The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  Anything you are attracted to, Let go of it!

  Visit cemeteries and other frightening places!

  Find the Buddha within yourself!

  In the minds of Tibetans, Pemako had long been considered an ideal realm for undertaking this inner level of pilgrimage and transforming one’s perceptions. Shepe Dorje had epitomized it: “Leaving our homes behind us we are self-abandoning yogis . . . As meditative experiences spontaneously arise, we travel joyously . . . without hope, doubt, or attachment as to whether or not we will succeed. We have no concern for our personal comforts . . . nor for the binding fetters of monasteries or the knots of worldly existence. Nor do we strive for nirvana. All places are joyous to us. We have no fear about dying on the way . . . nor will we have regrets when we have to return.”

  WE DESCENDED INTO THE MISTS below the pass, with little idea about where we would emerge. The clouds had enveloped us and we could only see a few feet ahead, yet I felt strangely surrendered to the unseen spaces around me. As we dropped lower, shafts of sunlight pierced through the veil of clouds, and we suddenly found ourselves in a glacial cirque. The mists slowly lifted, and we crossed the snow field to where it transformed into a half-frozen waterfall that poured down between black cliffs and disappeared into an abyss. We fashioned a platform from stones that had been pushed down by the glacier and erected our tents at the edge of the precipice. The waters of the melting snow coursed beneath us as we slept. Gunn had a rough night, as the sharp rocks punctured his air mattress.

  The following morning we traversed to a line of trees and descended deeper into the ravines below. We had seen a valley far below us through breaks in the clouds, and we imagined that we could follow it to a village in the Tsangpo’s lower gorge. We had seemingly missed the Shekar-La itself and had crossed the ridge too far to the west. Our only hope now was to find a way down to the jungle-filled valley. Light strained through veils of mist and rain, revealing abstract patterns of mountains, clouds, and trees. I thought of something the critic William Hazlitt had written in the eighteenth century in praise of mist, of how humans could borrow “a more fine existence from objects that hover on the brink of nothing.” As we descended, our world narrowed to a small circle in which orchids and wispy lichen floated from gray and ghostly trees.

  We fanned out in search of a way down the ridge, our hands blistered and raw from cutting through the tangled forest. Ken fell down an eroding cliff, suspended by his armpits between boughs of rhododendrons. Lower down, I tried to climb down a short face only to have the holds crumble beneath my feet. I fell onto a narrow ledge, a vast gulf opening below me. Any serious injury here would have disastrous consequences, and we proceeded as cautiously as the circumstances would allow.

  TOWARD NIGHTFALL WE FOUND OURSELVES on a steep slope covered with ancient, moss-laden rhododendrons. Rain dripped through the canopy of intertwining leaves and branches as the porters tried to start a fire in the hollow of a tree. The rest of us leveled a platform with cut boughs and clumps of moss. Nearly hypothermic, we set up a single tent, while the porters hunched like gnomes in notches in the moss-encrusted trees. “We will die here,” one of them said. “You brought us here against our will. Now you must find a way out!”

  After a nearly sleepless night, we left in rain, and with the aid of ropes descended lichen-covered slabs into an apocalyptic gorge, a place of mud slides, eroding cliffs, and vibrant orchids spilling from the trees. Raindrops beaded like pearls on the leaves of giant magnolias, while lianas and trailers of moss enveloped us in a net of vegetation. Mist swirled around us like ethereal veils.

  In crossing the pass, we had entered Pemako, the Land of the Lotus and the body of Dorje Pagmo, and it seemed fitting that we had come in through a back door where there wasn’t any path. We climbed down vines and rhododendrons, carpets of ephemeral moss dissipating beneath our feet. My watch had broken and time itself seemed to dissolve. We dropped through ravine after ravine. Leeches returned as we reached lower elevations, and we passed through swards of stinging nettles, oaks, tree ferns, and delicate orchids of a variety, Gunn claimed, once crushed in Chinese courts to make perfume.

  THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF EVERY PILGRIM to Pemako is Yangsang Né, the paradise of Dorje Pagmo’s innermost heart. According to Padmasambhava’s prophecies, a future generation to inhabit the earth will emerge from this most sequestered of valleys—born again from the secret lotus of this “mother of all Buddhas.” For some, Yangsang is an Elysian haven where fruits and self-sowing crops ensure freedom from toil, and life-giving waters confer longevity and everlasting health. For others, Yangsang refers to the innermost reaches of the human heart, a field of energy without boundary or end that certain environments can help reveal.26

  We followed a narrow stream through tunnels of bamboo until we reached a wide and turbulent river that surged through the narrow gorge that we had seen from below the pass. A limestone cliff blocked passage along the riverbank. We tried to climb above it but soon recognized that it formed a continuous wall of rock rearing up through the canopy of trees. We turned back to the river and warily eyed the torturous silt gray waves, swollen in the recent rains. We fell to cutting down a large tree which hung over the bank, aiming our slashes so that it would lodge against a boulder in the center of the stream. But the span was too great and the tree was swept away in the flood. A second attempt led to the same result and the near loss of one of the porters when the log jammed against his leg, nearly sweeping him into the river. We also lost half of one of the climbing ropes that had been tied to the end of the fallen tree. Sherab cut it at the last moment when the log was lost to the surging waves. The porters had become slightly panicky. At nightfall we made a makeshift camp in the subtropical jungle, eating only the sauce to our last freeze-dried meal while the porters brewed tea and scouted the forests for mushrooms.

  In the morning we began to construct a cantilever bridge, building a foundation of logs and boulders strung together with vines. As I pushed rocks into place, I could feel my arms trembling from lack of nourishment. Things would get very serious unless we got across the river, and there was no certainty about what we would find on the other side. The broad valley that we had imagined from above had been no more than a figment of hope, now dwindled into a dense and narrow gorge. From our current vantage point, we looked across at a wall of vegetated cliffs, although a small sandy beach farther downstream offered some promise of a way down the river. We could also see wild banana trees in the forest above.

  Despite our precarious circumstances, my mind had been filled with lucid dreams, and I had awoken with a strange sense of exhilaration. I thought back to the waterfall at Gyala, and the image of Shinje Chogyal that appears to pilgrims through the veil of water. When meditated upon without preconceptions, Shinje’s vast energies, the resources of the subconscious mind, offer a gateway to either heaven or hell. When we had crossed over the pass without coordinates, we’d stepped into a world that increasingly shaped itself to our projections and changed in character according to our shifting conceptions. The lama above Kyikar had asked us if we wanted to die here. Enveloped in this green world teeming with life and death, the two states did not seem so opposed. “Without contraries is no progression,” wrote Blake, and the surrounding jungle seemed to embody his vision of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (For Blake heaven represented reason while hell was a realm of uncensored and delightful energies.)

  WE EVENTUALLY SUCCEEDED in bridging the river by pushing logs out on top of the shorter ones which we had anchored to the bank with boulders and vines. With three logs lodged against the rock in the center of the stream, we were able to cross to the other side, losing no more than a plastic water jug. We struggled up the jungled slope on the far bank, heading for the wild banana trees that we had seen the day before, only to find that they bore no fruit. But the porters discovered edible ferns which they harvested for a later meal. As we climbed back down toward the river, moss and earth matted
over a network of roots and vines gave out beneath our weight. We used ropes to negotiate the final moss-covered cliff, first lowering our packs down to river level.

  The prospect from this far bank was hardly reassuring. Where we had hoped to find clear passage beyond the sandy cove, cliffs rose directly out of the river. Lianas trailed from the trees and mists mingled with the spray of the waves, forming an ephemeral curtain.

  Apart from their harvest of ferns and fragments of compressed tea leaves the porters were entirely out of food. They watched mournfully as we consumed the last crumbs of Ken’s stale pilot bread. Who would eat who if things get worse? Eric wondered. They have the knives, Jill said.

  I recalled again the consoling belief that those who die in Pemako will not pass through the bardo, a supposedly harrowing interim between one life and the next, but will be immediately transported to paradisiacal realms. Bolstered by these beliefs, pilgrims often take inordinate risks on their journeys. Despite their Buddhist faith, some of the porters were now visibly ill at ease. We had come to a moment of crisis and we all felt it.

  Strangely, I found myself not wanting things to be other than they were. I was concerned for my companions, but my initial fears of becoming even more lost until we were living on roots and insects, had given over to some unfamiliar psychological state, a contentedness beyond anything I had ever known. Perhaps it was no more than the first stages of starvation.

  Slightly disturbed by the selfishness of my thoughts, I shouldered my pack and we headed downstream in light rain, skirting the cliff at the end of the cove by wading up to our waists through churning water, our bodies insubstantial from lack of food. We reached a ravine, and as we contemplated whether to climb up it or to cut our way lower along the level of the river, we heard a sudden barking of dogs in the jungle above us. Two hunters appeared out of the trees, wearing animal-skin tunics and with primitive rifles slung across their shoulders. We told them where we had come from. No one goes over that pass, they said, but you are fortunate that you have, for it is called Tselung Pemadrak—Long Life Valley of the Wrathful Lotus—and the waters there confer longevity; you will live to be a hundred years.

  The two Lopas were headed up the valley to hunt takin. One, who called himself Nima Dorje, Invincible Sun, had scars across his face and a gimp leg from a fall off a cliff. They wore amulets of musk to protect themselves against snakebite. Seeing our condition, they immediately gave us some of their cornmeal tsampa. As Gunn jumped up and down ecstatically at our good fortune, Ken and I looked at each other with the complicity of shared disappointment. “They’ve appeared two days too soon,” Ken said. We were close to the edge, and salvation came before we had completely savored the experience.

  One of the hunters agreed to lead us back to the village from which they had come. The other continued on alone up the valley. Only later did the hunter Nima Dorje reveal that at the head of this cloud-enveloped valley was a pass leading into Yangsang. They had never crossed it, Nima Dorje said. Without a qualified lama to perform the appropriate rites, the hidden way through the dripyol, or obscuring curtains, would never be found.

  Following log bridges and treacherous catwalks of bamboo, Nima Dorje led us back toward his village. We crossed huge heights and dropped down again toward the river on trails that we would never have found on our own. Our hands pulsed with the toxins of thorns and stinging nettles. We passed steaming sulfur springs, moving quickly so as to reach the village before nightfall. Strengthened by Nima Dorje’s chang and roasted corn flour, we made rapid progress. In the emerging twilight, I grasped tentatively at every vine. “The snakes come out after dark,” Nima Dorje said, “we must hurry.”

  It grew darker and we pushed on, wary of vipers. There are black ones, Nima Dorje said, and if they bite you, you’ll die within an hour. The first fields appeared. A primitive mill for grinding barley and a prayer wheel inscribed with mantras turned in a shallow stream. We crossed a plank bridge and passed the first of several rustic dwellings that were raised above the earth on wooden posts. Two bear cubs wrestled in a pile of firewood, the skin of the mother bear nailed beneath the eaves.

  The Lower Gorge

  THE VILLAGE WAS CALLED GOGDEM. Nima Dorje took us to his house, where we dried out by the fire. His wife brought us bowls of chang, refilling them three times per Tibetan custom. Having barely eaten for days, we were immediately intoxicated by the potent brew of fermented maize. Cornbread followed, and coarse local rice, yogurt from dzomo tethered beneath the house, and strips of dried bear meat. With food and alcohol streaming through the open door, takin skins for mattresses, and a roof over our heads protecting us from the ever-present rain, we were giddily content, although our shrunken stomachs soon rebelled at the immoderate feast.

  The porters discovered relatives who had escaped from Kongpo after the Communist invasion, and they spread out among Gogdem’s seventeen houses, built amid small plots of barley, corn, and vegetables and garlanded with vines of crimson chili peppers. Semidomesticated boars wallowed in the mud beneath the houses, and besides their stock of pigs and dzo, the villagers hunted in the jungle for takin, bear, muskdeer, and wild goats. Most of the residents were Lopas, descended from Pemako’s original tribes, but they had intermarried with Monpas who migrated into Pemako from eastern Bhutan at the end of the eighteenth century, escaping feuds in their home valleys and following prophecies of the hidden-land. There was also a smaller number of Kongpopas and Khampas, refugees from their homelands after the Chinese invasion.

  We stayed in Gogdem throughout the next day. The hunter with the bear cubs came in the morning and tried to sell us pods of musk and the dried gallbladder of the cubs’ mother whose skin he had hung out to dry on the outer wall of his house. These glands are revered as potent medicine by both Chinese and Tibetans, but villagers came to us with ailments which no local plants or animal products had been able to cure. One had a necrotic leg from a viper bite. Others had septic infections caused by leeches. Although I asked them to describe their specific illnesses, they were more concerned that I read their pulses. Traditional Tibetan doctors examine eighteen different pulses to gain information about the health of specific organs and energy meridians. I had no idea how to read these pulses, but the villagers insisted on a hands-on approach. Besides an emergency reserve of antibiotics, I had only homeopathic and herbal remedies, and after disinfecting any wounds with iodine, I dispensed them as judiciously as I could. Most coveted were the rinchen rilbu, or Tibetan precious pills, that contain silver, gold, and semiprecious stones such as turquoise and coral. They are widely believed to cure a diverse range of ailments. Promised land or not, Pemako clearly offered no escape from old age, sickness, and death.

  Gunn and the others stayed wrapped up in their sleeping bags by the fire. Ken had filled his journal and was scribbling notes in the margins of The Prelude. He looked up, firelight reflecting off his wire-rim glasses, and declaimed, “. . . the voice of mountain torrents; or the visible scene / Would enter unawares into his mind, / With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, / Its woods, and that uncertain heaven . . .”

  Jill rolled over in her sleeping bag and, amused by these utterances, asked Ken whether he felt he had encountered the sublime. He replied that journeys take shape on reflection, but that yes, he had tasted what he had come for. Still, he said, he suspected that the ultimate journey, like the Tibetans’ quest for Yangsang, could never be fulfilled. It would be, as Thoreau had said, “like chasing rabbits that you keep dragging out of your hat.”

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Gogdem’s headman handed us a cryptic note from Rick, who had apparently hobbled into the village ten days earlier. Rick’s letter stated that the rest of the group had returned home, and that he was heading alone down the lower gorge, accompanied by two Monpa porters. The villagers had noted his injured leg and his trademark red bandana, and demon-stated how, in lieu of words, he had gesticulated with his hands in an effort to communicate
to his porters.

  The headman told me that a cable spans the Tsangpo several thousand feet below Gogdem and that Rick had crossed over to the village of Gande on the far side. News had already come back that local officials had not allowed him to continue south toward the border with India as he had planned, and that he had crossed over a pass called the Gawalung-La into the region of Powo. From Gogdem, we could see the Tsangpo far below us as it flowed southward into a maze of clouds and blue-gray peaks on its course towards the Indian frontier. There it would be referred to by its tribal name, the Dihang, and be joined by other Himalayan streams—the Lohit, Subansiri, Kameng, Bhareli, Dhansiri, Manas, Champamati, Saralbhanga, and Sankosh—to form the massive flow of the Brahmaputra before converging with the Ganges and Jamuna and emptying into the Bay of Bengal.

  Nima Dorje described how the Tsangpo represents the life-force of Dorje Pagmo and interlinks the energies of her throat, heart, navel, and womb. As enticing as it was to be on the threshold of the sacred sites of the lower gorge, our permits had expired, and Gunn stressed that we must return to Lhasa as quickly as possible. Nima Dorje agreed to accompany us on the way out, telling us that it would be a five- or six-day journey up the gorge to its confluence with the Po Tsangpo and onward to the trailhead at the village of Trulung (Pelung).

  WHEN SHEPE DORJE REACHED the lower Tsangpo gorge, he had planned to follow the river southward into the heart of Pemako, in accordance with the prophecies that he had received in his dreams and visions. But before he had even reached the Shekar-La, two Lopas had tried to make him turn back: “Please Lama, don’t go to Pemako. The Lopas there have no leader and the place has no laws. Even if you do reach there, there will be no benefit for you. We will help carry your belongings back the way you have come. . . . The Kanam Depa [the hereditary ruler of Powo] commanded that not even officials, lamas, or accomplished yogins should be allowed over the Shekar-La. If you let them pass, he told us, I will seize your property. You cannot succeed and even if you try, we will lose everything.” We argued extensively, but the Lopa said that the pass and related areas along the Tsangpo were the domain [of the King of Powo] . . . They held knives in their hands and insulted the Gyala Depa . . . saying, “Why do you and your son try to bring lamas to our village?” They tried many way to stop us, but retreated when we persevered.