The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  We descended toward the apex of the Great Bend, the Tsangpo surging beneath us with the additional waters it had amassed after merging with the Po Tsangpo, several miles upstream. When we reached the river, the altimeter registered only 5,247 feet above sea level—little more than the highest parts of Kathmandu. We found a 300-foot-long footbridge in place of the single cable that had previously connected these lower parts of Pemako with the regions to the north. In Kingdon Ward’s day there had only been a rope of twisted bamboo. Lord Cawdor had written of the experience in his journal: “I was hauled across, thrashed like a fowl for the pot. Fortunately the distance was short, and the agony did not last long.”

  Once across the river, we climbed up through the steep jungle to the village of Tsachu, comprised largely of Lopas and settlers from Powo. We slept at the house of the village headman and could look out from the porch over pendulous banana trees toward the massive headwall called Shatidzong that blocks all views and passage into the Tsangpo’s inner gorge. According to our host, the fluted cliffs conceal undiscovered terma, but villagers mostly visit them to collect honey.

  Tsachu had been equally enchanting on December 17, 1924, when Lord Cawdor had written in his diary: “I shall ever remember this corner as the pleasantest spot we have struck—wonderful country, interesting vegetation, plenty of cultivation, and extraordinarily pleasant, friendly, and cheerful barbarians.”

  We left our hosts at Tsachu early the next morning. After initial landslides, the trail began to level into dense temperate rainforest and to wind back and forth across the Po Tsangpo on primitive bridges. After fifteen days of rain, the sun finally emerged from behind the clouds and a shower of butterflies hovered over the path. Green and golden snakes stretched themselves across the trail to soak up the rare sunlight. We walked through forests of towering bamboo, cherry trees, and 200-foot cypresses, passing sulfur springs where vapors drifted through the trees and warm velvet waters cut across a sandy beach to empty into the Po Tsangpo. As we neared the road head, I lingered behind to walk alone, crossing a catwalk of cables and wooden planks bolted into the cliffs. As night approached, I emerged from the jungle and crossed a rickety bridge strung with tattered prayer flags. Navigating the broken boards, I stepped onto the road that connects Lhasa with western China. As I walked into the small roadside hamlet of Trulung (Pelung), a Chinese Dong Feng cargo truck laden with freshly cut logs rolled eastward along the narrow dirt road.

  Lo had installed us in a makeshift room with cement floors and broken windows. The next day we drove to Powo and visited Bhakha Tulku’s monastery, situated on a small peninsula where the Po Tsangpo broadens into a tranquil lake. Due to Chinese regulations forbidding foreigners to stay at Buddhist monasteries, we drove to the district center of Pomi (Powo Dzong), where a local police official directed us to a designated hotel. The Chinese immigrants who ran it were gruff and unfriendly. The official told us that Rick had already been “caught” and had been sent back to Lhasa. We were told to leave first thing the next morning.

  Lustrous, snow-covered peaks rose on both sides of the river that flowed through Powo Dzong. Beyond the small outpost, the Po Tsangpo was lined with peach trees and silver firs. As Lo negotiated on the black market to secure enough gasoline to get us back to Lhasa, the police official told us we should never have come and that we should go back to America.

  Lamaling

  ON THE THREE DAY DRIVE back to Lhasa, we made a detour to Lamaling, a Buddhist sanctuary built in a valley behind a seventh-century temple.29 My first Buddhist teacher, Dudjom Rinpoche (1904-87), had been born in Pemako but had later moved to Lamaling, where he lived until the time of the Chinese invasion, when he fled Tibet and settled in Kalimpong in northeastern India. His daughter, Semo Dechen, and his chief attendant, Lama Chonyi Rinpoche, continued his work in Tibet when conditions for Buddhist practice improved after the Cultural Revolution. They had made Lamaling a flourishing retreat center where men and women from all parts of Tibet came to study and practice. Dudjom Rinpoche had built a three-tiered temple at Lamaling representing Sangdo Pelri, the celestial paradise of Padmasambhava, but the earthquake in 1950 had toppled it to the ground. In recent years the Chinese government had relaxed restrictions regarding the practice of religion, and Chonyi Rinpoche and Semo Dechen had begun rebuilding the historic temple. We could see its golden roofs glinting in the sun as we drove through open fields toward a small hamlet built on a ridge amid poplars, cypresses, and pines.

  Red-clad nuns and yogis came out to receive us. Before we could account for ourselves, they led us through a wooden door into a hidden garden brimming with peonies and chrysanthemums, and pear and apple trees. Parakeets flew overhead and sat on branches above a small fountain. Chonyi Rinpoche, his long silvery hair tied into a yogic topknot, came out from a single story house and, after shaking our hands, led us into his shrine room.

  Sitting on colorful Tibetan carpets, I told the lama that I had been a student of Dudjom Rinpoche after he had left Tibet, and that we had just come from Pemako after a month-long pilgrimage. Chonyi Rinpoche had lived in Pemako for many years. He held up one of his hands and with the other indicated the incessant ridges and ravines that we knew only too well. I described our route from Gyala to Pemakochung and over the pass to Gogdem and Luku. “Ah,” he said, “you’ve been through the throat of Dorje Pagmo.” He described it as the gateway into the heart of Pemako and the hidden-lands below. I asked him about Yangsang Né, Pemako’s ever-elusive center, and whether it was located in the throat, the heart, or the vulva, as different accounts had suggested.

  Chonyi Rinpoche’s response helped clarify the conundrum. “Each chakra has outer, inner, secret, and ultimately secret [yangsang] dimensions,” the lama said. There are thus doors at every focal point along Dorje Pagmo’s body. “Each chakra, in turn, has four lings, or petals, each with their own outer, inner, secret, and ultimately secret levels. Each one, in turn, radiates outward. As Dorje Pagmo’s throat center, the inner gorge must therefore conceal a door.” But as far as he was concerned, to reach Yangsang one must journey first to a mountain called Kundu Dorsempotrang, the All Gathering Adamantine Palace, which rises at Dorje Pagmo’s heart. According to Buddhist treasure-texts, the mountain holds the key to Pemako’s innermost sanctuary.

  I asked about the waterfall rumored to lie in the Tsangpo’s innermost gorge, and he told me of the lama named Kanjur Rinpoche who had passed through such a falls in the 1950s while searching for Chimé Yangsang Né. In Buddhism, Chonyi Rinpoche explained, waterfalls symbolize the transitory nature of all phenomena. In Tantric yoga, they signify the descent of amrita, the glandular secretions that fall from the cranial vault and spread through the chakras, connecting what’s above with what’s below. Chonyi Rinpoche explained that to enter Yangsang, a place ultimately beyond geographical or anatomical coordinates, one would first have to open “secret gates” within the mind and body. One of the twelve yogis currently in retreat at Lamaling had been having dreams of Pemako, Chonyi Rinpoche said. His visions revolved around secret practices concerning the descent of nectar and the opening of the chakras. Perhaps that’s the meaning of the waterfall, Chonyi Rinpoche suggested.

  Semo Dechen served us a lunch of wild mushrooms, vegetables, and rice. Afterward, the lama led us through the garden to the temple of Sangdo Pelri, which was surrounded by fruit trees and banks of flowers. Inside, red and white blossoms overflowed from vases on an altar that was dominated by a gilded statue of Padmasambhava. A polished rock, embossed with what was said to be Padmasambhava’s own footprint, lay at its base. Deities representing increasingly subtle states of awareness emerged from lotus plinths as we walked up through the stairs and galleries toward the roof. From the balcony beneath the gilded eaves, we could see the gardens laid out like a mandala around the temple. Far on the southeastern horizon, the summit of Namcha Barwa rose through clouds, while the Tsangpo flowed below like a distant, silver mirror. An old woman was pili
ng juniper boughs into an incense burner at the base of the temple, and the smoke streamed into the sky like a fountain of fragrant vapors.

  As Chonyi Rinpoche led us back from the temple, sun rays poured across a ridge of pines, illuminating gardens which would have sent Kingdon Ward into fits of rapture. Kingdon Ward had searched the gorge for exotic seeds to “beautify the gardens of England” and to placate his sponsors; Shepe Dorje had searched for a flower of another order, the thousand-petaled lotus said to bloom at its center. Pemako, a land arrayed like enfolded lotuses, guarded its innermost secrets from both of them, but the two explorers had been models for me, their opposing yet strangely complementary perspectives opening my mind to the depths and complexities of the Tsangpo gorge.

  Lo had waited by the Land Cruiser during our visit to the temple. He urged us toward the open door, saying that we had many hours left to drive that day. As we drove off down the dirt road, Chonyi Rinpoche, Semo Dechen, and assorted nuns, yogis, and villagers all waved goodbye. I felt a strange lightness, as if the Land Cruiser was floating above the earth. I recalled the passage Ken had marked in Book Ten of The Prelude: Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,

  Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!

  But in the very world, which is the world

  Of all of us, the place where, in the end,

  We find our happiness, or not at all!

  PART THREE

  THE MOUNTAIN

  To reach this secret place, your meditation and insight should be confident; free of any fear or doubt. . . . In order to pass through the tunnel of obstacles, one’s behavior and actions must be impeccable . . . otherwise [Pemako’s] hidden places will never be revealed.

  RINCHEN RIWOCHE JEDRUNG JHAMPA YUNGNEY

  Clear Light: A Guide to the Hidden Land of Pemako

  This enchantment of the human mind with archetypal landscape . . . is a phenomenon as old as myth and persistent as dream. . . . We seem to have an insatiable thirst for places that don’t exist.

  We must believe that the mountain exists; yet it must remain elusive, yielding to none of our usual means of entry. . . . One “gets there” only through extremity, by way of abandonment.

  BELDEN C. LANE

  The Solace of Fierce Landscapes

  The sensible are never free.

  NORMAN MAILER

  An American Dream

  July 1995

  The Year of the Wood Boar

  WHEN SKIES CLOUD OVER during the summer monsoon, Kathmandu’s residents carry gilded deities from dark pagoda-roofed temples and parade them on covered palanquins through the rain-washed streets. The ancient rites are meant to protect the valley from landslides and floods, but nothing had prevented my old house from collapsing under relentless rains. I’d moved into a rambling flat with Hamid Sardar, who had taken a leave of absence from Harvard to study Sanskrit in Kathmandu. His tutor, a white-clad Brahmin pundit, would arrive early each morning, and the resonant sound of Sanskrit slokas would reverberate for the next two hours from the oval living room. As the monsoon rains intensified, mold grew on the plaster walls and spread across the surface of books and antique Tibetan furniture. Bamboo and banana trees in the garden reached unprecedented heights.

  On my return from the Tsangpo gorge in 1993, I sought out Bhakha Tulku and told him how I’d been unable to reach the deepest section of the gorge. He told me that without the key I’d never find the passageway into Yangsang. Like Chonyi Rinpoche, he advised me to go first to the mountain Kundu Dorsempotrang.

  The name Kundu Dorsempotrang translates as the All-Gathering Palace of Vajrasattva, a Tantric deity symbolizing pristine, unobstructed awareness. Tibetans often refer to the mountain as Kundu Potrang, the All-Gathering Fortress, or simply as Kundu. A neyig entitled Guide to the Heart Center of the Great Sacred Land of Pemako describes the mountain as the “indestructible, secret fortress of the dakinis . . . that liberates upon seeing.” Echoing stories I had heard in Sikkim and Tibet, Bhakha Tulku told me how the lama Longchen Yeshe Dorje, Adamantine Awareness of Vast Space, better known as Kanjur Rinpoche, had visited the mountain in the 1950s and been guided by visions to a tunnel behind a waterfall that led him to a paradisiacal valley that he had identified as Chimé Yangsang Né. When Kanjur Rinpoche tried to return there with his family, he claimed to be unable to find the route.1

  Bhakha Tulku had met Kanjur Rinpoche on his journey to Kundu Dorsempotrang in 1956. Although he was only twelve at the time, the mountain had left a deep impression. He compared the peak to Mount Kailas, the world pillar in the arid wastes of western Tibet that Buddhists and Hindus alike consider the meeting place of heaven and earth. Unlike the snow-covered dome of Kailas, which looms above vast, treeless plains, Bhakha Tulku described Kundu as being surrounded by swamps and rain forests. “The mountain is the heart of Pemako,” he said. “It’s the key to its hidden realms.”

  In May 1994, I returned to Pemako with Hamid in an attempt to reach the sacred mountain. Bhakha Tulku had returned to his ancestral seat and we visited him at his sixteenth-century monastery in the Powo valley north of Pemako. Together with Ken Storm, Laura Ide, a girlfriend I’d met during my sojourn at Columbia, a climbing partner, Rob Parenteau, and his fiancée, Karen Kung, we had followed the Tsangpo River south to Medok, the traditional starting point for the pilgrimage to Kundu and, since the 1960s, a Chinese military base. Local authorities had forbidden us to proceed farther.

  Claiming to be in need of a rest day, we headed into the jungle with minimal provisions on the pretext of bathing in a nearby waterfall. Avoiding detection, we climbed through dense forest and clouds of gnats until we reached a remote golden-roofed temple that according to local tradition, lies in Dorje Pagmo’s navel chakra. Kundu lay several days’ journey to the southeast, but heavy snow on the passes and the Chinese military emissaries sent to reclaim us thwarted our hopes of reaching the fabled mountain.

  On our return, Bhakha Tulku told me about a more circuitous route to Kundu that would take us deep into the wilderness, far from any Chinese military camps. We would have to travel during the summer rains, he said, the only time when the passes that encircle the mountain would be free of snow.

  As Bhakha Tulku’s wife served tea with fermented honey, he described the stages of the journey to the peak from high snow-covered passes to dense jungles infested with snakes and tigers. “Unless pilgrims have traveled there recently,” Bhakha Tulku said, “you will have to cut your own trail.” He spoke of Kundu as the gateway to Chimé Yangsang Né. At the turn of the twentieth century, the lama Jedrung Thinley Jhampa Yungney Rinpoche, Precious Lord of Compassionate Enlightened Activity ( Jedrung Rinpoche), had taken his bearings at the mountain and gone south with his followers in search of the paradise. But Jedrung Rinpoche and his followers were repeatedly ambushed by Mishmi warriors and never reached the promised land. His next incarnation, Jedrung Trakpa Gyaltsen—Bhakha Tulku’s father-in-law—returned to Pemako with no better fortune. “No one has yet been able to find the way,” Bhakha Tulku said.2

  Around this time, I had begun research for a book on Tibetan medicine, an amalgamation of Ayurvedic, Chinese, and Hellenic healing practices. Some of the more extraordinary additions to Tibet’s materia medica appear in the Pemako neyigs that describe “five miraculous plants” capable of bestowing siddhis, the physiological and psychic powers arising on the Tantric path. According to Bhakha Tulku, these uncataloged species grow most plentifully in the area of Kundu and the valleys of Yangsang. One plant, called tsakuntuzangpo, the all-beneficent herb, is said to induce memories of past lives and bestow visions of other realms; others are said to “confer immortality . . . and the experience of emptiness and bliss.” One lama I spoke with suggested that extracts from these psychoactive plants could be the mysterious key to Yangsang alluded to in Padmasambhava’s prophecies. According to Bhakha Tulku, animals that inadvertently eat these rare
herbs have left imprints of their hooves in solid rock.

  Over the past year, my study of alchemical elixirs in the Tibetan Tantras had brought exotic substances into my kitchen larder. Concoctions of lotus seeds and wild honey, sautéed caterpillar fungus (Cordyceps sinensis), Indian snake-root (Rauwolfia serpentina), and preparations made from purified mercury, silver, and gold became a regular part of my and Hamid’s diet. Some of the elixirs were only to be used in conjunction with specific Tantric practices. One, a formula from the Chandramaharoshana Tantra, caused eruptions of light in the frontal cortex when combined with certain yogas. A rarer recipe contained within the Nyingtik Yabtsi, a fourteenth-century compendium on Dzogchen meditation, prescribes a concoction made from the tropane-rich seeds of Himalayan datura (Datura metel) for opening the body’s subtle energy channels and cultivating visions, the final distillate to be dropped into the eyes through the hollow shaft of a vulture’s quill. (European varieties of datura, or thorn apple, were principal ingredients in the “flying ointments” and magical salves of medieval witches which promoted out-of-body experiences.) I asked Bhakha Tulku for more details, but he stayed silent, stroking his graying goatee and Salvador Dali-like moustache. He then uncorked a bottle of rice wine that had been steeping with various unidentifiable ingredients on his altar.

  KUNDU DORSEMPOTRANG DOES NOT APPEAR on any map. My U.S. defense chart showed a large white section along the border between India and Tibet emblazoned with the word unexplored. Available satellite imagery was even less helpful, as the territory lay concealed beneath dense clouds. Concerned after our last experience, I contacted Mountains & Rivers Travel in Chengdu, the company that had arranged permission for our journey through the gorge in 1993, on the off chance that permits could be issued for the mountain itself. Gunn faxed back to tell me that he could not locate Kundu Dorsempotrang, even on the restricted Chinese military maps. He told me over the phone that permission could not be given for a place that from an official perspective does not even exist.