The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  WE CAMPED THAT NIGHT ALONG THE TRAIL. The porters boiled water for the black tea that they mixed with their tsampa and chiles. We cooked rice and lentils. The Kongpopas were amused when they saw me eat from a burl wood bowl that a Tibetan friend had given to me in Kathmandu. Pemako is renowned for its poisoning cults, and if I ate out of this bowl, my friend maintained, the toxins would be absorbed and I would come to no harm. Several of the porters had similar ones, and they compared the swirling, knotted grains to establish their respective worth. The most valuable bowls, they claimed, were those with patterns like owls’ eyes. When the fire grew low, they stretched out on their black wool tunics and curled around the embers for warmth.

  The next morning we proceeded through oak and bamboo forests into an area where small streams circled through glades of pine. A primitive stupa surrounded by prayer flags strung from bamboo poles stood on top of an enormous rock overhanging the Tsangpo. An hour later we crossed a steep cliff said by the porters to be a residence of Dorje Traktsen, Vajra Rock Warrior, a fierce protector spirit who lords over Pemako from various rock citadels. The porters placed small quartzite stones and sprigs of juniper on a wayside shrine erected against the wall of rock, mumbling prayers before continuing over narrow logs set against the cliff. With the roar of the Tsangpo reverberating off the metamorphic rocks, I followed suit and looked back to see Ken placing his own stone on the primitive altar. We ate lunch on a sandy beach at the base of the cliffs, as long-tailed parakeets flitted through the pines. The vast glaciers of Namcha Barwa seemed to hang suspended in the sky behind us. Gunn declared that the mountain had begun rising from the ocean floor in a major uplift between eight and eleven million years ago, and that it was still rising more than an inch every year.

  Until 1992 Namcha Barwa was the highest unclimbed peak in the world. For Tibetans, and the people of Kongpo in particular, the mountain is the abode of deities as well as the repository of sacred scriptures said to have been concealed there by Padmasambhava. Sherab, our head porter, had carried loads for the joint Chinese-Japanese expedition that had climbed the mountain for the first time. He confided that it wasn’t good to climb these sacred peaks; it angered the local spirits. It was for this reason, Sherab maintained, that one of the climbers’ lives had been taken in an avalanche. The fatality occurred on October 16, 1991, when one of the Japanese climbers, Hiroshi Onishi, was swept off the mountain en route to camp IV at 20,450 feet. Despite the death, the team remained on the mountain for another eight days, but failed to reach the summit due to extreme weather and avalanches. Together with a team of Chinese climbers, they had returned the following year and succeeded.

  In the Buddhist tradition sacred mountains and other holy places are circumambulated, not climbed, one’s clockwise orbits linking one’s energies with the site’s. From Sherab’s perspective, all ventures into such hallowed terrain must seek benediction from the unseen spirits of earth and air. Failure to acknowledge them is to invite disaster.

  In Yolmo, Bhakha Tulku had spoken of the role of suma, or local protector deities, in keeping away those whose intentions are not in harmony with the spirit of the beyul. First they send bad dreams or through other means of psychic intervention attempt to turn one back, Bhakha Tulku said. If this fails they may cause illness or infirmity or other forms of physical distress. If one still persists, they may unleash rock falls, avalanches, or other calamities to obstruct one’s passage. Bhakha Tulku had told me how an entire regiment of People’s Liberation Army soldiers had been obliterated in a sudden blizzard while attempting to cross the Doshung-La pass into Pemako in 1959. Local Tibetans had credited the weather to the actions of Dorje Traktsen, Pemako’s fiercest protector, a wrathful entity described in texts as a warrior figure riding on a snarling brown bear, holding in his right hand a blazing sword and in his left a lasso and a club surmounted by a human skull (in other manifestations he rides on a serpent). The main dzong, or fortress, of Dorje Traktsen in lower Powo is a looming precipice guarding Pemako’s northern door. Bhakha Tulku related how in 1991 a convoy of seventy-eight trucks and Land Cruisers skirting this rock citadel en route to Lhasa, carrying goods to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Tibet’s “peaceful liberation” by the People’s Republic of China, had all been engulfed by a wall of mud and water that descended from above the road. Many of the passengers were able to clamber to safety, but the head officials as well as all of the trucks and their cargo were submerged beneath the Po Tsangpo River. For Tibetans this was no tragedy but a testimony to the power of their local protectors to sabotage the initiatives of outside invaders.

  The Falls of Shinje Chogyal

  TOWARD DUSK WE ARRIVED IN GYALA, the last outpost of human habitation before the narrowing walls of the gorge make settlement impossible. A cluster of a dozen or so stone and wood houses, Gyala was dark and sunless and our reception by the villagers made us long for the uninhabited spaces deeper in the gorge. Below the village, the Tsangpo widens and pilgrims cross to the opposite bank to visit a revered waterfall called Shinje Badong that tumbles through limestone caves and overhanging rocks, ultimately spilling over a cliff into the Tsangpo. A temple above the waterfall is dedicated to Shinje Chogyal, the Tibetan Lord of the Underworld. An image of this wrathful entity, crowned in skulls and holding at his heart a melong, an all-reflecting mirror, is said to appear spontaneously to pilgrims from the rock behind the falls.

  I wandered down the banks of the river, where two hollowed-out pine trees lay lashed together on a sandy beach. Gyala’s headman had told me that a month earlier a woman had been swept to her death while crossing to the waterfall. Since then no one had been to the other side. Judging by the condition of the makeshift ferry and the labyrinth of swirling eddies between me and the cascade I easily understood why.

  IN THE VAJRAYANA, OR TANTRIC, TRADITION of Tibetan Buddhism, the contemplation of archetypal deities such as Shinje Chogyal is not a morbid meditation on death and dissolution, but the fearless embrace of energies which are commonly disowned. In Dharamsala, Khamtrul Rinpoche had explained to me that Shinje Chogyal, an icon of impermanence, lords over the gates of Pemako. Whether one perceives him as the judge of the dead or the bestower of a richer sense of existence—a potent ally in the deeper reaches of mind and landscape, beyond hope and fear—determines one’s experience in the wilderness downstream.11 The white-haired lama had held out his palm and repeated a Tibetan saying: “Heaven and hell are closer than the two sides of a hand.”

  I focused my Zeiss binoculars on the pale stream that poured down through what Kingdon Ward had described as “a collection of poor little temples clapped against the face of the cliff.” I panned downward through rain-streaked lenses to the ledge where pilgrims invited visions by offering small lamps filled with melted butter. I saw the line of bells hanging from a heavy chain whose sounds one account had described as “the tinkle of goblin laughter.”

  THE SUN HAD SET OVER THE CLIFFS above and gray mists drifted down the Tsangpo like a wash of ink. As I sat gazing across the Tsangpo at the falls, I recalled my own near-death experience in a river in the Green Mountains of Vermont. I’d descended alone into a gorge on the East Middlebury River and jumped off the top of a waterfall into a deep pool where I knew that a professor had drowned the year before. The river’s vertical currents had drawn me into a whirlpool beneath the falls, and only when—in desperation—I dove downward rather than struggling toward the surface did I break free. The experience had released me from suicidal impulses that had shadowed me for almost a year as I despaired of recovering fully from my climbing accident in Norway. As the Buddha said: “He who knows that this body is but the foam of a wave, the shadow of a mirage . . . proceeds on his path, undisturbed by the Lord of Death.”

  From 100 yards away the sound of the falls mingled indistinguishably with the surging drone of the Tsangpo, its waves—dark jade striated with foam—washing up against rock walls that in the twilight seemed almost por
ous. With rain spilling down my neck, I gazed into the veil of falling water until failing light and incessant drizzle urged me back toward the village.

  RARELY DID ANYONE FROM GYALA head downriver toward Pemako. Even in Kingdon Ward’s day the village headman had told him there was no route into the gorge. Only when a group of Monpa traders ambled into the village did the headman admit there was a path, at least as far as Pemakochung. As Ward wrote: “The Depa . . . swore that there was no path, and that no one ever came up through the gorge. . . . Why he was so anxious to conceal from us the fact . . . that a path through the gorge did exist we could not understand.” A massive earthquake on August 15, 1950—the strongest ever recorded—had changed the topography of the gorge. The route along the cliffs beyond the abandoned monastery of Pemakochung had collapsed into the Tsangpo and tenuous pilgrim tracks had disintegrated beneath landslides of mud, rock, and shale.

  Breashears and Wiltsie had failed to push more than a mile beyond the ruins of the old temple at Pemakochung—a five-day journey downriver—and because only a single hunter had been even that far, our porters were hesitant. I made inquiries. Only a single living person in Gyala had gone through the gorge into Pemako, a toothless eighty-year-old woman half-blind with cataracts who had made the journey more than fifty years earlier. Her name was Olmula. I met her with Sherab and several other porters in the courtyard outside her house. At one time, Olmula said, many people used to travel through the gorge on pilgrimages and trading expeditions. Even then the way was dangerous, she said, but the earthquake in 1950—the year of the Chinese invasion—had altered the course of the Tsangpo and the jungle had reclaimed the trails. Few since then had attempted the journey, Olmula said, except to escape the Chinese army and those had never returned to report on conditions. There were innumerable passes to be crossed, Olmula said, as well as cliffs to be skirted. We could make it to Pemakochung in five days, she said. From there to Luku, the first village in Pemako (where she had an older sister), had taken her five or six days when there was a trail. How long it would take us now she wouldn’t even estimate.

  I handed Sherab my notebook and as Olmula recounted her memories of the route, he made strange markings resembling the graph of a wildly fluctuating stock market. The same earthquake that had destroyed the monastery, Olmula said, had also destroyed the series of ledges and log ladders that skirted the buttress which Breashears and Wiltsie had tried to traverse. Olmula described an alternative route called the Khandro Sang-La (the Secret Pass of the Dakinis) that ascends through a gap between precipitous crags leading into Shekarlungpa (the Valley of the White Crystal) the region before the Tsangpo turns abruptly north in a great 180-degree arc around a spur of Namcha Barwa. Soon thereafter, Olmula said, we would have to climb out of the gorge over a high snow-covered pass. If the snow was too deep or unstable we would have to return the way we had come. When we asked if there was a route deeper into the gorge without having to cross over the spur, she shook her head adamantly. No one has been into that area, she said. There are only cliffs and swirling, pounding rapids. Olmula’s explanation was conveyed in a dialect that I could barely understand, but Sherab seemed confident of the hierogylphic marks that he had made in my notebook.

  Gunn had fidgeted nervously during our interview with the old woman. When he spoke he seemed unusually preoccupied by the seismological instability of the region ahead. The continued pressure of the Indian subcontinent against the Asian plate causes frequent slips along the fault line far beneath the mountains, Gunn stated. Tremors here are frequent, he said, pointing out that the epicenter of the 1950 earthquake was directly beneath the Tsangpo. It had measured 8.5 on the Richter scale, Gunn said, the strongest earthquake ever recorded. We must think of safety first. We should be prepared to travel no farther than Pemakochung.

  During our talk in Olmula’s courtyard, a uniformed police officer arrived on horseback. He hailed Gunn and went off with him toward the headman’s residence. Ken, Jill, Eric, and I arrived later to find the hatchet-faced official waiting in the headman’s log house along with Gunn and most of our porters. Half of the village seemed to be gathered there as well. According to Gunn, the officer was under orders to escort us back to the county seat in Menling, a town halfway to Lhasa. Officials in Menling, he stated, would have to approve our permits before we would be allowed to proceed. The police officer was a Tibetan cadre of a distinctive type: power hungry and unsympathetic in equal measure. Although Gunn had told him that we hadn’t driven by that route, but had come via Bayi where our permits were shown to be in order, the policeman was adamant. He refused even to look at our papers and could give no coherent reason why we were being recalled. Gunn suspected it had something to do with Breashears and Wiltsie; perhaps their guide had told officials in Menling of our intention to trek through the gorge.

  Our rations had been strictly calculated. I pointed out to the officer that if we went to Menling it would delay our departure from Gyala by at least five days. We would then not have enough food to make it through the gorge and the onus would be on the officer. Gunn’s lips quivered as he translated my words into Chinese. Flickering light from pitch pine torches transformed the wood-framed room into a purgatorial chamber from which it seemed we would never escape. It soon became clear that Gunn was modifying my statements, so I switched and spoke to the officer directly in Tibetan. “Police in our country,” I told him, “are supposed to offer help, not obstruction.” He sneered at me and said, “Okay. You go, but if any villagers try to go with you I’ll put them in jail.” As the district’s chief of police, the officer had power and influence over all those who had come with us. The porters were thoroughly frightened and, glum faced, had already agreed to go back with him the following morning.

  The police official sat beside me on a rough-hewn bench, chain-smoking Chinese cigarettes. The smoke circled around his head like a sinister fog. In a final bid to turn events around, I asked for his name so we could report him to his superiors for obstructing our journey. His reaction was so dismissive that without thinking I ripped the cigarette from his mouth and threw it onto the ground. Most of Gyala’s villagers had gathered into the small house and they looked on agape as the enraged officer rose shakily off the bench and fumbled for his revolver. “If you weren’t a foreigner,” he said, “I’d shoot you.” Illumined by sticks of pitch pine burning on a small tray over the cooking fire, he spat on the floor at my feet and in a torrent of Chinese explicatives cursed me to all manner of atheist hells. I smiled back at him. I may not have gotten across the river to the waterfall of Shinje Chogyal, I reflected, but an icon of death had projected across to me. And as Tibet’s Tantric tradition maintains, without first encountering the depths of hell, the gates of heaven will never open.

  The next morning we had no choice but to store most of our loads with the village headman and return to Kyikar with our police escort. Before leaving, the headman’s savage mastiff came bounding out of the house and across the compound, heading directly for me with snarling jowls. A short sledgehammer lay on a workbench next to where I was standing and I hurled it toward the charging dog. By extraordinary luck, the hammer bounced once off the ground and caught the dog under its massive chest, sending it hurtling backward. I looked over at the police officer, whom I suspected of unleashing the dog from its chain, and said I looked forward to reporting these incidents to his superiors. As we left the village, the officer went out of his way to walk counterclockwise around the entry chortens and walls of carved mani stones, not leaving them to his right as is the Buddhist custom. He rode ahead on his horse, his two porters jogging behind him in an effort to keep up. As he passed Gunn, he told him he would have to pay for his porters. “I hate this man,” Gunn said, after the police officer had passed out of earshot.

  I could only surrender to the changing circumstances; this was a trial that we would not only have to endure but embrace. I thought of something Chatral Rinpoche had told me before I left: “In Pemako, d
on’t try to avoid hardship, but accept whatever comes.”

  Traveling with a minimum of gear we reached the roadhead in Kyikar in a single day. The police official had lied shamelessly in telling us that there would be jeeps waiting to take us to Menling. The next morning we were forced to hire the only vehicle for miles around, a derelict flatbed truck parked in the mud on the far side of the village. The driver wanted more than $200 for the trip, an exorbitant rate by local standards and money we had set aside to help pay the porters.

  Ten miles into our journey the police officer had the driver turn off the road into a walled compound with barbed wire and broken bottles cemented to the tops of the walls. What now? I wondered. We climbed out of the truck and were forced to wait in a small barrackslike room with peeling cement walls and bare desks. It was the head office of the local police headquarters. A forgotten portrait of Chairman Mao, the man who had destroyed much of Chinese civilization and invited famine and destruction in Tibet and China during the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, stared from the wall amid propaganda posters of glittering Tibetan peasants rejoicing in their “liberation.” The officer sent out two of his men. They returned almost immediately with two cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon, one of China’s most popular beers, and placed them on the empty desk.

  In a surreal ritual aimed at dissolving whatever lingering animosity might reflect badly on his future career, the Tibetan turncoat urged us to toast the eternal goodwill and friendship between America and China. Without glasses, we drank directly from the oversized bottles. The officer’s teeth were as rotten as Mao’s, and I wondered if he too had cultivated the habit of cleaning his teeth by chewing tea leaves. With each toast the officer smiled garishly. As he became increasingly intoxicated, he tilted back the bottoms of our bottles until beer foamed down our chins and chests. The Great Helmsman stared impassively from the poster on the wall as empty bottles accumulated on the cement floor.