The Snow leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

  It now seems certain that my promise to be home by Thanksgiving will be broken. Originally we had planned to arrive at Shey Gompa, Crystal Monastery, by October 15. There is no longer any chance of this, nor any real hope of returning home before December.

  That we might be trapped at Shey by blizzards is also a grim prospect for GS, who promised his wife that he would have Christmas with the family; Kay and the children are to meet him in Kathmandu. And so he is in low spirits, too, though he discounts the gloom-ridden reports of northward travel: "If you took people seriously in this part of the world," he says, "you would never leave home." And it is true that everywhere dangers and difficulties are exaggerated by the local people, if only as a good excuse for extortion or malingering: one must go oneself to know the truth.

  We are desperate to leave this half-civilized hole and get over the high passes while we can. Last March, GS's preliminary expedition to eastern Nepal produced inconclusive data on the blue sheep; if the rut is missed due to the snows, his second blue-sheep expedition will have been wasted. Considering all that he has at stake, he is remarkably patient and resilient, and we manage to get on very well, despite our cold, close quarters.

  GS has already devoured all of his books (he devours his last ration of chocolate in the same way, which I rather admire, being too provident myself, too untrustful of "the future") and so he is reading my Bardo Thodol (the Tibetan "Book of the Dead") out of desperation, and taking notes on it, what's more. He is even writing haiku, pursuing it with skill and vigor, and this poem seems to me much better than those I have written here myself:

  Oh cloud-trails I go

  Alone, with the chatting porters.

  There is a crow.

  OCTOBER 9

  This morning the rain is lighter, with long lulls, but we are stuck another day. At least we know that planes cannot fly the mountains in this weather; had we counted on coming to Dhorpatan by air, we would still be languishing in Kathmandu. Meanwhile, the season and the snows are gaining, and the new porters, such as they are, are getting restive: Jang-bu, the head sherpa, fears that if the rain persists another day, they may drift away. They are in here now, hefting the baskets under the whimsical gaze of Phu-Tsering, who pantomimes them comically, taking no trouble to conceal his view that they are low fellows, and light-fingered. Phu-Tsering accompanied GS last spring on the first blue-sheep expedition, and it was his high spirits, rather more than his cuisine, that recommended him for this one.

  Our speculations about the Crystal Monastery have led inevitably to talk of Buddhism and Zen. Last year, as a way of alerting GS to my unscientific preoccupations, I sent him a small book entitled Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Very politely, he had written, "Many thanks for the Zen book, which Kay brought with her to Pakistan. I've only browsed a bit so far. A lot of it seems most sensible, some of it less so, but I have to ponder things some more." GS refuses to believe that the Western mind can truly absorb nonlinear Eastern perceptions; he shares the view of many in the West that Eastern thought evades "reality" and therefore lacks the courage of existence. But the courage-to-be, right here and now and nowhere else, is precisely what Zen, at least, demands: eat when you eat, sleep when you sleep! Zen has no patience with "mysticism," far less the occult, although its emphasis on the enlightenment experience (called kensho or satori) is what sets it apart from other religions and philosophies.

  I remind GS of the Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhardt and Saint Francis, Saint Augustine, and Saint Catherine of Siena, who spent three years in silent meditation: "All the way to Heaven is Heaven," Saint Catherine said, and that is the very breath of Zen, which does not elevate divinity above the common miracles of every day. GS counters by saying that all these people lived before the scientific revolution had changed the very nature of Western thought, which of course is true, but it is also true that in recent years. Western scientists have turned with new respect toward the intuitive sciences of the East. Einstein repeatedly expressed suspicion of the restrictions of linear thought, concluding that propositions arrived at by purely logical means were completely empty of reality even if one could properly explain what "reality" means; it was intuition, he declared, that had been crucial to his thinking. And there are close parallels in the theory of relativity to the Buddhist concept of the identity of time and space, which, like Hindu cosmology, derives from the ancient teachings of the Vedas. Somewhere, Einstein remarks that his theory could be readily explained to Indians of the Uto-Aztecan languages, which include the Pueblo and the Hopi. ("The Hopi does not say 'the light flashed' but merely 'flash' without subject or time element; time cannot move because it is also space. The two are never separated; there are no words or expressions referring to time or space as separate from each other. This is close to the 'field' concept of modern physics. Furthermore, there is no temporal future; it is already with us, eventuating or manifesting." What are in English differences of time are in Hopi differences of 'validity'21)

  The progress of the sciences toward theories of fundamental unity, cosmic symmetry (as in the unified field theory)—how do such theories differ, in the end, from that unity which Plato called "unspeakable" and "indescribable," the holistic knowledge shared by so many peoples of the earth. Christians included, before the advent of the industrial revolution made new barbarians of the peoples of the West? In the United States, before the spiritualist foolishness at the end of the last century confused mysticism with "the occult" and tarnished both, William James wrote a master work of metaphysics; Emerson spoke of "the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One . . ."; Melville referred to "that profound silence, that only voice of God"; Walt Whitman celebrated the most ancient secret, that no God could be found "more divine than yourself/' And then, almost everywhere, a clear and subtle illumination that lent magnificence to life and peace to death was overwhelmed in the hard glare of technology. Yet that light is always present, like the stars of noon. Man must perceive it if he is to transcend his fear of meaninglessness, for no amount of "progress" can take its place. We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.

  Not long ago in the Western world, the argument was whether sun or earth lay at the center of the Universe. Even in this century it was believed that ours was the only galaxy, whereas Asian sages long before the time of Christ had intuited correctly that the galaxies numbered in the billions, and that universal time was beyond all apprehension: more than four billion years was but one day in the existence of their Creator, and His night was of equal length, and all of this was no more than "a twinkling of the eye of the immutable, immortal, beginningless Lord, the god of the Universe." In the Rig Veda, an oscillating universe is conceived to be expanding from a center—this is consistent with the "Big Bang" theory, which only in the last decade has met general acceptance among astronomers. In a Hindu myth, the "Fire-Mist," like a sea of milk, is churned by the Creator, and out of this churning come the solidifying forms of stars and planets—in effect, the nebular theory of modern astronomy, with the Fire-Mist composed of the primordial hydrogen atoms from which all matter is thought to derive.

  "Nothing exists but atoms and the void"—so wrote Democritus. And it is "void" that underlies the Eastern teachings—not emptiness or absence, but the Uncreated that preceded all creation, the beginningless potential of all things.

  Before heaven and earth

  There was something nebulous

  silent isolated

  unchanging and alone

  eternal

  the Mother of All Things

  I do not know its name

  I call it Tao22

  Darkness there was, wrapped in yet more Darkness. . . . The incipient lay covered by the Void. That One Tiling . . . was born through the power of heat from its austerity. ,.. Where this Creation came from, He who has ordained it from the highest heaven. He indeed knows; or He knows not.23

  The mystical percepti
on (which is only "mystical" if reality is limited to what can be measured by the intellect and senses) is remarkably consistent in all ages and all places, East and West, a point that has not been ignored by modern science. The physicist seeks to understand reality, while the mystic is trained to experience it directly. Both agree that human mechanisms of perception, stunted as they are by screens of social training that close out all but the practical elements in the sensory barrage, give a very limited picture of existence, which certainly transcends mere physical evidence. Furthermore, both groups agree that appearances are illusory. A great physicist extends this idea: "Modern science classifies the world . . . not into different groups of objects but into different groups of connections. . . . The world thus appears to be a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different lands alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine- the texture of the whole."24 All phenomena are processes, connections, all is in flux, and at moments this flux is actually visible: one has only to open the mind in meditation or have the mind screens knocked awry by drugs or dreams to see that there is no real edge to anything, that in the endless interpenetration of the universe, a molecular flow, a cosmic energy shimmers in all stone and steel as well as flesh.

  The ancient intuition that all matter, all "reality," is energy, that all phenomena, including time and space, are mere crystallizations of mind, is an idea with which few physicists have quarreled since the theory of relativity first called into question the separate identities of energy and matter. Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form; that matter is insubstantial in origin, a temporary aggregate of the pervasive energy that animates the electron. And what is this infinitesimal non-thing— to a speck of dust what the dust speck is to the whole earth? "Do we really know what electricity is? By knowing the laws according to which it acts and by making use of them, we still do not know the origin or the real nature of this force, which ultimately may be the very source of life, and consciousness, the divine power and mover of all that exists."25

  The cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which suggests either that the earth is at the center of the universe, as in our innocence we once supposed, or that the known universe has no center. Such an idea holds no terror for mystics; in the mystical vision, the universe, its center, and its origins are simultaneous, all around us, all within us, and all One.

  I am everywhere and in everything: I am the sun and stars. I am time and space and I am He. When I am everywhere, where can I move? When there is no past and no future, and I am eternal existence, then where is time?26

  In the Book of Job, the Lord demands, "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hath understanding! Who laid the comer-stones thereof, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"

  "I was there!" —surely that is the answer to God's question. For no matter how the universe came into being, most of the atoms in these fleeting assemblies that we think of as our bodies have been in existence since the beginning. What the Buddha perceived was his identity with the Universe; to experience existence in this way is to be the Buddha. Even the brilliant "white light" that may accompany mystical experience (the "inner light" attested to by Eskimo shamans) might be perceived as a primordial memory of Creation. "Man is the matter of the cosmos, contemplating itself," a modern astronomer has said;27 another points out that each breath we take contains hundreds of thousands of the inert, pervasive argon atoms that were actually breathed in his lifetime by the Buddha, and indeed contain parts of the "snorts, sighs, bellows, shrieks"28 of all creatures that ever existed, or will ever exist. These atoms flow backward and forward in such useful but artificial constructs as time and space, in the same universal rhythms, universal breath as the tides and stars, joining both the living and the dead in that energy which animates the universe. What is changeless and immortal is not individual body-mind but, rather, that Mind which is shared with all of existence, that stillness, that incipience which never ceases because it never becomes but simply IS. This teaching, still manifest in the Hindu and Buddhist religions, goes back at least as far as the doctrine of Maya that emerges in the Vedic civilizations and may well derive from much more ancient cultures; Maya is Time, the illusion of the ego, the stuff of individual existence, the dream that separates us from a true perception of the whole. It is often likened to a sealed glass vessel that separates the air within from the clear and unconfined air all around, or water from the all-encompassing sea. Yet the vessel itself is not different from the sea, and to shatter or dissolve it brings about the reunion with all universal life that mystics seek, the homegoing, the return to the lost paradise of our "true nature."

  Today science is telling us what the Vedas have taught mankind for three thousand years, that we do not see the universe as it is. What we see is Maya, or Illusion, the "magic show" of Nature, a collective hallucination of that part of our consciousness which is shared with all of our own kind, and which gives a common ground, a continuity, to the life experience. According to Buddhists (but not Hindus), this world perceived by the senses, this relative but not absolute reality, this dream, also exists, also has meaning; but it is only one aspect of the truth, like the cosmic vision of this goat by the crooked door, gazing through sheets of rain into the mud.

  Tomorrow begins the trek into the north. By the Jang Pass, we cross the Dhaulagiris to the Bheri River; we ascend the Suli Gad and the Phoksumdo River, and by the Kang Pass cross the Kanjiroba Range to Crystal Mountain. In spring or summer, a fortnight might suffice, but there is snow in the high passes, and we shall be lucky to arrive at all.

  In early afternoon, the sun appears—the first full sunshine in more than a week. Dhorpatan Valley, which has seemed so grim, is beautiful. I walk down into the valley pastures and circumambulate a great prayer wall of heavy stones, old and new, flat and round, of many colors and from many places—how and when the oldest of them got here, no one seems to know. From four tall poles, blue and white prayer flags—the celestial colors—snap in the crisp wind, sending OM MANI PADME HUM to the ten directions. The skies are shifting, and at dusk a peak of Annapurna rises, far away over the eastern end of the valley. On recent mornings, the low mountains all around this valley have turned white.

  NORTHWARD

  O, how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all; hut then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.

  HERMANN HESSE

  Narcissus and Goldmund

  Monk: What happens when the leaves are falling, and the trees are bare?

  Unmon: The golden wind, revealed!

  Hegikan Roku (The Blue Cliff Records)

  OCTOBER 10

  In the glory of sunrise, spider webs glitter and green finches in October gold bound from pine to shining pine. Pony bells and joyous whistling; young children and animals jump as if come to life. One beautiful child has a silver necklace and red-green strips of rag braided into crow-black hair; the infant she carries papoose-style is her own.

  A day so fine for travel is also fine for harvesting potatoes. The new porters refuse to depart, nor will they give up the pay advanced to them to buy food. "Dhorpatan no-good people," says Phu-Tsering. To find nine men, Jang-bu stays behind, and Gyaltsen stays with him, guarding the loads while his friend searches for porters. GS will wait awh
ile to see what happens. I set out with the rest, and do not see GS again until day's end.

  The northward path ascends the Hiagune Gorge through resined air of pine forest and cedar. A crimson-homed pheasant, or monal, bursts into the air over the valley, and the small marmot-like pikas are sunning at their holes, ignoring the flights of sweet-voiced alpine birds. Silver lichens, golden moss, the whistle of a falcon: the view south down the Phagune Gorge is full of light.

  We climb toward Dhaulagiri, the "White Mountains."

  Yesterday's snow retreats uphill as the sun rises, and we do not overtake it until afternoon, at 12,400 feet The snow is gray, on steep gray slushy scree, and the trail rises into clouds that hide the snow peaks. Cotoneaster of deep green, with its red berries, is the lone piece of color in the grayness.

  It is hard going in this mush: the summit never comes. The pass is a V far off and high against a sky that withdraws into swift, fitful weather, and when it is reached, it is only the portal to a higher valley, with yet another V at its far end. In the wet snow, the narrow path traversing the steep slopes is hard to trace, and treacherous. Phu-Tsering and Dawa have mountain boots inherited from past expeditions, but most of the Tamangs go barefoot so that the sneakers provided for them may be sold another day in Kathmandu. Even so, they keep up better than bow-legged old Bimbahadur, who starts off ahead of the others every morning and by evening has fallen far behind.

  Due to boot blisters, I am wearing sneakers, and my wet feet are numb. Dawa, climbing steadily along with the basket of camp cooking gear, overtakes me as I near the pass, at 13,400 feet. Here, the clouds have thickened so that we can scarcely see each other; there is strong wind and light snow. From behind and below, in the Phagune Gorge, rumbling rockslides are followed by deep silence. Uneasy, Dawa sets his basket down and works back a little way to whistle to Phu-Tsering and the others.