's demon yak, it is said, slaughtered by Gesar of Ling. We tramp dazedly above, through scrub and russet shale, staring down precipices of harlequin oddness. Through this palette two pilgrims are moving forward like caterpillars, prostrating on the stones, rising again, their padded hands lifted praying, falling. Their faces are black and m.u.f.fled: two women, young, tired. One still mumbles prayers with each prostration, the other mews like a kitten. The dust of pa.s.sing ponies closes their eyes.

I overtake them cautiously, as if skirting some private rite, although they lift their faces and smile. Within an hour I have crested the canyon path, and there opens out beyond me the remembered peace of the Barga plain. Beneath us the diffused headwaters of the Sutlej river are seeping from the slopes a thousand miles before it joins the Indus, and the sky is static with clouds. The kora is closing now, turning along the southern hills of Kailas. Forty miles away, clear across the plateau, the white upheaval of Gurla Mandhata appears, with Rakshas Tal, the demon lake, stretched indigo below, and close at hand a path leads under the last foothills, where pilgrims are walking home.

SEARCHABLE TERMS.

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Akbar, Moghul Emperor, 134 Amitabha Buddha, 126, 1712, 214 Amitabha valley, 169, 181 Angkor Wat, Cambodia, 139 Annapurna (mountain), 1 Api (mountain), 147 Arjuna (mythical archer), 141 Avalokitesvara (bodhisattva), 66, 171, 194, 210, 214 Avalokitesvara (mountain), 188 Axe of Karma (peak), 213

Barga plain, 144, 148, 218 beyul (sanctuaries), 82 (sanctuaries), 82 Bhagavad Gita, 141 bharal (mountain sheep), 103 (mountain sheep), 103 Bhotia people, 19, 21, 25, 60, 78, 86 Bhutan, 76, 172 Bhutan, Maharaja of, 144 Blakeney, Major, 169 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 31 Bon (Tibetan faith), 103, 126, 163, 168, 173, 17780, 216 Bonchung (Bon wizard), 167, 176, 216 Bonri, Mount, 10 Borobudur, Java, 140, 142 Brahma (Hindu G.o.d), 5, 119, 122 Brahmaputra river: source, 5, 100, 12930; course, 129 Buddha, Gautama, 6, 120, 185 Buddha, Samantabhadra, 51 Buddha, Vajrasattva, 50 Buddhists and Buddhism: and Mount Kailas, 6; obscurity, 19; in Tibet, 301, 49; and reincarnation, 434; statues, 489, 657; Mahayana, 4950; deities, 4950, 667; doctrines and beliefs, 502, 77, 134; art, 523; ban on taking life, 69; affected by Western ways, 70; Chinese attacks on, 114; adepts, 1346; wheels, 156; victory over Bon, 1623; takes over Bon G.o.ds and practices, 178, 216; effect of purified eyes, 193; and death, 1979, 2023; see also see also tantrism tantrism Burma: palaces, 140 Burroughs, William, 199

Cave of Miracles, 216 Ceremony of Long Life, 44 Changan, China, 88 Chenresig (Buddhist G.o.d), 49, 65, 206 Cherkip see see Serkyi Cherkip Serkyi Cherkip China: bans pilgrimages to Kailas, 7; Cultural Revolution, 7, 114, 117, 121, 184, 192, 214; invades Tibet (1959), 32, 43, 46, 82; and power of Mount Kailas, 34; Khampa resistance to, 79; closes Tibet's borders, 85; attacked by medieval Tibetan warriors, 88; road-building in Tibet, 91, 95; immigration officials in Tibet, 108; destruction and persecution in Tibet, 111, 114, 121, 134, 170, 214, 217; troops in Tibet, 146, 170, 217; soldiers at Mount Kailas, 1489, 1578, 160; Red Guards, 170 Chiu monastery, 1235, 1278 Choku monastery, 1704 chortens, 71, 1667 Christianity: missionaries in Tibet, 99, 102, 164; and Tibetan Buddhism, 1023

dakinis, 153, 108, 1956; see also see also sky-dancers sky-dancers Dakshinkali valley, 678 Dalai Lama: flight from Tibet, 323, 106; and reincarnation, 45, 49; and hidden Shambala, 82; status, 102; Chinese hostility to, 109 Damding Donkhang, 185 Darchen, Tibet, 1446 dead, the: disposal in Tibet, 1502, 154; and mountain path, 1845; and Vajra Yogini burial ground, 1957; and reincarnation, 201 death: denied by Hindus, 1412; ritual and experience of, 198202; see also Tibetan Book of the Dead, The delok see also Tibetan Book of the Dead, The delok (returned from dead), 202 Demchog (G.o.d), 137, 150, 1589, 175, 1934 (returned from dead), 202 Demchog (G.o.d), 137, 150, 1589, 175, 1934 Deng Xiaoping, 111 Desideri, Ippolito, SJ, 989, 129, 143 Dharamsala, 60 Dharapuri, 93 Dhaulagiri (mountain), 1 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 31 Drachom Ngagye Durtro, 150 Drira p.h.u.k Gompa (Monastery of the Cave of the Yak Horns), 1867, 195 Drokpa people (Tibet), 110, 157 Drolma (Buddhist G.o.ddess), 49, 53, 210 Drolma-la river, 191, 195, 205 Durtros, 150, 152, 154

Ellora (temple, India), 139 Everest, Mount, 1

Flaming Rock (sacred stone), 209

Ganga Chu river, 128 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma), 141 Ganges river: source, 5, 100, 128; course, 129 Gaurikund (tarn), 212 Gekko (Bon deity), 177 Gelugpa (Buddhist sect), 104 Gesar of Ling (Tibetan epic king), 175, 215, 218 Golden Basin (Mount Kailas), 167 gompos (dark lords), 153 (dark lords), 153 Gotsampa (lama), 175, 187, 208, 210 Guge (kingdom), 172 Gurla Mandhata (mountain), 89, 11516, 118, 121, 132, 142, 147, 218 Gyangdrak monastery, 161

Hamsa, Swami Bhagwan, 101, 207 Hanuman (Hindu monkey G.o.d), 175 Haroun-al-Rashid, 88 Hea.r.s.ey, Hyder, 99 Hedin, Sven, 101, 125, 1301, 159, 170, 2078 hermits, 1334, 136, 167, 169 Hilsa (village), 912, 95, 98, 103 Hilton, James: Lost Horizon Lost Horizon, 32 Hindus: and Mount Kailas, 6, 1012, 197; venerate Lake Manasarovar, 122; on shooting stars, 132; temples copy Kailas's layout, 139; bathe in Manasarovar, 141, 183, 212; view of death, 1412; exhausted by pilgrimage, 1824, 208, 212; deaths on Mount Kailas, 184, 207 Hitler, Adolf, 102, 131 Holmes, Sherlock (fictional figure), 31 Humla (region), Nepal, 1, 845, 103

India: pilgrimage tours to Kailas, 1078, 184; see also see also Hindus Hindus Indus river: source, 5, 1001, 130; course, 129

Jains, 168 Jamgon Kongtrul the Great (lama), 133 Java, 140 jhaboos (yak-Indian cow cross), 78, 85, 91, 154, 203 (yak-Indian cow cross), 78, 85, 91, 154, 203 Jung, Carl Gustav, 52, 199

Kagyu sect and monks, 127, 134, 149, 187, 194, 199, 214 Kailas, Mount (Mount Meru): as goal, 47; mystery and sacred image, 56, 334, 52, 1934; as source of rivers, 5, 18, 100, 1289; pilgrims to, 32, 478, 72, 92, 1012, 1078, 137, 14650, 1523, 156, 1589, 1678, 1767, 1928, 2049, 218; viewed, 11617; and Lake Manasarovar, 11819; deities and spirits, 1379, 1756, 1934; shape and geology, 138, 143, 189; temples copy, 13940; ascent, 155, 1678, 174, 18998, 2039; cleansing power, 1589; Tibetan name (Kang Rinpoche), 158; ceremonies, 15962; mast erected, 15961; Russian-German evangelist at, 161, 1635; and earth connection to heaven, 1623; flies in from unknown country, 163; remains unclimbed, 1689; Bonpo claim to, 1778, 180; guidebooks to, 1935; and visions, 193; descent, 21118; Milarepa reaches summit, 216 Kalacakra Tantra, 812 Kali (Hindu deity), 679, 139 Kangri chorten, 166 Kangri Latsen (G.o.d), 1734, 176 Kangyur (Buddhist sayings), 51, 128 Karakorum (mountain range), 90 Karnali river and valley: course, 2, 5, 18, 20, 357, 71, 8990, 98, 106; source, 129 Kathmandu: highway to Delhi, 1; and rural immigrants, 8; monastery, 69, 76 Kawaguchi, Ekai (j.a.panese monk), 101, 127, 144, 170, 186, 207 Kermi (village), 25, 27, 34 Khampa people, 79, 110, 157, 173 Khmer people (Cambodia), 139 Khojarnath monastery, Tibet, 110 Kingdon-Ward, Frank, 83 Kipling, Rudyard: Kim Kim, 31 Koros, Alexander Csoma de, 81 Krishna (Hindu G.o.d), 141 k.u.muchhiya river, 71, 79 Kunlun (mountain range), 90

Laing, R.D., 199 lammergeyers, 867 Landor, Henry Savage, 100 Leary, Timothy, 199 Lha river and valley, 148, 167, 170, 174, 185, 188, 191 Lham-chu river and valley, 21314 Lhasa: riots, 145 Lipu Lekh pa.s.s, 184