by Ian Baker
Once in the lower gorge, Shepe Dorje was better received: The Lopa Pawo [shaman] sent Lopas named Tsesung and Kunga to invite us to their village. They burned incense on a stone slab in greeting and, not far away, Lopa Pawo himself brought tea and chang and greeted us with veneration. . . . That night we camped near the Lopa village. Apart from the Lopa Pawo, everyone is very poor. Some have injuries and swollen limbs. Some of our porters had caught sadug [earth poison] which they healed with mantras and ointments.
The Lopa Pawo . . . is different from the others. . . . He has left foot and hand prints in solid rock [as signs of spiritual accomplishment]. . . . The Lopas offered us tea, millet chang, millet thukpa, dzo yoghurt, honey, and pork. . . . The Pawo gave me deer musk, butter, millet, and rope and mats woven from bamboo . . .
Despite his kind reception by the Lopa Pawo, Shepe Dorje’s journey south was blocked by a contingent of warriors sent by the ruler of Powo. The prophecies that Shepe Dorje had received had indicated that “If you enter Pemako from the western gate, you must have patience and perseverence. Then all wishes can be fulfilled.” Adamant that he should proceed, Shepe Dorje sent a letter to the court in Powo stating his objectives and settled down to await the reply.
The thirty-one-year-old lama was not idle while he waited for the messenger to return. As he wrote in his account: “The Drejongpas (from Sikkim) were practicing yogic exercises (trulkor). In the mornings and evenings, I performed my own practices and gave the teachings of Sangyig, the profound generating stage practices, and Guru Yoga to assembled dharma sisters and friends. I passed the time with discussions of Vajra Neluk (the natural state of existence, the changeless state of Dharmata). For the dakini, Pema Roltso and several others, I gave the pointing out instructions on the Nature of Mind (Rigpa Selwang ).”
Shepe Dorje also spent time documenting numerous unfamiliar plants and trees. He commented on the many varieties of fruits and also on the patterns of vajras, lotuses, and wheels which he witnessed on leaves and exposed tree roots. He also took note of banana trees which are found nowhere else in Tibet. “The leaves are two and a half paces long,” he wrote, “and shaped like swords. . . . They offer a perfect place to avoid the rain.”27
When the messenger returned with a letter from the Powo court, he announced that if Shepe Dorje did not return the way he had come, an army of Lopa warriors would come to stop them. The letter stated: “Pemako belongs exclusively to the people of Kanam (Powo); it is not a place that the inhabitants of U and Tsang (central Tibet) may enter.”
Despite the protector deity Mentsun Chenmo’s vow to assist Shepe Dorje like “a shadow following his body” and the prophecies concerning the places that he was to open in Pemako’s heart and navel chakras, “the auspicious circumstances (tendrel) and conditions and opportunities did not allow us to reach these [sacred] places.” As Shepe Dorje wrote: “We tried every means possible, but the Kanam Depa’s representatives were too frightened to let us pass. All the doors have now been closed and, in the end, we have decided to return the way we have come.” After final prayers “to increase the virtues and qualities of the hidden-land as well as for the good fortune of all sentient beings,” Shepe Dorje began his journey back to central Tibet. “I journeyed here not for my own sake,” he wrote, “but in fulfillment of the dakinis’ prophecies and to benefit all sentient beings. Although it was prophecied that I was to open the chakras at [Dorje Pagmo’s] heart and navel, the auspicious circumstances failed to materialize . . .”
ON MAY 18 WE FELT SUFFICIENTLY RESTORED to begin our journey toward the confluence. We set out for Luku, the next village to the north. As we walked, Ken lamented the return to inhabited terrain and looked longingly up the valley that we had followed from the Shekar-La. Vast glaciers on the southern walls of Namcha Barwa appeared through the clouds. Although intrigued by the local culture, his heart was set on finding a way into the still unknown section of the Tsangpo gorge and laying to rest the mystery of the falls.
We reached Luku before midday. The village was slightly larger than Gogdem, with twenty-two houses spread out along the steep slopes of the lower gorge. Dorje Drolma, Olmula’s older sister, had died years before, but our porters discovered other lost relatives who had come from Kongpo in the 1960s to escape the People’s Liberation Army. We settled into a large wooden house where three local women—Tashi Tsomo, Sonam Wangpo, and Sonam Dekyi—plied us with chang, while their mother, dressed in a bloodred shirt woven from raw silk, stirred cornmeal and millet into an enormous pot simmering on the earthen hearth. Large bowls of the millet-based alcohol were passed around the room, which was painted with white gakyils, or coils of joy. Bearskins and antique weapons hung on the walls from iron nails. In Bayu, the next village to the north, Kingdon Ward had been similarly received. “Occasionally you taste a vintage which is just frolicking foam,” he wrote, “One sip and the world is transformed . . . a fleeting glimpse of the golden age . . .”
Although the Monpas and Lopas spoke their own indecipherable language, they spoke enough Tibetan that I could communicate with them. Drinking games and dancing ensued, and even Gunn, well lubricated with the local spirits, was enticed into singing a Chinese love song. The chang continued to flow until we pleaded exhaustion and were shown to the family shrine room where we slept amid animal skins and a pedal-operated Chinese sewing machine. The revelry in the main part of the house continued throughout the night.
We tried to leave the next morning, but the porters were still drunk. When Chimé Gompo fell off the porch while shouldering his load, we realized that we would be marooned in Luku for another day. The chang again began to flow and the three sisters cooked up a delicious meal of wild mushrooms. On a trip out to relieve myself, I discovered opium poppies growing behind the house and was told they were used for medicine. Had they been brewed into the chang? Double rainbows arched across the Tsangpo amid spectacular cloud formations.
In Lopa folklore, a rainbow represents the movement across the sky of four lustrous, spring-dwelling nagas, or water spirits, in search of wives as radiant as themselves. The falling rain is held to be the ambrosial chang that they consume on their journey.
Back inside the house, the party continued. Eric, dressed in his newly washed Hells Angels sweatshirt, had passed out dreamily against a wooden pillar. Gunn was talking about his wife in Chengdu. Our porters sang and danced. The oldest of the three sisters, Tashi Tsomo, continued to ply me with chang and her beauty blossomed the more I drank.
A drunken Lopa with large ivory earrings came into the shrine room where we had sought refuge and, bowing his head to my knees, asked for abhisekha, initiation into the Tantric mysteries. Earlier I had given him a photograph of the Dalai Lama as well as Bhakha Tulku who is revered in Pemako and beyond as the reincarnation of Pema Lingpa, a fifteenth-century terton. Never having met any of the high lamas who had escaped to India after the Chinese invasion, the sinewy Lopa had convinced himself that the blessings and empowerments that I had received from them could be passed on. Amused, embarrassed, and nearly as drunk, I told him I could do nothing. But the Lopa was unrelenting and with his shaved head fixed to my knee, I brought out the sachet of mendrup that Chatral Rinpoche had given me the day before I left for Tibet. This consecrated elixir can only be prepared in elaborate Tantric rites and is highly esteemed in the Tibetan world. Suddenly the room was crowded with eager Lopas, Monpas, and Kongpopas, all insisting that I give them some of this coveted substance. Some ate it immediately. Others wrapped it carefully in bits of cloth and put it into their amulet boxes. During the proceedings, I learned that a forty-one-year-old incarnate lama from Kham named Wasadorje Tulku was staying in meditative retreat above the village. For three years he had not received visitors, and I began to understand why.
ON MAY 19 WE AWOKE to roosters crowing beneath the floorboards and soon began a grueling climb northward to a pass called the Gopu-La. A pilgrims’ shelter had been b
uilt at a clearing at the top of the pass, and on the following morning, rather than beginning the steep descent to Bayu, Nima Dorje led us along the crest of the ridge to a rock monolith called Tsebum, the Vase of Life. It was a sacred site highly revered in the upper parts of Pemako, and we circumambulated it through tunnels in the rock and across notched logs spanning precipitous drops.
Following Nima Dorje’s directives, we carried sticks with us, and near the top of the enormous outcrop we cut notches into them with our knives—one for every year of our lives. We then stacked them against the rock along with countless others that had been left there before, each one rising up like a ladder into the sky. Nima Dorje explained that by placing the stick there we were establishing a connection to the sacred energies of the place, and that powa, or transference of consciousness, would thus occur spontaneously at the time of our deaths.
Tsebum was a potent place. Nima Dorje showed me where a visiting terton named Tulku Dorje Tenzing had left imprints of his foot and hands in the rock after meditating there for a month, a physical testament that the world is more permeable than it appears. Three koras, or circumambulations, around the monolithic outcrop were said to confer the same spiritual blessings as a single circuit around Kundu Dorsempotrang, a sacred mountain deep in the wilderness east of the Tsangpo’s lower gorge. The towering rock had been enveloped in mist and only as we were leaving did we see it arching into the sky. Beneath it was a cave with water dripping into a tranquil pool.
We continued back to the pass, but rather than begin the long descent to Bayu, a village still many hours away, Nima Dorje insisted that we now climb up the ridge to a sacred body of water called “the burning lake which removes all obstacles,” where we should also perform ritual circumambulations. Snow lay in drifts in the forest, and Nima Dorje lost the way. It had begun to rain, but the porters were all eager to gain the blessings of this sacred site, a proxy to the remote mountain that local tradition claims to hold the key to Yangsang.
After thrashing through the forest, we eventually came upon the half-frozen lake. It was several hundred feet across and Nima Dorje said we would have to circle it thirteen times. As we began the first kora, the porters’ prayer beads came out again from beneath their tunics, and their mantras reverberated through the still and silent air.
Long before Buddhism came to Tibet, the soul and vitality of Tibetan clans was connected to particular lakes, rocks, and mountains. Although the spirits of these places could be appeased with ancient shamanistic rites, Buddhism transformed an uneasy alliance with nature into one in which pilgrims could participate directly in the sacred presence, just as Tibet’s primordial demoness, the Srinmo, had reformulated herself in Pemako as a bliss-bestowing goddess.
It was well past midday when we finished our thirteen rounds, and we were concerned about whether we would be able to make it to Bayu. We headed down through interminable ravines and gullies, following the faint semblance of a trail. Thousands of feet below the pass, we entered a forest of towering plantains, clusters of the green banana-like fruit dangling pendulently high above our heads. In twilight we climbed up a steep slope and emerged suddenly onto cultivated fields. Soon, we saw the first houses of Bayu.
Takin skins and bearskins were nailed against the walls to cure. Firewood lay in huge stacks beneath the eaves. Villagers came out of their houses to greet us. In gathering darkness, they led us up a log ladder into a house raised above the earth where they handed us bowls of chang. As we sat ourselves around the fire, our raven-haired hostess served us bear meat and mustard greens. It had been a long day, and we spread out almost immediately around the fire on takin skins. I drifted off to sleep to the sound of boars grunting beneath the floorboards.
Gunn’s senior colleague, Mr. Lo, had been waiting for us in Bayu for almost two weeks. Assuming that our route out of the upper gorge would take us directly into Bayu, he had stayed behind when Rick headed out on his own in an attempt to reach Medok, a remote outpost close to the border with India. Lo had been on the verge of sending out a rescue party when we stumbled into the village. He had been reasonably content in Bayu, he told us the next morning, as our pretty hostess, a Monpa woman named Nima Tso, Lake of Sunlight, spoke passable Chinese.
Over tea by the hearth, Lo told us that David Breashears had also come down the Po Tsangpo and had climbed up to the ridge above Bayu, scouting unsuccessfully for a route into the innermost gorge. Kingdon Ward and Lord Cawdor had crossed this same spur from the other direction, passing through a region of giant bamboo, palmlike Araliaceae, and unusual orchids. We were eager to make the 6,000-foot ascent up the ridge in order to look down into the area that no one had yet been able to reach, the forbidden land that Tibetan texts claimed concealed no less than seventy-five waterfalls. But the weather was still bad, and Lo, as our official liaison officer, would not allow it. Our permits had already expired, he said, and we would have to head straight back to Lhasa.
Over a morning meal of eggs and unleavened corn bread, Lo told us of a bizarre race that had occurred between Breashears and the twelve-year-old son of one of Rick’s clients. Having been closed out of the inner gorge by the cliffs beyond Pemakochung, Breashears and Wiltsie had determined to reenter the gorge farther downriver. Like Rick and his clients, they planned to follow the river that drains the Powo and Yigrong valleys to its confluence with the Tsangpo at the apex of the Great Bend. From there they would try to enter the section of the gorge that had thwarted all previous explorers, and fulfill their mission for National Geographic.
The route down the Po Tsangpo to the confluence is well traveled. A village called Tsachu (Zhachu) lies thousands of feet above the river with spectacular views—when the mists lift—toward Gyala Pelri and Namcha Barwa. Kingdon Ward and Lord Cawdor had returned to central Tibet by this route in the last week of 1924. Despite the relative ease of the terrain and the fact that Westerners had been there before, the broad trail down the Po Tsangpo provided the context for a ludicrous parody of Scott and Amundson’s tragic race for the South Pole. According to Lo, Rick was adamant that his team be the first to reach the area of the confluence. Unable to compete personally because of the torn ligament in his knee, Rick dispatched the two strongest hikers in his party—a forty-year-old secretary named Sharon Ludwig and Ry Larrandson, the twelve-year-old son of another of Rick’s clients. The two snuck through Breashears and Wiltsie’s camp before sunrise and began the seventeen-mile trek to Tsachu. Later that morning, Breashears spotted the tracks of their vibram boots and rose to the bait. Unloading his pack onto Wiltsie, he took off running in an attempt to beat Rick’s clients to the village. Despite his efforts and the ensuing abuse he received from Wiltsie for being made to carry two packs, Ry and Sharon had reached the village hours before him. The confluence was still more than two hours farther down the ridge, but after reaching Tsachu—idyllically situated amid meandering streams and fields of barley and corn—the mission suddenly seemed absurd to all participants. “What a sad day for me, getting caught up in that silly game,” Breashears later said.28
After Breashears’s foray to the ridge above Bayu, he and Wiltsie returned up the Po Tsangpo and drove back to Lhasa. After several days based at the confluence, trying unsuccessfully to find a route upriver into the inner gorge, Rick’s clients had also returned home. Rick stayed on and redirected his efforts toward the lower gorge. Unlike the wilderness upstream, the Tsangpo’s lower reaches—from the confluence all the way to the border with India—are sparsely populated. Bailey and Morshead had seen parts of the lower gorge in 1913, but they were blocked from continuing north to the confluence by a Powo official who rerouted them over the Su-La pass. Rick was eager to document the sections of the gorge that they had missed. As we later learned, he had crossed the Tsangpo on the cable bridge below Gogdem and had ended up in the next village without any food or Chinese currency. Avoided at first by wary villagers, Rick had ultimately convinced some of them of the value of a $100 bill and
secured porters to take him across a snowbound pass into Powo, where he arrived without a permit. He later claimed to have avoided frostbite by slipping Ziploc bags over his single pair of woolen socks.
WE LEFT BAYU ON MAY 21. A gnomish Monpa, sporting a red, three-pointed cap and twirling an oversized prayer wheel, came out of his house to see us off. Several other mantra-inscribed whirligigs gyrated along the ridgeline of his house, which was surrounded by banana trees and towering hemp plants that we were told were used for making rope. We walked past a wall of mani stones, carved with mantras, and along fields of ripening barley before plunging once again into jungle. Climbing through mist and rain, we began a long ascent through a forest of alders, oaks, and pines to a break in a ridge that runs out from a great cliff that looms over the Tsangpo-Po Tsangpo confluence. Through breaks in the trees, we could see snow ranges far to the north and the lower slopes of the eastern face of Gyala Pelri.