To A Mountain in Tibet Highlights

The most sacred of the world's mountains–holy to one fifth of the earth's people–remains withdrawn on its plateau like a pious illusion. For years I had heard of it only as a figment. Isolated beyond the parapet of the central Himalaya, it permeated early Hindu scriptures as the mystic Mount Meru, whose origins go back to the dawn of Aryan time. In this incarnation it rotates like a spindle at the axis of all creation, ascending immeasurable miles to the palace of Brahma, greatest and most remote of the gods, and plunging as deep beneath the earth. From its foot flow the four rivers that nourish the world, and everything created–trees, rocks, humans–finds its blueprint here. In time the mystical Meru and the earthly Kailas merged in people's minds. Early wanderers to the source of the four great Indian rivers–the Indus, the Ganges, the Sutlej and the Brahmaputra–found to their wonder that each one rose near a cardinal point of Kailas. loc: 98

It enters history quickened already by centuries of overlapping divinities. About a millennium ago the pagan gods in charge of the mountain were converted to Buddhism and became its protectors. A few slipped through the net, of course, with even a flying sky goddess, and linger still. loc: 115

a multitude of Buddhas and bodhisattvas–saints who have delayed their entry into nirvana in order to help others–flew in to occupy the high crags and summits, loc: 117

Then the Buddha himself arrived and nailed Kailas to earth loc: 118

It was on to such a peak that the first Tibetan kings descended from the sky (eventually to be cut off and stranded). Hindus believe its summit to be the palace of Shiva–the lord of destruction and change–who sits there in eternal meditation. loc: 120

My mother died just now, it seems, not in the way she wished; my father before her; my sister before that, at the age of twenty-one. Time is unsteady here. Sometimes I am a boy again, trying to grasp the words Never, never again. Humans, it is said, cannot comprehend eternity, in time or space. We are better equipped to register the distance spanned by a village drumbeat. The sheerness of never is beyond us. loc: 160

You cannot walk out your grief, I know, or absolve yourself of your survival, or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are. loc: 165

A journey is not a cure. It brings an illusion, only, of change, and becomes at best a spartan comfort. loc: 169

the old mystique of Tibet as an inaccessible otherworld. loc: 397

I am travelling with this mystique myself, I know. It has grown out of childhood, and adolescent reading. This looking-glass Tibet is a realm of ancient learning lost to the rest of the world, ruled by a lineage of monks who are reincarnations of divinity. Recessed beyond the greatest mountain barrier on earth, in plateaux of cold purity, it floats in its own time. It is a land forbidden to intruders not by human agency but by some mystical interdiction. So it resonates like the memory of something lost, a survival from a purer time, less a country than a region in the mind. Perhaps it holds the keys to the afterlife. loc: 398

These fantasies, of course, were distorted echoes of the earthly Tibet. The country was born in violence–most of its early kings died young–and for centuries it waged aggressive war against itself and others. loc: 426

the few Western trekkers passing through have motives alien to any he knows. As for my own, I hesitate to speak them to him, inchoate as they are. They belong to a world grown dim to him, to Western self and attachment, not to the abstract compassion that he entertains. He speaks of Kailas with a dreamlike evangelism. He wants me to honour the journey that he cannot make himself. loc: 623

'You know this is a mountain of great power. To travel there multiplies merit. The Buddha often flew there with his followers. And spiritual treasure-seekers meditated there –thousands of them–so its caves are full of blessing.' Sometimes I cannot decide whether he is a sage or a child. And often his words are drowned by the pounding drums beneath us. 'People walk around the mountain to cleanse their evil, the ten seats of sin. loc: 626

The abbot, patient and soft-voiced, guides me along the walls, identifying statues of other Buddhas and teachers, goddesses and multiple bodhisattvas, the blessed ones who postpone their own nirvana for the salvation of the world. In this proliferating pantheon, often elusive to me, the deities may reappear in different aspects or emanations of themselves. Their arms and faces divide and multiply in the dark. Often they turn feral and demonic. They hold up gems and lotuses, rosaries and thunderbolts, and stare into nothing. They are not only gods, but incarnate ideas. Their gestures are a cryptic language. Here divinity is protean and fluid. It manifests in bestial fury, female pity; it wears a smile of compassion and a garland of skulls. loc: 636

I am uneasily aware of walking among a revered army whose evolution the Buddha would have condemned. The Buddhism that Tibet first received in the seventh century–more than a thousand years after the death of its founder–was already rich in these alternately beautiful and grotesque offspring. Moreover the faith created its Tibetan bridgehead in the isolated kingdom of Shang-shung, near Mount Kailas, and in those bitter plateaux encountered a swarm of chthonic gods and spirits who violently coloured it. Then, over the coming centuries, the richly evolved Mahayana tradition of northern India infused the whole land, bringing with it a generous field of salvation and a host of variegated Buddhas, bodhisattvas and Hindu deities in disguise. loc: 643

Here is the white-painted Buddha Vajrasattva–shiny, crude, abstract. In his circling arms clings a sinuous consort, her legs hooked around his waist, their loins intermeshed. This is not sex as humans know it, but a marriage of symbols. They suggest eternal orgasm. loc: 658

The abbot says: 'This is the union of nothing and compassion.' loc: 661

As they walk on, I wonder at them, their lightness, their lack of need. They might already have passed through a painless, premature death. They have shed what others shed in dying. They will leave nothing material behind them to be divided, claimed or loved. Their dispossession strikes me as at once freedom, and a poignant depletion. Their buoyant laughter follows me up the valley, but I do not quite envy them. I only wonder with a muffled pang what it would be in the West to step outside the chain of bequeathal and inheritance, as they do, until human artefacts mean nothing at all. loc: 706

The value of things no longer belongs to cost or beauty, but only to memory. loc: 714

Every one discarded sounds a tiny knell of loss. The past drops away into the waste-paper basket and oblivion, and in this monstrous disburdening, grief returns you to a kind of childish dependence. You sift and preserve (for whom?) and cling to trivia. You have become the guardian of their past, even its recreator. loc: 716

These so-called wrathful deities infiltrate the Tibetan pantheon with terror. The old man's prayer wheel spins faster when he passes one. For some reason here they look more threatening in decay than when complete. They haunt every temple like a bitter shadow world. Some are mundane spirits with specialist powers, demanding tribute; others have been coopted as guardians of the Buddhist law. But most prominent are the alter egos of benign bodhisattvas, who don awesome forms to fight ignorance and evil. It is as if these saints had exploded out of tranquil repression into insensate fury. loc: 848

The interpretation of these monsters is conflicted. Classically they are said to echo abstract forces as surely as their serene counterparts, and liberate those who realise their truth. Even Yama–who rampages bull-faced and pitch black in a halo of fire and demons–is only an emanation of the merciful bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. But other scholars believe these inverted gods are psychic reactions to a harsh landscape and brutal cold; while yet others claim that they are the shamanic leftovers of an older Tibet, still vengeful and unassimilated. loc: 857

Kali's statue is one of those primitive images the more potent for their inhuman muteness. Classically she is portrayed hideous, a trampler of demons and a drunkard on blood. At Dakshinkali she accepts for sacrifice only uncastrated males. Shiva alone can control her. In yogic practice he represents pure, inert consciousness, she the energy by which he creates. In other guises she becomes a figure of cosmic triumph, the bringer of change who at last devours time itself and lapses back into primal dark. Sometimes she is even described as beautiful. loc: 876

The journey does not nurture reflection, as I once hoped. The going is too hard, too steep. Every footstep on the stone-littered track needs a tiny, half-conscious decision, and brings its attrition unnoticed. loc: 924

Slowly I am invaded by a different, profound tiredness, less muscular fatigue than an overwhelming longing to sleep. It is a little like despair. If it were not for glimpsing Iswor waiting above, I might curl up among the rocks and close my eyes. As it is, with suppressed alarm, I wonder for the first time if I will finish this journey. loc: 949

This feel of entering a sanctuary has not only moved travellers but has haunted the Tibetans themselves. For centuries they have envisaged a holy land of their own, invisible or inaccessibly remote. The precise location of this kingdom of Shambala is uncertain, but it is said to lie encircled by impassable snow peaks somewhere north of Kailas. loc: 1031

The origins of the myth may lie in the memory of some lost homeland, perhaps the kingdom of Shang-shung around Kailas, subsumed by war in the eighth century. But more likely it entered Tibet from India two and a half centuries later, in the mystical scripture called the Kalacakra Tantra, which details the meditational pathway to Shambala. loc: 1043

of Saga Dawa, and pilgrims will be gathering under Mount Kailas. loc: 1179

Note: Everything seems so bleak and depressing in this book. Passages of real beauty, although stark, intersperse with scenes of unrelenting poverty and depression-- hopelessness or weak hope in an environment of hopelessness Edit

'I have four. Two died.' I ask: 'How was that?' 'I don't know. One was five, another seven. I don't know why.' Iswor says gently: 'He has no education, you see.' 'The nearest clinic is over the mountains, many miles away,' Dhabu says. He looks less sad than bemused, as if at some inexplicable order. 'My village is poor, peaceful. We own one field, which is not enough. So I work like this, with my horse Moti-moti…' I wonder aloud how long he can sustain it. 'I will finish when the journey of my life is over, that is when I will end.' loc: 1189

The prospect of the trekkers touches me with foreboding. These past days I have felt a stressless self-diffusion, as if my own culture were growing lighter on my shoulders. I will not welcome its return in others. I have too much imagined these mountains as mine. loc: 1207

He wanted to succeed in the cruel labyrinth of Kathmandu. 'The young are bored in the village,' he said. 'It's only two hours by motorbike from the city, so they go in and get jobs as clerks, drivers, anything.' 'And what happens to the villages?' He said what I already know: that they become the ghetto of the unenterprising, the sick, the old. loc: 1229

But few Western travellers entered by this secretive Karnali. They came by more accessible passes from India in the west. The first European to set eyes on Mount Kailas, the Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri, loc: 1255

For a century after Desideri, no known European set eyes on Kailas. Then in 1812 the erratically brilliant veterinary surgeon William Moorcroft, with his shady companion Hyder Hearsey, made their way here disguised as Hindu ascetics. loc: 1265

The source of the great rivers–the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Indus and Sutlej–became an obsession in London and British India, and remained uncertain even into the early twentieth century. As if by divine intent, all four of them rose close to Mount Kailas, echoing 2,000-year-old Hindu scriptures. loc: 1269

Kawaguchi himself was one of the first and most perceptive pilgrims to recount his journey, in 1900. He was perhaps a spy; yet fervently pious. After surviving early vicissitudes (including a nomad girl's assault on his virginity), he prostrated himself a ritual 108 times on the first sight of Kailas, then broke into poetry and circled the holy mountain for four days in ecstasy. loc: 1289

Eighteen years after Kawaguchi, the swami Bhagwan Hamsa, a girlishly fragile figure, found his own salvation on Kailas. He too, in high-flown prose, survived countless perils on the way: cobras, ghosts, a lust-crazed elephant, licentious mountain women. On Kailas he stumbled into the glacial cave of a yogi, with whom he spent three days, drinking only water, his head resting in the yogi's lap at night; and beside the frozen lake beyond the highest pass he received a vision of his personal, tantric saint, in whose presence he felt himself diffusing mystically away. loc: 1293

This, perhaps, is a relic of the Nestorian Christianity that had penetrated deep into Central Asia by the sixth century. A thousand years later, Indian sadhus were returning from the north with unverifiable reports that Christian communities lived around Lake Manasarovar, and sparked hopes that somewhere deep in Asia the legendary kingdom of the Christian emperor Prester John survived. loc: 1307

In a land maimed since 1950 by Chinese occupation, by mass killings and displacement, the Cultural Revolution, with its wholesale destruction of all things old, struck at Tibet's heart. Amid the executions and 'struggle' sessions, all public vestiges of Buddhism were erased, the Buddha denounced as a reactionary, sacred images tossed into latrines, and scriptures converted into shoes for disgraced monks. By 1976, out of more than 6,000 monasteries and temples, thirteen remained. loc: 1437

How much material wealth must Beijing pour into the country before it can dream of seducing this profound Buddhist identity? Where Tibetans sense spirit, the Chinese see superstition. When the Chinese demolished Shepeling monastery, they say, with its treasured scriptures and sixty-foot silken banners, they swept away the remnants of feudal sorcery, together with the skull from which the chief lama drank, and the enshrined testicle of an idolised warrior. loc: 1441

Then at 16,000 feet, where the skyline is decked with cairns and flags, we crest the Thalladong pass and veer to a stupefied halt. We are gazing on a country of planetary strangeness. Beneath us, in a crescent of depthless silence, a huge lake curves empty out of sight. It is utterly still. In the plateau's barren smoothness it makes a hard purity, like some elemental carving, and its colour is almost shocking: a violent peacock blue. There is no bird or wind-touched shrub to start a sound. And in the cleansed stillness high above, floating on foothills so faded that it seems isolated in the sky, shines the cone of Mount Kailas. loc: 1462

In this heart-stopping moment pilgrims burst into cries and prayer. Even our seasoned trekkers spill from their Land Cruisers to gaze. There seem no colours left in the world but this bare earth-brown, the snow's white, and the sheen of mirrored sky. Everything else has been distilled away. The south face of Kailas is fluted with the illusion of a long, vertical stairway, as if for spirits to climb by. It shines fifty miles away in unearthly solitude. Void of any life, the whole region might have survived from some sacred prehistory, shorn of human complication. We have entered holy land. loc: 1467

Manasarovar. loc: 1478

From here, if you stand among the birds, the whole lake stretches into view. At its southern end the shelving ridges of Gurla Mandhata ebb still snowlit even along the eastern shore, while at the other end, beyond waves of brown foothills, Kailas mushrooms into the blue. These two white summits haunt the lake. Between them its indigo void appears coldly primeval. Tibetans call it Tso Mapham, 'the Unrivalled', or Rinpoche, 'the Precious'. Its hushed stillness seems to freeze it in a jewel-like concentrate of water. In both Buddhist and Hindu scripture the universe is born from such primal matter. A cosmic wind beats the water into worlds, and the god Vishnu, who dreams in the ocean near-eternally, creates diversity out of oneness by a sheer feat of will. loc: 1488

To Hindus, especially, the lake is mystically wedded to the mountain, whose phallic dome is answered in the vagina of its dark waters. Already in the second century the epic Ramayana, describing the Tibetan plateau, sites Kailas beside a great lake, beyond which spreads unending night. Manasarovar, they say, was created by the mind of God. It is the flower of first consciousness. In a time before scripture, a band of seers came here to worship Shiva, the god of destruction and change, who meditates on Kailas. To empower their ablutions, Brahma, the primal lord of creation, engendered from his thought these astral waters. The lake became the nursery of the gods. loc: 1495

By the sixth century, in the classic Puranas, Manasarovar has become a full-blown paradise. From its roots in the serpent world below, the Tree over-spreads the sky, and the lake is alive with bathing celestials and seraphic music. loc: 1501

The lake's waters, drunk by the dying, usher the soul to paradise, and its sands inserted into a corpse's mouth prevent rebirth as an animal. loc: 1510

It is Hindus who venerate the lake most deeply. Yet most of them gave up its parikrama–its ritual circuit–long ago. Perhaps because Manasarovar was born from the mind of Brahma, whose paradise is transient, they rather seek their final deliverance in Kailas, the abode of Shiva, whose worship leads them through incarnations to eternal peace. But they still bathe fervently in the lake's shallows, which release them from the sins of past lives. loc: 1532

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 passed the last seven days of his life in sacred trance. loc: 1576

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 sky-dancers. He traverses the mountains converting kings, war gods 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 passing 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. loc: 1586

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 nobody. loc: 1595

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. loc: 1616

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. loc: 1618

Their path was called 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 yogis–whether monk or layman–became a religious elite; but theirs was a dangerous and half-secret way. loc: 1675

At times a belief that all experience–however mundane or immoral–could 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 sex, 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. loc: 1679

But the classic practice–however disrupted by Chinese persecution–involves a lone and rigorous self-transformation. Guided by his guru, the novice selects a tutelary Buddha or divinity–a yidam–and by an intense practice of identification achieves an imagined fusion with him. loc: 1682

Over months and years of rapt visualisation, the adept starts to assimilate to the yidam, enthroned, perhaps, in his mandala palace. As his mind awakens, he experiences the mandala as real. Sometimes the god 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 god. 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. loc: 1686

The gods 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.' loc: 1694

The shape of Kailas–a near-perfect cone thrusting from the mist–may have attracted veneration in a time of primitive fertility worship, long before the Aryan invasions of 1500 BC loc: 1724

the early Aryans feared its future god, Shiva, as the outcast lord of renegades and thieves. loc: 1726

But to follow the rivers to their source was to seek out holiness, and the rivers led to Kailas. Some time early in the second millennium, Shiva was enthroned here in a surge of Hindu piety. Mount Meru broke into the human world, converging with Kailas, and multiple paradises radiated over the slopes. Tiers of gods and spirits ascended the mountain in an ever more powerful elite. loc: 1728

Shiva, meditating on the mountain's summit, retains the shadow of his renegade past. He is the lord of havoc and regeneration, patron of mystics and wanderers. His face is smeared blue with the ash of the dead. He dances the world into being, and into ruin again. He brings both the hope and the desolation of change. Only the yogi can still this impermanence, who in trance imagines his body united with Meru-Kailas, and who activates its psychic energies until they float him into peace. loc: 1734

In early scripture Parvati, daughter of the mountain god Himalaya, seeks out Shiva and seduces him over thousands of years, by her ascetic devotions and immortal beauty. She becomes his shakti, his energising genius, and their marriage on the mountaintop is the union of thought and untamed nature. loc: 1737

Whoever its presiding divinity, the concept of a world mountain pervaded Asia. A shadowy etymology even links Meru to ancient Sumer and the ziggurats of Babylon. Hindu temples were planned to emulate the mountain's mystic layout–for they too are the dwellings of gods. loc: 1741

Hindus more than Buddhists bathe in the icy water, drink it, carry it away. Its purifying powers deepen in their scriptures, until it washes away the sorrow of all mortal beings. loc: 1765

In a celebrated passage of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna addresses Arjuna the archer before battle: Thou hast mourned those who should not be mourned… It is impossible, he implies, to terminally kill or die. People shed one life for another. loc: 1771

So the two warriors pass into battle and hew down men with the exalted half-smile of Hindu gods. For they know they are killing nothing of importance. The erasure of the individual is the condition of salvation. loc: 1776

Even to mundane eyes its beauty was tinged with strangeness. Its apparent cone is in fact a steep pyramid, and each side faces a cardinal compass point. loc: 1793

For Kailas is the lonely relic of an age still earlier than the Himalaya, and was once the highest island in the dwindling Tethys Sea. loc: 1795

As summer advances, the melting snows on the south face break across its illusory stairway to sketch a shadowy swastika. loc: 1796

'The Chinese army, of course.' Their tread is heavy. We are close to a border disputed with India, and the barracks sprawl. From time to time squads of soldiers wielding batons and riot shields stamp through the streets, their march an open threat yet faintly absurd, their arms bullying wide. loc: 1826

The black, toppling ziggurat of a hill still intervenes, but beyond this, out of its dun foothills, the white summit moves up like the cone of a rocket. Here we stand at the first chaksal gang of the kora, a platform for ritual prostration, facing the mountain. loc: 1848

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. loc: 1874

On this Drachom Ngagye Durtro the sky burial of monks and nomads continues. The remorseless god Demchog, who dances out on Kailas the promise and terror of dissolution, imbues the Durtro with an ambivalent power. loc: 1877

It is to such places, especially in this propitious month of Saga Dawa, that people may go to lie down and enact their own passing. So the durtros become sites of liberation. Rainbows link them to the eight holiest cremation grounds of India, whose power is mystically translated to Tibet. loc: 1880

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. loc: 1886

The master and his 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 butter or tsampa, roasted barley, and then rolls it into balls. Finally the skull too is smashed and becomes a morsel with its brains. loc: 1892

the vultures crowd in. These birds are sacred. loc: 1895

Perhaps he is addressing the dakinis, but more likely he is invoking the gompos, the Dark Lords who inhabit all cemeteries. The followers of these gompos are the dregs of the spirit world: the hungry ghosts, the flesh-eaters, the rolang undead. By the rite of chodpa the yogi invites them to devour his ego, hurrying him to salvation. loc: 1911

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 rogyapas. loc: 1922

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. loc: 1926

generally the mourners come: it is important, they may think, to confront evanescence, and witness liberation. loc: 1929

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, gods, 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 dogs–all sentient creatures will accrue merit–after travelling here for hundreds of miles. loc: 1948

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 sanctity, 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. loc: 1972

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, which like a stain or shadow accumulates 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. loc: 1978

In the lonely hermitages, the 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 gods to bring back the Dalai Lama to Lhasa, and drive the Chinese out. loc: 1985

Its remembered rite carries with it, in spite of everything, a charge of innocent optimism, of earthy piety and trust. loc: 2015

Few beliefs are older than the notion that heaven and earth were once conjoined, and that gods and men moved up and down a celestial ladder–or a rope or vine–and 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 worship. 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. loc: 2018

For all its mass, the mountain is light. In Tibetan folklore it flew here from another, unknown country–many of Tibet's mountains fly–and was staked in place by prayer banners and chains before devils could pull it underground. Then, to prevent the celestial gods from lifting it up and returning it to where it came from, the Buddha nailed it down with four of his footprints. loc: 2031

These chortens find their origins far back in the Indian stupas that enshrined the incinerated corpse of the Buddha. loc: 2067

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 orb transmutes solar wisdom and lunar compassion into pure truth. Tantric initiates discover in the chorten an eidolon of the seated Buddha, and see its central axis–most chortens enclose a vertical beam–as a symbol of Meru-Kailas, or a male archetype infusing a female body. loc: 2072

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. loc: 2132

But when I ask about Kangri Latsen, the monk turns cold. Latsen is the wild, autochthonous god of the heights to which Choku clings, converted to Buddhism, but older and darker, and kept separate, as if secret. loc: 2148

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. loc: 2157

The kora of every pious pilgrim adds its mite to this bank of invisible virtue, and the years-long meditation of a revered saint–Milarepa, Padmasambhava, even the ousted Bonchung–saturates the mountain with its mana. Yet neither devoted ascetics nor conquering Buddha have quite eradicated a suspicion of darker gods. 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. loc: 2186

The pilgrims who pass 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 hardship 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 pass, sacred to Tara, and its climax of redemption. loc: 2194

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 air–I hear, but cannot distinguish them–prayers 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. loc: 2198

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 gods named gekkos, reflecting the lunar cycle of the year. loc: 2205

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. loc: 2213

But as the last pilgrim drops from sight under the gleam of Kailas, the beliefs of many peoples–from ancient Egypt to aboriginal Australia–seem starkly natural. The mountain path is the road of the dead. The Assyrian word for 'to die' was 'to clutch the mountain' loc: 2297

Drira Phuk Gompa, the Monastery of the Cave of the Yak Horns. loc: 2310

Their monastery, in its strange way, commemorates the kora itself. In the thirteenth century the sage Gotsampa was the first to circumambulate the mountain, lured along this valley by a dri, a female yak. He followed her into the cave above us, and found the imprint of her horn on the rock where she had vanished. She was, he realised, a dakini in disguise, a fairy sky-dancer named Senge Dongpa. As he settled in the cave to meditate, she returned to minister to him, and thereafter generations of Kagyupa hermits settled here. So he became the founder of the kora. loc: 2326

Iswor, suddenly nervous, wants to pray to the goddess Tara, who owns the 18,600-foot pass that we must scale tomorrow. In the chief shrine her white body is so garlanded in jewellery that even the eyes that open on her hands and feet are blinded. But a third eye gazes from her golden forehead in a face of vapid sweetness, and the blue lotus of compassion floats behind her. loc: 2338

Beside us, as if by the revolution of a giant wheel, the mountain's western face, with its vast hammocks of snow ledge, has followed the smooth beauty of the southern face out of sight, and into their place has risen this curtain of sheer terror. For the first time the whole mountain is exposed above us. From crest to foot it falls 5,000 feet in a near-vertical precipice. Nothing softens its chill descent. Its scarp is jet black, barely seamed with ice. Near its crest the snow plummets for hundreds of feet in razor sheets, and white pendants like inverted fans overlap one another six or eight high, descending in ghostly tiers to the abyss. loc: 2350

They go in a motley of novelty and tradition, some in long coats that sag open at the throat and bulk above sashed waists, others in peaked caps and quilted jackets. They look unquenchably happy. Sometimes they greet me as they pass, as if their faith was mine. loc: 2388

Note: So, why does so little of this joy come through Thubron's descriptions or narrative. Edit

You marvel at their speed, their delight: they, who have suffered the dislocation of everything they value. The old, especially. You think of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese war on faith, and you wonder what they have suffered, what inflicted. But their smiles, when they break, seem those of children. loc: 2390

What they are seeing, I cannot tell. Some murmur their Om mani padme hum like an urgent pulse, and the prayer beads tremble through their fingers. Most go undeviating, as if the kora contains its own meaning, beyond articulation. Buddhist lore claims that if the eyes are purified, the land transforms. loc: 2394

Note: Obviously, Thubron's eyes have not been purifird. He carries his own emotional baggage with him and he cannot see the joy or the hope of the pilgrims. I guess it would be like me trying to describe the pilgrims on the way to Chimayo. Edit

A perfect adept might gaze up at Kailas and discern the palace of Demchog with sixteen attendant goddess mountains, but he transfigures this view inwardly to a mandala peopled by bodhisattvas, the goddesses multiply to sixty-two, and he is guided to other knowledge as if layers of illusion have peeled away. loc: 2397

These are the Baedekers of the pious. They lay a tracing paper over the physical landscape, transforming it with stories, ordering it into sanctity. So Kailas becomes symmetrical. It deploys four prostration sites, and its humble gompas are seen as shining temples at its cardinal points. Their statues and treasures are reverently inventoried. loc: 2405

And this terrestrial path to merit may be buttressed by mundane directions for reaching one site from another, including calculated times of travel and the matter-of-fact assessment of virtue that will accrue. loc: 2409

We are walking across the Vajra Yogini burial ground, which Indians, remembering a holy cremation site back home, call Shiva Tsal. The plateau above was once a sky burial place. The cairns that cover it appease the restless dakini whose charnel ground this is, and the corpses of those who die unknown on pilgrimage are sometimes dumped here, their merit assured. loc: 2430

This cemetery, for all its squalid aspect, is for many the heart of their kora. What is buried here is not physical corpses, but the flotsam of past lives. The shedding of clothes or hair is an offering to Yama, the god of death, that he may ease the wanderings of the dead through limbo towards their next incarnation. loc: 2435

Later a young man walks up towards the plateau and places a garment there. He speaks cautious English, but cannot quite explain. 'You put something precious to you. You put something close to you.' loc: 2441

The meanings of this site multiply. Some pilgrims deposit a garment of their beloved dead, even a photograph or a pinch of funerary ash, and pray for them in whatever incarnation they survive. loc: 2446

Yet the Buddhist living cannot help the deceased, whose souls do not exist. Such hopes fly in the face of karmic law, and flower through some inchoate instinct, comforting the mourner, not the mourned. For nothing cherished or even recognisable endures. In this cold, weakened air I stare a little wretched at the heap of rags, which seems to symbolise pure loss: the loss that mourns the tang of all human difference, of a herdsman's impromptu song, perhaps, the lilt of a laugh in Grindelwald, or the fingers that caress a favourite dog. loc: 2447

A little way above us, beneath the grim peak of Sharmari, a russet slab of rock named 'the Mirror of the King of Death' reflects back to the pilgrims all their past sins. Some call this a vision of hell. Armed with its warning, and with the ritual shedding of their dress, their past life, they continue upwards. This is the heart of the kora. Here it quickens into a more intense trajectory. The pilgrim has passed into ritual death. Both Hindus and Buddhists enter this state. They have a thousand feet more to climb. Their breathless ascent to the pass of Tara will release them to new life. loc: 2454

the pilgrims wend like ants to their mountain salvation. They are mostly poor, and the mindfulness of death may rarely be far. The passage between one incarnation and another–the journey they are enacting now–is old in their faith. The first and last teachings of the Buddha himself dwelt on impermanence, and Tibetan funerary rites are steeped in the Book of the Dead. loc: 2461

'So nothing of the individual survives.' Nothing that retains memory?' 'No.' loc: 2522

'You know our Buddhist saying?' Yes, I remember. From all that he loves, man must part. loc: 2524

I am only nineteen and I am mourning, selfishly, the person you would have been for me. For a while your voice is playful beside me. We are approaching 18,000 feet. Am I all right? Day-dreaming brother. No sense of responsibility. Yes, I am all right. For a long time I have lost the person I was with you. And I reimagined your face so often that the images overlie you. loc: 2531

The sage Gotsampa, pioneering the kora, became the first to ascend the pass. 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 pass. Then the hermit knew that he had been guided by a vision of the twenty-one Taras, emanations of the goddess of compassion. 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 pass into purity at the axis of the world. loc: 2593

Among these stark precipices the artificial riot of flags throws up an almost violent wave of prayer, touching and defiant. loc: 2612

The twenty-one dissolving wolves proclaim the goddess of the place. To the Tibetans this protean deity is Drolma, the goddess 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 hell. Above all she is the deity of pity, born from the tears of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, 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, loc: 2614

In the minutes before sleep, a shadowy melancholy descends: the bewilderment when something long awaited has gone. loc: 2667