by Ian Baker
Months later, in April 1990, I was woken up at two in the morning by a telephone call from the review board at Columbia University. “We’re looking over applications,” a male voice said, “and we see that yours is not complete.” Before I could mumble any response, the voice continued over the static, “You’re still interested in coming aren’t you?” I replied that I was interested, but that as I wasn’t able to take the Graduate Record Exams, I didn’t see how it would be possible. “We’ll see what we can do,” he said, and hung up the phone. The next night I was woken again by a second call. It was the same unknown voice. “We’re ready to offer you a full scholarship and stipend,” he said, “but you’ll have to let us know by the end of the week.” The call was as brief as before. I put back the receiver and fell back into troubled dreams.
The offer presented me with a dilemma. I had already planned on leaving my position with the School for International Training at the end of the spring semester. From the summer onward, I intended on making an extended journey to India’s shaktipiths, the preeminent places of Tantric pilgrimage and primary influences on the Tibetan texts describing hidden-lands.37 Long before the Tantras were ever written down, practitioners congregated at remote sanctuaries in Assam, Orissa, and other regions of the Indian subcontinent where anatomical parts of a cosmic goddess were said to have fallen to Earth. I planned to keep a journal of a pilgrimage to some of the twenty-four primary shaktipiths that Tibetans also hold as sacred, exploring the ways in which the Tantric tradition transformed in its journey north across the Himalayas. If I could later find a sympathetic publisher, I hoped to turn the journey into a book, but the primary motivation was personal; an immersion in places where the physical and spiritual worlds are said to overlap. Now, rather than journeying through the limbs, eyes, and womb of a terrestrialized goddess, I was confronted with the alternative prospect of years in lower Harlem: paper deadlines, sleepless nights, and perambulations through the catacomb-like depths of Columbia’s world-renowned library.
I consulted a lama who was famous for his divinations: “It’s not the worst thing that could happen,” he said. Although far from reassured, I had definite concerns about staying on in Nepal. A complex relationship with a Nepali woman who claimed to be intermittently possessed by the same goddess whose sites I hoped to visit in India had exposed me to energies well over my head and the prospects of cool, academic halls had a sudden if still ambiguous appeal. In addition, the National Merit Fellowship that I had been offered would be hard to turn down. I called back that night and said yes, I would come.
I SHIPPED BACK BOOKS, CLOTHES, OLD MASKS, and Tibetan carpets, but kept my lease, lending the apartment I had been living in to a renegade white-robed Tantrika visiting from India. I arrived in New York on the last day of registration, and to explore my new surroundings got off the train at 125th Street on the east side of Manhattan and walked west through Harlem. With a daypack filled with notebooks and registration materials, I followed 125th Street to Morningside Park and entered a canopy of tall elms. I soon realized that the park was empty except for two ominous-looking men rapidly converging on me from opposite directions. I moved from the grass onto an asphalt walkway, eyeing a staircase leading to a street above. As they quickened their pace, I bolted for the steps with my pursuers close behind.
When I walked through the campus gates—the Goddess Columbia holding up the torch of illumination on the steps of Lowe Library and a bronze owl peering from a fold in her robes—I felt an immediate sense of sanctuary. I met with the head of the department, Professor Robert Thurman, in his office and told him of the route I had taken. “Needle Park! No one in their right mind goes through there,” he said. After discussing course options, he asked me whether I had any ideas regarding my dissertation. In this at least I felt no ambivalence. I wanted to write on beyul, the hidden-lands.
AT THE SAME TIME, Hamid entered a doctoral program at Harvard’s Department of Sanskrit and Tibetan Studies. We often talked by phone. Hamid shared a small house in Cambridge with a former classmate from Tufts who had recently returned from the Peace Corps in Africa. Because of my fellowship, I was given a tiny studio at the New York Theological Union on 121st Street with a wayward elevator on one side and a subway surfacing from underground on the other. A neurotic neighbor who was studying for the priesthood talked to himself quite audibly on the far side of a thin wall. When I went out to buy textbooks for my courses, I saw a title by Bruce Chatwin that I couldn’t resist adding to the ominously large pile: What Am I Doing Here?
I registered in the gymnasium for courses in Tibetan language, Indian civilization, and theories and methods in the study of religion. The highlights, however, were the courses I could only audit: Thurman’s discourses on Buddhism, and a seminar on the influence of Eastern thought on nineteenth-century American literature. As heady as the subject matter was, the courses lacked the intimacy between student and don that I had experienced at Oxford. The closest approximations were discussions with a professor in the art history department on her fieldwork in northeastern India studying Tantric pilgrimage sites and breakfasts at a local diner with a discontented department head who discoursed jadedly on Claude Lévi-Strauss, structural anthropology, and the soulessness of American universities.
From Columbia’s vast library I sought out texts only peripherally related to my class subjects: studies of pilgrimage in medieval Europe (barefoot journeys of atonement—six, ten, or twelve years in duration—often substituted for terms in dungeons) and ethnographies of obscure tribes in northeastern India. Along with staid papers on methodology in the study of religion, I filled pages with arcane speculations on Tantra’s assimilation of tribal rites and explored connections between Celtic sea voyages in search of mythical islands, Taoist quests for the Land of the Immortals, and the Tibetans’ own search for hidden-lands. As much as I enjoyed these journeys into the archives, I soon realized that the dissertation I had imagined on Tibet’s sacred geography would be less than fulfilling. As early as the eighth century a Tantric sage named Saraha had warned of the futility of exclusively intellectual approaches to knowledge, comparing them metaphorically to trying to measure darkness. Although I was grateful for the opportunity to deepen my studies, I worried that the pursuit of a doctorate would restrict me to a world of classrooms and dim-lit libraries.
I skipped classes to visit a Tibetan lama living on West End Avenue and to attend auctions at Sotheby’s, where a Japanese collector had enlisted me to purchase thangkas for his collection of Tibetan art. I began to suspect I was no longer cut out for university life. Overt discontent proliferated throughout the graduate school of religion, and New York as a whole began to seem the epitome of samsara, the world of thwarted hopes and unfulfilled, if unacknowledged, desires that Henry Miller had called “the air-conditioned nightmare.”
The final turning point in my stay at Columbia was a lecture by Professor Thurman on the origins of Tantric Buddhism. I sat in the auditorium with an alluring woman of Japanese descent whom I had met a month earlier at a Halloween party (and who four years later joined me on my second trip to Pemako). Thurman began the lecture by invoking the life of an eleventh-century Mahasiddha named Naropa, narrating how this great scholar at the Buddhist university of Nalanda had been inspired to renounce his academic studies and pursue a more primary path toward enlightenment. While reading in his cell, a cronelike cleaning lady peered over his shoulder and asked, “Do you understand the meaning or just the words?” When the erudite logician replied that he most definitively understood the meaning, the old woman reprimanded him for lying and encouraged him to leave his cloistered existence and seek out more authentic knowledge in the jungle. With a peal of enigmatic laughter, she dissolved into a rainbow and flew out the window, revealing her true identity as a dakini—a tantric muse who urges adepts beyond logic, reason, and abstract theory and guides them toward the unwalled sanctuary of the illuminated heart. Reflecting on his encounter, Narop
a realized that life as it is commonly experienced is “like a deer chasing a mirage . . . fleeting mist and rippling water . . . a flame flickering in the wind . . . delusion, dreams, and bewilderment, the waterfall of old age and death.”38
Like other adepts before him Naropa ultimately abandoned dry intellectual pursuits and entered tribal regions beyond the pale of Brahmanical society. Through a series of trials, rich in symbolic meaning, he realized the ultimate nature of mind and phenomena, beyond all divisions and rationally constrained perceptions. As his teacher Tilopa instructed him: Watch without watching for something.
Look from the invisible at what cannot be grasped.
To see and yet to see no things
Is to find freedom in and through yourself . . .
Dwell in the unity of Samsara and Nirvana.
Look into the mirror of your mind, which is radiant delight,
The mysterious home of the dakini.39
When I left the auditorium it was already dark. Police sirens and cold November winds swept across Broadway. I realized then that it was time to head for less administered terrain. A week later I wrote a letter to my academic adviser and another to Thurman explaining why I would be leaving the program after the fall semester. By the end of December, I was back in Nepal plotting a journey to Tibet.
WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN an existential crisis was averted by an offer to collaborate on a book on the Tibetan life cycle. I would travel with two close friends through eastern and central Tibet and contribute chapters on Tibetan approaches to pilgrimage, death, and spiritual liberation. Bhakha Tulku’s daughter, whose name was Yeshe Choden and who would be studying at Middlebury College the following fall, came with us as a research assistant in areas of Tibet where local dialects bear little resemblance to the classical Tibetan that I had studied in Nepal. If possible, we would visit her father’s monastery and ancestral seat in the region of Powo. High, snow-covered passes lead from there into Pemako, and I packed in hopes of possibly following the route which Bhakha Tulku had taken over the Dashing-La pass to the sacred mountain Kundu Dorsempotrang. Although I was officially only on leave from Columbia, I felt freed from the dichotomies presented by Buddhist scholasticism and eager to reenter more vital streams of experience.
After waiting for travel permits in Chengdu in western Szechuan, we were told, somewhat predictably, that the valley of Powo was still out of bounds, as it had been when Bailey had first tried to travel there in 1911. Our month-long journey was restricted to those regions in Kham which lay east of the border with the more politically sensitive Tibetan Autonomous Region.
On our return to Chengdu in August, I gave my name to a prominent Chinese travel agency in hopes that they would contact me if permits were ever granted for the Powo and Pemako regions. The director had told me of a “Doctor Fisher” who was supposedly organizing a scientific expedition into the Namcha Barwa Grand Canyon. He would give my name to him, he said, but as I immersed myself in the writing of the book I thought little about it.
The Invitation
IN APRIL 1993, after submitting my contributions to the book on Tibetan life cycles but before its publication, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a call from a night clerk in Kathmandu’s telecommunications office. A telegram had come for me, he said, marked urgent. I sat up groggily on my mattress. The heady scent of night jasmine streamed through open shutters. Calling the telephone number at the end of the message, I talked with Richard D. Fisher of Wilderness Research in Tucson, Arizona, who claimed to have been issued the first permits for the Great Bend region of the Tsangpo gorge. This would be a historic journey, he claimed, the first attempt to raft “the Mount Everest of rivers.”
Fisher claimed to have a state-of-the-art self-bailing boat and told me that he had applied for permits to raft down the Tsangpo River as far as the Indian border. He asked me what experience I had had on white water. Some, I said, but confessed that I would prefer to travel through the region on land. The prospect of rafting through what Morshead had described as “a boiling, seething mass” was far from appealing. But it was impossible to resist the possibility of a sanctioned journey through the restricted and uncharted regions which I had been reading about for years in Tibetan texts and hearing about from Tibetan lamas, pilgrims, and refugees. Fisher’s voice sounded high-strung and the telephone line was plagued by echoes. I wasn’t sure whether I was being recruited or discouraged. “If you’re not in Lhasa by April 21,” he said, “we’re leaving without you.”
THE DAY BEFORE FLIGHT to Lhasa I went to see Chatral Rinpoche at his hermitage at the edges of the Kathmandu Valley. He was sitting outside on the skin of a clouded leopard, pressing gold leaf into a ceramic bowl to make mendrup, a consecrated elixir originally used as a support in the practice of Tibetan Buddhist yogas. He cut up a musk pod and added it to the mortar. You’ll see many of these in Pemako, he said. The strong aroma drifted through my nostrils, blending with the scents of sandalwood, saffron, and cloves that provide an aromatic base for other undisclosed ingredients. As Chatral Rinpoche added a bear’s gallbladder to the dubious concoction, I sat down with Saraswati and two monks to help add the gold. Each leaf was infinitesimally thin; when touched, it instantly adhered to the skin. As we sat by the bowl, Saraswati told me that one of Rinpoche’s students—Daku Sherpa—the wife of Tenzing Norgay, Hillary’s companion in 1953 on the first ascent of Everest, had recently died from an illness that she had contracted while on pilgrimage to Pemako. Traveling through villages in Pemako’s more accessible regions across the Tibetan border in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, her body had become blue and swollen. Word had been sent that she had been poisoned by a practitioner of a cult in which a mixture of snake venom, toxic plants, and pulverized toads is administered to the unwary. She had eventually died in a town below Darjeeling, claiming that because she had reached the sacred land of Pemako she now had nothing to fear from death. Chatral Rinpoche had performed ceremonies during her cremation, directing her spirit toward the shingkam, celestial Buddha Realms of which Pemako is held to be an earthly emanation.
When the mendrup was placed on the fire, Chatral Rinpoche took out a songdu, a protection cord spun from the wool of a black yak. He tied nine knots along its length and, over the next hour, as he continued with the preparations of the elixir, he recited mantras over it and rubbed it between his hands. Then, as darkness claimed the limestone cliffs above the monastery, he tied it around my neck. “Don’t lose this,” he said, speaking in Tibetan, “Pemako can be dangerous.” When I asked for parting advice on how to move through the landscape, he replied pragmatically, “It rains a lot and the trails are rough: bring an umbrella and good boots.”
As I walked back toward the road with the sachet of mendrup that Chatral Rinpoche had given me on leaving, Saraswati related how, decades earlier, her grandfather Dulshuk Lingpa had perished in an avalanche while searching for a beyul called Pemathang, the Lotus Fields, to the east of Kanchenjunga. Bushwhacking through the dense Himalayan jungles, the lama had told his followers not to remove the leeches that feasted on their blood and to maintain a vision of their goal beyond the ice walls of the 28,208-foot mountain. While crossing a high pass, collapsing cornices had swept Dulshuk Lingpa and his fellow pilgrims down the glacier, burying them in the snow. The lama perished and those who survived were forced to amputate fingers and toes. After recovering, some resumed their journey and were never heard from again.
PART TWO
THE GORGE
The pious will lack the means to open the way to the hidden-lands. . . . Those who contemplate going will often fall prey to their fears and will lack the requisite courage. Those who do go will often be slandered by [others] who are envious of their good fortune. . . . For all who lack the auspicious circumstances to journey to these hidden-lands. . . . the beyul will remain no more than imagined paradises of enlightened beings; they will not manifest simply through
contemplation and idle talk.
PADMASAMBHAVA, The Outer Passkey to the Hidden-Lands
With every step the way [into Pemako] seemed to become more difficult; the ground was again rougher and the mountains steeper; the trees here grew much taller. In places we had to negotiate great rocks, only able to be crossed by narrow foot-holds. . . . Our journey now took us through yet stranger country; there were all sorts of trees forming a dense jungle with no level spaces; a tangle of mountains with continual rain and mist. . . .
CHOGYAM TRUNGPA, Born in Tibet
Every day the scene grew more savage; the mountains higher and steeper. . . . The great river was plunging down, down, boring ever more deeply into the bowels of the earth. The snow-peaks enclosed us in a ring of ice. Dense jungle surged over the cliffs . . .
FRANK KINGDON WARD, The Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges
There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul.
BELDON LANE, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes
April 1993
The Year of the Water Bird
FLYING NORTHEAST from Kathmandu toward Tibet’s single commercial airport, our pilot navigated through banks of clouds between Everest and Kanchenjunga, the earth’s highest and third-highest mountains. Windswept summits and vast fields of ice and light passed like apparitions beneath the wings of the Boeing 747.
As we continued northward, the skies opened and shimmering glaciers turned into barren high-altitude plains. The Tsangpo River appeared suddenly on the horizon, a glittering swath of water that flows for nearly 1,000 miles across the roof of the world.
