The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  During breakfast the following morning, August 11, Kawa Tulku suddenly appeared out of the forest. The monks from Kham who were originally to join him on his pilgrimage had sent word that they couldn’t come for another month, and he had made the decision to catch up with us. “The journey to Dorsempotrang is arduous,” Kawa Tulku said, “and you already took the only willing guide.” He joked that he had no choice but to team up with us. The one-eyed Khampa who manned the cable across the river had agreed to guide him as far as Gyayul but said that he was too old to go any farther. Everyone from the porters to Gunn was in high spirits. We had come to associate the lama with good weather and favorable conditions, and after two days of perpetual rain and drizzle while climbing through the leech-infested gorge we were ripe for a change in circumstances.

  Until Kawa Tulku’s sudden appearance, we had decided to stay another night at the door. It was raining hard, and almost nothing we owned was dry. Mists clung to the surrounding cliffs and the pass we now had to climb—the Pungpung-La—was hidden in clouds. Kawa Tulku, however, was resolved to continue, and so we rolled up our sodden tents and began climbing up a talus-filled ravine toward the cliffs below the pass. Waterfalls fell through rents in the clouds, the largest cascading in 200-foot tiers from the cliffs to the south. At 13,500 feet, we reached a glacier-carved valley filled by a mile-long lake dotted with small islands that rose like reefs from the clear, black waters. We followed Yonten up rock slabs to the south of the lake as several smaller bodies of water appeared out of the mists, interconnected by streams and waterfalls with the larger lake below.

  Possessed of new vigor, Kawa Tulku walked ahead, mantras and incantations issuing silently from his lips. As we neared the pass, a flock of ten or twelve bright blue birds flew in formation directly toward him, circled once above his head, and disappeared as quickly as they had come.

  AT 15,100 FEET (Bailey had put it at 14,395), the Pungpung-La was a treeless, rain-swept divide demarcating, in Yonten’s words, outer Pemako from inner Pemako. Four-foot high cabbagelike plants (Rheum nobile) rose out of the otherwise shrubless terrain. The Monpas claimed that their presence indicated the proximity of Pemako’s more arcane healing plants. The plant’s stem, they said, reduces swelling and fever, but if you tear off one of the leaves, torrential rain will immediately fall. No one wanted to perform the experiment. The porters also claimed that eating some of the root would protect us on the way ahead, and I joined them for the rite. One porter said, “The plants of Pemako can heal you, kill you, or make you crazy.” I worried that the slightly demented nun, Ani-la, had eaten one that caused the latter.

  We descended from the pass into what was now inner Pemako and entered a valley carpeted in alpine flowers of every describable scent and color. We walked along the edge of a lake where primroses and white, pink, and purple asters cascaded from the tall grass along its banks. According to the neyigs, Kawa Tulku said, this area below the pass is called Sangye Menla and is filled with healing plants. He began inspecting the flowers closely—yellow ones, purple ones, white ones—and then began eating what looked like small, blue hare-bells. He urged me to join him. They tasted of pepper and spice.

  As we walked, Kawa Tulku spoke of tsalududorje, the indestructible naga demon grass, one of the miraculous plants described in the Pemako neyigs. A single blade of this grass can cure innumerable diseases, he said, and open one’s eyes to other realms. As stated in Padmasambhava’s terma, Clear Mirror for Identifying the Five Miraculous Plants: Any deficiency of the five sense organs will be healed and one will attain miraculous powers. One’s body will transform like a snake shedding its skin.

  By this time we had lost sight of our Monpa porters who, though unbearably slow while ascending the pass, had forged ahead in the rain to look for some place to camp. We followed their footprints and cut branches through bogs and streams and emerged at a meadow where the Sherpas were stringing up the cook tent between two towering firs. The lama’s two attendants—the young monk who was carrying his supplies and the old man with the prayer wheel—erected the lama’s tent under the protective boughs of another large fir. Gunn pointed out that a small patch of blue sky had mysteriously opened overhead. We dined that night in high spirits.

  The Wrath of the Nagas

  ON AUGUST 12, after three days of nearly incessant rain, the sun rose from behind the mountain wall and flooded our camp with light and warmth. After the relentless, mist-wreathed jungles and ravines leading up to the Pungpung-La, we found ourselves in a broad, grassy valley with a stream as clear as crystal meandering through its center. A place worthy of the prophecies, Hamid remarked.

  Trees, grass, and clothing steamed with evaporating moisture, and we strung climbing ropes between the firs to dry out belongings that otherwise might have decayed before we reached Kundu. The Tibetans hung their sheepskins and tunics of matted felt next to our high-tech Gore-Tex jackets and the lama’s heavy woolen chuba. As the nun waited for her robes to dry, she walked out into the meadow in her undergarments to pick small flowers and toss them as offerings into the sun-drenched sky. At least she had abandoned her habit of wandering around with her mouth full of leaves, Christiaan commented.

  A short distance beyond the camp, the Monpas stopped by the stream to make a fire and brew tea for their midmorning meal. Kawa Tulku stopped to bathe. The lama’s body was covered from head to toe in tiny red insect bites, but he smiled radiantly as he basked in the sun while his attendants applied a mysterious salve to his back and arms.

  We continued on. Gradually the meadow transformed into an unnavigable swamp, and the trail entered a dense, sunless forest where we saw footprints of bear and takin. At intermittent sedge-filled bogs we often sank up to our knees in mud. Kawa Tulku plugged along in his customarily jovial mood. As conditions worsened, Gil expressed wonder at Kawa Tulku’s unshakable composure. Several days before, Gil had written in his journal: Today was particularly bad for me as the rain would not let up and the leeches were relentless. At one point I counted twenty-two of them sucking on me at the same time. . . . Sloshing along the muddy trail in the pounding rain I came upon a large, slimy log that had fallen chest high across our brush-choked path. In my agitated state I viewed the log as a menacing obstacle that was clearly separate, in my way and against me. With no way under or around I jumped, stomach first, and slid over the top. Regaining my balance on the other side, I was infuriated at the mud and decaying mush that seemed to have covered the entire front of my body. Rubbing off the crud I cursed the log and the god-damned rain. It was my brother Todd who suggested that we wait and see how the Lama would handle this formidable impediment. Surely this test would break him.

  Hiding off the trail we peeked through the underbrush just in time to see him trudge up to the log. Ever smiling he took a couple of steps back and tried his jump with a running start. With not enough momentum—coupled with a portly belly—he slid back down on the same side of the log and landed on his back in a large puddle. Shaking his rain-drenched head he burst into spasms of uproarious laughter. Staggering to his feet he repeated the same maneuver—with the same results—no less than three times. With each collapse back into the puddle his laugher grew stronger and louder. On his fourth attempt he made it over the top and slid headlong into the muddy puddle on the other side. Again, the laugher was knee-slapping. Continuing to chuckle, he wiped himself off as best he could—lovingly patted the log as though it were a dear friend—and proceeded up the trail—smiling. Todd and I just stared at each other.

  Deeper into the valley, we crossed to the left bank of the stream descending from the Pungpung-La and soon emerged at a slender shallow lake that was more than a mile long and blocked at its southern terminus by an enormous logjam. Bailey had seen the lake in 1913 and attributed it to the breaking of a glacial tarn in the valley that opened above us in a spectacular display of cliffs and glaciers reminiscent of the Canadian Rockies. One of the Sherpas spo
tted a bear on the opposite bank, our first such sighting. Another Sherpa drew giant Om Mani Padme Hums in the sand at the edge of the water. Hamid staged crazy photo-ops with a bewildered Ani-la, as Kawa Tulku sat on a rotting log and watched in amusement. The sun continued to shine despite a brief rain shower and deep thundering over the cliffs above. Gunn was by now thoroughly convinced of Kawa Tulku’s powers as a weatherman par excellence, and he stayed near him whenever possible. Zang said the atmospheric effects were only coincidence, he believed only in science. Putting away his cameras, Hamid retorted that there are many levels of science: the science of observing natural phenomena and the science of controlling phenomena. Gunn translated Hamid’s comments to Zang, but our friend from the PSB remained resolutely silent.

  Oy was sitting on the sand on a small Therm-a-Rest and overheard Hamid’s comments. “Science tries to define what life really is,” she said, “but the definition changes decade to decade; it’s only a working hypothesis.”

  Gunn was not interested in perpetuating the dialogue. “We must get going,” he said. “Yonten has already gone ahead.”

  WE FOLLOWED THE SOUTHERN EDGE of a narrow lake, Rirung Tso, through a thick tangle of bamboo and descended along the stream that disgorged from its southern end. In less than a mile, a second river flowing from a valley to the southeast merged with the one we had been following. Their confluence was marked by torn and faded prayer flags that hung from bamboo poles. This was a holy place called Yanggyap Né, Yonten said. As the river curled around a mound of lichen-covered rocks, it turned into gentle rapids and at one point formed a pool of deep green water bordered by a sandy beach. Thick grass covered the banks, along with wild irises and delicate bamboo. Small spruce trees sprouted from the rocks like sculpted bonsai. While we pitched our tents, the porters busied themselves weaving new pack baskets from the pliant bamboo. The altimeter showed 11,380 feet.

  According to my U.S. Defense Service Map, we were camped at the border of India and China, but with the closest habitation to the south more than a week away, issues of national boundaries seemed mildly ludicrous. Until Tibetans entered this region in search of Yangsang, it had been a wilderness frequented only by Mishmi and Abor hunters. During the period of the British Raj, the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation Act of 1873 cordoned off India’s relatively uncharted northeastern frontier—from the basin of the Brahmaputra to the crest of the Himalayas. Forty years later, in 1913, Captains F. M. Bailey and H. T. Morshead pushed into unexplored territory in the watershed of the upper Dibang (a tributary of the Brahmaputra) and, when they returned from the Tsangpo gorges, crossed back into Indian-held territory along a route that became known later as the Bailey Trail. Their surveys led to the establishing of the MacMahon Line, drawn along the crest of the Himalayas by Sir Henry MacMahon and based on a supposedly tripartite convention between British-Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese representatives in Simla in 1914.

  China never ratified the outcome, creating an amorphous autonomous status for Tibet while laying down its border with India on the basis of British “ridge and river” surveys. The tribal territory between the MacMahon Line and the northern banks of the Brahmaputra was only loosely administered. Once a year, expeditionary trips went up the Brahmaputra from Dibrughar to wave the British flag and meet with Tibetan officials.

  With India’s independence in 1947, the need for effective governance led to the creation of the Indian Frontier Administration Service. The job of policing what became known as the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) was assigned to the Assam Rifles. Since their war over the contested region in 1962, India and China had yet to establish an actual border, relying on the postconflict Line of Control to demarcate their respective territories. NEFA metamorphosed into Arunachal Pradesh, becoming a Union Territory in 1972 and a state of India in 1987. Beijing lays claim to the entirety of its 90,000 square kilometers (34,750 square miles).

  A rainbow arched across the valley to the southeast. As I read Bailey’s diary, this seemed to be the same valley that he and Morshead had followed on their route from Mipi, and where they had come across the remains of pilgrims returning to Tibet after their failed attempt to reach Yangsang. Yonten disagreed. He maintained that we would not reach the valley leading to Mipi until we had crossed Adrathang, a notorious bog still several days away. Yonten claimed that the fir-filled valley that sloped above us led into the territory of the Tranak, fierce Lopa tribes that, a British colonial officer had written in 1899, “kill Tibetans on principle.” Yonten spoke about a mountain in the land of the Tranak called Shelkichorten, the Crystal Stupa, that Jedrung Rinpoche had tried to reach in the first years of the twentieth century. According to Yonten, the Tranak Lopas make pilgrimages to the mountain and have successfully kept outsiders from coming near. After circumambulating the peak, Yonten claimed, they press their palms into the sand in the shape of the hand, hoof, or paw of any creature they want to become, then bodily transform into that being.

  It sounded like a dark vision of Yangsang, and I asked Yonten why no one since Jedrung Rinpoche had tried to go there. Yonten’s answer seemed to sum up our mission: “If you have the key,” he said “Yangsang can be like paradise, if not you’ll be lucky to come out alive.”

  Hamid threatened Gunn with another expedition in search of the fabled crystal mountain. “If we were able to reach this mountain,” Hamid prodded, “what would you like to become?” Gunn said he would like to transform into “a rich man, a holy man.”

  Throughout these proceedings, Kawa Tulku, the Jolly Lama, laughed quietly. Our quest for Yangsang Né obviously amused him, even though it was something he himself was actively seeking. Was it our approach that he found so humorous? According to tradition, the key to Yangsang can be found on the circumambulation route around Kundu Dorsempotrang, but what the key was could only be guessed at.

  “What is this Yangsang?” Christiaan finally asked as we sat along the grassy banks above the river. “Is it a real place or was it just a fantasy to inspire Tibetans to travel to these wild lands?’

  Hamid attempted an explanation: “It seems more like a hypothesis, a vision of what lies in potential. Although no one has found Yangsang yet, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It may simply mean that no one has looked for it in the right way.” In tribute to Oy’s earlier comments by the lake, he added, “It’s simply not perceivable to science as we currently know it.”

  “Maybe that’s what the key is all about,” Oy said, joining the conversation, “a new way of investigating nature. Maybe Yangsang actually is some unknown dimension of time and space. If we limit ourselves only to what we can perceive, or prove, we rob reality of all its magic. Science is sometimes like a blind person claiming there’s nothing there, or like someone who is deaf claiming that music does not exist. Just because something can’t be proved scientifically doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

  “It may be linked to the plants that Kawa Tulku is looking for,” Hamid suggested. “Like the vision plants used by shamans in the Amazon, the plants described in the neyigs may offer a missing ingredient in how we percieve reality; something that bridges the gap between what we imagine to be real and what actually is real.”

  Oy interjected, “You mean between what we know to be true intuitively and what can be empirically measured. Empirical knowledge is only one kind of knowledge. It’s not truth. Even with microscopes, what we see with our eyes is only a narrow spectrum of light between red and violet. We see only five percent of the ‘real’ world. Most of what’s out there remains hidden.”

  “Maybe Yangsang’s like particle physics,” Christiaan offered, “in that it conforms to one’s method of observation, and that one only sees what one expects to see.”

  “Whatever Yangsang is,” I added, “we certainly wouldn’t find it using compasses and maps.”

  GIL WAS USUALLY THE FIRST to initiate such discussions, but he had gone to the river with his brothers to perform their daily washing ritual, a
holdover, I suspected, from their Mormon ancestry. The trio emerged from the shady pool beneath the rocks and, with towels draped over their shoulders, squished by in shorts and Teva sandals. Kawa Tulku looked up anxiously. “Did they bathe in that pool below the prayer flags?” he asked. The lama was clearly disturbed, and I asked him what was wrong. “That’s the place of a powerful Naga spirit,” he said. “They should not have bathed there.” He went back to fingering the beads of his mala.

  Pemba had climbed up some nearby trees and harvested a load of bright orange ashamu, or chicken mushrooms, and transformed our noodle dinner into a delicious feast. We took off our boots and sat in a circle on the floor of the dining tent. Gil was wearing a fresh T-shirt of a yowling skeleton riding on a dead horse. Tipping his cowboy hat, the specter shouts, “Have fun. I’ll see you in five minutes.” I kept what Kawa Tulku had told me about the water spirit to myself.

  GUNN APPEARED IN THE MIDST of our banquet and confessed his anxiety about the route ahead. Yonten had told him that in the following days we would be passing through vast swamps with mud up to our thighs. Gunn’s porters had also insisted on making the kora, or ritual circuit, around the mountain with Kawa Tulku, adding three days to the itinerary. “Those days are not scheduled,” Gunn lamented. “If we go around the mountain, we won’t reach Medok on time.”