A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  These early stages in Tibet’s prehistory took place without human witnesses but are celebrated in Tibetan mythology with stories of a time before the advent of man when the plateau lay submerged under a vast lake – until a compassionate Bodhisattva (one who delays Buddhahood in order to help mankind) cut an outlet through the Himalayas for Tibet’s ‘great river’, the Tsangpo. In reality, the Himalayas succeeded the formation of the Tibetan plateau. They represent the last and most dramatic phase of this extraordinary upheaval, a recent and rapid event in the geological time-scale, but one that added at least another mile to the general height of the Himalayas.

  The outcome of this prodigious burst of activity was a twenty-thousand-foot wall that spans twenty-five degrees of meridian from Namche Barwa in the east to Nanga Parbat in the west; a fifteen-hundred-mile barrier that has blocked the monsoon winds from the south and turned much of Tibet and Central Asia into desert. A leading authority in Himalayan geomorphology has gone so far as to suggest that some sections of the Himalayas may have risen as much as nine thousand feet and more within the last half-million years – and that the rise may be continuing at the rate of some thirty inches a century. What is certain is that the rapid growth of the Himalayan ranges took place not so very long ago, and that it effectively put a stop to man’s migrations to and fro across the steppes of Central Asia. Thus Tibet became the isolated and forbidding land that it is today, sealed off from the south and west, its lakes and rivers becoming increasingly desiccated as the Himalayan wall continues to capture more and more rainfall.

  Anyone who has stood at dawn on the ridge of one of the lower foothills of the Himalayas and seen the first rays of the sun light up a seemingly endless succession of snowpeaks will know how the advance guards of the Aryans must have felt when they first crossed the Punjab in the second millennium BC and saw the Himalayan ranges rising tier upon tier before them. In Atkinson’s Himalayan Districts – the vade mecum of the Victorian sportsman or administrator in the hills – the author speculates as to how these Aryan immigrants from the west might have reacted to the awesome spectacle:

  The rugged grandeur of the scene, the awful solitude and the trials and dangers of the way itself naturally suggested to an imaginative and simple people that they had at length rediscovered the golden land, the true homes of their gods whom they had worshipped when appearing under milder forms as storm and fire and rain.

  Taking their inspiration from this ‘abode of snow’ – Himavant, Himachala or Himalaya – the Aryans developed a cosmography that established Meru, the mountain of ‘blazing appearance’, as the central core of the universe and navel of the earth. They sited it beyond and to the north of the Himalayan ranges – ‘kissing the heavens by its height’, according to the Mahabharata, greatest of the Hindu epics, ‘shining like the morning sun and like a fire without smoke, immeasurable and unapproachable by men of manifold sins’. On Meru’s summit stood Swarga, the heavenly city of Indra, the ancient Vedic god of rain and storm, a paradise ‘furnished with heavenly flowers and fruit and covered everywhere with bright gold dwellings’. Here were to be found the gods and celestial spirits, headed by Brahma the Creator, with lesser deities and saints inhabiting a less exalted plane lower down the mountain. Leading up to Mount Meru was the pathway of the stars, a never-never land of fragrant trees and flowers where the souls of the dead awaited rebirth.

  A white mountain named Kailas also makes several appearances both in the Mahabharata and in that order, stodgier epic, the Ramayana, but at this early stage of development – dated at about the middle of the first millennium BC – it is only one of a number of subordinate holy mountains, not yet linked to the celestial Meru. Similarly, a lake called Manasarovar also makes an appearance – in the form of a single, fleeting reference in the Ramayana to ‘the lake Manasa … swollen with water on the arrival of the rains’. Both mountain and lake have been visited and named, but not yet understood.

  As the Aryans continued their push eastward down the Gangetic plain so grew their dependence on that constant central artery, the Ganga, the river that still nourishes a third of India’s population to this day. It succeeded the Indus as the most vital – and therefore the most sacrosanct – of India’s rivers. It served as a life-force and as a channel between the gods and men, and its divinity took the form of a mother goddess, Ganga Mai, daughter of the Himalayas. To die by Ganga’s banks and to be cast into her muddy waters was to be delivered directly to heaven. Even to dip oneself three times under her surface was to be cleansed of all sins, to emerge reborn. So it became the ambition – as it still is today – of every devout Hindu to make a pilgrimage to the Ganga and to bathe there at least once in his or her lifetime.

  The formula has not altered for nearly three thousand years. Soon after dawn the bather immerses himself fully three times, then cups his hands and three times raises the water as an offering to the sun. As he does so he chants the prayer of the seven sacred rivers of India:

  Gange cha! Yamune chaiva! Godaveri!

  Saraswati! Namade! Sindhu! Kaveri!

  Jale asmin sannidhim kuru!

  O Ganga! O Jumna! Godaveri!

  Saraswati! Namade! Indus! Kaveri!

  May you all be pleased to be manifest in these waters!

  Before the bather climbs out of the water he changes into a clean dhoti – or a clean sari – to emerge as a new person. He has, in a spiritual sense, completed a turn in the wheel of life, death and rebirth.

  One of the oldest and most familiar legends in India concerns the birth of this most celebrated of rivers; how the goddess Ganga Mai was moved by the devotions of a saint named Bhagirath to come down to earth to purify the remains of the sixty thousand sons of King Sagar, blasted to ashes by an angered holy man. Mother Ganga descends from Mount Meru only to be caught up in the matted locks of the god Shiva, representing the Himalayan mountains. Bhagirath continues his prayers and the god Shiva relents and releases the goddess, whose waters flood across the land and touch the ashes of the sixty thousand sons of Sagar, so redeeming their souls.

  Of the many sites along the river Ganga visited by pilgrims none bestow more merit than those associated with its origins. What adds greatly to their value is the fact that these holiest of holy places are buried so deep in the Himalayas as to be virtually inaccessible, so that to make a pilgrimage to some of these mountain shrines is to place oneself almost literally in the lap of the gods. Yet despite – or because of – the difficulties, pilgrimages into the mountains have always been an important feature of Hindu religious life. High-caste Hindus in the fourth and final stage of life are exhorted by their scriptures to free themselves from all family ties and responsibilities and to go in search of deliverance from the cycle of death and rebirth. They shave off their hair and beards, conduct their own funeral ceremonies and take on the pale ochre robes – symbolizing rebirth through the purifying flames of the funeral pyre – of the sanyasi, the ascetic who roams from one holy place to another seeking final absorption into the Absolute. Those who come to the Himalayas begin their pilgrimage at Ganga-dwara, the gateway of Ganga, the narrow break in the Siwalik foothills through which the river pours out into the Indian plains. Passing through this gateway they enter the holy land of the Hindus, sometimes called Uttarakhand, the north country, or Kedarkhand, Shiva’s country, where every peak had its deity, every valley its temple and every spring its shrine.

  This Himalayan holy land had been thoroughly explored by the time that the first of the sacred texts known as the Puranas came to be written. So, too, had at least part of the high plateau lying beyond the Himalayas, allowing the basic cosmography of the Mahabharata to be expanded into a more solid and realistic Asian geography.

  The eighteen texts that together make up the Puranas were compiled over a thousand-year period – from about 200 BC to AD 800 – and they concern themselves chiefly with the works of the Hindu gods. The oldest and the best-known of the Puranas is the Vishnu Purana, believed to date from the secon
d century BC. Its main object is the glorification of Vishnu, but one of its chapters is given over to a description of the earth. It describes how the world is made up of seven continents ringed by seven oceans. The central island has Meru at its core, bounded by three mountain ranges to the north and three to the south, and lying between them ‘like the pericarp of a lotus’. One of these ranges is the Himalayan barrier, interposed between Meru and the Indian subcontinent (Bharatha). The world-pillar itself stands eighty-four thousand leagues high, with four faces of crystal, ruby, gold and lapis lazuli. From the heavens – or, more precisely, from the nail in the great toe of Vishnu’s left foot – falls ‘the stream that washes away all sin, the river, Ganga, embrowned with the unguents of the nymphs of heaven, who have sported in its waters.’ After washing the ‘lunar orb’, the Ganga alights on the summit of Meru, circles the mountain and then divides into four mighty rivers which flow to the four quarters of the earth, ‘for its purification’. These four rivers – ‘four branches of but one river’ – are named as the Sita, Alaknanda, Chaksu and Badra:

  The first, falling upon the tops of the inferior mountains on the east side of Meru, flows upon their crests and passes through the country of Bhadrashva to the ocean: the Alak nanda flows south, to the country of Bharatha and, dividing into seven rivers on the way, falls into the sea: the Chaksu falls into the sea after traversing all the western mountains and passing through the country of Ketumala: and the Badra washes the country of the Uttara Kurus and empties itself into the northern ocean.

  Here, in all its essentials, is the prototype of a legend that spread with only minor variations as far afield as Japan and Java; the archetypal image of a mountain at the hub of the world from which four mighty rivers take their source – an image powerful enough to be reflected not only in religious literature but also in the art and architecture of South Asia. It can be seen in the earliest Buddhist and Hindu structures to be laid out in stone: the Great Stupa at Sanchi in Central India (built in the third century BC), the central temple of Tibet’s oldest monastery (built at Samye in the lower Tsangpo valley during the eighth century AD) and the temple mountain of Borobudur in Java (built a century later) – all are microcosms in stone, sharing a common form in the world-pillar rising above the four continents.

  The same image forms the symbol known to Hindus as the yantra and to Buddhists as the mandala. Both are visual maps used to provide a focus during the act of meditation, guiding the practitioner towards the centre as he seeks to integrate his being with the Absolute. Both combine the circle (water) with the square (earth), superimposed upon a cross representing four paths or doors. It is a standard yogic exercise to place oneself mentally within such an image, imagining the spinal column to be at one with Mount Meru, so achieving a deepened sense of earth-consciousness. Underlying all such mystical exercises is the oriental concept of natural harmony, of union achieved through a balance of opposing forces, as between earth and water, male and female, light and dark; in the Taoist idiom, as between yin and yang; in the Tibetan tantric tradition, yab and yum; in Shaivite tantra, Shiva-Shakti. The strength of the Meru image lay in this natural harmony, but what made it doubly potent was that it was rooted in geographical fact. The original Meru probably took its inspiration from the Himalayas in general; the later Meru of the Puranas was founded on the unique geographical properties of South-Western Tibet.

  Though it presented a formidable obstacle to any large-scale migrations, the Himalayan barrier could always be crossed by enterprising travellers during the summer months. The series of longitudinal foothills and ranges that build up to the Great Himalaya Range are cut across at a number of points by deep transverse gorges – the old antecedent water-courses that pre-date the massive uplift and which, by continued erosion, have kept pace with the elevation of the Himalayas. In such gorges it is possible to look out across the valley and pick out on the opposite wall a complete cross-section of vegetation ranged by altitude from high alpine to subtropical, from the bhojpatra or silver birch that grows above ten thousand feet and whose soft bark provides the writing-material for religious texts, to the sturdy sal tree of the plains, the evergreen hardwood of the terai jungles.

  By journeying up one such transverse gorge Hindu pilgrims could reach deep into the heart of their holy land, Uttarakhand. The river that made this possible was the Ganga’s main Himalayan tributary, the Alaknanda. Of the four mighty rivers named in the Vishnu Purana – the Alaknanda, Sita, Chaksu and Badra – this river alone is immediately identifiable. It is the Ganga of our own times, with the same attributes then as those ascribed to it today:

  The branch that is known as the Alaknanda was borne affectionately by Mahadeva [the great god, Shiva] upon his head for more than a hundred years, and was the river which raised to heaven the sinful sons of Sagar, by washing their ashes. This sacred stream, heard of, desired, seen, touched, bathed in or hymned, day by day, sanctifies all beings; and those who, even at a distance of a hundred leagues, exclaim ‘Ganga, Ganga’, atone for the sins committed during three previous lives.

  Having followed the Alaknanda upstream for two hundred miles through the Great Himalaya Range the pilgrim eventually arrives at a temple complex nestling in a side-valley, overshadowed by a score of sharply defined snowpeaks. This is the shrine of Vishnu, manifest in the form of Lord Badrivishal, and the place is Badrinath, most sacred of all the Vaisnava shrines in India. Some form of temple has stood on this site, beside a hot-spring, for at least two thousand years – but not always dedicated to Lord Vishnu. The weathered black stone idol that occupies the inner sanctum has the form and posture of a Buddhist Bodhisattva. Buddhists argue that it dates back to the golden years of Emperor Ashok in the third century BC, when the Way was preached throughout Northern India – only to be converted into a Hindu god in later centuries as Buddhism was suppressed. Hindus counterclaim that if there ever was a Buddhist shrine on this spot it was preceded by an even earlier Vedic one. Whatever its origins, for most pilgrims this distant shrine has been the limit of their aspirations.

  North of Badrinath there rises another great mountain wall: the eastern half of what is now termed the Zaskar range. It presents an even more formidable barrier than the Great Himalaya, because here there is no transverse gorge; the Ganga’s northern watershed has been reached. The pilgrim who hoped to proceed further – on to that central pivot where the Alaknanda and the other mighty rivers of Asia were said to have their common source – was now faced by such Himalayan giants as Kamet, Ibi Gamin, Rataban and Tirsuli. But between these massifs are a number of saddles, one as low as sixteen and a half thousand feet, another eighteen, which for three or four months every summer are free from snow. These are the passes – the ghats or, in Tibetan, la – that lead into Tibet. The summit of each is marked by a cairn of piled-up mani-stones incised with Tibetan prayers, signalling the end of one cultural boundary and the start of another. From here the pilgrim could look northwards, out across the Chang Tang, the great plateau of Tibet.

  What he actually sees looks nothing like a plateau: immediately below the passes the land falls away into a deep depression, one of the sediment-filled longitudinal troughs formed after the Tibetan uplift. Beyond the depression, cutting across the skyline at a distance of some fifty miles, is yet another mountain wall; the Kailas range, dominated – even at this distance – by the mountain that provides the keystone to the drainage system of much of South and Central Asia. This is the high point of the Tibetan table-land; the south-western corner that has been given an extra tilt upwards by the nearby Himalayas to form a highly improbable complex of watersheds and river basins in which four major river systems take their rise.

  At the centre of the complex stands a pyramid of rock and snow, towering above the surrounding mountains, as the Tibetans say, ‘like the handle of a mill-stone’. This is Mount Kailas. Deep clefts on either side isolate it from the rest of the Kailas range, which makes it especially well-suited to the act of devotional circumambulation
, known as the parikarama, practised by Hindus and Buddhists.

  Even in the strictest geological terms Kailas stands alone, being the world’s highest deposit of tertiary conglomerate – a vast pile of cemented gravel laid down in the period immediately preceding the arrival of early man and then thrown up into the sky. It has four clearly-defined walls that match the points of the compass, and on its southern face a deep gully runs down from the summit, cutting across an equally distinctive rock band of horizontal strata. This is the mark that has earned Kailas the title of ‘swastika mountain’, and it is this southern face, emblazoned with its talisman of spiritual strength, the swastika, that the pilgrim first sees as he climbs out of India; Kailas on the horizon and, occupying much of the depression in the middle distance, what was formerly one large circular lake with an island at its centre but is now two lakes divided by a narrow isthmus of high ground.

  The larger of these two lakes, roughly circular in outline and about fifteen miles across, is the sacred lake Manasarovar – the lake ‘formed in the mind [of God]’. In his Himalayan Districts Atkinson quotes an account of its creation from one of the later Puranas, the Skanda Purana:

  The sons of Brahma proceeded to the north of Himachala and performed austerities on Kailas. There they saw Shiva and Parvati and there they remained for twelve years, absorbed in mortification and prayer. There was then very little rain and little water, and in their distress they went to Brahma and worshipped him. Then Brahma asked what their desire might be. The Rishis [sages] answered and said ‘We are engaged in devotion on Kailas; make a place for us to bathe in.’ Then Brahma by a mental effort formed the holy lake of Manasa and the Rishis again engaged in mortification and prayer on Kailas and worshipped the golden ling which rose from the midst of the waters of the lake.