by Ian Baker
Colonel Francis Younghusband, the legendary imperialist who led the British forces into Lhasa in 1904, returned from Tibet with a bronze Buddha given to him by the Dalai Lama’s reigning regent. In response to a mystical vision during his campaign, he devoted the better part of his remaining years to exploring “the supreme spiritual ideal,” founding the World Congress of Faiths and numerous other religious societies. His Mountain Sanctuaries Association sought to offer pilgrims “the full impress of the mountains” and “that ineffable bliss which springs from deepening union with the spirit.”34 Lieutenant-Colonel Waddell, who accompanied Younghusband’s mission as medical officer, was averse to Tibet’s “priestcraft and superstition,” but he admitted to hearing “echoes of the Theosophist belief that somewhere beyond the mighty Kanchenjunga there would be found a key which should unlock the [ancient] mysteries . . .” Such turn-of-the-century murmurings later found fuller expression in the novel Lost Horizon, which introduced the word Shangri-La into the English language. Sir Thomas Holdich of the Royal Geographical Society seemed to be referring to more than Tibetans when he described the Falls of the Tsangpo as “the bourne of many a devout pilgrimage.” Bailey returned from his journey through the Tsangpo gorges to write of his “annoyance with myself for rushing to conform again after those splendid months in which none of that mattered; months when the falls, the map, the flora and the fauna, the lie of the frontier . . . were the only concerns.” In Tibet, he and Morshead had wandered “where and when we could, happy in the knowledge that every place was unknown.”35
BY SYSTEMATICALLY CHARTING THEIR FRONTIERS, the British sought to secure their empire, yet the riddle of the still-undiscovered falls transformed imperial dreams of geographical conquest into a yearning for what lay beyond the horizons of empirical knowledge. At the end of the nineteenth century, what Joseph Conrad had called the last remaining “blank spots of delightful mystery” represented not only unexplored portions of the Earth but gateways to new orders of experience. Like a distant mirror, the long-imagined Falls of the Tsangpo reflected the era’s twinned, if seemingly contrary, spirits of science and romanticism. The waterfall became a symbol of the unattainable for both East and West, Bailey’s “last secret place” conflating with the Tibetan vision of an unmappable paradise—a place long imagined but never reached. Like Yangsang—the ultimate goal of Tibetan pilgrims—the lost falls filled a blank spot not only on the map of the world but in the human spirit. In an audience, the Dalai Lama likened Pemako to Shambhala, a mythical kingdom described in the Buddhist Tantras, a place both of the earth but beyond it, a place, His Holiness said, one could actually visit but not by conventional means.
IN THE LATE 1980S TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS tightened in Tibet in response to demonstrations in Lhasa for independence from Chinese rule. I contemplated ever more elaborate ways to reach the Tsangpo gorges. One day while discussing the matter with Tashi Tsering in a Dharamsala teahouse, I learned of a young Tibetan woman named Ayang Lhamo, whose grandfather had been a lama in Pemako. Ayang had lived for several years in Italy but had recently returned to her parents’ home in a Tibetan resettlement camp not far from Dharamsala, Tashi told me. “Ayang is spirited and pretty and speaks the local Pemako dialect. She has relatives there who will be able to help you. You should ask her to go with you.”
On the day I left Dharamsala, Tashi handed me a stack of thick worm-eaten folios wrapped in a silk khata, or offering scarf. The densely marked pages comprised one of the earliest surviving manuscripts concerning Pemako, Tashi told me, and contained rituals and invocations to open the doors to the hidden-lands. 36 At each cardinal direction are gates with so-called curtains, obstructions that must be overcome before the beyul can be entered. But more important than any ritual, Tashi said, was to go with what Tibetans call danang, or pure vision—something, I suppose, like what William Blake meant when he wrote of seeing “not with the eyes but through them.”
I hired a vintage Ambassador taxi to drive me to the resettlement camp and sought out the house of Ayang Lhamo. Her grandfather had been the head lama of a monastery only an hour’s walk from the one where Kinthup had sought refuge after escaping from slavery. Between bowls of home-brewed chang, a potent beverage made from fermented barley, Ayang’s mother regaled me with stories of life in this remote land. “When people die there,” she told me, “rainbows touch the bodies of the dead.” “Have you seen this yourself?” I asked. “Not just me,” she said, “everyone sees these things in Pemako.”
Ayang took me to meet two togdens, dreadlocked yogis, who had escaped from Tibet in 1959 following a route through the Tsangpo gorges. In the middle of winter, they had traveled for weeks through the wilds of Pemako, living on the bark of trees and boiled shoe leather, their dreams deepening and guiding them toward Yangsang. They kept warm practicing tummo, the yoga of inner heat. Without the appropriate texts, they had been unable to locate Pemako’s innermost realms, and with Chinese soldiers in close pursuit, they had crossed the border into India.
Ayang asked one of the togdens to perform a divination as to whether she should go with me to Pemako. It came out favorably and, with her parents’ approval, we made immediate plans to leave for Tibet. Using Ayang’s connections, we planned to hire a truck to transport us clandestinely to where we could cross over the mountains into Pemako. As Ayang had relatives in one of the first villages we would reach after crossing the Doshung-La pass, we felt confident that we would be aided in our journey onward toward the heart of the beyul.
In Kathmandu, Ayang and I scoured local trekking shops to outfit her with hiking boots and other essential gear. Bhakha Tulku had come down from Yolmo and began translating the Pemako neyigs which I had brought back from Dharamsala, annotating them with his own insights and experience.
Plans changed abruptly, however, a week before our intended departure. Due to proindependence demonstrations in Lhasa on March 10—the thirtieth anniversary of the day in 1959 when Chinese troops trained their guns on the Dalai Lama’s summer palace and massacred thousands of Tibetans—the Chinese government declared martial law and cancelled all travel permits to Tibet. I went to see Chatral Rinpoche, who said, “Go to Beyul Kyimolung instead and meditate.”
The hidden-land of Kyimolung lies in the Tibetan borderlands, north of the Himalayas and beyond the headwaters of one of Nepal’s greatest rivers, the Buri Gandaki. Milarepa, Tibet’s revered poet-sage, had visited the area in the eleventh century and described it as a demon-infested land with an incomprehensible language. Kyimolung’s inner valleys were opened only in the seventeenth century, when an itinerant yogi followed a red mountain goat to the base of a sheer cliff. He found three scrolls hidden in the rock, one of which, “The Heart Mirror of Vajrasattva,” designates places for meditation where one can reputedly accomplish in a single day what elsewhere takes years to attain.
With Tibet closed and a new agenda of solitary retreat, Ayang returned to India while I prepared for the journey up the Buri Gandaki with Hamid Sardar, a recent graduate of Tufts University who had first come to Nepal two years earlier on a semester abroad program which I had been directing.
Hamid was born in Iran and had lived in Tehran before the revolution, in a house surrounded by gardens and towering walls. He summered with his family at an estate on the Caspian Sea, where his father took him to fish for sturgeon and to hunt bear. When he was ten, his father made a difficult shot over his shoulder to fell a large brown bear that had reared up out of the underbrush and was poised to attack him. As Hamid told the story, he saw a wildness when looking into the eyes of the bear that he had sought to rediscover ever since. In 1978, when street riots calling for the overthrow of the shah erupted, Hamid’s family left for Greece, where his uncle was ambassador. Soon thereafter the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power and plunged the country into a decade of war with Iraq. Hamid then moved with his parents and two younger brothers to a château outside of Paris where his father began to breed Arabian hors
es.
Years later, while attending college in the United States, Hamid learned of Bon, Tibet’s pre-Buddhist shamanic religion, which traces its origins to Tazig in ancient Persia. A growing interest in Eastern mysticism led to his college semester abroad in Nepal in 1987 and to our shared interest in Tibet’s hidden-lands. I had told Hamid about the remote sanctuary that I had heard about in Kathmandu and, during his independent study period, he had traveled to Yolmo and met with Chatral Rinpoche. Hamid found his way to the hidden cave and spent several weeks alone there, producing a series of haikulike poems called “Naked Mist,” which he submitted in lieu of a final report. When he left the valley, he forged a trail through a previously untrammeled gorge. Impressed by his boldness, Chatral Rinpoche initiated him into the practices of Vajrayana Buddhism and conferred on him the name Lekdrup Dorje, Adamantine Accomplishment. The following summer—while I stayed in the cave in Pemthang—Hamid also returned to Yolmo and began another protracted meditation retreat. Although Pemako and the Tsangpo gorges had become a dream for both of us, we were eager to deepen our Buddhist practice with further mountain retreats. Kyimolung, the hidden-land in the Tibetan borderlands, seemed the next best thing to Pemako.
After a ten-day trek Hamid and I passed through a series of stone portals, crossed a plank bridge over a narrow gorge hundreds of feet deep, and entered Beyul Kyimolung. By chance, we arrived on the tenth day of the third Tibetan month, the beginning of an annual festival when herders and shamans from the surrounding mountains gather to perform religious ceremonies and sacred dances at an isolated gompa circled by glaciers and towering peaks. When we reached the monastery, the head lama was performing a ceremony at the valley’s “soul tree,” an ancient cedar rising above the temple walls. Seated beside him was a row of rough-clad village ngakpas, or lay lamas, visibly drunk and banging on large double-headed ritual drums. A pretty nun, equally intoxicated, was brewing a batch of potent grain alcohol in an iron cauldron as pilgrims arrived bearing alpine flowers.
Chatral Rinpoche had written us a letter of introduction and, after the conclusion of the three-day festival—during which monastic vows had been resolutely suspended—the head lama, Chokyi Nima, Sun of the Dharma, led Hamid and me through steep forests to two caves—several hours apart—where we would spend the next month in solitary meditation. Hamid’s cave, Fortress of the Vajra, was built into a cliff overlooking glaciers; mine, several miles away through fir and bamboo forests, was perched above a waterfall looking across at walls of ice and rock that form the border with Tibet. The lama referred to the cave as Sangwa Dechen Puk, the Secret Cave of Bliss, and told me that it had been used for centuries for the Tantric practices of korde rushen and tsalung.
During the month that I stayed at the cave wild Himalayan tahr, a species of mountain goat with short curving horns and flowing hair, grazed nearby, entirely unconcerned by my presence. Between sessions of meditation, I made journeys to the waterfall to collect water. The Tibetan saint Milarepa had meditated in the same valley, writing ecstatic verse such as: The wilderness cave is an open market
where Samsara can be bartered for Nirvana.
In the monastery of your heart and body
lies a temple where all the Buddhas unite.
After a month, I traversed along moss-laden cliffs and found Hamid perched on his ledge, gazing out at glaciers hanging from the valley wall.
With our retreats finished, Hamid and I continued up the Buri Gandaki on an ancient trade and pilgrimage route toward Tibet. In 1990, the area was completely closed to foreigners, and to circumvent a police check post guarding the upper valley we camouflaged our packs with pine boughs and traveled after sunset, sleeping in caves to avoid detection. In one of the odd ironies common on pilgrimage, we were assisted on our mission by two young women of Tibetan descent who had seduced and robbed us on our journey up the Buri Gandaki six weeks before.
Once in the upper valley, we visited hermitages where Milarepa had meditated nearly a thousand years ago. The most important site, we learned, lay across the Himalayas in Tibet. Closer to the border we took refuge in a village of retired Khampa guerillas, one of whom offered to send his son to take us into Tibet over an obscure pass that did not appear on our map. Traveling as lightly as possible, we crossed high glaciers and descended snowfields into a village where children announced our arrival by shouting, “The Chinese have come! The Chinese have come!”
To our knowledge, no Westerners had ever visited this remote settlement and there was no precedent for our appearance, still less for our being allowed to continue deeper into Tibet without passports. At our guide’s insistence, we attempted to pass ourselves off, not as Chinese, but as a Nepalese doctor and schoolteacher on pilgrimage. Whether or not the headman believed this improbable story, he said he had no authority to let us continue but that if we waited three days, he would send a runner to the nearest Chinese headquarters and request permission for us to continue our journey. Until the runner returned we could stay as his guests. The plan suited us well for, in any event, Hamid was snowblind from our trip over the pass. Expecting a Chinese police patrol to come and arrest us, Hamid and I sat with our packs by an abandoned Chinese bunker above the village. From our lofty vantage point I could watch the trail by which the messenger, and anyone accompanying him, would have to return.
Two days later, we watched the runner descending the steep escarpment leading into the valley with no more than his single companion. He bore surprising news. In the absence of any Chinese officials, the local Tibetan authorities had sent a letter to the headman requesting him to escort us to the region’s primary pilgrimage site, a cave complex called Dorje Trakdzong, where Milarepa had perfected the practice of powa, or transference of consciousness. Relieved at not being reprimanded for having allowed us to stay the few days that we already had, the headman sent us with horses for the journey to the caves. Accompanying us were his son and daughter. Dressed in a faux leopard-skin jacket, his daughter served us tea beside the trail on colorful Tibetan carpets. After our return to the village the following day, they escorted us up toward the pass. Never sure just who they thought we were—Westerners or Nepalese—we crossed the snow-covered divide with our Khampa guide and descended back into Nepal.
Weeks later, when we were back in Kathmandu, we heard that during our illicit sojourn in Tibet, Chinese students and ordinary citizens had protested in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Unnerved by their demands for democracy, the eighty-three-year-old Communist party patriarch, Deng Xiaoping, had sent tanks and PLA soldiers to quash the “counter revolutionary rebellion.” On June 4, the day we had crossed the pass, hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese had been killed. Fearing further uprisings beyond Beijing, martial law had been declared throughout Tibet.
Measuring Darkness
I HAD BEEN LIVING in Kathmandu for more than six years now, from 1984 to 1990. Like Paul Bowles’s Tangiers or Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria, Kathmandu, with its vital mingling of ethnic groups and cultural traditions, offered a rich curriculum in which lines sometimes blurred between formal study and experiences beyond what Richard Burton had once called “the deadly shade of respectability.” Since Nepal opened its borders in the 1950s, many Americans and Europeans had found their way to this crossroads between south and central Asia. Many felt they had come of age here, and the kingdom, ever accommodating, referred to the growing expatriate community as Nepal’s “forty-forth tribe.” Some found their calling as artists, writers, or photographers. Others dealt in antiques or more nefarious commodities. Many became Buddhist practitioners, supporting themselves by diverse means as their visas, passports, and connections to the West slowly expired.
Unlike foreign communities in other Asian capitals, Kathmandu’s expatriates were rarely motivated by economic or career considerations. They were more impelled by an ill-defined sense that this cash-poor mountain kingdom with its wealth of ancient trad
itions could provide a more fulfilling existence than their cultures of origin. An important aspect of the Kathmandu experience for many of us was the presence of the Tibetan lamas who had settled there after the Communist invasion of their homeland during the 1950s. Their teachings of Tantric Buddhism offered an inspiring vision of human potential which had resonated deeply and assuaged a spiritual restlessness that more orthodox religions had failed to address.
Despite Kathmandu’s legendary enticements I felt an increasing pull to return to graduate school in the West; not to prepare myself for a job in academia, but to frame what often felt like an excess of experience in some larger perspective. I worried sometimes that, like the narrator in one of Henry James’s novels, “I had spent too long in foreign parts.”
On trips to America and Europe, I met with professors in anthropology departments at Berkeley and Oxford, but never felt sufficiently inspired to commit myself to the doctoral programs that they headed. In the end, I applied to Columbia’s Graduate School of Religion; it offered a Buddhist studies program chaired by Robert Thurman who had recently appointed an erudite Nyingma scholar whom I hoped would prove a sympathetic mentor. Although I submitted essays, transcripts, and letters of recommendation, I never completed all elements of the application. The Graduate Record Examinations, central to the process, were offered in Kathmandu at a time when my work required me to accompany students on a village stay in the mountains. I accepted then that my fate did not lie in academia and that my interest in Buddhism and sacred landscapes would remain primarily experiential. As I settled deeper into my life in Kathmandu I soon forgot all about the abandoned application.
