Known as yartsa gunbuin Tibetan – the name means ‘summer grass, winter bug’ – it was long believed to be a genuine mix of the two. Cordyceps sinensis was first written about in AD 620 in the time of the Tang dynasty. A fifteenth-century Tibetan poem entitled ‘An Ocean of Aphrodisiacal Qualities’ credited the fungus with the power to ‘remove prana diseases and cure bile diseases without raising the phlegm; a marvellous medicine, in particular it increases semen’. It was poetically described as an almost mythical beast that transformed from animal to plant in summer and from plant to animal in winter. Until very recently, we reserved the usual sneering attitude to such ancient botanising: we knew better – Cordyceps was simply a parasitic fungus that fed off the hibernating larvae of the ghost moth. But more detailed studies have revealed that there is much more of a symbiotic relationship than the one-sided parasitic kind. The fungus inhabits the moth larva and draws nutrition from it, while the larva in turn derives energy from the fungus. Despite killing many of the larvae, the presence of the fungus may enable the few survivors to be strong enough to thrive.
Like some horror film alien, Ophiocordyceps sinensis eventually sprouts from the head of the subterranean-dwelling caterpillar that ultimately becomes the ghost moth. The spores of the fungus, or perhaps the filaments of non-fruiting fungus, invade the breathing pores of the larvae – which spends five years burrowed 15 centimetres underground, before it hatches as a moth. Or not, if the fungus gets there first.
Environmentally, Bhutan is still the favoured haunt for this moth. Pressure on habitat in Nepal and Tibet may have driven its numbers down in the last two decades, along with the milder weather this region has been experiencing. At the same time, owing to increasing publicity about its miracle effects, demand continues to rise sharply. In the early 1990s you could buy a kilogram of Cordyceps in Tibet for $10; now it will set you back thousands of dollars – depending how close you are to its source.
For many years it was considered impossible to make the Cordyceps fruit in the laboratory. Now, driven by price rises, much more sophisticated growing techniques are being used. The hypoxic environment of 4,000+ metres is replicated in special growing tents where oxygen levels are only two-thirds that of normal air. The acidic quality of the soil, the low temperatures of the high Himalayas – all this is now replicated in the commercial growing labs producing Cordyceps. However, one quality still eludes the cultivar as opposed to the wild version – cultivated Cordyceps has uncontrollable variations in its mineral content, something the wild version stabilises naturally.
To look at, the caterpillar fungus is nothing special. The fruiting part looks like a rather dark and insubstantial sausage or a somewhat charred tuber (when fresh, it is yellower in colour). The fruiting stalk of the fungus is about 4-10 centimetres longer than the caterpillar (which is itself quite big at 10-15 centimetres).
We have known about caterpillar fungus in the West for a long time. Jesuit missionaries first brought it back from China in 1726 and introduced it in Paris as an aphrodisiac and general life tonic. In 1843, the obsessive cryptogamist (cryptogamy is the study of plants that reproduce by asexual spores rather than seeds: lichens, fungi, mosses, ferns and slime moulds) Miles Berkeley described the caterpillar scientifically for the first time. Yet it was only in 1993 that Cordyceps went mainstream. At the Chinese national games that year nine world records were broken in distance-running events. Then at the 1994 World Championships in athletics held in Stuttgart two more world records were broken. Controversial running coach Ma Junren declared that no steroids had been used, only infusions of turtle blood and Ophiocordyceps sinensis. Though later tests on athletes have not been conclusive in showing the benefit of the mushroom (partly as a result of the design of the tests and the kind of athletic event concerned), there has been overwhelming evidence from more widespread testing on ordinary people – and mice – that demonstrates that this fungus is far from being a figment of the quack medicinal mind.
Research has shown that imbibing Cordyceps through a tea infusion increases cellular ATP levels, which in turn increases energy output at the cellular level. One’s overall energy is raised but there is no deficit later, as is the case with caffeine and other stimulants.
In one test where elderly patients were administered Cordyceps or a placebo, none of those who received the placebo showed any benefits (a rare result in itself; the placebo effect occurs with almost all drugs) but those who imbibed Cordyceps all showed significant improvements in chronic fatigue reduction, as well as improvements in breathing, amnesia and other symptoms of hypoxia. This is not so surprising. The Tibetans have always claimed that a major use for Cordyceps is to reduce altitude sickness – hypoxia – and it seems that it does.
Another group of elderly volunteers – all over sixty-five – took Cordyceps for six weeks. They showed significant improvements in stationary bicycle performance, increased energy and oxygen capacity when compared to the placebo group.
More fiendish testing is possible with mice, poor things. When placed in an oxygen-deprived vivarium (perhaps not the best word), so lacking in the gas that death was inevitable for all participants, those mice that had partaken of Cordyceps lasted an astonishing three times longer than those with no such fungal assistance.
In the equally desperate environment of the terminal swimming tank, mice were tested for their endurance and will to live. In this test, mice were tipped into a tank with slippery steep sides from which no escape was possible. The mice kept swimming until they drowned from utter exhaustion (or were pulled out by a soft-hearted technician). Those mice given Cordyceps lasted significantly longer, swam for longer and suffered less exhaustion than the mice not given Cordyceps.
Switching back to humans, the Beijing Medical University dosed fifty asthma patients with Cordyceps. It was found that not only was ATP production boosted, but auto-immune tracheal contractions were reduced. Both effects benefit asthmatics; they experienced an 81.3 per cent reduction in symptoms in only five days. Those given the more usual antihistamines found only a 61 per cent decrease in symptoms, and this took nine rather than five days.
Another Chinese study confirmed what many researchers merely hint at: Cordyceps has a sex-steroid effect – at least on mice. Are you a man or a mouse, one might ask. Stanford University followed this up and concluded that Cordyceps does indeed boost human androgen and other sex hormones found in the adrenal glands and the testicles.
It was this use of Cordyceps – as a Chinese sex drug – that led the Gurkha lads into their losing battle with sixty-five very angry Narpa villagers. They ran – and one account (the official account is considered unreliable) has it that two boys fell into a crevasse, where they died. The Narpa claim that they had only intended to give the Gurkhas a good scare. But with two dead, they feared the others would betray them to the police. With sticks, stones and farm implements the five were killed and chopped into pieces; the parts were then disposed of in the fast-flowing river.
Women from the Gurkha village went calling a month later on the police chief of Chama, the nearest town. When writer Eric Hansen interviewed him two years after the murders, he was drunk on local home brew and openly boastful: ‘This was my most successful mission – we arrested 70 people!’
Since there was no jail in Chama, a stockade was improvised and most of the male populace of Nar were interned – between sixty-five and seventy male suspects, depending on whose version you read.
Meanwhile the Gurkha people demanded blood money from the Annapurna Conservation Area project. This – perceived as rich – organisation fills its coffers from the thousands of tourists who trog round the Annapurna Circuit each year. The Gurkha appeal was successful: $14,000 was awarded to the family of each victim.
Their suspected killers were not faring so well. While most were released on parole fairly quickly, twenty-seven were interned for over two years. After many prevarications and delays – some of which smacked of sheer idleness on the part of the autho
rities – the Narpa were sentenced. That month the people of Nar held a week-long puja. They prayed that their men be set free. Six men – said to be the murderers – were sentenced to life imprisonment. Thirteen accomplices were set free, with the two years already spent in jail serving as their sentence. The eight remaining went free, without a stain on their character maybe, but having served the same sentence as the accomplices.
That a fungus which was claimed to prolong life and supply life-giving energy should be the cause of death is just what we should expect. As I have already noted, Hindus claim we are living in KaliYarg – the age of Kali – when everything is upside down, good is bad and bad is perceived as good. Clearly, the mushroom that grows from the head of a caterpillar has driven some people mad . . .
11
Alexandra David-Néel and the Dawn Runners of Tibet
The mouse is the head in a house without a cat.
Balti proverb
I was in Kalimpong and feeling low. It didn’t help that I was staying in a very cheap hotel, a hovel really. The manager was friendly, but it was not enough to overcome the depressing windowless bedroom. The broken window in my ‘en suite’ bathroom provided the only outlook: over a cracked and dribbling sewage pipe and a steel exterior staircase (on to which it dripped). All night there was a whiff of sewage and the constant passage of ringing footsteps, even with the flimsy bathroom door closed. My room had that deeply grimy look that only years of half-arsed cleaning can achieve; a line of grime highlighted every place a little awkward for mop, broom, or duster to reach. You begin to resent walking barefoot on such a floor . . .
It was time to play the luxury card. As Bruce Chatwin rightly wrote: ‘luxury is only luxurious in adverse conditions’. I wanted to save money – hence hovelling – but I needed to stay cheerful. I called the Himalayan Hotel and they had one vacancy – I was over in a shot.
Kalimpong was a hill station, a sort of Mussoorie to Darjeeling’s Simla; it was smaller and easier to get around but had less going for it. The Lepcha Museum of indigenous people was shut. So were the ruins of the Damsang Dzong, where the Lepcha kings were soundly beaten by the Bhutanese. Shy and retiring by nature, the Lepcha legacy was upheld by a collection of proverbs and folktales I bought in a stationer’s shop (where I also found Peter Goullart’s excellent Forgotten Kingdom). So I had high hopes for the Himalayan Hotel – a colonial-style place where everyone who was famous who had ever visited this part of the Himalayas had stayed: Hillary and Tenzing, Heinrich Harrer, Alexandra David-Néel, Joseph Rock. The hotel’s founder had been David Macdonald, interpreter on the 1904 Younghusband expedition. Already I was finding that 1904/5 was a key date for my researches. It was the year Halford Mackinder proposed the ‘Heartland’ Theory (he suggested that whoever controls the supercontinent of Eurasia controls the world – a theoretical backup to the Great Game), and the year the West finally burst open the inner fastness and mystery of Tibet. It was also the year Aleister Crowley attempted Kanchenjunga using newly invented metal climbing aids known as crampons.
The Himalayan Hotel, where many famous travellers have stayed
I was lucky enough to get the Alexandra David-Néel room. She seemed a saner version of Madame Blavatsky, and though there is some quibbling about the exact geography of her travels, she definitely had real experience of travelling extensively in the Himalayas. Her room was large, old-fashioned, spick and span and perfect. I imagined Alexandra lying on the bed, writing up her memoirs of mystical experiences in Sikkim and Tibet. She’d spent the first two years of the First World War in a cave in Sikkim, studying Tibetan spirituality with a fifteen-year-old monk who became her lifelong companion. Before that she’d been an opera singer in Indochina, playing Carmen in Hanoi. She met the thirteenth Dalai Lama twice – once in Kalimpong, where I was now. She wore trousers to travel when they weren’t fashionable, visited Lhasa, and spent part of the Second World War in the Soviet Union.
Reading her work, I was agreeably surprised to discover she doesn’t come across like a New Age nut; which is what I had been expecting. She does tend towards the fey. Often, in an ordinary situation but faced by someone who looks strange or exotic, she fantasises a what if situation and the what if is her interlocutor disappearing in a puff of genii smoke or instantly reading a mind. Her reality, from the moment she arrived in the Himalayas, was not exactly one of credulity, but it is oriented heavily towards potential invisible forces.
Her style reminds me of David Hatcher Childress, whose Lost Cities series of travel memoirs is equal parts intriguing and oddly pedestrian. One reason for reading both is not just for the uncensored interesting information but also the kind of vicarious travel thrill they supply; that indefinable combination of credulousness and savvy needed to make a good trip.
One invisible, possibly demonic, force, which sounds more plausible than others, is that of super endurance, which she observes among the mountain-dwelling monks. As we’ve seen, Tibetan monks can raise and lower their temperature at will, so it doesn’t seem too unlikely that they would encourage their bodies to other feats of extreme endurance. The police report that people resisting arrest while on the drug PCP can appear to have the strength of six – easily throwing bigger and bulkier policemen out of their way. There is considerable anecdotal evidence of elderly, infirm or slight women lifting cars or other super-heavy machinery* off injured loved ones. No one really denies these situations happen – the thing is, they require immense and life-threatening situations; you can’t just dial up superman’s strength when you need it.
Alexandra David-Néel was travelling with a caravan in the Himalayas. She relates a small black moving dot that quickly became apparent as a human being moving with great rhythmic and elastic steps. He did not reply when spoken to. Members of her group thought he must be lost or a survivor of some mountain accident. He was almost running and yet seemed without any tiredness, despite carrying bags on his back. She compared the impression of seeing him with that of watching a slow motion film at the cinema, such was the ease and fluidity of the man’s movement. No one could keep up with him on foot. One of the party followed on horseback, but turned back when the extraordinary runner took off up a steep and rocky slope impassable to equines.
Instead of focusing on wealth creation and making labour-saving inventions, the people of the Himalayas, David-Néel writes, have concentrated on psychic development. In special monasteries – the suggestively named ‘powerhouses’ – mastery over breathing and mind is developed using symbols, mantras and long periods of concentration. And long periods of walking.
I know of Bedouin who, in exceptional circumstances, will travel all night and day with camels, covering 70-80 kilometres in a twelve-hour period, and some of them will be walking much of the time. Masai will happily run 80 kilometres if their cattle are threatened and they need to move fast. Humans are long-distance running machines, as Arthur Newton showed in the 1920s when he started, aged forty, as an ultra-long-distance runner, shattering records of the time for fifty, seventy and one hundred mile races by times of up to an hour less than previous winners. His method was simple and evolved by himself with an eye on super endurance. Most long-distance runners evolve from marathon running and are used to a faster pace than can be sustained for seventy or more miles. They therefore run like hares with frequent rests. Newton focused instead on breathing, maintaining a pace that he knew he could keep up for the entire race – without stopping. He theorised that when the many systems of the body work together, they need to be in some kind of rhythm or syncopation to perform at peak efficiency. This feeds back to the runner as a ‘second wind’ – and Newton wrote about how to achieve a ‘third, fourth and fifth wind’.
Newton believed that, while interval training built strength, stamina rested on getting into a rhythm dictated by breathing. Had he stumbled, or perhaps, elegantly jogged, across the same information as the Himalayan runners mentioned by Alexandra David-Néel?
What is emphasised by David-N
éel is the need for the mind to dominate the body, for a mental picture of the destination to be so powerful that it almost takes over the runner’s own volition.
Tell people there is buried treasure if you want them to dig their fields; they will get wealthy just the same.
Himalayan proverb
* To cite one recent example: Kirstie McCrum, ‘Teen girl uses “superhuman strength” to lift burning truck off dad and save family’, Daily Mirror, 11 January 2016.
12
Release Your Fiery Inner Demons
Canals are large in a waterless land, measures for grain are large in a land without grain.
Balti proverb
The Cordyceps fungus allows you to function better at altitude, but breathing control – conscious breathing – helps you to go higher too, and to get higher. By messing with the amount of oxygen the brain receives, all kinds of states can be triggered. The body, too, can be fooled into changing its default settings. This helps you cope with other aspects associated with altitude – namely cold.
For many years stories came from the Himalayas of monks who had absolute control over their body’s autonomic systems. This is something no conventionally trained doctor can possibly agree is true. As a result, these stories remained part of the imaginary journey of many people.
Alexandra David-Néel talks about the incredible ability of certain Tibetan monks reputedly able to raise their body temperature at will.* Draped in wet sheets at minus 35 degrees Celsius, their bodies naked beneath, great gouts of steam rose from the wet cloths as their superheated torsos turned the icy garments into steaming pudding cloth. Other travellers made mention of this technique, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that Western science was able to catch up with Eastern expertise.
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