The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  As we climbed higher through the scrub to catch up with the Sherpas, we passed several small lakes and eventually crossed a grassy ridge at 14,000 feet. The clouds had lifted and from the top of the pass we could look northward toward an extraordinary mountain with a summit like a black anvil with two lakes wrapped around its lower slopes. Bailey had referred to Kundu Dorsempotrang as “a slender snow peak rising into the clouds,” but the mountain I was looking at was solid rock. Was this the mountain that we had come so far to see, the jewel in the heart of Dorje Pagmo? We had pursued it like a femme fatale into the depths of the Tibetan wilderness, only to be struck with uncertainty when we finally saw it.

  Clouds had formed, and the peak disappeared and reappeared as if in a dream, each time looking slightly different. “It looks like a black castle,” Oy declared. Hamid thought it looked more like a Buddhist reliquary box. Soon it disappeared altogether in the swirling clouds. If it was Kundu Dorsempotrang we had circled far to the south of it. And the lake where Yonten had said we would camp looked very far away.

  We crossed the ridge and followed a worn track leading away from the mountain that we had seen through the clouds. Perhaps it wasn’t Kundu after all. We had still not caught up with the Sherpas and although we were above treeline on a definable path I was worried about the Gillenwaters. As I dropped down a steep slope beneath overhanging rocks, I came around a corner and saw in the distance that the Sherpas had set up our tents at the edge of a small pond beneath overhanging cliffs. I also saw a line of porters climbing up the ridge beyond.

  When I reached the tents, I asked Pemba what was happening. The Sherpas had reached the small body of water and, in consideration of the Gillenwaters, had tried to convince Yonten to camp there, but he had refused. Unless we reached a shelter several hours farther on, he told Pemba, we wouldn’t reach the mountain the following day. Concerned at his own dwindling food supplies, Kawa Tulku had gone with him. Gunn became anxious that we would lose the only ones who knew the way and possibly be further delayed. He had gone racing after them.

  Our party was unraveling along the trail. The trying circumstances and lack of clear communication from Yonten were pushing everyone’s limits. None of the porters at the Sherpas’ camp had any idea where the mountain lay. As concerned as I was about the Gillenwaters, I knew that if we lost Yonten we might well founder in the wilderness.

  Christiaan and Oy stayed back to wait for Gil, Troy, and Todd. Although it was already pushing 5 p.m., Hamid and I started out with the two Monpas who were carrying our gear and climbed up through broken cliffs to another 14,000-foot ridge. When we reached the top we were puzzled to find that the trail swung away even farther to the west—away from the mountain that we had thought might be Kundu Dorsempotrang. If it was the holy mountain, we were clearly circling it on an extensive outer kora.

  The Tibetan word for pilgrimage, né-kor, means to circle around a sacred site and, throughout the Buddhist world—from the Jokhang in Lhasa to revered features of the landscape—pilgrims seek religious merit by performing koras around places or objects that they consider holy. Guided by an intuition that the sacred cannot be approached in a straight line, still less by linear thought, pilgrims emulate the path of the sun and circumambulate in a clockwise direction, beginning as we had from the east.

  Yonten had mentioned that the outer kora around Kundu takes several days to complete. The inner kora, he said, takes only one day. According to the Kundu neyig, a single circuit of the mountain yields the same merit as thirteen koras of Pemako as a whole. Thirteen circuits around the mountain are held to establish one at the thirteenth bhumi, the level of a realized bodhisattva—perhaps something akin to the lines of poetry by Wallace Stevens in which he writes: “and round and round, the merely going round / Until merely going round is a final good . . .”

  Because of time, we had stressed to Yonten the importance of heading to the mountain directly and foregoing the lengthy outer kora, but Yonten clearly had no intention of breaking the protocol. By tradition, a pilgrim must first successfully complete the outer kora before attempting an inner one. I now better understood why Yonten had been so vague when it came to estimating distances and why we had headed south at the end of the Adrathang marshes rather than directly west. I also understood why we hadn’t yet reached the mountain.

  There was no sign of those who had gone ahead of us. As we were unsure of the route, we followed the natural contours of the landscape and followed the high ridges that seemed to inscribe the mountain that we were now quite sure must be Kundu. It stood far off to the northeast like a dark sentinel, its summit a perfect horizontal block.

  The skies had cleared, revealing lush ravines and slopes of silver-green grass that were drenched with pink, yellow, and blue flowers. High snow peaks rose in the distance into the evening sky. As we turned northward, the glacial massif of Namcha Barwa seemed to fill the horizon, its 25,436-foot summit turning purple and gold as the sun set over the horizon.

  We had walked quickly, but despite our efforts we had seen nothing of Yonten, Gunn, or the lama except for occasional footprints. And now, as night fell, it became harder to follow their trail. Six hours after we had left the Sherpas, we began to descend toward a lake at the bottom of a deep valley in the hope that we would find the advance party camped along its shore.

  When we reached the lake, we called out into the darkness, but there was no sign of Yonten or the others. We continued by flashlight along the water’s edge and saw footprints that entered a bog as dismal as Adrathang. With wavering batteries, we trudged on through what all of Pemako had begun to seem—a vast, primeval swamp. If the ultimate purpose of pilgrimage was, as Bhakha Tulku had said before our departure, to move deeper into the equanimity of the heart, we still had a long way to go.

  Hamid’s flashlight batteries had given out and mine were about to, and we hastened our steps through the marsh. After some time we saw a brief flash of light far ahead of us that disappeared again as quickly as it had come. Gradually the light appeared like a distant campfire. But as we stumbled forward, multiple fires suddenly flared across the horizon as if the entire mountainside had been set on fire. The fires vanished again just as quickly. The two porters from Chimdro stopped short, staring into the blackness. Suddenly they began reciting prayers.

  As the fires across our field of vision continued to appear and disappear, we had no idea what we were up against. In Tibetan tradition, such seemingly magical occurrences attend the ganachakra, or Tantric feasts presided over by dakinis. In our exhaustion no more plausible explanation for the strange lights came to mind. All four of us began reciting protective mantras until, deeper into the marsh, we suddenly realized that we were approaching one of the primitive pilgrims’ shelters whose locations had defined the length of our days. The light from the central fire had filtered through the wooden slats and created an optical illusion. We felt somewhat foolish for succumbing to the mirage. Kawa Tulku, sitting by the fire, gave us a knowing smile. Yonten called the place Shula Pongkhang. The altitude was just over 13,000 feet.

  As we settled by the fire to dry our boots, Gunn announced that he had decided to bypass the mountain and travel directly toward Medok, the Chinese administrative center and army post in the lower Tsangpo gorge. He could contact his head office from there, Gunn announced. He would leave early the following morning with Zang and one of Yonten’s men. “We are very late,” Gunn said. “I will have problems when I reach there.” Before we left Chimdro, Kawa Tulku had expressed concern about Chinese visiting the sacred mountain, and he now sat contentedly by the hearth, silently reciting mantras.

  ON THE MORNING OF AUGUST 17, I left a note by the fire pit, informing those trailing behind us of Gunn’s decision to go directly to Medok and of ours to continue on to Kundu Dorsempotrang with Yonten and Kawa Tulku. Yonten assured us that we would reach the base of the mountain that day, but as he’d given the same estimate for three straight days, no on
e got overly excited.

  With Gunn’s departure, our expedition had separated into three independent groups. The fate of those behind us was uncertain, but our own core group had been distilled to me, Hamid, and the lama. Along with Hamid’s and my two porters, Yonten, and Kawa Tulku’s attendants, we started out through high-altitude marshes that were punctuated frequently by large, unusual shaped rocks that had been marked with prayer flags. Following Kawa Tulku’s lead, we circumambulated each of them three times to ensure a favorable reception by Kundu’s guardian spirits.

  We soon had our first clear vision of the mountain that we had been circling for days. Far from the tall slender snow peak that we had initially expected, Kundu rose in front of us like a black, tectonic obelisk of ophiolite rock, thrust up from ancient sediments of the seabed from which Tibet had formed.

  Kundu reminded me of the mountain in Norway where, at the age of fourteen, I had learned to climb. A cylindrical tower of dark, lichen-covered granite with a waterfall flowing from its slopes into a lake dotted with mossy, birch-covered islands. I’d fallen from the mountain’s heights on a return visit eight years later.

  The night I was released from the hospital, a red pulsating lotus appeared on the ceiling above my bed and I felt that I was being pulled through a doorway into another realm. I was rushed back to the hospital with a blood clot in my heart. I had been ambivalent about the return to life. The fall had left me shattered, and death held a strong attraction. Ultimately, though, my wounds initiated a journey into a richer life and unsought visions in which boundaries between worlds seemed only habits of thought. As much as I resisted these eruptions from my subconscious, I began to think of reality, and myself, in different terms, so that when I went to Sikkim, the stories of the beyul had resonated deeply.

  WE DESCENDED THROUGH a rhododendron forest where a few trees were still in bloom and entered a meadow teeming with lilies, begonias, lavender, and wild ginger. Yonten found some wild rhubarb and soon we were all sucking on the stalks. After crossing through more marshland, we reached the edge of the lake that we had seen from a distance the day before. Kundu rose directly above us, its summit hidden by cliffs and forest. Yonten told us of a shelter higher up the mountain and, after staking a note to a tree for those who were behind us, we began the climb toward the inner kora.

  We climbed steeply through a forest of rhododendrons. Leopard prints abounded in the soft earth. As we rose higher, the forest abruptly ended and we found ourselves above the tree line looking at a row of ghostly prayer flags waving in the misty wind. A simple, unwalled shelter sat on a tiny plateau jutting out from the steep slope. Yonten called it Osel Pongkhang, the Shelter of Clear Light. Perched at nearly 13,000 feet, it would be our base camp for the circuit around Kundu.

  Beneath the roof of the shelter, a lone Monpa yogi sat by a small fire, turning a prayer wheel in one hand and counting mantras on a string of beads on the other. A row of butter lamps burned on a simple altar. Small prayer flags hung down from the beams. A blackened tea kettle sat on a rock beside him. With his thick woollen chuba and penetrating eyes he looked like an emanation of Kinthup, the legendary surveyor spy that the British government had dispatched to the Tsangpo gorge in 1881.

  The yogi indicated with hand gestures that he had undertaken a vow of silence. Kawa Tulku set up his tent beneath the prayer flags. Hamid and I rolled out our sleeping bags on the earthen floor of the shelter and after a quick bowl of tsampa retired early in anticipation of the inner kora that we would begin the following day.

  The Heart of the Goddess

  WHEN WE WOKE AT FIRST LIGHT, Kawa Tulku had already departed. To maximize the merit, he’d resolved to circle the peak three times and needed to make an early start. Hamid’s and my zeal for merit was countered by our desire to experience the mountain at a slower pace. We had decided to go on our own. Before heading out, we asked the yogi-in-residence for hot water from his kettle.

  The mute hermit had not accompanied the lama because of an injured foot. With the hilt of his prayer wheel imbedded in the ground, he watched intently as Hamid took out some small, bluish bits of organic matter from a plastic bag. It was the psilocybin that we had harvested several days earlier from its mycilium bed. Although neither of us had consumed anything similar since college (my roommate and I had tried unsuccessfully to grow them in canning jars in our dorm room closet), we had decided to eat a small amount before beginning the kora.

  As we washed down the decomposing mushrooms with the hermit’s tea, he put out his hand, indicating that he would like to share whatever it was we had so carefully ingested. Hamid explained that the small mushrooms are akin to the revered but ever-elusive plant tsakuntuzangpo. They can induce visions, but not necessarily pleasant ones, Hamid told him. The yogi became even more eager. You might see demons, Hamid warned him. Or get sick. The yogi stretched out both of his hands insistently. Hamid and I looked at each other and realized that we had no choice but to allow him to share in our experiment. Hamid measured out a significant portion onto the yogi’s blackened palm. He washed them down with tea and, with a big grin on his face, went back to spinning his prayer wheel.

  THE KUNDU NEYIG DESCRIBES six distinct regions, or lings, encircling the mountain like petals of a lotus and demarcated by lakes and intervening rock ridges. In Tibetan sacred geography, mountains and rocks represent the structural, or masculine component of a landscape. Streams and bodies of water express the feminine element. Kundu’s six lings unite form and essence and enfolded within lie six additional “secret regions,” perceivable only to illuminated adepts. Each of the lings, the neyig claims, contains undiscovered termas. One of them contains the key to Yangsang. The mountain as a whole represents the heart essence of Dorje Pagmo, the great goddess of Pemako.

  Hamid and I left the shelter and followed a trail up a series of crude log ladders through a landscape of mist, rocks, and tumbling streams. After an hour, we reached the edge of a placid, cloud-enveloped lake. This was the Kundu Lhatso, the All-Gathering Essence Lake, and the first of the six lings. “Whoever washes and drinks from this lake,” the neyig informed us, “can purify lifetimes of karmic defilements and pacify the obstacles and disturbances of this life.”

  Where the water flowed from the lake into a series of small waterfalls, we drank deeply and splashed ourselves in the clear, transparent water. Our ablutions over, we began contouring around the Lhatso on a faint track at the water’s edge, passing between a tiger and a peacock-shaped rock held to be the doorkeepers of the first ling. Suddenly, a tunnel opened in the mists and—like a door opening into Avalon—revealed a snowfield clinging to black cliffs on the far side of the lake. A moment later, Kundu’s square summit block appeared out of the swirling clouds. The entire mountain towered out of the tranquil lake like a majestic altar.

  A cluster of prayer flags hung from bamboo poles at the top of a rise, and we meditated there, gazing into the mists. The mountain came in and out of view, its polyhedral summit swallowed by clouds only to appear again in its reflection in the black waters of the lake. It seemed like the long-sought lapis philosophorum of medieval alchemists, the jewel that would allow them to see into other dimensions of time and space.

  According to the Guide to the Heart Center: The All-Gathering Palace of Vajrasattva that Liberates upon Seeing, a secret, black-bodied form of the wisdom goddess emanates from the center of the Kundu Lhatso with a retinue of dakinis while surrounding rock formations represent Padmasambhava in eight varying manifestations. Unlike most neyigs, the Guide to the Heart Center is not a terma, but was authored by a shaman-yogi from Powo named Pawo Orgyen Chongon. After Duddul Dorje and the three knowledge holders (vidyadharas) of the hidden-land—Rigdzin Dorje Thokme, Orgyen Drodul Lingpa, and Kunsang Ozer Chimey Dorje—first opened Kundu as a pilgrimage site in the eighteenth century, the way had been lost. In popular accounts Pawo Orgyen rediscovered it by following a takin that led him along the kora path.
Possessed of supernatural powers, Pawo Orgyen communicated directly with Kundu’s protector spirits and—in departure from customary Buddhist practice—had climbed to the summit to place a banner of victory.

  In Guide to the Heart Center, Pawo Orgyen Chongon writes how each of the three knowledge holders of the hidden-land had perceived the mountain as Tantric deities in ecstatic embrace with their consorts. Representing the dynamic synergy of form and essence their alchemical passion gives rise to forty-two peaceful and fifty-eight wrathful deities (shidro), freeing those who can perceive them from the blinders of conventional vision. “The most fortunate beings will see Padmasambhava and the deities directly,” Pawo Orgyen writes. “Others will hear their voices. Ordinary beings will see only earth and rock.”

  Modern science’s mechanistic conception of nature has generally been taken for granted as the basis for any realistic experience of the world. Contemporary physics and depth psychology both reveal, however, that this assumption, and the dualistic worldview it supports, is ultimately a selective construct of the human mind, conditioned by its own unconscious processes. In its passage through a landscape lush with symbols, the inner kora represents a movement inward toward a more participatory and empathic consciousness in which imagination reveals forms of awareness and layers of reality hidden to the objectifying mind. The Tantric pilgrim familiar with the meditative rite of Tromo Nagmo (in Sanskrit, Krodakali)—the three-eyed goddess issuing from Kundu’s essence-lake—invites her to figuratively sever his or her head and transform it into a skull bowl in which she distills the adept’s dismembered body into enlightening nectar which she bestows to spirits of earth, air, fire, and water. Freed of all egoistic reference points, and radiant with fearless compassion, the pilgrim recognizes his or her essential being as no different from that of the goddess. Adorned with visualized anklets of snakes, flaming hair, and a skull garland of outmoded thought forms, the pilgrim continues the journey through the black rocks and waters of the sacred mountain, converging on the pristine, unobstructed consciousness of the heart.