The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  No one has ever gone down all the way down to the falls, Lama Topgye told us, and he claimed to know no more than he had told us the preceding spring. He held up his hands and opened them back and forth. Somehow, he said, there is a way through the waterfall, but he offered no insight as to how to penetrate its aqueous veil. The door to Yangsang will only open when the reincarnations of three Pemako lamas come in unison, he said, looking quizzically at the pale substitutes sitting across from him on worn Tibetan carpets. I asked him to come with us, but he looked down at his admittedly frail form and said that his body was too old.

  He urged us to pray to Padmasambhava and to Dorje Pagmo, the female Buddha whose citadel, he said, lies directly above the falls. This initiatress into the mysteries of earth and psyche guards the portals to Yangsang, Lama Topgye told us. Only she could lead us to our destination.

  ON THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 3, we descended from Tsachu on eroding switchbacks toward a plank bridge that crosses the Tsangpo. A group of mostly female pilgrims was climbing toward us in bright blouses and jaunty hats and, as they neared, I recognized our hostess, Tashi Tsomo, from the nights of revelry that followed our emergence from the gorge in 1993. As vivacious as before, Tashi Tsomo and her three bright-eyed companions offered to carry our packs, but they were en route to visit Lama Topgye and afterward Gompo Né, and I did not want to divert them from their pilgrimage. Tashi, Sherab, and Sangye—Auspiciousness, Penetrating Wisdom, and Buddha—resumed their climb up the ridge as we descended toward the river, a sweeping mass of white water spanned by a tenuous looking plank bridge suspended from rusted cables.

  We rested on the far side of the river amid rocks and bamboo and then began a grueling four-hour climb toward the pass that would lead us to Bayu, the last village before the hunters’ trails that lead into the Five-Mile Gap and the region of the waterfall.

  Descending alone on the far side of the 8,000-foot pass, night fell before we reached the few scattered houses that comprise Bayu, the forest alive with the sounds and furtive movements of unseen animals. A full moon rose through scudding mist and vanished into a canopy of clouds.

  The Sherpas had established themselves in a storage shed filled with baskets of maize, wheat, and barley. Hamid, Ken, and I sat in the main house with Sangye Tsering and his young wife, Nima Tso, the pretty half-Khampa woman who, five years earlier and before her marriage, had infatuated Lo, our Chinese liaison officer, who had waited for us here for more than two weeks. Hunting had been good. A week earlier, Sangye Tsering and another hunter named Senge, the Lion, had returned from the ridges above Bayu with the carcasses of three bears. We sat on their skins, as Sangye Tsering urged us to buy one of their gallbladders. Not wanting to encourage the trade in animal parts, I offered instead to buy some of the crystals that he and Sangye had carried back from the slopes of the inner gorge, not because I wanted to carry rocks around with me, but because cash is a rare and needed commodity in these remote gorges.

  SANGYE TSERING AND SENGE agreed to accompany us into the gap, and we headed out with them the next morning for Azadem, a cluster of five houses an hour and half beyond Bayu where we would meet Tsering Dondrup and the other hunters who had led us toward the falls the preceding spring.

  We walked through rhododendron forests and across steep slopes planted with barley and maize, as well as burned-out areas of slash-and-burn cultivation where the cutting of trees had caused landslides and deep erosion. In less than an hour we were compelled to change porters when we reached an amorphous boundary between the Bayu township and that of neighboring Azadem.

  To ensure a just distribution of work and income, Pemako custom dictates that porters from the preceding village must forfeit their loads (and salaries) to new porters from the next. Not only does this make for lost time and lack of continuity, but it becomes expensive as well when porters demand payment not only for the days they carry, but also for their journey home. Ironically, this unwieldy portering system originated in the tradition of ula, in which Tibetan government officials traveling in remote areas could enlist bearers free of charge. So as not to overburden local resources, porters would continue only as far as the next village. Delays and complications inevitably arose when villages were close together or too small to provide sufficient manpower. We faced a similar problem now and were forced to pay double wages to the few available villagers as they doubled up on loads.

  Weighed down by our gear, we climbed slowly up the steep trail to Azadem that winds through a forest of rhododendrons and cascading streams. We unloaded at an empty house on the far edge of the village and set up our tents in a clearing beyond. Afterward we visited Tsering Dondrup to discuss our plans. He rallied the other hunters, and they prepared supplies for the journey into the Tsangpo’s innermost gorge: sacks of chilies, dried meat, roasted tsampa, bricks of compressed tea leaves, blackened pots and kettles, thick sleeveless goshung, or tunics of animal skins10 or matted wool felt, block-printed prayer flags, and freshly cleaned .22 caliber rifles.

  Bryan went out with his video camera to document the proceedings while Ken, Hamid, and I sat by Tsering Dondrup’s hearth, drinking tea and discussing the emerging film for National Geographic Television. Each of us had concerns about the direction the documentary seemed to be taking. Ken complained of the intrusion of Bryan’s camera into every aspect of our experience and missed the unselfconscious immersion that we all valued so highly. He also commented that Bryan was focusing the film too much on me. With philosophic detachment, Hamid told him that, for coherence, a documentary film must concentrate on a single character to serve as a bridge between the subject matter and its audience. But each of us clearly felt uncomfortable that we had lost the power to direct how Pemako and our own experience would be portrayed.

  We reminisced about the film on Buddhist hunters we had begun making under the auspices of the Film Study Center at Harvard University. In Hamid’s and my view, the film would have invoked Pemako in all its paradox and inscrutability, with all bridges burned and “great white explorers” deleted from the script.

  “We only needed shots of the takin hunt,” Hamid lamented, “otherwise it was all there.”

  Hamid had brought reels of film for his Bolex movie camera, but he doubted that a group as large as ours would be able to get close to any wildlife. He proposed a solution to the lost vision of the film which would also ensure that we saw as much as possible of the Five-Mile Gap. Hamid suggested that if he entered the gap from the north—near where Sangye Tsering and Senge had killed the bears—and traveled south with two or three hunters who could travel quickly with less disturbance to local wildlife, he could secure the missing footage and also look for other waterfalls that might lie hidden in the recesses of the gap. If he moved quickly, he could meet us at the waterfall that Lama Topgye had indicated as the door into Yangsang.

  “It would allow us to close the gap from both sides,” Hamid said, “and to make sure we cover all the ground.”

  Hamid’s plan held strong a attraction; it would give him the chance to secure the missing footage for the film that we had begun the preceding May, far from the camera’s eye. To free himself from Bryan’s viewfinder, Ken considered joining Hamid in his adventure, but the waterfall held too strong a pull, and he decided to stick to the original itinerary.

  I personally suspected that the waterfall that each of us had already seen from far above would fall short of 100 feet. Neither did I harbor any realistic hopes of some kind of a door behind the veil of water leading into a lost world. But the mystique of Yangsang pulled me strongly, and the prospect of reaching places with our climbing ropes that local Tibetans had not been able to go was irresistible.

  We left Tsering to his preparations and climbed back up the trail to tell the Sherpas that we would be dividing into two teams so as to explore the unknown part of the gorge from both ends. Hamid enlisted one of the more experienced Sherpas, Gompo, to go with him as well as Tsering Dondrup, Sangy
e Tsering, and another hunter named Bu Tashi. In the morning, they would descend partway to Bayu and then climb toward a small pass called the Shati-La that leads into the gap. Tsering Dondrup said they could descend from there toward the caverns of Hugudurung, where takin would supposedly be abundant. From these caves perched above the sheer walls of the Tsangpo they would continue through the gap, keeping the river in view wherever possible.

  If all went according to plan, our two parties would meet somewhere in the heart of the Five-Mile Gap, and Hamid would continue down to the falls with Tsering Dondrup on the path that we had forged. Ken and I would retrace Hamid’s steps and exit the gap over the Shati-La. We imagined that we could complete the circuit in ten days or so, but the time estimates given by each of the hunters varied drastically. Were they drawing out the days to ensure additional payment? Did these places with such improbable names actually exist?

  Hamid was geared for the hunt. The shaman in Tuva, the White Old Man, had given him a talismanic bear claw that he now wore around his neck. The hoary oracle had chided Hamid for his Buddhist faith. “Why put Buddha between you and nature?” he reputedly asked him. “Invoke directly the spirits of mountains and rivers; they are your true allies.” Hamid later learned of a waterfall in Mongolia where the Humi masters learn their unique art of overtone singing by tuning in to the sounds that the waterfall makes at different seasons and internalizing their harmonies and rhythms.11

  Over a dinner of egg noodles, canned tuna fish, and dehydrated miso, the conversation turned to the legendary Falls of the Tsangpo. Whatever its height, Bryan saw it increasingly as the focus to his film. He wanted to know more about the realm toward which it leads.

  “If the waterfall is a doorway into Yangsang,” Bryan asked, “where is Yangsang itself supposed to be? Is it a large area or relatively small?”

  “Yangsang could be anywhere,” Hamid answered, eager for the opportunity to provoke confusion. “According to Buddhist tradition, Yangsang does not exist separately from the mind. Even though it exists physically, its coordinates are necessarily inexact, and there are no real directions as to how to get there.”

  “Wasn’t your trip to the mountain to get the key?” Bryan asked.

  “Yes,” Hamid answered, “but we didn’t find it.”

  “You didn’t?” Bryan asked.

  “No. No one has.”

  “How do you get to Yangsang then?”

  “No one ever has,” Hamid replied enigmatically.

  Bryan felt he was missing something and pressed Hamid to explain further.

  “Knowing there’s no key is the key,” Hamid said, and went back to cleaning his Bolex.

  Sensing Bryan’s frustration with his cryptic replies, he offered another perspective. “To ask the meaning of Yangsang is like asking for a definition of love,” Hamid said. “It can only be known through direct experience. That’s why Pemako as a whole is viewed as Dorje Pagmo. To find her secret places, to enter her heart, you first have to fall in love with her. You have to give up all maps, compasses, and sense of direction. This is what the goddess demands. She is the known leading to the unknown.”

  Bryan still looked perplexed but later began jotting down notes in his journal.

  I smiled at the exchange. As Hamid, Ken, and I all agreed—albeit from slightly different vantage points—Pemako’s essential qualities could easily be missed by clinging too strongly to facts. Would Bryan’s film capture Pemako’s mythic coordinates or reduce our enterprise to a one-dimensional geographical adventure? Could our own sense and experience of this land—and more important the Tibetans’ perception of it—ever be adequately conveyed? If our films, our writings, our lives could achieve anything, I hoped it would be only to dispel the estranged vision that has led humanity to exploit and desecrate the only outer paradise we are ever likely to know—the earth itself.

  Yangsang, in the end, might simply be the recovery of that lost vision of oneness with the natural world that the first couple enjoyed in Eden, but which their own ignorance kept them from recognizing until it was irretrievably lost. As to some gateless gate leading to this lost unity, speculations were idle. Even the Tibetans had only gazed down on their sacred waterfall from the high precipices above, as if to approach too closely would temper their faith. I remembered a telling passage from Talbot Mundy’s Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley: For that which men have uncovered and explained . . . they despise. But that which they discern, although its underlying essence is concealed from them, they wonder at and worship.

  Shechen-La—Pass of Great Glory

  THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 5 opened to a frenetic scene as prospective porters wrestled over our equipment and food supplies. The Sherpas had devised a sophisticated system of name tags that they handed out to stipulated porters, but the procedure collapsed as villagers ran off with partial loads and others were nearly trampled in the process.

  Before the bedlam resolved itself, Hamid, Ken, Bryan, and I headed out to visit Konchok Wangpo, Tsering Dondrup’s elder brother and Bayu’s head lama. We had asked him to perform a ritual fire offering that morning to ensure the success of our journey, but when we arrived at his house, he told us he was indisposed and that he would do it while we were away. Bryan had hoped to capture the ceremony on film and was hardly placated when the lama produced a jug of arak, a potent home-brewed alcohol, and insisted that we imbibe liberally while he, himself, returned to his texts.

  We finally set out from Azadem with a ragtag crew of porters, including the lama’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Sonam Deki, who’d pleaded with her father to let her come. On the outskirts of the village, the hobbitlike old hermit whom we had seen in 1993 emerged from his house with his equally diminutive wife, both twirling enormous prayer wheels.

  We crossed the stream at the north end of the village and began climbing steeply to the west through a corridor of ferns. The trail followed the edge of a narrow defile, rare sunlight streaming through towering hemlocks and an overhead tangle of moss-covered rhododendrons. After climbing steadily for four hours we reached Tsodem, a 9,000-foot-high swampy clearing covered with undulant ferns. The porters struggled in an hour later, complaining about the weight of their loads. We set up camp beneath a cloudless sky as the water by the spring slowly transformed into a thin pane of ice. In another month, claimed one of the hunters, Tsodem would be buried neck deep in snow.

  The following morning we climbed through a rock-filled defile to the 9,700-foot Tsodem-La. From the pass, Ken, Bryan, and I would descend toward the waterfall with Buluk and three other hunters while the majority of the carriers continued along the ridge with two of the Sherpas to set up a camp at Benchi Pagmo, the site of another small spring where we hoped to rejoin them five days later.

  Clouds were gathering over the gorge, and our hunter-guides—Buluk, Jayang, and Drakpa—were eager to start down into the chasm. They stashed some of their food and provisions in tree branches for the return journey and slashed through undergrowth to reveal the game trail that we had followed the previous spring. Dropping quickly down a shallow stream, we stopped to eat beneath ancient hemlocks and filled up all available water containers for the push to Darup, the narrow shelf where we had bivouacked in May, waiting out three days of rain.

  As we traversed across a series of landslides, the glacial spire of Gyala Pelri emerged from the clouds across the gorge. Looming up from Gyala Pelri’s southern spur was the triangular citadel of naked rock that the hunters regard as the primary seat of Dorje Pagmo. Sheer 4,000-foot cliffs drop from the summit ridge and plunge into the depths of the gorge, forming an unassailable fortress.

  Even the religion that conjured this uncompromising goddess defends itself against her essential nature: reality as it is. Tantric icons lead the mind beyond dualities imposed by logic and reason. Yet they also mask what Lelung Shepe Dorje had called “resplendant terror,” the convergence of opposites when the mind abides in
its essential nature. Carl Jung had termed it conjunctio tremendum, the paradoxical union of seemingly contradictory truths.

  The trees cantilevered out over the abyss below us, and in several places a small misstep would have meant an unbroken fall into the depths of the gorge. We contoured across fresh landslides and clung to thin grasses that emerged from the eroding rubble. We reached Darup well before dark and sent back three of the porters to join the others at Benchi Pagmo.

  In the spring, we had been stranded here for three days as a storm lashed against the sides of the gorge and unleashed rock falls on both sides of the narrow, multitiered ledge. But our campsite now proved reasonably comfortable, with boughs of hemlock and spruce forming a platform for our tents and a large fire warding off the cold autumn air.

  Jayang headed out with his rifle in search of game and returned instead with a sack filled with crystals and aquamarine. He claimed we would need ropes to cross the landslide just beyond our camp. But spirits were high as we neared the crux of our journey—the descent to the waterfall.

  The Shape of Falling Water

  ACCORDING TO FRANK KINGDON WARD knowledge of the region below Rainbow Falls was based solely on the alleged Buddhist texts that described a series of seventy-five waterfalls in the innermost reaches of the gorge, “each presided over by a spirit—whether benevolent or malicious is not stated.” The intangible guardian spirits of earth and air that Kingdon Ward had referred to are called suma in Tibetan, and they are customarily appeased with aromatic offerings of juniper and other incenselike plants. On the morning of November 7, Lama, the ex-monk, performed the necessary rites to ensure their benediction. Wisps of sweet-smelling, blue-gray smoke encircled the trees and curled into the sky and, as if by magic, the ominous clouds that had settled over the slopes of Namcha Barwa began to dissipate and golden sunlight bathed the eastern walls of Dorje Pagmo on the opposite side of the gorge. We strung prayer flags above the fragrant ashes with aspirations for clear weather as we began the final descent into the gorge. (Edward Abbey once wrote: “The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth . . . I doubt whether all the smoking censers of Dante’s paradise could equal it.”)