The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  A similar phenomenon might have happened here on the Tsangpo, we speculated, as waterfalls typically occur where resistant, crystalline rocks overlay weaker sedimentary formations and cause what geologists refer to as differential erosion. But neither of us was qualified to speculate authoritatively on the underlying bedrock, and we renewed our efforts simply to measure the waterfall’s height.

  The falls were in perpetual motion, without edge or center, and unmeasurable as such by our given tools. We trained the range finder instead on the wall of rock over which the waterfall coursed. The readings were stable and yielded the necessary data. Averaging the troughs and waves, the waterfall ranged between 105 and 115 feet.

  The hidden waterfall that Kingdon Ward and Lord Cawdor failed to locate may not have been the rival to Victoria Falls and Niagara that some geographers dreamed of after Kinthup’s report to the Survey of India in 1884. As magnificent as it was it could hardly compare to the grandest waterfalls of the world, but it put the centuries-old question of its existence to rest.

  The description of the waterfall Waddell had written in the nineteenth century based on Tibetan accounts had proved uncannily accurate. “Gathering its waters into a narrow torrent, [the Tsangpo] precipitates itself over a cliff about 100 feet in depth, cutting and boring its way so deeply through the rocks that . . . below these falls it is said to go quite out of sight.” The president of the Royal Geographical Society of London at that time, Sir Thomas Hungerford Holdich, had also written effusively about the undiscovered falls. He emphasized their importance as a pilgrimage site and described the “clouds of misty spray” that rise above them, the same mysterious mists that had captivated the attention of the hunters since we first arrived at the grove of weeping pines. The ascending column of light-filled vapors had reinforced their convictions that the place was sacred and perhaps even, as Lama Topgye had suggested, the portal to a hidden paradise.

  When David Livingstone stumbled accidentally into Victoria Falls in 1865, he likened the perpetual veil of mist for which the native tribes had named the falls to a “flight of angels.”13 In Tibetan meditation practices performed at waterfalls, the same phenomenon is described as a dance of dakinis, referring to the anthropomorphic expressions of the five elements that comprise phenomenal existence. Meditating on the inner essence of this dance of water droplets, adepts could refine their spiritual awareness and enter secret spaces in the interstices between their bodies and the outer landscape, using form as a doorway to the formless.

  Although our measurements of the hidden waterfall could only be reductive—even trivial from a certain point of view—they did clearly establish, after more than a hundred years of searching, that the legendary Falls of the Tsangpo was not a myth but a reality. Moreover, the waterfall we had just measured was nearly three times as high as any other previously documented on a major Himalayan or South Asian river. 14

  We still needed to reach the waterfall’s base to compare our readings with the range finder to those of the clinometer. There was no way down from where we stood, so Ken slung the range finder over his shoulder and jumared back up to the top of the cliff. When I joined him, I asked Buluk and Jayang if they had any local name for the falls, and they told me that they refer to it simply as Dorje Pagmo’s chinlap, her blessings or, in literal translation, her transformative flood of power. We collectively decided to call the waterfall Pagmo Sang Bab, the Hidden Falls of Dorje Pagmo.

  Before searching for a way down to the base of the falls, we stretched prayer flags between two silver-green pines with aspirations that this hidden place that had inspired dreams and speculations, lost texts, and new discoveries would remain forever inviolate, and that the guardian spirits that had kept it thus far off the map would remain ever vigilant. The multicolored banners imprinted with Buddhist mantras and images of Padmasambhava were also a message for the Chinese expedition that we half expected at our heels.

  The Secret Door

  NEVER HAVING ROCK CLIMBED BEFORE, Bryan had struggled with the jumars while ascending the overhanging cliff. He was not interested in subjecting himself to further danger or distress. “I have all the footage I need,” he said confidently. “I don’t need to go down to the base.” He told us he planned to end the film with pans of Ken and me rappelling out over the void of the falls.

  If for Bryan the film—and the expedition—were effectively over, Ken and I agreed that to complete even the outer measurements of the waterfall, we would still have to descend beneath it. Perhaps we could also resolve the question of the legendary door. From our earlier vantage point on the sloping ledge, a protruding buttress of igneous rock had concealed the waterfall’s right-hand edge. We fantasized that we might find something hidden there akin to the Cave of the Winds behind Niagara or the passage through the falls in The Last of the Mohicans.

  We threw the ropes down over the cliff on the northern side of the spur, but they only reached halfway to the level of the river. After coiling them back up, we made our way along the cliff edge looking for a break in the rock. We found a steep vegetated gully that eventually disgorged onto a moonscape of wave-polished gneiss fifty feet above the Tsangpo. We traversed out across the silvery, mica-flecked rock. The protruding buttress still hid the falls, but we were hopeful that by contouring across the slabs we would soon reach its base.

  At a gap in the escarpment, I clambered down to the edge of the Tsangpo and filled my water bottle from the silt-filled waves. The water was cold and penetrating and surged before me through a flume of burnished rock. A varicolored wall of rock swirling with gold and purple lichen rose from the waters on the opposite bank. Two hundred yards to my right, the river cascaded over a hidden drop and disappeared into a hairpin bend. I recalled a passage from the Tantra of the Direct Consequence of Sound that offers instruction on meditating on waterfalls and turbulent rivers. “The dakinis’ harmonies manifest in the water’s thunderous roar,” states the text. 15 The Dalai Lama had explained the practice in reference to wall paintings on what had once been his private meditation chamber in Tibet. One image shows a yogi meditating in front of a waterfall with a tunnel leading behind it as if into another realm. “This shows a form of meditation on the sound of the elements,” His Holiness told me. “Waterfalls are the best places for this. The practitioner merges with the sound of water to open subtle energy currents within his inner yogic body. . . . When these energies are unified and circulating through the uma, the central meridian, the chakras open like petals of a lotus and previously hidden dimensions of awareness arise in one’s mindstream.”16

  I climbed back out of the defile and caught up with Ken, Buluk, and Jayang, who were looking for a route across the steepening quartzite slabs. As we neared the falls, the ever-present spray had coated the rock with a slick veneer of moss. We traversed out on slimy footholds, looking for a place to anchor the rope. We could now clearly see the waterfall as it avalanched through the cleft, but a bulge in the cliff that rose above us obscured its upper section, where we had stood only two hours before. From whatever angle we had approached, some part of the falls always remained hidden from view.

  Even had we found a belay point for the rope, the ubiquitous slime and steepening angle made it impossible to proceed farther across the slabs. To get any closer to the waterfall’s base, we would have had to approach from above with hundreds more feet of rope. But we could see beneath the buttress now, and no cave seemed to lead into the fall’s interior. We abandoned our fantasies of anything approximating the Cave of the Winds or a passageway through this suture between ancient continents.

  By taking measurements with the clinometer on the wall of rock that rose across from us and above the cauldron of foam at the waterfall’s base, we were able to verify our earlier calculations. The height of any river fluctuates with the seasons and, if we had measured the falls in full flood, we might have gotten different readings. But on this day—November 8, 1998—ou
r various measurements gave the Hidden Falls of Dorje Pagmo a height of anywhere from 105 to 115 feet. Oddly, we continued to come up with the figure 108—a sacred number in Buddhist cosmology and a figure enthusiastically endorsed by our Tibetan companions. (Coincidentally, Victoria Falls is 108 meters high.)

  Like all data, the measurements would lead to facts, but not to the discovery of anything beyond our normal range of experience. How can one presume to measure water? I thought. From clouds, to river, to sea, where does a waterfall really begin and end? As Heraclitus had said, it all just flows away.

  ALTHOUGH BULUK AND JAYANG had cooperated with us in our geographical mission to measure the falls from several vantage points, the waterfall’s height clearly mattered very little to them. But they had looked intimately for auspicious signs and portents in the surrounding environment that might indicate a route beyond or through it. Only if the waters that flow over the falls could be temporarily stopped, like those at Niagara, would they ever be convinced that no golden road leads through the cascading water.

  In the midst of my musings, Buluk asked me for the range finder. He’d been looking at the scriptlike swirls of lichen on the opposite wall, commenting that they resembled khandro dayig, the secret dakini ciphers that often indicate the site of a terma. The patterns faintly resembled petroglyphs or some lost runic language. The range finder doubled as binoculars, and he panned across the lithic whorls until the viewfinder came to rest at an oval-shaped opening on the rock wall across from the waterfall.

  “That may be the door,” he said. After minutes of gazing through the double lenses, he handed me the range finder to look for myself.

  Huge waves leaped out of the Tsangpo and spilled down the smooth rock wall directly below the apparent tunnel. A perfect oval had formed in the reddish granite twenty or thirty feet above river level, and a passageway seemed to veer off diagonally into the dark heart of the mountain; how far one could only guess. Could this be the legendary portal that the correct ceremonies or rituals would cause to open? A tunnel into the heart of what once had been Gondwanaland?

  The terma that Duddul Dorje had brought forth in the sixteenth century from a lake in Powo had referred to a door in a wall of rock and a tunnel behind that one would have to follow for an entire day to reach a paradisiacal realm of healing fruits and eternal youth. According to the revealed scroll, a high pass leads even farther to an emerald palace inhabited by joyful beings in bodies of rainbow light where all desires are magically fulfilled. Were these symbolic evocations of internal meditative states, hyperbolic accounts of parallel dimensions, or simply the literary fantasies of a Buddhist sage?

  The questions posed by the texts and traditional Tibetan beliefs, however diffuse and unanswerable, were ultimately as intriguing a proposition as the height of the waterfall, a fact that we quickly established with the aid of modern technology. The Falls of the Tsangpo had offered turn-of-the-century explorers a geographical quest to rival the search for the headwaters of the Nile. But the Tibetans—who knew of it already—did not view the falls as a topographical trophy but as a sacrament, a threshold between the physical universe and the world of the spirit. That Kingdon Ward and those before him never found the falls seemed strangely just, as its significance lay in qualities quite distinct from those they sought. And even when it could be seen from high above, it had been dismissed as a hydrolic event of no great consequence—its true proportions concealed by foreshortened perspective.

  If the oval gateway at the base of Dorje Pagmo really was a door to some undiscovered realm, it wasn’t a question of how to open it—the portal was already open wide—but how to reach it. More than 200 feet of seething white water lay between the tunnel and where we stood on the opposite side of the gorge. The waters of the Tsangpo surged up against the cliffs in a fluvial chaos that could never be crossed. Rappelling down the sheer walls of Dorje Pagmo—provided one could approach from the other side—did not look any more feasible. It would take some arcane methodology—far beyond our current means—to ever enter that mysterious passageway. And even if one did penetrate the granite veil, unless one’s mind’s eye was honed to an almost exquisite sensitivity, any hidden world might pass unnoticed. I felt happy that the oval passage was so thoroughly beyond reach. Some doors cannot be opened until they open first in us.

  The elliptical opening in the side of the gorge was a compelling feature of the landscape, suggestive of hidden worlds and birth tunnels into new states of existence. At the same time, it was a simple geological fault and unlikely to penetrate deeply into the wall of rock, which was darkening now as shadows flooded down the sides of the gorge.

  How we view the world is a strange alchemy of cultural conditioning and personal choice. One could cautiously avoid all geomorphic speculations or, like the Tibetans, allow the configurations of rock and water to guide one into more exalted thoughts and alternate ways of seeing. As the Victorian poet Robert Browning wrote: “. . . a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or what’s a heaven for?”

  Poststructuralist theory holds that the meaning of words and events is forever contingent on a web of shifting contexts and points of view. The falls, the neyigs, our own conditioning all point toward a vision of the universe and ourselves that admits multiple and simultaneous perspectives, ones that free us from self-limiting opinions and open the way for true discovery—to recognize that all we see is not the world but a world, generated by a language of only half-conscious thoughts, ideas, and sensations that, as Wittgenstein observed, “could all be otherwise.” Either way, we had reached a place where a Victorian dream of a legendary waterfall converged with the Tibetan quest for a paradisiacal sanctuary. Standing between the falls and the unreachable doorway, encircled by towering cliffs, the implacable drone of the Tsangpo reverberating through our cells, we shared with our Tibetan companions, each in our own way, a moment beyond time and geography.

  RISING UPWARD FROM THE FOAMING CAULDRON between the waterfall and the oval door was the diaphanous fountain of mist that we had first seen from high up on the walls of the gorge. A swirling iridescence distilled from the turbulent waters of the falls, the cloud of condensed water droplets rose on vectors of air toward the heights of Dorje Pagmo. In contrast with the downward thunder of the waterfall, the mists flowed upward in etheric ease, transforming into light and air.

  Carl Jung wrote of waterfalls as images of unification, alchemical symbols joining “the above to the below,” the conscious mind with the vast resources of what he termed the collective unconscious. Nineteenth-century painters viewed mists rising from the base of falls as confirmation of spiritual resurrection. Livingstone wrote of a “flight of angels,” and his description of the mists hovering above Victoria Falls led to the naming of a heady cocktail still offered at the Falls Hotel. In Tibetan thanka paintings, the cycles of nature illustrate experiences in meditation. Opalescent clouds pictured above waterfalls represent bodhichitta, the enlightened essence inherent within all beings. Waterfalls depict its active flow and circulation through the body, mind, and universe.

  When the great Terton Rigdzin Godemchen searched for the hidden-land of Dremojung in the fourteenth century, he dreamed one night that he was lost in a fog-enveloped valley. A voice guided him through the mists: “The stream of your mind is agitated by doubts and conditioned appearances. . . . Pristine consciousness—your mind’s natural state—is free of conceptual thought; this is the one essential secret that cuts through every obstacle.”

  Godem, like other tertons, followed the meditative practices of Dzogchen, the pinnacle of the Nyingma tradition. Dzogchen’s discourse makes any outward search seem futile. From the view of Dzogchen, the pristine reality symbolized by the hidden-lands is already fully present, though veiled from view just as mists can obscure the sight of surrounding mountains. “The flow of wisdom is as continuous and unstoppable as the current of a mighty river,” declared Padmasambhava in a Dzogchen Tantra. “Look into y
our own mind to know whether or not this is true.” To search for truth externally, Padmasambhava taught, is to miss its all-pervading presence.

  The culmination of all Buddhist paths Dzogchen leads to lucid awareness of the mind’s ultimate nature, beyond all concepts of self and other. “When you recognize the pure nature of your mind as the Buddha, looking into your own mind is resting in the [omniscent] Buddha Mind,” wrote Padmasambhava.

  The Tibetan translation of Buddha is Sangye. Etymologically, sang means purified of all obscurations and gye means vast in expansive qualities. Buddha thus refers to the great sphere of pristine wisdom in which all perceptions are viewed ultimately as reflections of mind, yet free of any reference to a self. “When truly sought even the seeker cannot be found,” Padmasambhava declared, “thereupon the goal of the seeking is attained, and the end of the search. At this point there is nothing more to be sought, and no need to seek anything.”

  Lamas sometimes introduce the view of Dzogchen by sending their students into the mountains to look for mind. When they return not having been able to locate consciousness either in the brain, the sense organs, or external phenomena, the lama points out that not to find mind is to discover its true nature. For in that empty space—the clarity and openness between thoughts that can only be discovered experientially—lies the path to enlightenment and the realization that to search for the Buddha outside ourselves is like trying to grasp flowing water. We only come up empty-handed.

  In reaching the waterfall at the bottom of the gorge, we had discovered something that was in fact no “thing” at all, but rather a dazzling display of light and waves. In Buddhist terms, its fluid dance of emptiness and appearance reflects the mind’s innermost nature. Perhaps in this way, I thought, the waterfall serves as a door into the hidden realms beyond mind as we know it. In describing the quantum world beyond ordinary human perception, the physicist David Bohm wrote that: “Consciousness has to become commensurate with that different space in order to discover it. Consciousness, in fact, has to change its very state.” The Buddhist termas say the same thing about reaching Yangsang.