by Ian Baker
On a fundamental level, the world conforms to our inner vision, just as chemicals that bind with certain receptors in the brain alter how we see. Pilgrimage, in this sense, becomes a journey from ordinary perception into full consciousness of our interpretive role in determining reality, to recognize, as Padmasambhava states, that “all phenomenon are, in essence, the magical display of mind.” As we contoured through the green-black metamorphic rocks, we witnessed suggestive shapes of sinuous goddesses and sign letters in the secret language of dakinis. In distinction from the prosaic descriptions of science, in which words are confined to a single, precisely rendered meaning—the hermeneutic descriptions of the neyigs invite simultaneous levels of perception. Through a poetic mode of thought and communication that Thomas Mann referred to as moon grammar, they urge the pilgrim to see beneath the surface manifestations of the landscape into an open dimension, not unlike the implicate order of quantum physics, in which all is interconnected, luminous, and unbound—a primal matrix beyond the grasp of objectifying consciousness.
The tryptamine alkaloids of the mushrooms had seeped into our cells but revealed no more than what was already present, dissolving what Aldous Huxley had called the “cerebral reducing valve” that shuts out perceptions not required for biological survival. As we skirted Kundu’s western wall, the path swelled and opened beneath our feet and a lush radiance emanated from the boulders that lined the trail. Sections of the rock had been worn smooth by the hands and foreheads of passing pilgrims. Other depressions represented the body prints of early tertons.
The neyigs, it could be argued, fictionalize the landscape as much as they reveal it, but we were willing sojourners through the mytho-poetic terrain. The neyigs were keys to a topography that in turn required further keys—a landscape of the heart beyond divisions of perceiver and perceived where pilgrims surrender themselves to a larger existence.
We entered a cave that sloped upward into a narrowing fissure. Faded prayer flags hung from bits of string. Offerings of rice and copper coins lay on tiny ledges on the rock wall. Was this a portal into the heart? The texts mentioned two tunnels: a Bardo Path representing a symbolic journey from one life to the next and a Liberation Path signifying spiritual rebirth. Eager pilgrims had worn the rock smooth, but we could find no way through. Not knowing the ritual protocol, I made a small offering and placed my head into the dark crack to receive whatever the mountain would offer in return. Like all Tibetan pilgrimage circuits, Kundu’s inner kora offered numerous opportunities for dissolving the sgrib, or obscuring, psycho-physical shadows that veil the full expanse of earth and psyche, and for experiencing the chinlap, or flood of power, that issues from sacred sites.
The Guide to the Heart Center stipulates that in order not to disturb Kundu’s energies, one cannot urinate or even spit except at two designated spots on the kora, marked by cairns. We hadn’t yet located one, and to avoid any potential calamity Hamid had peed into a spare water bottle. Accounts of offended guardian spirits proliferate in Pemako. Bhakha Tulku had told us a story about a prince in Powo who, due to his position, had thought himself exempt from the usual protocol. He had urinated where he wasn’t supposed to and was immediately crushed by a boulder. “The hardships you’ve endured coming to this place should not be wasted by incautious behavior,” the neyig adds. “What should be a cause of virtue and happiness should not turn into a cause of suffering.”
AS WE MADE OUR WAY around the mountain we climbed toward the rim of what seemed like a crater; mist billowed up from the third ling, the Valley of the Dakinis. Before entering Khandro Ling, we stopped to eat on the rocky precipice, where I took out my one gourmet delicacy: a tin of alligator meat that my sister had given to me the previous Christmas. We consumed it along with chyawanaprash, an Ayurvedic concotion made from more than forty different herbs.
After finishing our meal, we descended over the ridge into the Valley of the Dakinis. As we threaded our way through fields of boulders, the landscape opened into an abyss of swamps and vast gulfs. Spring water bubbled up from the sloping ground and drifted in small streams amid towering rocks. There was no clear trail, and Hamid and I wandered along separate routes, heading for a pass that would lead us to the next ling.
As I wove through the undulating landscape, mists curled through the rocks and gave shape to the saturated air. Birds with glossy blue-black wings danced on slabs of rock, veering around me in close circles. The mist condensed into a shimmering drizzle. I followed intermittent piles of rocks that indicated what I hoped was a trail.
Hamid had contoured lower down on the mountain, and I hadn’t seen him for the last hour. When I called out there was no response, only muffled echoes off the walls of mist. I climbed higher to the top of a large boulder and called again. Like elsewhere in Pemako, the slightest deviation from the marginal paths—even here where there were no trees—could mean disappearing altogether. Had the siren calls of dakinis led him to other realms?
I was fairly certain that I was now on a route of sorts and that I was headed toward the pass leading to the fourth ling. Perhaps the route that Hamid was following would converge there from the marshes below. When I reached the rock cairn that marked the pass, I called out in the mist and heard a faint voice far below me. We continued a dialogue of calls, but Hamid’s grew ever fainter. Perhaps he was convinced that he was on the right track and that I would descend.
As rain poured down ever harder, I waited by the cairn where a near-vertical spur curved upward into the clouds. I wondered whether this was the ridge that the shaman from Powo, Pawo Orgyen Chongon, had reputedly followed to the summit to place his banner of victory. The rock looked thoroughly unclimbable.
As I waited at the pass, Kawa Tulku suddenly appeared out of the mists along with Yonten and his attendants. They were midway on their second circuit around the mountain. Not long after, Hamid emerged from his adventures in the Valley of the Dakinis, his eyes wide and blazing. A few minutes later, Christiaan also appeared out of the fog banks with a retinue of porters-turned-pilgrims. The self-effacing nun trailed behind them, quietly mumbling to herself and carrying a glass jar filled with water and herbs that she had collected along the trail.
CHRISTIAAN GAVE A QUICK REPORT of what had happened over the last several days. Todd had largely recovered from his illness, but Gil and Troy had not been able to hold down food or water for the past forty-eight hours. They’d resorted to an exclusive diet of Gummi Bears, Christiaan told us, and had camped by the lake beneath the mountain to recover their strength.
Christiaan was determined to make the inner kora, he said, and had set a fast pace from Shula Pongkhang, the shelter in the marshes. He’d lit out ahead of the others and found the note that we had staked to the tree by the lake. I had written that Hamid and I had gone ahead with Kawa Tulku to complete the kora, and that if they could not make it up the mountain, we would meet them at the campsite by the lake on our way back down. For a moment Christiaan had been dismayed. “Not to reach the object of one’s journey would be exasperating under any circumstance,” Christiaan wrote in his journal, “but [the kora around Kundu] means far more to me now than . . . an abstract notion in a foreign mythology. If pilgrimage for Tibetans is a spiraling path drawing you ever nearer to a place of great significance, both physical and of the mind, then for me it has become something similar; if I came on this trip mostly out of a desire for adventure, something else is facing me here . . . I came to escape the comfort and routine of an urban, working life; [and] through the challenging conditions I’ve come to . . . understand very well the true meaning of those wrathful forces said to roam these hidden lands. If you are not ‘pure’ of mind, if your intentions are petty and selfish, the perilous circumstances will get the better of you. I was drawn here by the lure of the unknown, but it is revealing the unknown within me, and I’ve become a true pilgrim too.”
OY HAD CAUGHT UP WITH CHRISTIAAN at the lake and, although they both felt badly
about leaving the Gillenwaters behind, they decided to continue on up the mountain. They left another note for the three brothers and began the ascent to the House of Clear Light with two of the Sherpas.
Christiaan raced ahead. When he reached the shelter, he was surprised to find a total stranger sitting by the fire in meditation posture. “From the looks of him he’s a monk, and he’s either in deep meditation or he is fast asleep,” Christiaan wrote in his journal. “I’m kind of shocked by his presence; he is the first person we’ve encountered in all this time on the trail. He sits by the smoky fire in lotus position, holding his prayer bead necklace. . . . The monk stirs as I put down my pack. . . . He doesn’t seem at all surprised though by my presence, and he continues rocking back and forth, counting his beads and reciting mantras. He greets me with a slow, wide grin. I try in vain to ask him what time the others left, a difficult concept to explain when using only hands and feet. In reply he just nods gently and smiles even more broadly.”
Despite the clouds that had engulfed the peak, Christiaan headed off with six of the Tibetans—including the one he called Humphrey Bogart—who had followed him up the trail and were as determined as he was to make the circuit. Freed of their loads, the Tibetans leaped from boulder to rocky ledge as Christiaan struggled to keep pace. The porters stripped to their waists at the first stream and cleansed themselves of accumulated grime. At the cluster of prayer flags by the lake, they had prostrated themselves before the holy peak and prayed and meditated. Some had written on small scraps of paper which they left under rocks at the edge of the water. One made an offering of a cob of corn that Christiaan confessed to coveting. It was the first nondehydrated vegetable he had seen in weeks.
At the back of the wedge-shaped cave where I’d stuck my head, they’d reached into the narrow opening and came back with their fingers covered in a gold-colored dirt that they examined for signs. They had collected water from every stream—the heart nectar of Dorje Pagmo—scooping it into glass bottles with small green leaves of a particular plant that they added to the mingled waters. They had hurried on until they saw Kawa Tulku ahead of them through a break in the clouds.
The Key in the Wall
KAWA TULKU SAT ON A ROCK in the rain, smiling his characteristic smile, his bamboo walking stick resting against his thigh and his umbrella perched over his shoulder. The porters who had arrived with Christiaan filed by to receive his blessing—a perfunctory tap on their heads.
Kawa Tulku had already completed one kora around the mountain. The cairn where we sat marked the border between the third ling, the Valley of the Dakinis, and the fourth ling, the Valley of the Prophecy, Lungten Ling. Kawa Tulku said that we would soon be reaching the site said to conceal the dimi, or key, to Yangsang.
Long before the trip began, the enigma of the key had worked in my mind like a Zen koan. What is it that unlocks the innermost secret? Why had Chonyi Rinpoche, Bhakha Tulku, and other lamas insisted that I journey to Kundu before descending deeper into the gorge and the region of the suspected waterfall?
During a solitary meditation retreat at Taktsang, the Tiger’s Nest sanctuary in Bhutan, my first Tibetan teacher, Dudjom Rinpoche, had visions of the innermost secret heart of Pemako. A rectangular rock had appeared containing the mystic key to Yangsang, but due to lack of tendrel, or auspicious circumstances, he was not able to open it. Was it this summit block of Kundu Dorsempotrang that he had seen in his mind’s eye?
Chatral Rinpoche and Bhakha Tulku had both told me that the key refers to a concealed terma—a ritual object, text, or teaching, whether in the mind or hidden in rock, that would open a path to the heart of the beyul. But the door would only open, they had assured me, to one whose awareness had fully ripened through meditation and the practices of the inner yogas.
On our journey toward the mountain, Kawa Tulku had spoken of Yangsang as a mysterious interworld between the mind and physical reality. To reach it, he implied, is not simply a matter of decoding the neyigs; it involves a transformation of vision, recognizing external appearances as mutable apparitions of consciousness. Circling the mountain was clearly a process of entering this new awareness. The essence lake, the cave, the marshes, the cliffs all offered fulcrums where perception could turn to revelation and open the gates to some previously inaccessible space, whether within the outer landscape or the mind.
IT POURED RAIN AS WE SAT amid the rocks waiting for everyone to assemble, mist curling around our limbs. We started out from the pass across narrow ledges at the base of Kundu’s western face and entered the fourth ling. Rocks plunging into the depths below punctuated the deep silence. Far beneath us, the pale outline of a lake emerged fleetingly through the mist. This is the lake of Dorje Pagmo, Kawa Tulku said, before the mists reclaimed it from our sight. The clouds condensed until we could see no more than thirty feet in front of us. I followed the lama through a world narrowed to shifting mists and the dark, basaltic walls of rock that loomed above us.
Kundu’s western wall gradually formed into a steep slab laced with rain water. Kawa Tulku suddenly began climbing directly toward its base. He was breathing heavily, and his mantras seemed to take shape in the mist in front of him. The slab rose through the watery air and diffused into bright clouds several hundred feet above. With the water streaming across its surface, the rock seemed more acqueous than solid. Green, red, and yellow trails of lichen formed patterns like an unknown script. “This is the place,” Kawa Tulku said.
I looked up through the mists at the glistening slabs; waters coursed down the rock and rose again as vapors. “Where?” I asked.
He pointed 100 feet up to where the lichen had etched scriptlike patterns across the wall. “There,” he said, “the place of the key.”
BHAKHA TULKU HAD DESCRIBED THE KEY to Yangsang as some kind of crucial dream, vision, or meditative experience that would arise symbiotically with the landscape and open the door to more subtle dimensions. “The door to these other realms opens rarely,” Bhakha Tulku had said. “When it does you must be ready.” Was there a terma, or some key experience, hidden on the wall of rock above that could unlock the secrets of the beyul?
The Tibetans had already begun to ascend a series of small ledges leading across the yellowish, lichen-covered slab. When they reached a point where the holds seemed to dissolve into a blank wall, they stood still and faced the rock. I watched through the mists as they slowly descended again the way they had come. Chimé Gompo, the scar-faced Tibetan from Powo, stayed the longest on the tiny ledge. Others returned impassive. Had they got it, I wondered? This elusive key or subtle instruction without which one can proceed no farther?
Kawa Tulku headed up toward the cliff in his rain-drenched woolen chuba. A large stone lay at the base of the wall and, like the others before him, he lifted it three times and placed it back on the earth. Leaving his bamboo staff against the side of the cliff, he started up the thin ledges in his rubber boots. Despite his girth, he ascended the diagonal line with the ease of a takin until he reached the point where the slab rose upward like a smooth granite wave. I watched through the veils of mist as he stood facing the rock and imagined the mantras that he was reciting; I half expected that the rock would open and that he would descend with some golden key. But after only a few minutes he began his descent along the moss-covered fissures. I had reached the base of the rock myself, and as he made the last steps down to the saturated ground I asked whether he had found the key. He smiled enigmatically, as if to ask: Do you really think there is something material there to be found?
I began climbing up the slab. I was surprised that, though streaming with water, it offered good friction. Two Khampas had stayed above at a critical point to help the lama over a tricky section, and they stood there now to help others. I moved up through the thinning ledges until I came to the lichen patterns on the rock wall. I let my eyes drift over the tiny crystalline protrusions that composed the rock. From below it had seemed as smoot
h as a mirror, but closer inspection revealed a microscopic landscape of valleys and ridges, a conglomerate of the upthrust of millions of years of subterranean forces. Lichen, a primeval organism formed from the union of algae and fungi, had taken root on the rock, nurtured by mist and light.
Instinctively, I sought out small protrusions by which to ascend farther into the brightening mists. Perhaps if I could reach a point above the others, I thought, something hidden would be revealed. I stood higher on small holds until they ended in a blank wall stretching ever upward.
I watched the mental graspings that cause us to miss what is right before us by seeking what is always just out of reach. In my climbing days, I had meditated on ledges halfway up cliffs, emptying my mind of thoughts and conceptions before embarking on the next pitch. And I stilled my mind now. Whatever was to be revealed on the cliff would not come by exceeding my reach or through the peregrinations of my mind, but by remaining receptive.
The rock felt thin and insubstantial, as if the mind’s habits of perception were all that obscured its deeper strata. Soon there was only breath and mist. My eyes opened to the growth of fungi and algae that flowed across the crystal extrusions and beneath the water streaming down the slab. The suggestive scriptlike shapes of lichen that weave across the surface of leaves and rocks and reflect the unique energies of particular places are often said to reveal the location of termas. I held my hands open against the rock.
