Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains

by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

  Afterwards we continued walking along the same boggy embryo of the new road, through fog so low it was as if the earth had been swallowed by a pale ghost. It cut around the shoulders of the hills, raw and recently blasted, ripped-up trees lying like slain soldiers on the slopes below. Beside us the survivors loomed spectrally out of the murk. For a while, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. In the utopia of my imaginings this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I was supposed to be walking through a sylvan wilderness, stumbling over ancient stupas and mysteriously inscribed rocks, not walking to the heart of Pemako through the sludge of a freshly blasted road. But sadly I was a few months too late. At a tea shack, where I fed milk and a packet of biscuits to a starving puppy, the elderly Khampa owner bemoaned the road that now ran like a scar through her mountain village. Pemako wasn’t the same, she said, everything felt different now. Dorje agreed.

  ‘Before this it so silent – just birds and insects. Now machines.’

  Later, we found a section of the old footpath and followed it through a few miles of damp, slippery jungle. This was more like it – sweating up hillsides on ladders of gnarled roots through the green womb of the forest. Dorje, who wasn’t prone to speed at the best of times, lagged behind, pausing frequently to catch his breath. After one worryingly long delay, he emerged with a handful of foliage that resembled red cow parsley.

  ‘This very delicious to eat,’ he announced, nibbling a red bud.

  ‘Is it the one that makes you fly?’ I asked hopefully, trying a bit myself. Sadly it wasn’t.

  Meanwhile the two Adi porters had downed their loads and vanished into the trees, catapults in hand.

  ‘The Adi kill everything,’ said Dorje disapprovingly. ‘Birds, frogs, insects – everything. They don’t understand Pemako. It mean nothing to them.’

  When they caught us up, empty-handed, Dorje chastised them in Hindi and forced them to hand over their catapults. There’d be no killing on this walk, he said sternly, pocketing the weapons.

  At four, having covered a leisurely ten miles, the triple-tiered golden roof of Yoldong’s gompa materialized from the fog. Meaning ‘curtain mountain’, from Yoldong’s ridge you could (on a clear day) see to the edge of Pemako at Tuting, and to its heart at Devakotta. From here on we’d be walking into the beyul’s inner realms.

  13

  THE HEART OF THE LOTUS

  The lama at Yoldong was a silver-haired colossus with a rasping voice and eyes tinged blue with cataracts. He was by far the tallest man I’d met here, even taller than the king. He towered over us all, a kindly obelisk swaddled in red. His wife, Anguk, was tiny, limping and exceptionally jolly, with a face like a happy walnut that radiated compassion and cheer. They lived near the gompa in one of Yoldong’s nine houses, and had a garden fecund with mustard plants, cabbages, orange trees and radishes as big as my hand.

  ‘This is normal for Pemako,’ chuckled Kabsang, when I picked one up with astonishment.

  Dorje, the lama and his wife were old friends and relatives of some sort. They sat in a row beside the fire gossiping like old biddies at a WI coffee morning, Anguk clasping Dorje’s hand affectionately as they talked. They’d all had the same guru, a tulku, or reincarnated lama, from this village who’d died in 1970.

  ‘He got rainbow body after he dead,’ said Dorje. ‘He very tall man. But three days after he dead his body become tiny, only one-foot tall. And when he cremated he produce five different type of ringsel.’

  This phenomenon of ‘rainbow body’, the bodies of high lamas shrinking and even disappearing after their deaths, has been well documented throughout Tibetan history. Sometimes only hair and fingernails are left, or just emanations of light. Guru Rinpoche was said to have dissolved into rainbows at the time of his death and, when the Chinese imprisoned and tortured thousands of lamas after the invasion of 1950, there were reports of lamas self-realizing their own deaths and the Chinese guards finding nothing but empty robes in their locked cells. I’d heard it was common in Pemako too.

  While the others caught up, Kabsang and I talked over mugs of hot chang, greasy with melted mithun butter.

  ‘It’s a blessing from Pemako,’ Anguk told us, as she ladled out the steaming liquid.

  The lama and Anguk had married in unusual circumstances, Kabsang told me. Anguk had been married before, to the tulku I’d just heard about, the guru whose body had shrunk so dramatically after his death. On his deathbed he’d instructed her to marry the tall lama who now sat before me, and she’d agreed, asking him to be reincarnated in any sons they had.

  ‘Only if you have faith,’ the dying tulku said.

  When the couple had a son three years later it was soon apparent that her request had been granted. The infant sat, looked and behaved like the dead lama, and as a young child he could remember details of his past life and recognize his old disciples. As soon as he could talk he asked to be taken to the tulku’s retreat house, where he picked out his belongings. Now that little boy, Tulku Orgyen P’huntsok, is in his forties and lives in California, where he teaches Buddhism at Santa Barbara University. I spoke to him a few months after my visit to Yoldong, his kindly, jovial voice crackling over Skype. When I asked him if he could remember anything of his past life nowadays he laughed. ‘No! I’m old now and I don’t remember anything – only when I was a child.’

  My disappointment about the road, and the day’s dismal walk, quickly dissipated among these people. They were so gentle and cheerful and, huddling around their fire, listening to stories about rainbow bodies and reincarnation, such tonic for the soul. From my fleeting, outsider’s impression theirs seemed a contented existence, enfolded as they were in Pemako, nature and their faith. Almost entirely self-sufficient, they only went to Tuting two or three times a year to buy salt, sugar, tea and oil. Everything else they produced themselves.

  ‘When I was a child,’ said Dorje, ‘we only went to Tuting once a year, to buy salt.’ He nodded towards the smoke-blackened stack of salt packets piled above the fire.

  I asked the lama about the road and he said they didn’t want it, that it would disturb the peace of Pemako. After this he disappeared into his shrine room for several hours to make his evening puja, the deep, insistent pounding of his drum mixing with the din of a sudden rainstorm.

  It poured all night and, in the morning, just as I finished my yoga, there was a flash of lightning and a blistering crack of thunder. Was it a portent, I wondered? Did Pemako not want me to reach its heart?

  ‘The goddess doesn’t want to see a Britisher,’ teased Dorje, sitting beside the fire and chopping the plant he’d picked yesterday. ‘Actually, rain a good sign. It means the protector deities are happy. They are welcoming you.’

  It was good to hear, although I suspected it to be from the same strain of optimism as beliefs about birds crapping on your head and rain on your wedding day signifying good luck.

  ‘Not everyone can reach Devakotta,’ Dorje continued, looking at me with scrutinous eyes. ‘You must have pure mind.’

  He’d once known a Bhutanese woman who, despite several efforts, had never been able to reach the holy mountain. She’d had recurrent dreams of two naked children (Devakotta’s protector deities, Dorje said) with bows and arrows, threatening to kill her if she went, and every time she tried to go an illness or accident befell her. I’d had an odd dream the previous night about my father building a replica of our old family home in the smoking ruins of Ground Zero, but there’d definitely been no angry children.

  After warm goodbyes we set off in the rain, me looking faintly ridiculous with my poncho, a frilly purple umbrella and a pair of camouflage wellington boots bought at the shop in Tuting for the equivalent of two pounds. F. M. Bailey would not have been impressed. Soon afterwards we came to a road workers’ hut, where we found six men sheltering from the rain. They lounged on filthy blankets, smoking and playing cards. Outside, a clot of yellow diggers idled in the mud. Dorje, it emerged, wanted to have a word with the headman: locals
were worried the road was due to pass too close to Devakotta monastery, and had asked the king to intervene. The two men chatted convivially over cups of sugary tea, Dorje sitting in his usual lotus position, his hand on the smiley Monpa headman’s knee. No problem, said the Monpa, tracing an imaginary extra loop on the floor; he’d happily add an extra kilometre or two. It couldn’t have been more different from the suits and surveyors of a road-planning meeting in England.

  At this point another road worker appeared, a Khampa, and sat down on the other side of Dorje. The king put a brotherly hand on the man’s knee.

  ‘This my . . .’

  I finished the sentence for him. ‘Cousin brother?’

  Everyone laughed.

  The discussion moved on to Tashigong, Dorje’s own village. A powerful deity dwelt inside a pilgrimage rock behind the gompa there, and Dorje was adamant that the road shouldn’t disturb it.

  ‘There are so many people who have been healed by doing kora [repeated clockwise circuits] around this rock,’ said Kabsang. ‘One man, an Adi, had a disfigured jawbone and made one hundred kora of it. That night there was a cracking noise in his sleep and, when he woke up, his jawbone was healed.’

  Again the headman nodded sympathetically and agreed to add an extra ‘zig’. Being a Buddhist himself, he knew the importance of not angering such beings.

  While the two men talked, Kabsang explained to me some of the vagaries of Indian road construction. The total length of the planned new road had been agreed as 90km, and was supposed to take six years to complete. But all along the route the actual kilometres constructed were inflated by the various contractors so that they could make more money. Not to mention the numerous locals who popped a few rupees in the contractors’ pockets to add a little loop here, avoid that patch of forest there. Already we’d seen evidence of numerous unnecessary ‘zigs’ – an insane waste of land and resources in the name of making more coin. It used to be a 30km walk from Tuting to here, but by the new road it was 60km.

  ‘This is India!’ chuckled Kabsang, noticing my shocked expression.

  In response to renewed Chinese claims on Arunachal Pradesh, in October 2014 Modi announced a plan to build a 1,800km trans-state highway hugging the Chinese border. The Indo-China Frontier Highway, as the paper project is known, will supposedly cut from Tawang to Vijaynagar, across the currently impenetrable, unexplored northern rim of the state. Quite apart from the obvious environmental concerns of such a project, if the Pemako road was anything to go by, there’ll be bowling alleys on Pluto before it’s completed.

  The rain was still sieving down in great curtains when we left, swelling the oceanic puddles and veiling the mountains in grey. It dripped down our noses and pasted our waterproofs against us as we sloshed on through the mire. But I was in high spirits nonetheless. An hour later the village of Mahacotta emerged from the mist, a sprinkling of homesteads on the smooth side of a hill. Beyond it, through wandering fragments of cloud, I could just make out the golden finials of Devakotta’s roof peeping from its hilly abode. The road ended here, so we bowled down a grassy hill past a mossy stupa and a parade of tall bamboo poles tied with faded white prayer flags. Under these, what looked like a stone cowshed was stacked to the roof with tshatsha, small devotional images moulded out of dried mud. When we stopped for tea at a house in the village, an old lady was making them in the yard, her wrinkled face steeped in concentration as she pushed balls of mud into copper moulds with stout peasant’s hands. Behind her dried rows of miniature stupas and icons of a scowling Guru Rinpoche astride a tigress. She’d made 10,000 over the past few years, she told Kabsang; as she didn’t know how to read or write this was her means of obtaining karma and purifying sin. When we knelt in the dirt beside her to make a stupa each, a man shouted out from the house: ‘Maybe you will get enlightenment now!’

  Inside we found Dorje holding court beside the fire.

  ‘These all my relations,’ he announced, as I walked in. ‘This—’ he pointed to a small, wizened man, ‘my cousin brother. This—’ gesturing towards a rosy-cheeked young woman, ‘my father’s cousin’s sister’s daughter . . .’ And so on, through a muddling maze of familial connections. Already the spotted rucksack was open and he was busy distributing his blessed salt.

  After cups of sweet tea, Kabsang suddenly announced: ‘Come and meet my friend the tulku – he will give you a long-life blessing.’

  Never one to miss out on the opportunity for eternal life, I duly followed him to a nearby house, assuming we were just popping by for a casual cuppa and a priestly pat on the head. But as we pulled off our boots on the veranda I could hear a chorus of chanting voices, and inside we found a shrine room crammed with people. There were about thirty of them in total: older men with Confucian faces and wispy beards; fat-cheeked infants dandled on plump young women’s laps; a teenage boy with red-tinted hair and diamante earrings; old women with leathery faces. They sat on the floor facing a portly young tulku, a shaven-headed Khampa with a spidery moustache, whose youth and fleshiness gave him the look of a happy cherub. He sat cross-legged, swathed in an orange blanket, the low table in front of him stacked with the tools of his trade: sutras, bells, beads and images of the Buddha. Beside him sat another lama, a slender ascetic with a sleek black plait hanging to his waist. And on the far wall was an elaborately decorated altar flickering with butter candles and thick with offerings: silver bowls full of water, khatas (ceremonial silk scarves), packets of biscuits, sweets, money, sutras, golden Buddhas, psychedelic images of a wide-eyed Guru Rinpoche and several extremely phallic statuettes made from rice dough and butter. In the centre of the altar was a butter carving that was oddly reminiscent of a cross.

  The chanting stopped and, for a while, the villagers sat rapt, nodding in silent agreement as the tulku read passages from his sutras. When he’d finished, everyone shuffled to their feet and again took up the chant, a sonorous, hymn-like mantra that asked for wisdom from Guru Rinpoche. Their voices swelled to fill the room and they bowed their heads and pressed their hands together in prayer, their faces etched with expressions of humble devotion. As they sang, we all took turns to bow before the tulku, cupping our hands together as he bestowed on us the blessings of a long life. He cleansed us with drops of holy water, nourished us with tsampa ‘long-life balls’, fired our bellies with palmfuls of chang and tapped us on the head with sticks and doughy pink phalluses. Last of all, he gave us tiny handfuls of rice, which we threw all over the room and each other to signify non-attachment.

  With its holy water, dough balls and sacred alcohol, the ceremony – known as tshe-bang, or ‘life consecration’ – struck me as curiously reminiscent of Christian communion. But it wasn’t until a few months afterwards, when I was reading Charles Allen’s The Search for Shangri-La, that I thought about this again. In the midst of Allen’s thrilling pan-Asian quest are the Nestorian Christians, a breakaway Eastern sect of the faith whose isolated medieval communities became entwined with later Western fantasies about Shambhala. The question of whether any lost pockets of Nestorianism remained hidden in deepest Asia sent numerous Jesuit missionaries tramping across the icy wastes of Tibet in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the fictional Father Perrault in Hilton’s Lost Horizon.

  ‘What is intriguing,’ writes Allen, ‘is the survival within the two oldest religious sects of Tibet – in Bon and among the Nyingpa school of Buddhism – of a ritual known as Tshe-bang, or life consecration. . . the rite is represented as a strengthening of the bla or life-force of the participants. How or when it became part of Bon ritual we will never know – but there can be little doubt that it had its origins in Nestorian Christianity.’

  Reading this, I felt a thrill of discovery, a sense that I’d been exceptionally lucky to partake in such an ancient ritual. How fortunate that we’d chanced upon it that day.

  Now we were so close, I didn’t want to wait another day to reach Devakotta so, leaving a tired Dorje at his cousin’s house, Kabsang and I set
off to the holy mountain. I say mountain but, now we were so close, I could see that it was really a bouffant cone, one of the many hills, spurs, ridges and undulations that frothed up from the river in densely forested humps. Almost an island, it was cradled in an oxbow of the Yangsang Chu, surrounded on all sides by wooded slopes and the icy, purling waters of the river. But while it may have looked like just another fold in the subcontinental plate, Devakotta was the heart of Lower Pemako, one of the Rinpoche’s greatest treasures, the home of the dakinis and the place where the worthy could achieve instant Buddhahood. Even if you weren’t saintly, it was good luck just to walk around it. Dorje had advised that I do three koras in order to gain good fortune. As Guru Rinpoche himself had written: ‘Whoever makes one complete circumambulation of Devakotta Mountain, the door to all lower rebirths will be closed.’

  Perhaps after three I’d be reborn as a queen.

  To reach the mountain we had to cross two rickety hanging bridges, their rusted cables almost invisible under quantities of prayer flags. As I edged over the first one I felt a strange stirring of emotion when a shaft of sunlight, the first we’d seen all week, burst theatrically through a chink in the grey. For the next half an hour we slid and scrambled clockwise around the steep shoulder of the mountain on a treacherous pilgrims’ path. We grasped at slippery rocks and woven roots, slithered down muddy slopes and pulled each other over rocky ledges through damp tunnels of prayer flags, the river rushing a hundred metres below. At times there was nothing to stop us falling down the vertiginous sides of the mountain: it was not a feat for the old or infirm. At one point we slid and half-crawled into a small cave almost hidden behind soggy streams of flags.