by Ian Baker
Adding to Gunn’s frustration was the palpable languor that had come over the rest of us. Like Odysseus’s crew in the Land of the Lotus Eaters, we were in no hurry at all to leave: we had discovered troves of edible mushrooms, the weather was clear, and we were camped in one of the most beautiful spots imaginable. As much as Gunn seemed bound to a tight time frame, we had a growing sense that as long as the weather held and we had food we could stay here happily indefinitely.
The weather didn’t hold. The following morning, August 13, the skies turned ominous again, and soon after we had crossed the river on a series of roughly hewn cantilever bridges, it began to rain. On the opposite bank we entered a moss-encrusted forest and followed a route along the trunks of ancient, fallen trees. Mushrooms grew in profusion on the rotting logs and in the leaf litter of the forest floor.
Some of the mushrooms bursting from the ground looked clearly like psilocybin, a psychotropic fungus used by Mazatec shamans in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, to communicate with the spirit realm. When I’d first visited Nepal in 1977, the same “flesh of the gods,” as the Mazatecs call it, sprouted from cow patties on the grass runway at the airport in Pokhara. Enterprising Nepali children collected the mushrooms after the rains and sold them to unwary travelers. I put some into my pack for later evaluation.21
The porters had pressed on ahead through the dense undergrowth, the faint tracks of their often laceless canvas shoes overlapping at times with the paw prints of bears. Yonten, as usual, had disappeared somewhere far ahead. “We must slow this man down,” Gunn said. “It is not safe. We could get lost here.”
Five hours later, we came to a clearing in the forest where the Monpas were stringing up the plastic tarpaulins that we had given them as protection against the rain. Kawa Tulku settled into a primitive shelter with a roof of rough-cut boards. Yonten called the place Adralatsa—the base camp for crossing the bog. The altimeter showed 10,900 feet. Hooves and tufts of skin of a musk deer lay outside the wooden shelter. The Tibetans from Chimdro were concerned. This is a sacred area, they said. Only Lopas coming up from India would dare to hunt here. If they’ve killed a tiger, Yonten muttered, it will rain for days.
The porters had nearly depleted their stock of bear meat and had been supplementing their tsampa and chiles with berries, nettles, and a large leafy plant favored equally by bears. They borrowed our climbing rope from the Sherpas and went off into the forest to lasso blood mushrooms from where they grew, high on dead trees.
As the other porters busied themselves making a fire, Gunn hounded Yonten for a clear assessment of the route ahead. Standing by the fire, Yonten described the next day’s journey through the infamous Adrathang, a vast swamp that we would apparently reach after crossing a forested pass several hours climb above our camp. “The mud is deep and there’s no way around it,” he told Gunn. “Don’t walk alone; there are tigers there.” At the end of the day, Yonten said, we would cross another pass called the Kangkang Sam-La. From there, if the weather was good, we would be able to see Kundu Dorsempotrang. The kora, Yonten explained, would begin there.
When Gunn came up to me afterward, he looked thoroughly dejected. “Why do we have to go around this mountain?” he asked, his lip curling upward under his wispy moustache. “After seeing it, why can’t we just go directly to Medok?”
Hamid tried to think of something that Gunn could relate to. “If we don’t, Mr. Gunn, it would be like ordering a great feast of your favorite dishes and and never even getting to taste them.”
Whichever way it went, Gunn was emphatic that this would be his last trip to the Tsangpo gorges. Cookie too, who had come on the trip to qualify himself as a guide, had no intention of coming back. “It’s too difficult,” he said, “and the weather is always bad.”
IT BEGAN TO RAIN AGAIN, and we retreated to our respective tents. I was sharing mine with Hamid, and as the rain pounded on the sagging nylon, we began to reconsider our long-held plan of breaking away from the group. After circling Kundu Dorsempotrang, we had hoped to cross the border to the remote valley in Arunachal Pradesh where Jedrung Jhampa Yungney had staged his journeys in search of Yangsang, and where, decades later, Kanjur Rinpoche had entered through a waterfall into the mystic sanctuary. We had told a contact in the Indian government to expect us to emerge from the headwaters of the Dibang, even though no permits are ever given for the region. “The Indian government will be happy to have information about this area,” our contact assured us. “I’ll make sure you don’t have any trouble.” We had no illusions of what we would discover, but just because Yangsang might not exist in strict geographical terms seemed no reason not to explore the region that had inspired the myth.
At this stage, however, the weather and dwindling food supplies were threatening our resolve. Furthermore, our maps had proved to be thoroughly useless, and no porters would be likely to go with us. We would have to carry our own gear on a kind of commando operation, such as when we had crossed surreptitiously into Tibet in 1989. There would be repercussions for Gunn if he had to account for us at the end of the journey, and it could jeopardize our chances of returning to Tibet in the future.
There was also the question of how we would be received by the Lopas. Tibetans have always held a dark view of the Chulikata Mishmis who guard the portals into Yangsang. They accuse them of being cannibals who, in the absence of ready victims during their marriage ceremonies, kill and eat the mothers of the brides.22 When Jedrung and his followers attempted to reach Yangsang at the turn of the century, hostile Lopas had ambushed them with pitfalls and poisoned arrows. We reached no conclusion except to wait until after the kora, to see what would be revealed on the cliff where the key to Yangsang was said to be located.
We went to visit Kawa Tulku. He was reclining on a sack of clothing and had stretched his tent across the roof of the shelter to keep out the rain. He had spread his texts out on a plank and was asking Yonten about the five mystic plants described in the neyigs. The descriptions were suitably vague. I wondered if they could be the psilocybin mushrooms that I had found along the trail. I showed them to Yonten and to Puntsok—the Khampa with the boar’s tooth—but neither of them knew what they were. Only the Lopas know about these plants, Yonten said.
Yonten claimed that the Lopas had plants that allowed them to live to extraordinary ages—by his reckoning, as long as the third growth cycle of bamboo. Puntsok was skeptical and pointed out that bamboo takes up to one hundred years to mature and that the third cycle would mean that they could live to be more than two hundred years old. Hamid asked Yonten if he had ever gone south into Lopa territory to find these special plants. “You’d make a good profit,” Hamid assured him.
“No one can go into that area,” Yonten said. “The Lopas would kill you.”
Yonten said that he had met Lopas when they had come north toward Kundu on hunting trips. Although Tibetans hold the area to be sacred and refrain from killing even the smallest insects there, Abors and Mishmis from across the Indian border hunt for tiger, takin, and musk deer in the surrounding valleys. To Yonten’s way of thinking, the killing of animals around the sacred mountain had caused the mystical plants to go into recession and become harder to find.
THE ANCIENT LIFE FORMS that Kawa Tulku was seeking recalled the Tree of Knowledge described in Genesis. The Bible is not specific about the nature of the tree, nor its fruit that “made [Adam and Eve] as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4) Long before apples were shown hanging from the mythic tree, the forbidden fruit was depicted as Amanita muscaria, as revealed in a thirteenth-century fresco on the wall of a ruined chapel in Plaincouralt, France, where the red-and-white flecked mushroom “is gloriously portrayed, entwined with a serpent, whilst Eve stands by holding her belly.” The noted Bible scholar from Cambridge University who first published material on the subject claimed that: “The whole Eden story is mushroom-based mythology, not least in the identity of the ‘tree’ as the sacred fungus.”23
/> Had the identity of Pemako’s mystic plants been similarly lost? Were they possibly the small tryptamine-rich fungus that I had unearthed the previous day?24 A traditional Tibetan doctor in Kathmandu had told me that there are particular mushrooms in Tibet that “bring bliss to the body and realization to the mind,” but he had not specified their appearance. A section of Dorje Thokme’s Luminous Web misleadingly titled Clear Mirror for Identifying the Five Miraculous Plants simply states that: “[These plants] cannot be found by ordinary people, but only by great, highly-realized Bodhisattvas.” In Yangsang, thirteen “nectar-bearing trees” are said to grow. “Due to the interconnected power of these trees,” the terma states, “one can obtain the siddhis [Tantric powers] of heaven and earth.”
The search for consciousness-expanding and rejuvenative elixirs has long been linked with Taoism and Tantric Buddhism. Alchemical preparations made from cinnabar, or mercuric sulfide, are common to both traditions, as is the use of specific fungi. Early Tantric siddhas are thought to have used Amanita (which contains the tropane alkaloids muscarine and muscimal) in their elixirs of immortality, and the eighth-century Vima Nyingtik—The Secret Heart Essence of Vimalamitra—describes various concoctions of mind-altering substances, including datura and oleander, which can be formed into pills or placed directly in the eyes to induce visions and illuminate hidden contents of the psyche.25 Yet the plant and mineral preparations only reveal their true potential in combination with yogic practices that harness the flow of subtle energy within the body’s neural pathways and activate the true elixir vitae—the mysterious secretions of the pineal gland called amrita, or nectar, which often manifest internally as luminous spheres.
The blissful, visionary states resulting, in part, from the integrated flow of betacarbolines and other neural chemicals take symbolic form in Buddhist paradises such as those of Padmasambhava and the wisdom deity Dorje Pagmo. Dorje Pagmo’s limbs and chakras form Pemako’s esoteric geography as well as a map of the Tantric adept’s subtle nervous system. The Tsangpo represents the central meridian called the uma, while lateral streams form the solar and lunar channels, the roma and kyangma. Through control of the breath and subtle physical energies called tigle, the Tantric practitioner activates the chakras, or neural energy centers that lie at major nerve plexuses along the body’s central meridian, from the sacrum to the crown—a process uniting him or her with the realization of ultimate reality, personified in Tantra as the great goddess.26
YOGA COMES FROM THE ROOT YUJ, to yoke, or join together, and its practices unite individual consciousness with the source of consciousness beyond all concepts of “I” or “mine.” The joyful awareness arising from the practice of Tantric yogas is never an end in itself, but a means for expanding deeper into the vast, open, nondual nature of anatta, or egolessness.
Before leaving Kathmandu, Hamid and I had gone to see Chatral Rinpoche in Pharping, at the cave where Padmasambhava had attained liberation together with his consort Sakyadevi. The daughter of a Nepalese queen who died in childbirth, Sakyadevi was reputedly raised from infanthood by monkeys in the forests surrounding an ancient temple dedicated to the great goddess Vajrayogini. Padmasambhava first saw her perched on the branch of a tree and dressed in nothing more than leaves; he immediately recognized her as an ideal spiritual companion.
The narratives of Padmasambhava describe his numerous liaisons as parables of the Tantric path, in which desire is transmuted into radiant compassion and expanding levels of spiritual awareness. In Tibet, when ministers threatened to cast Padmasambhava into the Tsangpo for his disregard for conventional morality, he retreated to an ice-bound cave with Yeshe Tsogyal, the Tibetan emperor’s youngest queen. Practicing under his guidance, she attained enlightenment through tummo, the yoga of mystic heat.
According to Tantric precepts, practices such as tummo dissolve the illusion of an isolated, independent self. When practiced in union or through visualization, desire itself transforms into luminous rapture, and becomes an offering of joy, beyond conceptions of self and other. Tertons, the male and female treasure revealers, often developed their intuitive powers to their highest capacity through consorts who served as channels or intermediaries between the adept and the full expanse of reality. In accord with Tantric vows, they almost invariably kept their consorts’ identities secret or referred to them only obliquely. Yet as Padmasambhava declared in one of the neyigs, no one following the code of a monk would ever be able to open the doors to Pemako’s innermost realms: they remained the province of the noncelibate yogi-terton. As his consort, Yeshe Tsogyal declared “Let male aid female, female aid male; let each penetrate the other as in weaving . . . merge emptiness with bliss . . . and allow the vital essences to pervade your being . . . Realize the fruit of passion, the Great Bliss (Mahasukha) . . . and let doubts and confusion disappear!”27
When I had first approached lamas for instruction in these secret yogas, they told me they could be dangerous. They’re similiar to a snake in a hollow piece of bamboo, I was told: one can fall to the lowest hells or travel upward to the highest Buddha Realms. In other words, the bliss may either inflate the ego and result in spiritual complacency or dissolve all sense of separation and lead deeper into the mystery of sunyata, or emptiness. (“Translating sunyata as Emptiness,” wrote Octavio Paz, “is something worse than a misuse of language; it is a spiritual infidelity.”) As desire without compassion sabotages the subtle unfolding of higher states of awareness, the yogas of union are often regarded as the most deceptive of all Tantric practices. If practiced correctly, however, and the woman’s energies penetrate the male’s, neural energies flow through a fractal network of synaptic pathways called tsa (nadis), dissolving subtle physiological, psychological, and energetic impediments and uniting at the heart center, the nexus of the body’s estimated seventy-five trillion cells. In the illuminated heart, illusions of separateness vanish and, what Buddha called avidya, or not really seeing, transforms into a radiant realization of the dynamic interconnectedness that unifies all life.
With or without a consort, practitioners of the inner Tantric yogas arouse the dormant energy in the lower chakras and cause it to rise like a flame through the body’s central meridian, “melting” the luminous secretions (tigle) in the brain which, in turn, stream down like nectar (dudtsi) and give rise to increasingly subtle states of consciousness and, ultimately, to the realization of the nondual expanse of emptiness and luminosity, the Clear Light, held to be the mind’s innermost essence.
In the 1980s, in order to delve more deeply into these arcane practices, I studied in South India with a Tantric master who placed me on a diet of cinnabar and gold dust. My assigned consort, Uma Devi, had been raised in a temple since the age of six. In the weeks before initiation, she lived on crushed rose petals and powdered pearls that had been dried under the rays of the moon. In later retreats, I used preparations from the Chandramaharoshana Tantra that transform seminal essences into a bioluminescence that lifts the mind from habitual perceptions of time and space.
Hamid had eaten the same alchemical preparations of purified mercury and gold with a girl of exceptional beauty from India’s northeastern frontier named Minring. Minring had come to Nepal to work as a pilot for one of the kingdom’s airline companies. Despite her training at a Texas school of aviation, Minring was deeply connected to her tribal roots in Nagaland. Soon after she’d returned from America, fellow villagers had killed her uncle as he devoured a goat on a night when he had allegedly transformed into a tiger. It’s still commonly held in India’s northeast frontier that certain human beings have a propensity for turning—literally—into wild animals. According to Minring, her aunt and nephews had locked her uncle in his room at night on full moons, but in the mornings the inside of his bedroom door would be gouged with claw marks.
Minring’s remarkable stories—along with the fact that her maternal grandfather had the largest collection of human heads in their an
cestral village—had impressed Hamid sufficiently that he relented to her requests for a formal consecration of their union. Bhakha Tulku performed the rite, giving them five-feathered arrows of long life to hold in their hands and seating them on the moulting skin of a Himalayan brown bear that he had brought back to Kathmandu from Powo. After performing the ritual, Bhakha Tulku had his doubts. “Lopa girls are too wild,” he told me after the ceremony, “they rarely stay with one man.”
HAMID AND I RETURNED TO CAMP, where the others had gathered in the dining tent. Despite the weather, there was enthusiasm for the way ahead. By Yonten’s estimates the mountain was only two days away, and even the infamous bog that we would have to cross to get there had captured everyone’s imagination. Only the Gillenwaters remained quiet, despairing over another meal of lentils and brown rice. They had resorted to a secret stash of Gummi Bears. After dinner we retired to our tents, rain pooling on the sagging nylon walls.
ALTHOUGH EVERYONE HAD FELT WELL the preceding evening, Kawa Tulku’s prediction concerning the disgruntled naga seemed to be coming true. On the morning of August 14, Gil appeared at my tent door to tell me that Todd had become violently ill. He had severe stomach cramps and had been vomiting throughout the night. I informed Pemba that Todd was too sick to move and that we would have to spend another night at Adralatsa. Pemba was nervous about our dwindling food supplies. Unlike Yanggyap, there were few edible mushrooms here, he said. I proposed that we try to move in the afternoon, but Yonten claimed that there would be nowhere else to camp until we were through the bogs.
Even as we spoke, Pemako’s notorious weather descended upon us: mists and pouring rain sent us scurrying back to our tents. We resigned ourselves to spending another day and night in the mist-laced forest, catching up on our journals, meditating, sleeping, and hoping that Todd would quickly recover.