The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  In Buddhism, the veil that obscures reality in its full expanse is the clinging to a sense of “I,” as well as the rejecting of an “I.” The key to the hidden spaces beyond those veils lies in the letting go of all hope, fear, and expectation—the subtle forms of attachment by which those luminous dimensions elude our sight. I remembered the story of the terton that Tashi Tsering had told me in Dharamsala: as the hidden treasure came closer, the terton suddenly grasped for it, and it vanished from his hands. As long as appearances are seen as separate from consciousness, the Tantras state, the essence of mind and reality remains unrealized.

  Yangsang’s coordinates thus lie neither outside nor inside the seeker, but in their conjunction in human consciousness. The portal opens when one realizes that one no longer needs to seek it and must simply open to that which is already fully present. In that vastness in which nothing is hidden and nothing needs to be revealed, as all is transparent, clear, and free of obscurations, the adept opens unhesitatingly to all that presents itself, without reference to the ego. And the doors, in response, open everywhere.17

  WE HAD DESCENDED deeper into the Tsangpo gorge than any human to our knowledge had ever gone. According to the coordinates of the Pemako neyigs, we were deep in the throat of the dakini goddess Dorje Pagmo. In the Tantric presentation of the body as a system of interrelated energy centers, the throat chakra—visuddha in Sanskrit—means purgation and refers to the release of false concepts of reality so as to experience fully the transcendent, a world whose perfection lies in its ongoing process. Anatomically, the throat serves as a link between the head and the heart. In the hermeneutical twilight language of the Buddhist Tantras, being swallowed by the dakini—an embodiment of the divine feminine—infers initiation into mysteries beyond the reach of the rational or empirical mind: the maturing process of the psyche as it abandons false certainties and efforts to limit and control its experience and yields instead to the fecundity and flow of the world as it is. Reconnecting with full consciousness to the lost feminine unity, the adept is symbolically reborn from the dakini’s secret lotus.

  In our descent to the falls, we too had been swallowed by the mysteries of the gorge. In this fault line between ancient continents, we had sought something seemingly beyond reach, beyond the falls itself, and had ultimately surrendered to the incalculable reality that had enveloped us—without further thought of walls, doors, or keys. If there was any innermost secret to be revealed here in the configurations of cliffs, waters, and oval doorways, I felt no need for it: the inconceivable wonder that surrounded us was already more than enough, an intertwining world of snakes, orchids, lithe huntresses, and evanescent mist. I felt no yearning for more etheric realms, for anything akin to what Nabokov had once described as a “silent solarium for immortal souls” or Edward Abbey’s “banal Heaven for the saints . . . a garden of bliss and changeless perfection.” No, I preferred this wilder world of rich paradoxes, beyond the diminishments of more temperate thoughts.

  I’d been drawn to these distant gorges by ancient scrolls that invoke a landscape that perhaps one was never meant to find. But the quest for Yangsang had enlivened my relationship with the earth and nature, the womb from which we all emerge. There is no paradise beyond that which is already present, even if still hidden from our view. The gates of Yangsang pervade all space, and the portals are everywhere, as numerous, say the texts, as pores on the skin or blades of grass on the earth.

  The vision of Yangsang propounded in the termas foretells a form of consciousness beyond the veils of discursive thought, a space forever present for those who seek it, not in some far-off wilderness, but in our innermost hearts. When that realization dawns in the depth of one’s being, the world effortlessly transforms into that which was sought. In a phrase that could as easily have come from Buddhist treasure-texts, The Book of Revelations states that: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.”

  WITH SHADOWS LENGTHENING down the walls of the gorge and our ears brimming with the drone of the river, we climbed back over the silver-gray slabs and up the cliff above. We reached camp in near darkness, sustained by the adrenaline of our discoveries. Until now we’d had no idea what we would actually find in this forgotten corner of the Tsangpo gorge. We’d all been skeptical, yet having descended to the falls and measured its waters, we completed a journey begun more than a hundred years earlier. At the same time, we knew that discovery is not a simple process of raising a flag at spots not previously visited by outsiders or guessing at the significance of sights seen from afar.

  The Hidden Falls of Dorje Pagmo, concealed in the narrowest and most precipitious section of the Tsangpo gorge, had been a perennial goal of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century explorers. Our discovery exploded a long-standing myth concerning the waterfalls’ very existence and placed it within a larger historical, geographical, and cultural context. Not least of which was the Tibetan perspective that the falls was not so much an overlooked geographical fact as a threshold to a hidden dimension or, at least, to a new way of seeing. Although such vision can’t be quantified, the perspective offered by Padmasambhava’s scrolls invite us to grow beyond nineteenth-century models of exploration and to open to the blank spaces within our own understanding—to explore not only the physical terrain but, to the best of our ability, to comprehend what the earth’s wildest places mean for those who have always lived there or dreamed them into existence.

  THE PORTERS SETTLED DOWN by their fires, but frost had already covered the thick grass and they had only their clothing and animal skins for bedding. I gave my heavy woolen tunic to the lama’s daughter, Sonam Deki. As I sat in my tent the following morning, she came to the door with the folded tunic and her hands cupped like a chalice around a heap of freshly picked indigo-colored berries. “They’re ripe,” she said as she poured them into my opening palms.

  The Missing Link

  BESIDES LOOKING FOR WATERFALLS, our expedition’s stated purpose was to explore the entirety of the Five-Mile Gap—in reality, more than ten miles of some of the most forbidding terrain on the planet. Beyond our camp at the base of the spur, the gorge transformed into a labyrinth of landslides and cliffs. The lower one traversed along the side of the chasm, the more precipitous the walls. To proceed farther into the unknown section, we would first have to climb back up to our earlier bivouac site, high on the upper slopes of the gorge. From there, we would traverse north to the next spur that would allow us to drop back toward the river.

  Bryan was less than enthusiastic about the way ahead. As far as he was concerned his work was over and he was anxious to get his footage to Washington.

  On November 9 , we breakfasted on dried goral meat and began following our previous route up the ridge. Hoping to shorten the distance, we veered north and climbed through a series of steep gullies and cut our way through mazes of thorn-filled barberry and scrub rhododendrons. Five hours later, we finally traversed the treacherous landslides leading back to our previous bivouac site. Without water, we continued on to Darup, the small spring beneath towering hemlocks, where we carved out platforms to accommodate our tents.

  In dropping temperatures and with thick clouds obscuring all views into the gorge, I spoke with Jayang and Buluk about the route ahead. I told them we needed to stay as close as possible to river level and to document the Tsangpo’s course through this hidden section of the gorge. The hunters reaffirmed what was already obvious: the lower reaches of the gap are sheer cliffs, and the only way to see down into the river is to descend on intermittent spurs. Even without descending lower, they claimed, the journey through the gap involves regular ascents and descents of thousands of feet through pathless, bramble-choked ravines. There are only shifting game trails, Buluk clarified, and they’re far back from the river where high cliffs seal it off to animal and man. There was clearly no set route through the zone ahead and although the distance was little more than te
n miles, towering nettles, rhododendron mazes, landslides, steep ravines, and choking undergrowth made it all seem an exaggerated version of what we had already been through, a deepening journey into Dorje Pagmo’s throat.

  DURING THE NIGHT, the clouds that had enveloped the gorge transformed into pounding rain that, by morning, bordered on sleet and snow. Further dampening the mood, Buluk came to my tent and announced that they had nearly run out of food. According to Buluk it would be less than half a day’s trek from our camp beneath the hemlocks to where our advance crew had set up a base camp at a spring called Benchi Pagmo. Buluk proposed that Jayang lead us to the forest camp while he and Drakpa, one of the other hunters, returned to Azadem to bring back fresh stores of tsampa and chilies. He insisted he would be able to meet us there by nightfall.

  Following Buluk’s plan, we unloaded some of our surplus climbing gear so that he could carry it down to Azadem. He and Drakpa then headed off into the mists while the rest of us packed up the sodden tents and started for Benchi Pagmo. We reached the small pass called Tsodem-La in little more than half an hour. From there, we followed a marginal path lined with sphagnum moss, spruce, and hemlocks. Banners of mist streamed through the pale trees as we followed the occasional blazes that the hunters had made in the past to mark the trail. In places, steep washouts and vertiginous landslides had erased all signs of previous passage, and fog obscured all but a narrow circumference through which we moved like wraiths. Flowing through the mists and primeval old-growth forests we finally reached a few perches that over the past five days, the two Sherpas and six Tibetans who had gone ahead of us, had carved from the 9,500-foot mountainside.

  The mists briefly opened, and through the shining wetness of the forest, I looked across the gorge and saw fresh snow blanketing the heights of Dorje Pagmo. Fleetingly, I also saw a spur called Sangkami that extended below our camp into the unexplored chasms where we hoped to follow it the next morning. We spent the remainder of the afternoon huddled around the fires or escaping the drizzle under the plastic tarps that served our porters as tents.

  Sonam Deki, the lama’s daughter, laughed with her friend Tsering Yuden over their myriad leech bites. The two women were related through an illicit liaison that they attempted to explain to me by pointing to their fellow villagers and recounting their histories of elopement, divorce, and multiple marriages. Our entire crew of porters seemed to be made up of half brothers and sisters related to each other through their parents’ complex alliances.

  In the midst of these sociological digressions, Buluk and Dranak returned from Bayu with news of the Chinese expedition that in our euphoria we had nearly forgotten about. According to Buluk, a team of forty Chinese who had entered the gorge from Gyala was stranded now on the far side of the Shechen-La pass. Their porters from Pe and Gyala had apparently refused to continue and the expedition leader had sent a runner ahead to Bayu to return with a team of porters who knew the way ahead, as well as with eggs, tsampa, and any other available food to replenish their dwindling stocks. The advance scouts had returned with some food and a few porters, but we had already secured the majority of Bayu’s available manpower. Buluk smiled when he recounted how disappointed the Chinese leader had been to hear that a team of Americans had already descended to the falls and was now continuing deeper into the gap.

  More worrisome to us, Buluk reported that the dzongpon, or governor, of Tibet’s Nyingtri county was accompanying the team. Although our permits were perfectly in order, we knew this meant very little if the issue of national pride came into play. Also, there was the fact that we had employed the majority of Bayu’s and Azadem’s potential porters. We wouldn’t reach Azadem again for another five days, but from there we planned to head out immediately for Tsachu with the same crew of porters. In a strange twist of fate, the unintended race for the waterfall had led to the possibility that the Chinese would be stranded in the gorge without porters or guides.

  Bryan was more eager now than ever to pack up and leave. He had brought a Magellan satellite phone—the size of a small laptop computer—and he wanted to phone in a report to National Geographic concerning the discovery of the waterfall before the Chinese got there. He hadn’t been able to get any reception whatsoever in the gap—all satellite signals seemed to be blocked by the walls of the gorge—but he was hopeful he’d be able to phone in from Azadem. He was also anxious to get his film out of Tibet as quickly as possible in case we ran into any resistance.

  HEAVY MISTS HUNG OVER OUR CAMP the following morning, November 11. We could hear the Tsangpo droning through unseen chasms 3,000 feet below us, but visibility was restricted to the towering hemlocks that surrounded our tents. Despite our concerns about the Chinese, we had committed to fully exploring this unknown section of the gorge. The first major spur descends from Benchi Pagmo and, in hopes that the fog would soon burn off, we began making preparations to follow it as far as possible, and, we hoped, gain views into the tight hairpin bend below the Hidden Falls.

  We arranged for the Sherpas and the porters to proceed higher up on the face of the gorge and to set up a camp in a small glen known to the hunters as Zadem. Ken, Bryan, and I would head down the spur with Buluk and Jayang. Once we were in sight of the river, if conditions allowed, we would try to traverse north and reach Zadem from below. Across the gorge, the peak of Dorje Pagmo lay garlanded in mist, like a harem dancer made more beguiling by what she hid from view.

  Fifteen minutes from camp we came upon a recent landslide, worse than anything we had yet encountered. The drop was perilous and, though the rocks seemed relatively stable, Bryan didn’t want to risk a crossing that wasn’t absolutely necessary. He opted to wait behind at a large boulder emerging from the side of the mountain. Ken and I continued on with the two hunters, the mists clearing as we descended a spine of rock beyond the slide. Gyala Pelri emerged from the clouds; Dorje Pagmo cast off her diaphanous veils. But the Tsangpo itself remained hidden beneath the cliffs that steepened as they approached the level of the river.

  As the cloud banks dissolved, a spherical rainbow suddenly appeared in front of us and hovered over the abyss. A second circle of rainbow-colored light manifested around the first one, forming a double nimbus. Reflections of our bodies suddenly appeared within the circle of fog and sunlight. Buluk and Jayang kept muttering: “Beyul. Beyul.” Eventually the vision dissipated and the gorge lay revealed below, free of clouds.18

  We continued down the ridge to where it briefly leveled, but we still could not see the Tsangpo. It lay beneath us, lost in the layered corrugations of the gorge. We angled south and descended a precipitous ravine. Neither of the two hunters had ever ventured into this unknown section of the gap, but they had caught the fever and seemed as eager as we were to see every corner of the river and to locate the third, smaller waterfall that Lama Topgye had spoken about.

  As we descended lower, the terrain progressively steepened and became more hazardous. Where we could no longer proceed, we cleared branches and peered out over the cliffs. We saw the Tsangpo as it flowed northwest from the Hidden Falls and, half a mile or so later, entered a torturous U-bend where it careened into the base of the spur and then almost immediately doubled back on itself and surged due south as a mass of foaming water. A quarter mile beyond, it crashed against the lower walls of Dorje Pagmo and disappeared from sight where it flowed northwest again at the base of the Sangkami spur. Through the range finder we could see innumerable cascades and lesser waterfalls, but nothing as distinctive as the jetting falls that Lama Topgye had described to us in Tsachu.

  Although we could see and photograph the full length of the Tsangpo from the Hidden Falls to the base of the Sangkami spur, a rocky promontory blocked our view of the easternmost corner of the U-bend. Having come this far, we were determined to see down into the hidden pocket. In hopes of gaining a sight line beneath the intervening protuberance, we scrambled downward for another hour until a sheer cliff dropping down into the Tsangpo barred all
further progress. The innermost corner of the U-bend remained resolutely hidden, and we resigned ourselves to starting back up the spur.

  While descending, we had kept an eye out for possible ways to traverse north and reach Zadem without having to climb back up to Benchi Pagmo. But steep cliffs lined the northern side of the spur, and we could find no way through. Besides, Bryan had waited behind above the landslide, and we needed to return to Benchi Pagmo to fill our water bottles at the spring and retrieve some of our gear.

  By 4 p.m. we had recrossed the landslide and reached the point where we had left Bryan. But despite having made visual contact with him two hours earlier from lower on the ridge, he was nowhere in sight and made no response to our calls. We could only hope that he had returned to wait at our previous night’s camp.

  Quickening our steps, we reached Benchi Pagmo a half hour later and found Bryan desperately trying to kick-start the fire. He had misread our hand signals and imagined that we had contoured around the ridge and abandoned him above the landslide. Unwilling to cross the unstable slope of mud and talus and catch up with us, he had returned to Benchi Pagmo and looked for the route to Zadem that the porters had forged that morning. He’d found only incipient game trails that petered out into jungle. Admittedly in a state of panic, he had decided to try to make his way back to Azadem if he couldn’t resurrect the fire. If he could keep it going, at least he knew he wouldn’t freeze to death.