The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  Gunn became very agitated. “If we lose another day you will never make your flight back to Nepal on August 26,” he said. “I will have no way of contacting Lhasa to change your reservations. You might lose your tickets.” The fact that none of us seemed particularly disturbed by the delay seemed to agitate him all the more.

  Once the announcement was made throughout the scattered encampment, Kawa Tulku’s attendant appeared at our dining tent where we were finishing breakfast. He put down his oversized prayer wheel and silently began to unwrap his feet, which he had encased in plastic bags and strips of green canvas. Eventually, he revealed a staggering display of swollen, infected blisters in place of toes. We sent him to the stream to wash his feet with soap and doused them afterward with liberal quantities of iodine. He remained completely composed, despite the inevitable pain. “He must have picked up his equanimity from Kawa Tulku,” Oy mused.

  All our tents were leaking badly, and in the afternoon Hamid and I ventured down the rain-soaked trail to visit Kawa Tulku again in his wooden hovel. The Monpa porters had strung up their tarpaulin from the roof and were huddled around a damp fire, not entirely pleased with the prospect of another day and night in their sodden confines. Kawa Tulku was quietly biding his time reciting mantras and poring over his collection of neyigs. His countenance never lost its quality of joyful repose.

  “If from the point of view of ultimate truth, all is empty without any nature of its own, how can Yangsang exist?,” I asked him, following up on our discussion of the previous evening.

  Kawa Tulku responded in typical Buddhist paradox: “Sunyata, great emptiness, is inconceivable. It neither exists nor does it not exist. It transcends both being and nonbeing.”

  The doctrine of universal emptiness, or Sunyata-vada, that Kawa Tulku was invoking is less a philosophy than a dialectical practice that strips the world and self of every theoretical construction. Just as one cannot say of sunyata that it exists or that it does not exist, Yangsang is neither real nor unreal, but is closer to being a quantum truth that does not itself exist and that simultaneously does not not exist.

  Hamid tried a slightly different approach: “Just as bodhisattvas vow to liberate beings that don’t in truth exist, the adept searches for a place that he already knows is neither real nor unreal. Is that how it is?”

  “Yes,” Kawa Tulku said. “That’s exactly how it is.” He smiled and went back to cutting strips of meat from the dried haunch of mutton that he carried in his bag.

  “To doubt Yangsang’s existence,” he then said, “would be the same as doubting its reality within ourselves,” to fall from Vajrayana’s sacred outlook.

  It seemed to come down to a great leap of faith.

  “Is finding the key to Yangsang ultimately just a matter of overcoming all doubts?” I asked Kawa Tulku, hoping for some definitive answer.

  Several Tibetans who were sitting nearby were hanging on the lama’s every word but attention was suddenly diverted when Christiaan appeared out of the rain like a wandering friar, the hood of his rain jacket pulled down in front of his newly bearded face. He sat down on a broken plank next to me and Hamid. “Ever since the porters cut up the bear, I’ve been eyeing their knives,” he announced.

  “Not the machetelike knives,” he clarified, “but their daggers with the silver scabbards.”

  At Christiaan’s request, Hamid asked the bedraggled throng of porters if any of them would be willing to sell their knives. The porters’ knives were among their most cherished possessions, and they used them for everything from dissecting bears to constructing pack baskets.

  Yonten, our phantom guide, slowly took his knife from his leather belt and let Christiaan inspect it. Like all their knives, its silver alloy sheath was engraved with stylized representations of a tiger and a dragon.

  Christiaan offered Yonten 200 yuan, or roughly $25, for the ten-inch dagger. The other porters talked hushedly among themselves. Yonten looked a bit confused and made a counteroffer: “One hundred yuan!”

  Hamid burst out laughing before he had a chance to translate, and Christiaan looked bewildered. Some of the other porters started slapping Yonten around, but he remained totally perplexed. He turned to Kawa Tulku for arbitration, and the price was finally set at 200 yuan.

  Christiaan pulled out a wad of yuan and, as Yonten carefully counted and recounted it, the others porters suddenly smelled a good deal. Puntsok, the Khampa with the boar tusk hanging from his neck, pulled out his dagger from beneath the folds of his chuba and handed it to Christiaan. “Damn!” Christiaan said “this is nicer than the one I just bought. The silver work is more intricate. The proportions are better. And it doesn’t have a rough bolt on the head.”

  Through Hamid, he asked Puntsok how much he would sell it for. Puntsok looked hesitant, most likely because his knife was an essential tool along the trail. Christiaan was adamant. “I’ll give you four hundred yuan,” he said.

  Yonten looked worried, thinking perhaps that Christiaan would ask for his money back. Christiaan had another idea, however, and proposed it to Puntsok: “I’ll pay you two hundred yuan and give you Yonten’s knife in place of yours.”

  Puntsok appeared amenable to the idea, but Yonten sensed he was losing out. He yanked the knife from Christiaan’s hands and extolled its virtues. “The bolt makes it stronger,” he said. “The leather strap is better . . .” To the amusement of the entire group, he began to perform various tests to demonstrate the superiority of his knife over Puntsok’s, cutting one blade with the other to show which metal was stronger.

  Christiaan tried helplessly to indicate that it was not an issue of the knife’s function, but a matter of aesthetics. “They’re the same!” Yonten retorted, pointing out the tiger and the dragon. In the end, the other porters were making too much fun of him, and Yonten gave up. Christiaan handed Yonten’s knife to Puntsok and paid him 200 yuan. Yonten retreated under the tarpaulin, thoroughly perplexed.

  The Bogs of Paradise

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, August 1 5, Todd was still weak, feverish, and retching from the door of the tent that he shared with his two brothers. The rain hadn’t stopped, but as we were short on food, we had to move on. During a brief break in the rain, we put on our neoprene oversocks and nylon gaiters and packed up our tents. The porters shouldered their loads, and we started out across a precarious tree bridge. Afterward we climbed steeply through the tangled roots and branches of enormous rhododendrons with nine-inch leaves. The backs of the leaves were veined in delicate patterns that Yonten claimed were auspicious mantric syllables. Kawa Tulku looked unconvinced.

  I dropped behind and let the stillness and silence of the forest envelop me. My breath misted in the saturated air, and I paced myself so that it flowed evenly through my nostrils as my eyes drifted over the spaces between the leaves. Whatever the outcome of the journey across the bogs, we were finally converging on a mountain that I had dreamed about for years—the heart of the goddess.

  After two and a half hours, I emerged from the rhododendron forest into the much anticipated Adrathang, literally the flat place shaped like an AH. Indeed, as I walked out into the vast, primeval swamp, the white chalky banks of a river that wound through its center approximated the shape of this most primal of Tibetan syllables. My immediate concerns, however, were to avoid sinking up to my knees in mud and not to lose my way across the bogs which seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance. Fog drifted over the open, marshy expanse, and small streams meandered through the low swamp growth. There was no trail, and the bog seemed to have swallowed the footprints of all who had gone ahead.

  The neyigs compare the sedge-filled swamp to Sitavana, or Cool Grove, an ancient charnel ground in India where many Tantric adepts deepened their realization. When I caught up with Christiaan and Oy, Oy compared it to the Urschleim, the primordial ooze posited by late-nineteenth-century scientists. “Urschleim was the protoplasmic half-living matter from which o
ne-celled organisms first emerged,” Oy said, in her Thai-British accent with its distinctive rolling r’s. “It happened more than three thousand million years ago.”

  Christiaan countered that she was thinking about her favorite childhood book, Uma’s Diamond. He pulled the brim of his hat down over his dye-streaked forehead and plunged forward through the muck, eager to reach the campsite that Yonten said we would find at the far end of the marsh.

  THREE HOURS INTO ADRATHANG , the porters stopped at the edge of the swamp to brew tea and to warm themselves by a smoky fire. They pressed ahead in the mist and rain while Hamid, Christiaan, Oy, and I waited for the three brothers to catch up. The band of siblings looked pale and drawn when they came in off the swamp. Gil and Troy had come down with the same mysterious illness, giving credence to Kawa Tulku’s fears that they would become ill after bathing in the naga pool at Yanggyap Né. They had been vomiting and wanted to rest by the fire. We had to press on, however. Yonten was the single person who knew where we were going and, as usual, he was somewhere far ahead, as he refused to carry a load.

  At 3 p.m., we reentered the bog, thinking we would easily locate our campsite at the far end. Very soon, however, we lost the track and became entangled in dense underbrush that seemed to be floating on a layer of brackish water. Even more disturbingly, the marsh appeared to branch out in different directions. The seven of us fanned out to look for signs of the porters, plunging through mud and thigh-high streams. Cold fog and rain lashed across the pale reeds and saturated grass.

  By the time we discovered the porters’ tracks on the north side of the main river, we were completely soaked. At the crest of a grassy plateau far ahead of us, we saw a line of prayer flags. We assumed that it was the Kangkang Sam-La that Yonten had spoken of and that we would find our camp on the other side of the ridge.

  When we arrived at the line of prayer flags, it was raining hard, and there was no sign of our porters or camp. We had no idea which way Yonten and the porters had gone, as footprints and other signs of passage had dissolved in the swamp grass. Had we missed a turnoff ? Bhakha Tulku had told me in Kathmandu that the route to the mountain branches off near this pass, and it appeared that a track headed west from the crest of the ridge. But after following it some distance it petered out, and it seemed impossible that our entire regiment of more than thirty pilgrims and porters could have gone that way. Hamid and Oy continued to head south and shouted through the rain that at least some of the porters seemed to have gone that way.

  According to my notes from Bhakha Tulku, the route we were now following would lead us not to Kundu, but into Arunachal Pradesh and the territory of the Chulikata Mishmis. Did Yonten know where he was going? Had the Sherpas gone this way?

  Todd, Gil, and Troy were lagging far behind, but when we were sure that they had seen the direction we had gone, Hamid, Oy, Christiaan, and I followed the faint track through the reeds until the swamp suddenly ended and transformed into a narrow rocky chute dropping steeply into a slope of enormous talus. A vast valley of seemingly endless jungle opened below to the south.

  “I can’t believe the porters have gone on ahead like this,” Christiaan said with a hint of panic. “It’s probably Yonten trying to get revenge for the escapade with the knife!”

  IT WAS FROM HERE that Hamid and I had planned to break away from the group on our secret mission into the valleys leading toward Yangsang. Alternating currents of dread and exhilaration filled us as we gazed below into the abyss. The mountain was washing away behind us in a veritable deluge, and we slid down slabs with no sense of whether or not we were on the right trail, or even on a trail at all. Our surroundings felt like Pangaea, the primeval super-continent that incorporated all the earth’s major landmasses before they began drifting into their current locations more than two hundred million years ago. After clambering down rocks and sliding down waterways, guided by occasional footprints, we entered a dense tangle of rhododendrons and followed more tracks into the forest.

  We doubted strongly that all of the porters, let alone Gunn or Kawa Tulku, had come this way. We began to suspect that we were following only the three Sherpas who had left after the others from our fire at the edge of the swamp. We also suspected that the others had followed a path that we had somehow missed. At this point, however, it was too late to turn back. Our only hope of avoiding hypothermia and a night out in the forest with neither fire nor shelter was to keep going and hope that we could catch up with whoever was in front of us.

  We were now in a dense bamboo forest and Oy pointed out clearly demarcated tracks of a Bengal tiger. “This is just the kind of environment they love,” she said.

  Hamid and I ventured ahead in hopes of catching up with the porters. An hour or more later, Christiaan came up from behind. With green dye from his hat streaming down his cheeks and forehead, he breathlessly announced that Oy had fallen headfirst off a log while crossing a large stream. The straps on her backpack had caught on a rock and prevented her from being swept down the river, but she was nearly hypothermic. Christiaan was having flashbacks to the day after crossing the Chimdro Chu. “I can’t believe this is happening all over again. I’m drenched. It’s getting dark. I’m on a muddy forest trail with no end in sight. We don’t know who is ahead of us, or even if we’re on a trail at all.”

  What’s more, Christiaan had seen no sign of the Gillenwaters. “The last time I saw them, they were huddled in the mud and bamboo. They seemed unable to move.”

  As we debated whether to continue on or go back for the three brothers, Oy appeared out of the bamboo. Her lips were blue and her body was steaming. “I can’t believe this! Where’s the damn camp!” she yelled in her lilting accent.

  We had no food, no shelter, no dry clothes, and no way to make a fire. Our only compass had broken when Christiaan fell from the trail, landing on his head and wrist. We were not even sure that we were on the right trail. By this time, we were all shivering; a night out without fire or warm clothing would have meant certain hypothermia. We had no choice but to continue on as fast as possible and to overtake whoever was in front of us. Words came to mind from Padmasambhava: “The time has come to recognize that negative circumstances can be transformed into spiritual power and attainment. . . . Utilize adversities and obstacles as the path!”28

  OUR CIRCUMSTANCES WERE DIRE, yet I felt as oddly peaceful as I had on the journey two years earlier when Ken Storm and I had run out of food and lost all signs of a trail. At a high spot, Hamid yelled ahead into the forest, but the trees immediately muffled his voice. We continued to climb steeply through the forest, our senses alert. As we climbed higher, the trees began thinning and gave some promise of open ground where we might get some sense of our surroundings.

  Suddenly, there was a faint smell of smoke. Was it our camp? Christiaan still doubted that our whole troop could possibly have come along this track, and he imagined that we were about to descend, unannounced, on a Mishmi hunting party. We continued on, and before long we arrived at a primitive wooden shelter. Kawa Tulku and the Monpa porters were there, huddled around a fire. The Sherpas had set up tents just beyond, commandeering the sleeping place of a bear at the base of a gnarled oak tree. Yonten called the place Pongkhang Sapa. The altimeter showed 12,500 feet.

  We told Pemba that the Gillenwaters were still somewhere behind, and he immediately arranged for two of the younger Sherpas, Tika and Lhakpa, to search for them. While we huddled around the fire and poured water from our boots, Tika and Lhakpa loaded a tent, sleeping bags, food, and thermoses of hot water into a bamboo pack basket in case they found the brothers but were unable to return.

  Just after the two Sherpas headed off into the twilight, Todd miraculously walked into camp. He had recovered from his illness, he said, but Troy and Gil had fallen into a stream and were severely hypothermic.

  At 10 p.m., after walking for fourteen hours, Gil and Troy finally trudged into camp with Tika and Lhakpa. Without a word,
without eating anything, shivering uncontrollably, they immediately crawled into their sleeping bags. As they walked by, gaunt and exhausted, Kawa Tulku looked up as if in surprise and said, “Oh, they didn’t die.”

  The Outer Kora

  DAWN BROUGHT THE PROMISE of lifting clouds. Yonten, our phantom guide, also had welcome news.

  “It’s not far now to the base of Kundu,” he promised, “only four or five hours.” I asked him to pace himself with the slowest in the group, but before we had finished breakfast he had already disappeared ahead.

  All three of the Gillenwater brothers had vomitted intermittently throughout the night. It wasn’t clear whether their symptoms were only those of hypothermia or, as the Tibetans maintained, an illness caused by bathing in the naga pool at Yanggyap. As the rest of us were completely healthy, it seemed unlikely that it was caused by anything that they had eaten, unless it was something from their own private stock.

  Gil, Troy, and Todd started out early, knowing that they would be slow, but hoping to keep up with the first wave of porters. Not long afterward, the rest of us began climbing up the trail, following the left bank of a roaring cataract.

  As we entered a zone of scrub rhododendrons, I turned a corner and found the Gillenwaters sitting on a rock and looking pale and exhausted. They asked me to send back a Sherpa with their tent and sleeping bags in case they weren’t able to make it all the way to camp.

  Yonten had disappeared after making his pronouncement that we would camp that night at a lake beneath Kundu Dorsempotrang and begin the kora the following day. Yonten’s estimates of time and distance had been sketchy throughout the trip, and none of us had any real sense of how long the day would be or where we would actually camp. Christiaan was convinced he was winging it. “How can we put faith in time estimates from a man who has never in his life owned a watch, or even thought in terms of hours and minutes?” Christiaan asked.