The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  By the time we were all back on track, it was close to 5 p.m. and we had only two hours of daylight left. Buluk claimed that it would take us four hours to reach Zadem, but we were traveling light and were determined to keep as quick a pace as possible. We had three working flashlights between the five of us and enough battery power to illumine the final two hours if it truly took as long as Buluk claimed.

  We climbed steeply to a small pass. As the sun set over the rim of the gorge, we descended into a lush forest carpeted in ferns and moss. Moving as quickly as possible, we followed a rocky stream bed and emerged after another hour into a haunting stand of weeping pines. In fading light, we made our way through the forest until, rounding a house-sized boulder, we heard voices ahead and imagined that some of the Sherpas had come back to look for us.

  As the figures approached, we suddenly recognized Tsering Dondrup, and behind him the hunter Sangye Tsering with his characteristic swashbuckling grin. We then saw Hamid, his face and arms inflamed with insect bites. Our own appearance was in all likelihood equally fearsome and, despite our joy at our sudden reunion, we kept our distance. Hamid and the hunters had been tracking an elusive boar lower down the valley and, as it was almost dark, had been looking for the trail that would lead them back to Zadem where they had camped under an overhanging boulder.

  As we stumbled on through the forest, Hamid excitedly recounted his adventures in the gap. “It’s a gnat-infested hell,” he claimed with obvious relish, and went on to describe the route that he and the hunters had taken from Bayu.

  They had descended into the gorge from a pass below Shati Pemayangdzong, a fluted pinnacle that looms over the northern end of the Tsangpo’s Great Bend and which local tradition reveres as the repository of still-undiscovered termas, concealed there by Padmasambhava 1,200 years ago.

  From a point roughly opposite from where Kingdon Ward and Lord Cawdor had reentered the gorge in 1924, they forged upstream through dense jungle and across avalanche chutes. Two days into their journey, they came across a herd of approximately twenty takin. The hunters pursued them through the dense forest, and Sangye Tsering shot a large male that tumbled down a cliff and landed near Hamid’s feet—providing him with critical footage to complete the film that we had begun with Ned Johnston the previous spring.

  They continued on toward the cave sanctuary of Hugudurung where large numbers of takin reputedly shelter during the winter. The animals had not yet arrived, so Hamid and the others continued on through an unending maze of spiny shoulder-high stinging nettles. One of Sangye Tsering’s hunting dogs became so filled with vegetal toxins, Hamid said, that he died before they emerged. Red ants and small unidentifiable insects had plagued their steps as they labored under the weight of the freshly slaughtered takin.

  The following afternoon, Sangye Tsering shot a large Assamese macaque, a short-tailed monkey known as one of the most resilient and adaptable of all primates. Despite four bullet holes through its chest, it fought furiously with Sangye Tsering’s dogs, slashing one of them across the throat before it finally collapsed. Hamid had filmed the macaque’s final gambit but suffered a similar wound across his left arm. The hunters skinned the tawny monkey but left its body in the notch of a tree. They already had more meat than they could carry.

  Over the next two days they’d forged through what Hamid called a “savage Eden.” Where conditions allowed, they’d dropped their loads and followed steep spurs that jutted down toward the Tsangpo. But like our own investigations in the U-bend below the Hidden Falls, they’d seen no waterfalls higher than fifteen or twenty feet.

  After reaching camp, the hunters made smoke offerings of juniper and cinnamon bark to aid the transit of the animals that they had killed while Ken, Hamid, and I discussed our strategy for the days ahead.

  Originally, Ken, Bryan, and I had intended to retrace Hamid’s passage through the northern part of the gap while Hamid had planned on following the path that we had forged to the Hidden Falls. But to duplicate each other’s routes did not seem the best use of our resources, especially in such unforgiving terrain. Hamid’s journey had clearly verified that this area that for so long had been considered terra incognita was well known to these Buddhist hunters. Hamid observed that they had names for each stretch of forest and significant feature of the landscape. He had already followed whatever spurs he could and photographed these previously hidden sections of the Tsangpo.

  One major spur remained, however: the right fork of the one that we had followed the day before, the one that had been inaccessible from Benchi Pagmo due to intervening cliffs. If we could reach it from Zadem, it would lead us below the U-bend and allow us to see into a section of the Tsangpo that neither party had yet seen. Ken and I decided that documenting this last unknown stretch of river and looking for the mysterious third falls were more important to us than retracing Hamid’s steps through the part of the gap that we hadn’t seen.

  Hamid had already passed through the gauntlet and decided to head back directly to Azadem and Bayu. The hunters had full loads of fresh meat and they were eager to take it home. Hamid wanted to film the continuity of their hunting foray and to document their return to the village. The falls would have been a lengthy diversion, adding days to their journey.

  For Hamid, the hunters epitomized the rich paradoxes central to life in Pemako. “These hunters have traveled more deeply than anyone else into these remote gorges,” Hamid observed. “They face death almost on a daily basis, both in the lives that they take and their own lives that they risk. It makes their Buddhist faith more poignant and real. They eat and dress in the skins of the animals they kill. They have great reverence for life, but they have deep convictions about what lies beyond that threshold. Is this life of the hunter—dwelling at the heart of life and death—not as pregnant with meaning as the monk or yogi sitting in a cave and meditating upon those things that he has abandoned?” Hamid imagined a film that would focus on Tsering Dondrup’s ambiguous identity as both hunter and Buddhist practitioner.

  While Hamid conjured scenes of a possible docudrama in which Tsering would eventually offer his gun to the village lama, giving up his quest for game for an inner search for illumination, Ken and I determined that we would head out the following morning to investigate a possible route down the final spur.

  It wasn’t a clear mission, however: Tsering Dondrup reiterated that the third waterfall that Lama Topgye had spoken about was not a true falls but a place where the entire Tsangpo funnels through a narrow flume, jetting out horizontally before crashing again into a mass of white water. According to Tsering Dondrup, this jetting waterfall did not lie concealed in the hidden pocket of the U-bend, as we had initially imagined, but beyond the end of the Sangkami spur. When we pressed him on where to look as we descended toward the river, he became more vague and admitted that he hadn’t actually seen it. Another older hunter named Choeden claimed to have seen it long ago but couldn’t remember where it was or how to get there. We knew what spur we would have to follow to get anywhere close to the Tsangpo, but the location and even the very existence of the third falls was now in question. We resigned ourselves to the possibility of spending our last day in the gap scrambling through a trackless wilderness in search of a chimera.

  AT DAWN ON NOVEMBER 12, Hamid and his crew of hunters began the climb back toward Azadem. Ken, Bryan, and I left camp when the first rays of the sun permeated our hidden meadow and began melting the ice that had formed overnight in the cooking pots that we had used to store water. Together with Buluk, Jayang, and Choeden, we followed twisting game trails to the southern edge of the forest plateau where the right fork of the Sangkami ridge rose above us as a line of heavily vegetated 200-foot cliffs. From a large vine-strung boulder that we used as a landmark to ensure our return, we headed southwest along the base of the cliffs and dropped down a steep ravine, following a track left by migrating takin. After an hour of bushwhacking through briars and across steep slopes of bamb
oo, the vague trail began to climb toward the Sangkami spur. Amazed at the navigational skills of the takin, we followed their tracks up a series of broken, moss-covered ledges that eventually led us to the crest of the right fork of the Sangkami spur.

  We were now firmly in the deep throat of the gorge and choking on the underbrush. From the outset, Bryan had been less than enthusiastic about this last foray, and the prospect of forging onward through the tangle of briars and precipitous ledges held no appeal. He had had enough shots of brambles, cliffs, and landslides, he said, enough of traipsing through the wilderness, following Ken and me on our quixotic quest for the third falls. The route ahead was entangled with thick vines, and the tracks of the takin that had led us onto the spur had vanished without a trace. With little hope that the forest would open and allow him to get shots down into the Tsangpo, Bryan announced that he would return the way we had come and meet us back in camp.

  Ken and I continued with the hunters through a maze of vertiginous ridges, the river hidden below us by a screen of thick moss-brimming trees. We made repeated descents and ascents through the steep jungle until we came to the edge of a promontory where the trees ended abruptly at the top of a vertical cliff. We lowered ourselves to a precarious vantage point where Jayang cut through a tangle of tree boughs and we could gaze down between our feet to the Tsangpo, swirling beneath us in a series of cataracts and minor waterfalls. With the range finder, we panned across the white water from where the river rounded the corner out of the U-bend and surged downstream toward Hurgudurung and Neygyap. We saw a litany of lesser waterfalls that seemed to accord with the seventy-five listed in the lost scrolls, but nothing that stood out as the mysterious jetting fountain. Convinced that it must exist somewhere, Choeden determined that it must lie on the other side of the ridge, in the narrow corner of the U-bend that we had been unable to see during our descent from Benchi Pagmo. We were below the line of the cliffs that had obscured our view the day before, and we decided to traverse southeast and see if we could reach a lower point on the left branch of the Sangkami spur.

  An hour of hazardous bushwhacking brought us to the edge of a precipice where we could finally get a clear view into the hidden corner of the U-bend. There was no sign of any horizontal jet of water, just a seething maelstrom as the Tsangpo pounded against its eastern boundary and like liquified jade turned back on itself to flow along the tectonic fault line. It felt right, in the end, to leave behind us the lingering mystery of the third falls. But we also felt a certain sense of completion; not unlike Lord Cawdor who, on December 16, 1924, had written in his journal: “We have exhausted all the possible methods of getting a sight of that part of the Tsangpo which we have missed, and have left hardly any room for any more falls than those we have seen.”

  As we retraced our steps toward Zadem, we felt a sense of closure, but, as on all past expeditions into Pemako, a sense too that we were on the edge of mysteries that we would never fully fathom. Historically, the Five-Mile Gap had come to represent the discrepancy between dreams and their fulfillment. Although we had penetrated this final refuge of the unknown, a larger mystery had opened around us. The Buddhist word for paradise is shingkam, or pure field, that by definition has no boundaries or divisions. All walls are in the beholder—the marig ki drib yol, the curtains of ignorance, that obscure perception of a synergistic, interpenetrating reality at the heart of all experience. The Tsangpo gorges had led us into a different way of thinking, into a world in which mind and nature, texts and landscape, interfuse and enrich each other. I thought of Marlowe’s words in Heart of Darkness: “Going up that river was like traveling back to the beginning of the world.”

  That night, Ken and Bryan hardly slept. They reported in the morning that enchanting singing had awakened them near midnight and continued throughout the night. It reminded Ken of the melodious recitations of the Gesar Epics that he had heard in Ladakh. Bryan wondered if the porters were celebrating our impending return. I had heard nothing, although I had slept fitfully.

  The Pemakopas and the Sherpas had slept near the fire but when I asked them about the singing, they claimed to have slept early after their customary mantra recitations and prayers. They’d heard nothing like what Ken and Bryan reported. Maybe they were only dreaming, I said. But Choeden, the older hunter who had joined us on our last foray, said that it was an auspicious sign.

  “We often hear such singing when we hunt in the gorge,” he told me, “particularly if we have made many prayers to Dorje Pagmo and Padmasambhava. We hear voices, but never see anyone and, although we can hear the words, we can’t understand the meaning.”

  Choeden told me that they often hear duets sung between a male and a female. Sometimes they hear voices calling their names, but there’s never anyone to be seen.

  “The singing comes as a blessing of Dorje Pagmo,” Choeden asserted. “Your friends are lucky.”

  Encouraged by Choeden’s revelations, Jayang acknowledged that on past sojourns in the gap he had heard the jingling ankle bells of dakinis. He had witnessed strange lights and apparitions and been entranced by their songs.19

  Perhaps that’s paradise after all, I mused, when all boundaries between outer and inner experience have broken down. Or perhaps, on the other hand, it’s no more than delectable madness.20

  The Way Out

  QUANTUM PHYSICISTS HAVE LONG RECOGNIZED that we see only a portion of the world around us. The most intellectually rigorous and accurate model of the physical universe produced by Western science, quantum physics offers a paradoxical world of shifting perspectives and possible probabilities and—like Buddhism—fully acknowledges the role of consciousness in shaping reality.

  In quantum physics, the very act of observation alters the supposedly objective reality that is being observed. As Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein asserted in their Copenhagen Interpretation, the observer fundamentally creates reality by observing it, and how we look determines the phenomena that we perceive. “Until an observer sees an atom, the atom occupies an infinite number of possible positions simultaneously,” wrote a noted physicist. “Upon observation, all of these possibilities collapse into a single reality.”21

  The famous uncertainty principle formulated in the 1930s by Werner Heisenberg observed that subatomic particles such as electrons can’t be definitively located in space but can only be said to occupy probable, estimated locations. The spatial location of a particle remains inherently ambiguous until the observer’s intent, or method of inquiry, causes it to manifest in a particular time and space.

  In Buddhist Tantra the world is perceived as a luminous web of energies and possibilities. Just as the physicist’s intent influences where, when, and how electrons manifest from the vast field of probability, Tantric practitioners apply a similar principle to alter and expand their view of reality, to free it from the reference point of an observing subject and still more from the oxymoron of an objective object wholly distinct from human consciousness. By altering states of consciousness through ritual and meditation, adepts manifest latent, simultaneous realities, beyond the bounds of conventional perception. Yangsang lies in this interworld between mind and nature and, like the particles sought by quantum physicists, where the terton seeks that hidden dimension influences where it will be found. Intention transforms latent possibilities into actual events, and just as subatomic particles appear in the world in response to our method of inquiry, potential realities are realized by first imagining their possibility.

  THE TEAM OF CHINESE SCIENTISTS currently stranded below Pemakochung was also searching for a waterfall whose possibility had been imagined more than a century earlier. Bailey’s book, No Passport to Tibet, had been translated into Chinese and had helped alert the nation to the historical quest. The Chinese Academy of Sciences had recruited top geologists, botanists, reporters, and media personnel to form “one of the most important expeditions of the century.”

  National pr
estige played a large part in how the Chinese expedition presented itself. Before we had reached the road head at Trulung, Tibetans recounted that they had seen nightly clips on Chinese television documenting the team’s progress. They told us that they had prayed to Padmasambhava that the veils of their promised land would remain firmly drawn, and that the Chinese would not be able to penetrate their last sanctuary as they had their homeland, forty years before.

  We had beaten the Chinese Academy of Sciences to the falls, but were we any more entitled to be here? Bryan was poised to send his news release to National Geographic, and Ken and I pondered all the implications. Whatever we could say about this place would only veil its true proportions, or still worse, turn it into the latest ecotourism hotspot—the world’s deepest gorge, the last great waterfall, the real Shangri-La. But the die was cast, and if we refrained from reporting the discovery of the falls the Chinese version of events would prevail. We could only try as best we could to convey the meaning of the falls for those who dwell in these remote gorges and who draw both their livelihood and inspiration from its waters, animals, and plants. Pemako had revealed itself as a landscape of the heart, a realm of unbounded possibilities where those who venture here dream themselves into a larger existence. But we knew better than to try to convey such ideas through international media.

  If the Chinese had coerced their porters to proceed, they could show up at any moment. To avoid any unpleasant encounters, we decided to return to Azadem as quickly as possible. Bryan buried his exposed film cassettes at the bottom of his pack in case we were challenged, and we left Zadem on the morning of November 13.