The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  Bayi had anything but pleasant associations. Apart from its garish architecture and the oppressive military presence, Hamid and I had been robbed there on our previous trip. Khampa thieves had climbed into our supply truck during the night and made off with our sleeping bags, mattresses, and large portions of our food. We’d replaced the down bags and Therm-a-Rests with Chinese army blankets and sheep skins that we found in the Bayi market, but after weeks of Pemako’s constant rain, they doubled in weight and slowly began to rot. On our return through Bayi, we had found that the thieves had been caught and some of our gear recovered. The Tibetan police detective who had handled our case, dressed in a trench coat and fedora hat, had insisted that when we next returned to Bayi we bring him a “prize.” We were very much hoping to avoid him.

  We negotiated with our drivers to take us on to Lamaling, an hour to the south. Chonyi Rinpoche was sitting in his walled garden among cages of parrots and parakeets. He would feed them mendrup for a week or two, he said, and then return them to the skies, carrying the blessings of the Buddhist Dharma. He remembered our conversation two years earlier and was pleased that we were headed to Kundu Dorsempotrang. “Although outwardly we might see only a mountain,” he said, “inwardly Kundu is a mandala of Dorje Sempa [Vajrasattava in Sanskrit], a supreme expression of enlightenment.” Circling the peak would open doors to new awareness and, by extension, the hidden realms beyond. When the others had gone to visit the temple, Chonyi Rinpoche told me of a cliff on Kundu’s eastern wall where the key to Yangsang is said to be located. “What is the key?” I asked. Somehow my question seemed to miss the point, and he smiled back as if to suggest that if I had to ask I would never find it. Although I’d become accustomed to such Buddhist paradoxes, another part of me still sought literal explanations. Does the key refer to a particular terma, a ritual text, a map, an inner revelation? Touching his forehead to ours, he sent us off with his blessings but without answering.

  Back in Bayi, Gunn informed us that the local Public Security Bureau (PSB) had insisted that we take a police escort with us for “protection.” Gunn introduced a small unsmiling man dressed in camouflage fatigues and a Mao cap who, as Gunn translated, said that he would be our “friend” on the journey. Hardly convinced of that, we retired for dinner to a vinyl-seated restaurant attached to the single hotel designated for foreign visitors. We’d seen longhaired rats being sold for food in Bayi’s central square, and no one had much of an appetite. Music pulsed from the floor above, and we went upstairs to a surrealistic dance hall. The room was empty except for two Chinese men, dancing arm in arm to wailing disco music.

  The next morning we crossed a 15,440-foot pass and descended steeply on the other side to a logging camp where Chinese army personnel and Tibetan prisoners were reportedly engaged in cutting down old-growth forests of cedar, spruce, and fir. We ate in a wooden shack where immigrants from China’s Szechuan province had set up a makeshift roadside restaurant. One of the ingredients in our midday meal made us all very drowsy, and we nodded off as we descended lower into the gorges leading toward Powo. Through heavy lids, our driver looked up continuously to avoid falling rocks, at one point swerving in the mud tracks and nearly driving off a precipice.

  Soon after, the road ended at a great landslide several hundred meters across. Many roads built by the Chinese to harvest Tibet’s vast timber reserves have been abandoned as too difficult and expensive to maintain. But this was the southern highway between China and central Tibet, and road crews had shored up part of the track with interlaced logs and were cutting through the steep waste of mud, boulders, and uprooted trees. The PSB officials in Bayi had told us about the slide and said that we would most likely have to cross on foot and hire new vehicles on the other side. Dodging falling rocks, we ferried loads across the eroding mountainside and negotiated with truck drivers marooned on the other side to take us on to Powo. But in the meantime, our drivers determined to get across the landslide and, free of passengers and excess weight, careened across the precipitous slope.

  The road continued as a tilting, muddy track through streambeds and dense forests until it emerged at the village of Trulung where a footbridge connects to a trail leading down into Pemako. This was the same route by which I had emerged from the Tsangpo gorges in 1993, but our journey to Kundu now meant continuing east on the road toward Powo.

  We drove along the northern edge of the Po Tsangpo, crossing the Yigrong River at 7,680 feet and continuing on through washouts and waterfalls that plunged into the river below us. Despite the hazards of the road, Oy was in near ecstasy, stopping the car frequently to examine plants or point out a band of macaques crossing a sandy beach on the opposite bank. When she discovered six species of lichen on a single tree, she declared the area a botanical paradise.

  The valley gradually widened into lush fields of ripening barley and peach and apple trees. We came upon the first timber-framed habitations in Powo, until 1931 a semi-independent feudal kingdom whose hereditary rulers claimed dominion over the tribes of Pemako.4 Powo is connected to Pemako by a range of high snow-covered passes. In the vision of Pemako as the body of Dorje Pagmo, Tamer of Serpents, the valley of Powo is the snake that she wields in her left hand.

  The Valley of Powo

  BHAKHA TULKU’S ANCESTRAL SEAT, Bhakha Gompa, is one of Powo’s principal monasteries. It sits on a promontory on the southern bank of the Po Tsangpo river, surrounded by glittering snow peaks and lush forests of hemlock and fir. To the east, sandbars reach out into a wide and placid section of the Po Tsangpo. Where the river narrows again into fierce rapids, a wooden suspension bridge strung with colorful prayer flags connects the monastery to the northern bank and the road from Szechuan to Lhasa.

  We carried the Buddha statues, still hidden in duffel bags, across the bridge and climbed the hill to the courtyard in front of the main temple, where monks and carpenters were reconstructing the sixteenth-century temple. (It had been destroyed in the great earthquake in 1950 and again by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution.) As workmen shaped trees into timber planks, monks painted images of Buddhist deities on either side of the wooden entrance doors.5

  Sangye Tenzing, the acting abbot, received us in Bhakha Tulku’s absence. In a private room away from the watchful eyes of our “friend” from the PSB, I gave him Bhakha Tulku’s letters. He eagerly opened the one addressed to him, the first news in many months from the departed Rinpoche. Outside, other monks had lined up porcelain cups on wooden boards to serve us tea. Rain showers skudded across the river below.

  WHEN WE HAD LAST VISITED in May of 1994, Bhakha Tulku had been overseeing the monastery’s reconstruction from a family home in the upper Powo valley where glaciers descend toward the edges of ripening fields of barley. The same idyllic valley also contains a Chinese high-security prison. A Tibetan student from Middlebury College in Vermont who had received a Watson fellowship to record traditional Tibetan dances and music had been accused by the Chinese of espionage and was confined there for several years. The valley was restricted and we left hurriedly, concerned that our presence might put Bhakha Tulku in danger.

  Later that year, Chinese authorities accused Bhakha Tulku of being a spy for the U.S. government and forced him to leave Tibet. He had traveled back to Nepal by truck and public bus, laden down with whatever possessions he and his wife, Sonam, could carry. Immediately afterward, the local administration began cutting down old growth forests in the vicinity of the Bhakha monastery, turning what had been a protected forest into lumber for export. The Chinese call Tibet Xizang, the Western Treasure House, and since their “liberation” of Tibet in 1950 they have systematically plundered its vast forest reserves and ravaged its earth for uranium, gold, and other precious metals. In Tibetan culture, mining was largely forbidden. Instead, the earth was regularly empowered and enriched by filling sechu, or earth treasures vases, with jewels and other precious substances and burying them underground—a covenant with the
landscape in radical contrast to Chinese policies of extraction.

  Sangye Tenzing folded up the letter from Bhakha Tulku and concealed it in his robes. Most of the resident monks, those who weren’t needed for overseeing the construction of the monastery, were up in the mountains on meditation retreat, he told me. Nonetheless, he would spare whomever he could from the construction site to come with us as porters. Sensing a rare opportunity, he said he would personally come with us to perform the religious rites to open the way (go-che) to Kundu and beyond.

  We’d intended to spend the night at the monastery and leave the following morning, but our new “friend” from the Public Security Bureau, Mr. Zang, would not allow it. It wasn’t specified on our itinerary, he said. We would have to drive another hour to Pomi, the local administrative center. We left after arranging to send the truck back the following afternoon to collect Sangye Tenzing and whatever porters he could recruit.

  As we crossed the rickety bridge leading back to the road, I shared with Gunn my concern that, even with the abbot’s best efforts, we would not have sufficient porters for the journey. A crew of ragged Monpa coolies who had been repairing a washed-out section of the road were resting under towering fir trees. After a short negotiation, Gunn hired them, and they squeezed into the back of the truck with the few meager possessions that they carried in their bamboo baskets.

  AFTER PILING INTO THE LAND CRUISERS, we drove to Powo Dzong, known as Pomi to the Chinese, and settled into the soulless designated hotel—as Christiaan noted, “a euphemistic way of saying you can’t stay anywhere else.” As we divided food supplies and other gear into manageable loads, police officials came into the room and told us not to leave the hotel. The streets in Pomi are dangerous, they insisted. We thanked them for their concern and soon went out to explore.

  Cradled beneath soaring moonlit peaks, with the Po Tsangpo River meandering through its center, Pomi seemed like a Klondike boomtown. Dingy restaurants littered with empty Chinese beer bottles lined the mud-filled streets. The restaurants’ proprietors hailed from China’s Szechuan province. They’d been lured into the Tibetan outback by Chinese government incentives that left many Tibetans unemployed. We rounded a corner and came upon a makeshift disco with revolving strobe lights. Behind the curtained doorway, Szechuan nymphs cupped their hands around glasses of hot jasmine tea. As Gunn explained, it was so the “cats” hands would be warm when they touched you. We passed on in search of other locales.

  The restaurants all looked questionable. Scandal had erupted in Pomi earlier in the summer when a dog unearthed a human head from a rubbish heap behind one of the more popular restaurants, reinforcing widespread rumors that Tibetan children were being served as food in Chinese eateries. In Lhasa, there had been demonstrations in the Barkhor against what we were told was an increasing incidence of street children, itinerant nuns, and other untraceable persons ending up as mincemeat in Chinese Muslim restaurants. Bhakha Tulku had been the first one to tell us about this, relating how a fat nun in Nakchuka, a region north of Lhasa, had entered a Muslim restaurant and not come out.

  The previous night, when the chief of police in Bayi had turned up to issue our road permit, we had questioned him about a foreigner that we had heard had been arrested for traveling without a permit in the lower Tsangpo gorge. He was from Austria, the police officer told us, and he had been collecting medicinal plants. But exactly where he was arrested and what the penalty had been for his illicit journey was all “secret.” When the official remained silent on the subject of his punishment, Hamid offered that we’d heard he’d been eaten. The chief officer got up abruptly and left the room, not sure, it seemed, if we were joking. Life in Tibet held uncertain perils. As we plied the streets of Pomi in defiance of the local police, Oy reflected on our apparent danger of ending up as an ingredient in some cadre’s noodle soup.

  Nonetheless, we were eager for a solid meal as we had carried little more than rice, lentils, noodles, and dehydrated vegetables for the journey to Kundu. The Gillenwaters wanted meat. We ordered chicken stew and several other dishes at a roadside restaurant. Perhaps to reassure us of what we would be eating, the Chinese cook appeared from the kitchen with two squawking hens. A few seconds later they uttered their last sounds. When the pot of chicken soup finally arrived at the table, it was decidedly disappointing; an assortment of claws, necks, and heads, and very little meat. The Gillenwaters looked dismayed. Christiaan picked at it with his chopsticks.

  Apparently, the cook was preoccupied by a more lucrative enterprise. A large stack of white and gold mushrooms was pickling in brine in the corner of the restaurant, to be sold to traders who would export them to Japan. In July and August, Pomi’s entrepreneurs engage in a brisk trade in what we took to be maitake mushrooms. The cook had fresh ones too, but he wouldn’t let them go for less than $100 a kilo. Communicating through a Tibetan who had wandered into the restaurant to inspect our little group, the Chinese man claimed that the mushrooms, which he had harvested from the surrounding forests, were “like gold beneath his feet.” “The mushrooms grow from a fungus underground, and if you don’t damage the earth more come up each year,” he said. An expert in fungi, Oy clarified that maitake can’t be grown commercially, as the mushrooms sprout from a network of threadlike fungal cells that feed only on the living roots of pine trees. Foregoing the house specialty, we started back for the hotel along a pitch black street, stopping in briefly at a surrealistic wood-floored roller skating rink erected beneath a vast tent, which was being patronized by teenage girls and three underage monks.

  BY THE NEXT DAY, August 2, several of the Monpa porters we’d hired from Bhakha had already disappeared. Some of them, it seemed, had just wanted a ride into town. Others now asked for an advance so they could shop for food for the journey. Although Gunn wrote down their names in his yellow notebook, we had no way of knowing whether they would actually show up later that afternoon when we would drive to the road head.

  After setting aside as much gear as we could to send back to Lhasa, we drove to Dungchu Lhakhang, a seventh-century border-taming temple that had served as a staging ground for the earliest journeys into Pemako and where several of the Pemako neyigs had been discovered.

  THE SOUTHERN REGIONS OF PEMAKO into which we were now headed were not opened until the late 1700s. A lama named Dorje Thokme, Limitless Vajra (1746-97), discovered a yellow scroll in a pillar of the Dungchu Lhakhang entitled The Luminous Web: The Seven Profound Teachings that Open the Gate of the Hidden-land. He transmitted his teachings to two other renowned lamas— Orgyen Drodul Lingpa (b. 1757), the abbot of a monastery called Daglo Gampo, and Kunzang Garwang Chimey Dorje, the reincarnation of Choeje Lingpa who, after dying in the jungles of Pemako, had been reborn in 1763 to a local Monpa family. Collectively, the three lamas became known as the Beyul Rigdzin Nam Sum, the Three Knowledge-Holders of the Hidden-Land, and their teachings spread among the Monpa clans that were migrating into Pemako from eastern Bhutan at the end of the eighteenth century.

  With the patronage of Powo’s king, Nyima Gyalpo, the three lamas journeyed into Pemako, converting hostile Lopas and opening the pilgrimage route to Kundu Dorsempotrang, the mountain described in the neyigs as “the heart center of the great sacred land of Pemako.” Through their efforts, the mountain became renowned as the ultimate Tantric pilgrimage site. A sixteenth-century meditation master had defined the benefits of pilgrimage through such perilous terrain: “Progress can be achieved more rapidly during a single month amid terrifying conditions in rough terrain and in the proximity of harmful forces” than by meditating for three years in towns and monasteries.6 As we left the temple, a rainbow arched over the valley to the east in the direction we were headed.

  When we arrived back at the hotel, Gunn looked nervous and distressed. The Monpa porters were demanding higher wages than they had agreed to the day before. The abbot had arrived from Bhakha monastery along with another senior monk, but the local powers had
intervened. The monastery was being rebuilt, and Sangye Tenzing was responsible for overseeing it, the police officials said. The other monk could go with us, they assured us, but not the abbot.

  We were already sitting in the Land Cruisers, and we made room in the front seat for the maroon-robed monk. At this point, Zang interjected, saying that it was illegal in China for Westerners to travel with monks or lamas. The monk offered to dress in lay clothes, but Zang was unmoved. He flatly forbade us to take him. Gunn sat glumly in the front seat.

  We were disappointed that none of the monks from Bhakha Gompa would be coming with us and concerned that no one in our entourage knew the way to Kundu Dorsempotrang. Still, we were happy to be leaving this remote outpost, one of the most fertile and beautiful parts of Tibet, but as unaccommodating under Chinese rule as it was when Bailey and Morshead had visited here in 1912 during the reign of the Kanam Depas. One of our Monpa porters had been over the first pass to a valley called Chimdro. We would find people there, he said, who would know the way to the sacred mountain. There was an uncertainty now to every step, but the unknowing contained a strange joy, a trust in the unfolding of the journey.

  The Dashing-La

  SOON AFTER LEAVING POMI the road opened into a spectacular valley overhung by glaciers and granite spires too steep for snow to cling to. The Po Tsangpo, swollen by the summer rains, flowed beneath them. As we turned south and drove across the river on a cantilevered wooden bridge, the eastern extension of the Himalayas that seals Pemako from the north rose in front of us like a burnished wall of rock and ice.