The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  As we contoured along the sides of the gorge, Gyala Pelri soared into the sky much as an early explorer had described it: “A perfect jewel; one might have fancied it to be the immaculate abode of some radiant god, feeding on pure light.” We crossed the tree-covered Tsodem-La and descended quickly through wet ferns and gnarled rhododendrons. The Tibetans were eager to get home and we covered the distance to Azadem before the sun had disappeared over the horizon.

  The village buzzed with unaccustomed activity. Hamid had been filming the hunters as they offered the blackish head of the takin to Lama Konchok Wangpo. He performed the requisite rites, sending its spirit to greener pastures on the curling clouds of blue-gray smoke.

  Several men from Tsachu were camped on the lama’s porch. Over bowls of chang, Tsachu’s headman, Sonam Nima, told me that more than fifty Chinese were based at their village above the confluence. As few porters were available in Bayu or Azadem, the expedition leader in Tsachu dispatched Sonam Nima with twenty men to carry food supplies to the Chinese team stranded behind the Shechen-La. According to Sonam, the Chinese hadn’t gotten farther than Shekarlungpa. Only when an advance party arrived in Azadem would he and his men head into the gorge to relieve them. “There are lots of plants that they can eat there in the meantime,” Sonam Nima said with a grin.

  It seemed like more than coincidence that within a matter of days our two expeditions with no prior knowledge of each other had nearly collided in the Tsangpo gorge. Difficulties with their porters had apparently prevented the Chinese from proceeding more quickly, and we felt admitted gratification at having beaten them to the falls.

  Later in the evening, Bryan finally got a signal on the Magellan satellite phone. He came into the house and said that his supervisor at National Geographic Television, Maryanne Culpepper, wanted to speak to me.

  “Congratulations,” said the voice, traveling through thousands of miles of space. “You found the falls. Why do you think you succeeded while others did not?”

  I felt a strange foreboding. Her question framed our discovery in the context of who got where first, not on what the falls—to our minds at least—actually represented. I thought back to a cartoon from The New Yorker that the librarian of the Explorers Club had once pinned to the club’s bulletin board. The drawing showed a great white explorer in a pith helmet standing beside his native guide as they gaze up at a curtain of falling water. The caption reads: “They are nice falls, aren’t they? I’ve always hoped someone would discover them,” a droll reminder of the relative nature of all discovery.

  “The Tibetans knew of this waterfall long ago,” I finally said. “They kept it secret because of its importance in their own religious beliefs. A Chinese Academy of Sciences expedition is headed there now and may view it very differently. We were simply the first to reach it and document its height. Our role now is to help explain what the falls signifies in the Tibetan Buddhist worldview, as well as in terms of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century notions of exploration.”

  Whatever I said, the focus on the other side of the planet remained on our expeditionary coup, and I could sense its importance to the National Geographic Society in counteracting the negative publicity that it had received for sponsoring the ill-fated kayaking expedition. I went back inside and sat by the fire wondering at the drama in which we had inadvertently involved ourselves.

  “The word discovery carries a lot of ambiguity,” Ken offered. “Is it the first person to see something who gets credit for discovering it? Or is it the first person to reach it and place it in historical and geographical perspective?”22

  “Similarly pointless debates have raged about who set foot on the summit of Everest first—Sir Edmund Hillary or Tenzing Norgay Sherpa,” Hamid quipped, somewhat disgruntled that he was unlikely to appear in Bryan’s film as he was not present at the waterfall during Bryan’s defining shots. Bryan had ignored Hamid’s solo passage through the gap because he could not see how to integrate it into his film.

  OUR DEPARTURE FROM AZADEM on November 15 was plagued by a surfeit of prospective porters. We had drawn up a name list and placed all of the loads in a back room, all to no avail. Some villagers tried to climb in through the windows and one even appeared at the smoke hole on the roof. Even once the loads were distributed, they changed hands through some form of inside trading. Cash was hard to come by in these remote gorges.

  Once the porters had headed out on the trail, we resigned ourselves to further rites of departure. At the bottom of the hill below Azadem, we were compelled to drink arak and chang at the home of Buluk’s father-in-law, while his wife, Tsering Yuden, breast-fed her two young babies before heading out with us toward the trailhead. Another mile down the trail we drank more chang at Buluk’s house, where he showed us a trove of quartz crystals, aquamarine, and other stones that he had harvested from the gap. I traded some for our climbing ropes and tarps, as well as two pairs of unwashed Patagonia socks.

  We were apprehended again farther up the hill, at the house of one of the hunters who traveled with Hamid through the gap. Along with the requisite farewell chang, Senge tried unsuccessfully to get him to buy the dried gallbladder of a bear that he had killed a month earlier. Clearly the people of Pemako needed an alternative source of income.

  By midday, we regrouped with our similarly inebriated porters and began the grueling climb to the pass that would take us to the bridge below the confluence. Beams of sunlight filtered through the mossy forest and cast magenta light on the fluted walls of Shati Pemayangdzong, which rose behind us over the apex of the gorge.

  The Chinese had taken over Tsachu, and I had told the Sherpas to try to set up camp near the bridge across the Tsangpo. With the steady flow of chang, communications had been less than optimal and by the time we reached the bridge, half of the porters had already gone ahead, following a faint trail through the jungle that they said would lead to Ganglam, a small village high on a ridge above the confluence. It was nearly dark and the trail was marginal and the drop below often precipitous. With only three flashlights for the more than twelve of us in the rear guard, we proceeded very slowly. Eventually, however, the gradient lessened, and we entered the outskirts of the village, a collection of no more than five or six houses scattered along the ridge, 2,000 feet above the river.

  We finally located the house that the Sherpas had commandeered for the night. They had woken up the residents, restored the fire, and begun preparing a meal. The matriarch of the household looked on mournfully as we used up the supply of water she’d stored in a great iron cauldron. It’s an hour’s journey just to collect water, she said. Nonetheless, we enjoyed a simple meal and dried ourselves by the fire. The chaos of our presence delighted the young children of the household, but the old woman was visibly put out. She showed me a gangrenous left arm—the aftereffects of a viper bite—and asked if we had any medicine that could restore its use. I helped her as best I could.

  As elsewhere, only the old, the infirm, and the very young were left in the villages; all others had been recruited by the Chinese as porters for their multipronged siege on the Tsangpo gorge. We retired to tents that the Sherpas had set up on a flagstone threshing ground a short distance above the house.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, November 16, Ken, Bryan, and I descended with Jayang, Buluk, and Tsering Yudon to the pilgrimage site of Gompo Né, an hour’s climb below Ganglam. Hamid had gone down earlier so he could film independently of Bryan, who was eager to document this Jurassic realm of limestone caverns that I had last visited with Ani Rigsang. Buddhist pilgrims traditionally visit the site to pass through an archetypal landscape that forms a microcosm of the journey ahead, or the one through which they have already passed. In a circuit through cave tunnels, ravines, and jungle, they inscribe a symbolic passage from birth to death to resurrection.

  Our journey began by choosing lhashing, or life sticks, from the surrounding forest. We cut notches in the saplings for every year o
f our lives and placed them upright, along with countless others, against an enormous boulder, thus establishing the auspicious circumstances for our spirits to ascend after death to the paradise of Padmasambhava, a realm often linked to the innermost heart of Pemako.

  We proceeded next through a symbolic birth channel, signifying emergence from the womb. After squeezing headfirst down the narrow passage, we had to suckle a limestone protuberance that represents the teat of Padmasambhava’s consort Yeshe Tsogyal, Lake of Primordial Wisdom, who concealed the Pemako neyigs. Nurtured by the life milk of this revered emanation of Dorje Pagmo, we continued through a jungle exploding into green light and drank from dark pools with leaves of bamboo to remove obscurations of vision. We then passed through a narrow tunnel that allegedly closes in upon one if one entertains doubts or falls into mundane thoughts.

  The pilgrimage circuit continued through limestone passageways that purify past karma and ended on a ledge where we lay down like corpses to enact a symbolic death. Rising from this shi-sa, or dying ground, we found ourselves at the edge of the Tsangpo, gazing across the river at the fluted walls of Shati Pemayangdzong where Padmasambhava supposedly concealed important teachings that will be revealed when humankind is ready.

  As we sat amid these fertile mysteries by the banks of the Tsangpo, Tsering Yuden led the others in a pilgrimage song that they later told me had been composed long ago by Orgyen Dorje Dranak, a master of the lineage of the Immortal Heart Drop.

  Ah ho! The secret land of Pemako

  A Pure Realm for the Buddhas

  of past, present, and future

  Just thinking of this place I become joyful . . .

  Crystal glaciers adorn the sky

  Rain falls like nectar from the gods . . .

  And rainbows fill the valleys . . .

  Walled round by snow peaks, cliffs, and jungle,

  This hidden-land of Padmasambhava is

  A place where fortunate beings can find enlightenment

  With rocks like molten iron and

  Trees like the hair of demons

  Pemako appears like a realm of fearsome Rakshas . . .

  Those without pure perception will have no chance here

  With caves for meditation,

  Healing waters and medicinal plants

  This is a place for yogis and Vidyadharas

  Rainbow-colored birds spread their wings,

  Their songs like melodious mantras . . .

  This great land of Pemako is a pure realm of the Buddhas

  Thinking of this place I became joyful

  And with pure devotion,

  Make offerings of this song.

  Our passage through Gompo Né marked the end of our journey through the sacred land of Pemako. We climbed back to Ganglam and, after retrieving our packs, continued on up the ridge to Tsachu where we discovered that a drunken official from a village above Yumé had waylaid the majority of our porters, insisting that they relinquish their loads to men from Tsachu. The fact that Tsachu’s headman, Sonam Nima, had already agreed to let us take our porters from Bayu all the way to the trailhead at Trulung, because the Chinese had already enlisted all of the locally available manpower, had no bearing on his thinking. Matters were further complicated by the fact that the Chinese were paying their Tsachu porters only 45 yuan a day, and several wanted to defect and take advantage of our inadvertently higher pay scale.

  After heated discussion, the drunken-eyed official finally allowed our original porters to proceed. We started down the trail ahead of them in the fading light, circumventing an agitated bull and crossing landslides and narrow trails carved out of the granite cliffs above the Po Tsangpo. Only after we had reached the sulfer-carved sands of Yumé did we discover that three of our meekest porters had eventually succumbed to pressure by a trio from Tsachu, who appeared with our loads late in the evening.

  At Yumé, we were not alone: a subdivision of the Chinese Academy of Sciences expedition had left Tsachu earlier that day and had encamped there en route to Trulung. A female journalist from Beijing named Linzi spoke passable English and, as we sat on logs around a communal bonfire made from driftwood, she told us that the 1998 China Tenyen Yarlung Tsangpo Biggest Scientific Expedition was being sponsored by a prominent Guanjou-based manufacturer of “health clothing.” Along with top Chinese scientists, they had sent journalists, news reporters, and TV personnel to report on the expedition’s progress and discoveries.

  Three different teams, with specialties in fields such as atmospheric science, botany, zoology, and geology, were focusing on different parts of the gorge, Linzi told us. One group had begun near Gyala and was following the Tsangpo as far as they could, always keeping the river in sight, if not actually traveling on its banks. They’d enlisted a Tibetan mountaineer named Rochen to help them reach the waterfall. “He has never been in this area before,” Linzi told us, “but he has climbed Everest eight times.”

  Another division of more than fifty had crossed the Doshung-La and spent more than a week in Medok, studying plants and wildlife. They were now following the river north toward Tsachu, Linzi said, where all the groups would converge. She was leaving before the onslaught made conditions there unbearable.

  Linzi also told us that the scientists in Tsachu were investigating the feasibility of building a hydroelectric dam that would flood the inner gorges of the Tsangpo—much like Glen Canyon in the southwestern United States—and divert the water northward to fuel China’s ever-expanding industrial growth.23 They had dispatched a side expedition to Neythang where a Chinese television crew had filmed the Monpas hunting takin. Two Mondrong villagers were standing near us by the fire and, shifting into Tibetan, I asked them whether this was true. The Chinese had paid them to kill almost an entire herd of takin, they told me. Because of this, the Monpas said, the weather had been steadily getting worse.

  Their stories only amplified what we already knew. The Chinese expedition had little concern for the environment; the formerly pristine campground at Yumé had been trashed with cast-off tin cans and plastic wrappings of instant Chinese noodles. Despite their massive numbers—more than five hundred including their porters—the Chinese had no toilet tents, our journalist friend confided. Linzi had spent ten days in Tsachu and had quite obviously had enough. She asked if we had room in our Land Cruiser to drive her back to Lhasa.

  IRONICALLY, THE EARLIEST KNOWN literary account of a bucolic paradise in the remote mountains of Asia appears not in Tibetan literature, but in a Chinese poem called “Peach Blossom Spring” written by Tao Qian, who lived between 365 and 427 c.e. The poem describes a fisherman who follows a stream of peach blossoms into a tunnel through a mountain and arrives in a hidden-land where hermits have attained extreme longevity and flowers scent the air; in essence, Shangri-La. The fisherman leaves to tell others about the hidden paradise, but like Conway in Lost Horizon, he cannot find his way back. The poem had an enormous influence on Chinese culture and landscape painting and would have been known to any Tibetan familiar with China’s literary and artistic heritage.

  Throughout Chinese history, artists and writers made reference both directly and indirectly to the peach blossom paradise, conveying through their art a perennial longing to escape the travails of worldly life for the peace and serenity of distant mountains—whether literally, or through art and imagination. After the Manchu invasion, many Chinese artists and dispossessed Ming dynasty officials expressed their resistance to foreign occupation in poetry and paintings of idealized realms.24 One spare, monochromatic painting by a disenchanted government official from this period shows a small, solitary figure on a path leading to a tunnel through the mountains. “Maybe this is the opening,” states the calligraphic inscription, a reference to the long dreamed-of peach blossom sanctuary.

  An earlier Chinese hanging scroll from 1658–60 is called Listening to the Water
fall. Composed by a poet-artist named Zhang Feng who renounced government service to become a Buddhist monk, the painting shows a lone figure sitting above a cascading waterfall amid fantastic cliffs. Mists rising from the depths of the chasm and the repeated contours of the mountain walls echo the falling water as it reverberates off the cliffs, and through the mind of the beholder. Using delicate brush strokes, the artist reinforced the merging of sight and sound in a poem that appears in the upper left-hand corner of the scroll:

  Looking up I see rocky cliffs;

  bending down I hear rushing water.

  The mountain trees are tall and distinct;

  The valley flowers burst forth brightly

  The call of a yellow bird [pierces]

  the myriad layers of gray mist.

  Those with tranquil hearts can walk on undaunted;

  [And having passed, they can] enjoy this place forever.

  In 1687, the artist Dai Benxio (1621‒93) created a haunting, visually complex scroll entitled The Pines of Mount Tiantai, a mountain retreat favored by Buddhist sages and where a tantalizing stone arch points toward the paradise of the Immortals. In strong brushwork, Dai Benxio painted on the scroll: “. . . I have heard that most of these strange pines have met the sad fate of extinction. It seems that once the natural wonders of the sky, earth, mountains, and rivers are exposed to the intimate scrutiny of this dusty world, they do not last long. This indeed is cause for lament.”25 Cause for lament indeed: Linzi told us that in order to build what would be the world’s largest hydroelectric project, the Chinese government was thinking to use nuclear power to blast a tunnel through the heart of Pemako. It recalled the words of Henry Miller: “Every Utopia confers upon us a new hell. The chasm widens and deepens. The isolation becomes more intense.”