The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, on the night of November 17, we rolled into the Nyingtri Hotel in Bayi. China Central Television was broadcasting the progress of the Chinese expedition on the television set in the hotel lobby. Set to synthesized music, the digitalized images of the gorge, rare plants, and staged Monpa dances revealed a last great place to be claimed for the Chinese Motherland, a synth-pop Shangri-La. I worried what our own National Geographic Television film would convey to audiences in America and realized that if we actually had found Yangsang we would have had to cover our tracks, confuse and elude at all costs. Or else, like the world’s most magical places, it would soon be desecrated with a road or hotel, like the one we were now in. (Two days later in Lhasa, a Tibetan friend told me how her elderly mother had watched the daily dispatches on their small black-and-white TV and, fingering her rosary, prayed that rockfalls and avalanches would bar their progress, anything to keep the Chinese from entering this last bastion of Tibetan hope.)

  The dream of an earthly paradise hidden in the deepest heart of Pemako, of a realm which cannot be measured or fixed on any map, had inspired generations of Tibetans and many in the West as well. That dream was now in danger of vanishing as what had previously been hidden became fodder for TV audiences and, quite possibly, for the turbines of the world’s most ambitious hydroelectric plant. The dream of Shangri-La, whatever its local expression, is a defense against crass materialism, and although the vision can lead to escapist fantasies, I was saddened to watch the mysteries of the Tsangpo gorge slip away across the screen.

  Beyond the specter of commercial logging and—so far—hydroelectric exploitation, the Tsangpo gorges may be technologically undeveloped, but the inalienable unity between nature and humankind promoted by its peoples offers a vital counterpoint to unmitigated dreams of material progress that, were the Chinese to endorse it, would contribute to a wiser, more resplendent world. For behind the paradisiacal ideal of the beyul lies the recognition that by changing the way we view the world—and acting on that vision—the world itself transforms. Yet as the ancient Capuchin, Father Perrault, had observed at Shangri-La, the nations of the world seemed to be “strengthening, not in wisdom, but in vulgar passions and the will to destroy.”

  Weighted down by these thoughts, I climbed to my appointed room on the third floor of the empty hotel. I navigated the square-cut porcelain tiles and poured cement of the staircase, passing shadowy chambermaids wearing white surgical masks that obscured all but their eyes.

  The hotel’s archaic plumbing eventually yielded a tub full of hot water and, with water streaming from the rusted pipes, I immersed myself in my first bath in more than month. In Lost Horizon, Conway had told his host at Shangri-La that modern plumbing was, to his mind, “the only certain boon . . . that the East can take from the West.” At the Nyingtri Hotel that blessing had yet to be fully realized, but the steaming waters did offer a welcome sanctuary away from Bryan’s video camera as well as from my persistent thoughts.

  Ever since we crossed the bridge at Trulung and met with our Chinese drivers, I’d felt as if I’d crossed a threshold into profane space. Pemako’s cloud forests and hidden waterfalls seemed suddenly distant memories. As to Yangsang, I thought of the prescient words that Voltaire had written in 1770: “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.” (“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”) Losing myself in these reflections, I opened the taps to let in more steaming water. The pipes clanked as it streamed through the rusted spout, the hot, healing balm dissolving the legion of wounds and insect bites that I had amassed over weeks in the gorges. I listened as the water poured from the pipes, its sounds enveloping me as I lay back in the porcelain tub. Molecules of hydrogen and oxygen flooded my brain and nerves as the room filled with evanescent steam and water spilled through crevices in the floor. The water’s sound filled all available space, connecting to the waters within my cells and the rivers flowing through my veins. Soon there was only the water and its myriad convolutions; its eddies, whorls, waves, and bubbles.

  Flowing through my pores and over the edges of the tub, the water swelled across the cracked and grimy floor until the bathroom walls dissolved in mist and with them, all thoughts of hidden scrolls and rediscovered waterfalls. As the Buddha pointed out, waterfalls are in essence no thing at all, just shimmering displays of water, light, and air, their very features—like our selves—an optical illusion of the senses. The water submerged my ears and my breath came as if from beneath a rising sea. Where did this water ultimately come from? Where was it going when it disappeared into the drains of this remote hotel?

  I recalled the words of Marcel Proust: “The real journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Would we learn to bring forth what is hidden, to rescue into consciousness the endangered worlds and ideas that enlarge our sympathies and our senses and connect us to a greater whole, beyond the perennial tides of ignorance, greed, and aggression? With the chrome taps opened wide, and the wild thundering of the waterfall still within me, I could only hope those radiant waters, hidden in our deepest collective being, would never be dammed or diverted but—like the dream of unknown places—carry us beyond all divisions into the currents of the unbound heart.

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  Through the unknown, remembered gate

  When the last of earth left to discover

  Is that which was the beginning;

  At the source of the longest river

  The voice of the hidden waterfall . . .

  —T. S. ELIOT, “Little Gidding,” The Four Quartets

  We are surrounded and embraced by her; powerless to separate ourselves from her, and powerless to penetrate beyond her . . . We live in her midst and know her not. She is incessantly speaking to us, but betrays not her secret.

  JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE 1

  All poetic language is the language of exploration . . . I dare say it is meaningless until one has drifted into a certain vein of thought.

  EZRA POUND

  If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without.

  HENRY MILLER

  Epilogue:

  The Veils of Paradise

  ON JANUARY 6, 1999, the National Geographic Society issued a press release stating that the discovery of the Hidden Falls of Dorje Pagmo had resolved a mystery that “had been the source of myth and speculation for more than a century.” The director of National Geographic’s Expeditions Council told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, “If there is a Shangri-La, this is it!” Newspapers around the world subsequently ran headlines such as shangri-la discovered and hidden paradise unmasked, often on the same page as news of calls for President Clinton’s impeachment over his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

  The National Geographic Society immediately commissioned me to organize a return expedition to the Tsangpo gorges to document their natural history. Our team reached no farther than Lhasa, where the Chinese authorities revoked our permits and informed us that the Yarlung Tsangpo Great Canyon had been closed until further notice. I silently rejoiced that Dorje Pagmo had let fall her veils.

  When Beijing’s policies changed and Pemako reopened, the elements-- some would say Dorje Traktsen—took over the role of barring entry. In June 2000, a glacial dam on the Yigrong River burst its walls and a cataclysmic flood of mud and water swept away bridges across the Po Tsangpo and the lower Tsangpo gorge. Water levels rose more than 600 feet above the normal high water mark, unleashing landslides and transforming the lush jungles that grew along the canyon walls into a moonscape of barren rock.2 The Hidden Falls of Dorje Pagmo—upriver from the confluence—had remained unaffected, but access to the region was entirely cut
off.

  By January 2002, seven world-class kayakers took up the challenge of continuing beyond where Wick Walker’s team had pulled out of the Tsangpo’s upper gorge. Walker had acknowledged that “defining success on a first river descent is a subjective and elusive task,” but the expedition led by Scott Lindgren and sponsored by Outside Magazine and Chevrolet’s Chevy Avalanche reached within a mile of the beginning of the Great Bend, albeit with extensive portages.3 Ken Storm had headed the expedition’s land support team and guided the kayakers out of the gorge with their boats on their backs well before they neared the Five-Mile Gap.

  In Tsachu, the Chinese had erected a concrete and bronze memorial to their expedition in the fall of 1998, displacing a row of prayer flags that had once traced the movements of the winds. Lama Topgye had passed away in 2001 and the Chinese had begun relocating the local populace to Bayi; those who remained spoke alternately about an ecological preserve4 and an impending dam, the construction of which would submerge the Tsangpo’s inner gorge and obliterate the Falls of Dorje Pagmo.

  BRYAN HARVEY’S FILM, Secrets of the Tsangpo Gorge, had debuted at Telluride’s MountainFilm Festival and ended with the exploding waves of the hidden waterfall. Hamid Sardar had edited his footage from his journey through the gap, but the plan to combine it with Ned Johnston’s never materialized. The needed reels remained sealed in the vaults of the Film Study Center at Harvard University. After completing his doctorate, Hamid redirected his energies toward central Asia, where he made a film about a vanishing tribe of nomadic reindeer herders who seek guidance in their migrations from a ninety-three-year-old female shaman.

  Discouraged by China’s plans for developing the Tsangpo gorges into a new ecotourism hotspot (he’d even heard talk of a planned cable car to the falls), Ken turned elsewhere in his quest for pristine wilderness, purchasing an island in northern Lake Superior inhabited only by a herd of deer and a roaming bear. “It’s my own private Pemako,” he said from his office in Minneapolis.

  Between trips to Tibet, I’d stayed in Kathmandu, seeking to give voice to the mystery of the hidden waterfall and the lure of unchartable terrain. As I immersed myself in writing, Nepal’s streets erupted in riots after the crown prince gunned down the majority of the royal family. A place that had been a kind of Shangri-La for me and others spirited into anarchy.

  As the book neared completion, I sublet my home in Kathmandu and took up residence at a relative’s eighteenth-century mill house near New York where a waterfall pours over a stone ledge. I wrote at a large oak table overlooking the falls and a pond where a female trumpeter swan plied the waters or stood luxuriantly, her right leg tucked beneath her, where the waters gather and stream over a fifteen-foot wall of rock.

  Fall came, and the trees around the pond turned bright gold, red, and ochre, and leaves spilled into the waters like crumpled scrolls and swept over the lip of the falls. With the brush of her wings, the swan traced patterns across the amber surface of the lake, and I thought of the goddess Dorje Pagmo who, in the guise of a snowy vulture, had guided the treasure-revealer Lhatsun Jikme into the heart of the beyul.

  Hidden-lands can open anywhere; they are as much modes of perception as actual places. In his “Essay on American Scenery,” written in 1836, painter Thomas Cole pleaded that “we are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.” At Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau wrote passionately in defense of nature, “if only to suggest that the earth has higher uses than we put her to.” Following Emerson’s dictum that “the whole of nature is a metaphor for the human mind,” Thoreau envisioned wilderness as an image of unexplored capacities. He advocated “uncivilized free and wild thinking” as an antidote to civilization’s excesses and urged his readers to explore their “own higher latitudes.”

  The scrolls describing beyul are as “wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile”5 as the works of literature that Thoreau praised as nourishing humankind’s identification with outer and inner nature. In its original sense, wilderness conveys both awe and threat, alluring mystery and a sublimity that reconnects us to our origins. Pemako and the Tsangpo gorges embody its essence. Yet so too does every moment when the veils drop and we see into the heart of things.

  The pond took the shape of an interdependent living whole, transforming and metamorphosing before my eyes. Perhaps I had found Yangsang after all, I felt, a shining world where a swan could transfigure into an embodiment of the muse and give testament to Wallace Stevens’s maxim that “realism is a corruption of reality.” Can we ever peer behind the veils that enrich our vision of nature, or are they perhaps as Goethe wrote in Faust, a necessary protection against some blinding truth? As Emily Dickinson wrote: “A charm invests a face/ Imperfectly beheld—The lady dare not lift her veil.”

  We feed on mystery, whether the enticements of unknown lands or a masked dancer revealed more perfectly by what she hides. The scrolls describing the beyul lead us similarly into wonder, for they are accounts of processes in the mind as much as in the external world. There is no real separation or boundary between our selves and the world around us, and an ever-present wildness and radiance lies at the heart of our tamest vistas.6

  As the final words of the book flash across my computer screen, the swan eyes me through the open windows as leaves like yellow parchment swirl around her legs and flow over the edge of the falls. With her webbed feet rooted at the top of the waterfall, she spreads her wings rapturously as water spills from her feathers and her breast rises toward the sky. Forming the arc of an unbounded circle, she lets out a piercing cry—or laugh—and vanishes into unutterable space.

  Glossary

  abhiseka (T: dbang skur) Annointment, empowerment, or initiation. A ceremony in which a student is ritually entered into the mandala of a particular Tantric deity, thus empowering him or her to practice the meditative rites associated with that specific expression of enlightenment.

  abor (Adi) Assamese word, no longer current, meaning savage or “one who does not submit” in reference to tribes such as the Minyong and Gallong Adis who live in present day Arunachal Pradesh.

  afflicitve emotions (nyon mongs kyi sgrib pa; Skt: klesavarana) The disturbing emotions and mental states that obscure the nature of reality and fuel the processes of rebirth in cyclic existence, or samsara. These obstructing mental states are generally referred to as the five poisons of desire, anger, delusion, pride, and envy.

  amrita See Nectar.

  appearance (snang ba) A sense impression or mental occurrence; anything that is experienced by a conscious mind. In Buddhist philosophy appearances are viewed as mental events, empty of inherent existence and beyond constructs such as arising, dwelling, and ceasing.

  awareness (rig pa; Skt: vidya) In the context of Dzogchen awareness refers to consciousness devoid of ignorance and dualistic fixation.

  bardo (bar do) Intermediate state; commonly refers to the state of consciousness and lapse of time between death and the next rebirth, but can also indicate other transitionary phases such as meditation, dream, death, or even the gap between two thoughts.

  beyul (sbas yul ) Secret or hidden land; paradisiacal realms in remote parts of Tibet and the Himalayas described by Padmasambhava in revealed scrolls. Beyul have outer, inner, secret, and ultimately secret ( yangsang) dimensions, corresponding to levels of initiation in the Buddhist Tantras.

  bindu (thig le) 1 . The red and white essences within the body. 2. Spheres or circles of light. See also Tigle.

  blessings (byin rlabs; Skt: adhisthana) Wave of splendor, conveying the grace and heightened receptivity which descend upon the devout practitioner from the teachers of the lineage, awakening a sense of greater reality.

  bliss (bde ba; Skt: sukha) Bliss, clarity, and non-thought (bde gsal mi rtog pa). Th
ree temporary experiences that arise in meditation. Fixation on them plants the seeds for rebirth in the three realms of samsara. Without fixation, they are adornments of the awakened state. See also Great Bliss.

  bodhichitta (byang sems, byang chub kyi sems) Bodhi mind; awakened state of mind. The aspiration to attain enlightenment for the sake of all beings. In the context of Dzogchen, the mind’s innate wakefulness synonymous with rigpa, or pristine awareness. Absolute bodhichitta is often described as emptiness indivisible from compassion—radiant, unshakable, and impossible to formulate by concepts. In Tantra, bodhichitta also refers to the subtle red and white essences normally located in the body at the level of the navel and the crown chakra, and which converge at the heart during the death process and in deep meditation.

  bodhisattva (byang chub sems dpa’ ) Someone who has developed bodhichitta, the aspiration to attain enlightenment in order to benefit all sentient beings. A being who has realized the empty nature of phenomena and the nonexistence of individual self and who is free from the klesas, or ordinary emotions.

  buddha (sangs rgyas) Literally, “awakened”; the Enlightened One; a perfected Bodhisattva who attains complete, perfect enlightenment in a human form. Although numerous Buddhas are said to have manifested in past ages to show the way to enlightenment, historically, the Buddha refers to Sakyamuni Buddha, who was born Prince Siddhartha in Lumbini in southern Nepal in the sixth century b.c.e.