White Mountain

by Robert Twigger

  Greater knowledge of Tibet and her monks – whether they live on the Indian side or the Tibetan side of the border, the monks involved were practitioners of gTum-mo (pronounced ‘dumo’) – a combination of breathing exercises and meditative concentration that is mentioned in the teachings of the Tibetan Vajrayana, which itself stems from Indian Buddhist Vajrayana tradition.

  The basic form involves performing ‘the vase’, a breathing technique where air is brought deep into the lower abdominal region and held there, making a pot belly or ‘vase’ of the stomach. There is a forceful version of this where the air is sucked in, held and then expelled with great vigour. There is also a gentler version where the transitions are far less marked and the intake and exhalation of breath, though deep, is gentle.

  Accompanying the breathing are two varieties of meditation. For the forceful breathing (which is used to ramp up body temperature quickly from ‘cold’, so to speak) the meditation is to picture internally an inner flame, something like a Bunsen burner flame, roaring hot, that starts at the navel and shoots up to the crown of the head. You have to imagine that flame in all its heat, roaring noise and light, burning up through the core of the body.

  For the more gentle variant of body temperature manipulation, the mental image is of a surging sensation of bliss and rising warmth throughout the body.

  Nature magazine has published a scientific investigation of gTum-mo yoga conducted in the Dharamsala Monastery of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile, during which three monks were able to raise the temperature of their fingers and toes by a creditable 8.3 degrees Celsius. This is rather impressive; in some situations it would mean the difference between frostbite and frost-nip or merely coldness. If climbers and others who venture into highly refrigerated environs could learn these techniques, many digits might be saved.

  In 2002 the Harvard Gazette reported on two monks – of Western origin and living in Normandy – who were able to raise their body temperature using gTum-mo techniques. But it wasn’t until 2013 that a more comprehensive set of tests and a general survey of previous attempts was made. In the previous thirty years it had been found that raising peripheral temperatures – of hands and feet – could be achieved through various easily taught meditations, and, in fact, by training people to use simple biofeedback techniques. Typically, a digital thermometer would be connected to sensors on the subject’s hands and feet. Through a greater awareness of the temperature of the hand or foot, the extremity warms up, though you have to avoid forcing it.

  But complications entered the field when it was found that raising core body temperature did not accompany raising peripheral temperatures. One theory suggested that various forms of muscular contraction served to raise hand temperature.

  The 2013 tests showed that, unlike biofeedback results, gTum-mo genuinely raised core body temperatures – so much so that the wet sheet dried by body heat alone was shown to be fact not fiction.

  The scientists involved located one of the very few nunneries where a body temperature-raising ceremony exists. This was at the 4,200-metre-high Gebchak convent, close to Nangchen in Qinghai province. The ceremony was held annually and the nuns participating would wear only a short skirt, shoes or sandals with a wet cotton sheet draping the rest of their body. It would be performed in winter when air temperatures would be dry but – 25 to – 30 degrees Celsius. Anyone who has dipped their hand in water at these temperatures will know the extreme discomfort involved, and how hard it is to regain skin warmth after drastic cooling like this has happened. Ranulph Fiennes dipped his hand in icy sea water to release a sunken sledge and did not dry and warm the hand immediately. He later remarked that these two minutes of carelessness cost him the fingertips of that hand. I’ve swept a frosty tent surface with a bare hand at – 15 degrees Celsius and found the hand still cold ten minutes later, despite wearing a mitten. Such anecdotal evidence makes even the existence of the sheet ceremony all the more impressive.

  The nuns were aged between twenty-five and fifty-two, and some performed the forceful variety of gTum-mo and some the more gentle kind. It was reported that the forceful kind could not be sustained for very long, so it was used to warm the body up, after which the gentle type would be used when walking and wearing the wet sheet.

  Nuns raised their peripheral temperatures easily by to 6.8 degrees Celsius. More importantly, the forceful type of gTum-mo raised core body temperature by over a degree. One woman was able to get it higher and only stopped because she felt uncomfortable. Another stopped because she was developing fever symptoms.

  If peripheral temperature raising results in a lowering of core body temperature, then using techniques to merely warm the hands might actually hasten hypothermia. However, if, as the gTum-mo tests show, you can raise core body temperature and peripheral temperature, you have the means to withstand great cold – as the nuns show during their freezing sheet ceremony.

  As a control, a group of Westerners who had some experience of yoga or meditation or kung fu were taught the gTum-mo technique. Very quickly they were able to show raised body temperature similar to that of the much more experienced Tibetan nuns. Something that appears mysterious and oriental turns out to be rather ordinary after all. I for one will certainly be using it when I next find myself shaking with cold in some Himalayan fastness.

  * Alexandra David-Néel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet

  13

  Buddhism: Religion of the Himalayas

  The wanderer has no land and the sulky one no food.

  Ladakhi proverb

  We have become diverted by the inexplicable so it is time to do some explaining. There are Hindus, Muslims, Bon worshippers, Lepchas, Mishmis and Christians all inhabiting the Himalayas. But the religion that really defines the high places is Buddhism. Just as Nepal is arguably the central Himalayan country, so Buddhism is the central Himalayan religion. And in Nepal, though Hinduism is widespread, there is a large admixture of Buddhist belief; so much so that the people see no contradiction in worshipping one day in a Hindu temple and another day in a Buddhist temple.

  Buddhism was pushed out of Afghanistan by Islam and out of India by Brahmins, but it lodged in the mountains and on the 5,000-metre plateau of Tibet. It travelled to China, Japan, Thailand and Indochina, where there were no competing religions as jealous as those further west. But it was the mountains that protected Buddhism north of India.

  When Tibet, the land of Bod, was also the land of Bon, there existed the odd situation of a state religion which was not only informed by folk-religious practices, but was essentially shamanistic. This is a tricky term that few can agree upon, but in the use of trance states and magical practices, Bon resembled many rites also observed among the Tungus shamans of Siberia, the origin of the term and perhaps the practices too. But the Bon religion bloated its rites with demons and masks and magical items such as ritual knives and effigies of people, that would, eventually, show up in Western black masses and witchcraft cults.

  Then, in the sixth century AD, Buddhism arrived – not from its southern neighbour, India, where it had originated and grown influential over a period of a thousand years, but from Nepal and China. In this period much had changed in the original doctrine, as promulgated by the former prince turned beggar, the original Buddha or enlightened one.

  The original teachings of the Buddha emphasise a turning away from both the stark asceticism of the Indian Sadhu and the pampered life of a rich princeling. The ‘middle way’ promises a path that hovers between attachment and detachment, wary, perhaps, of becoming too attached to the idea of being detached. There is no evidence the Buddha thought his path could become a religion that would compete with Hinduism. However, the Buddhist message that it takes many lives to reach enlightenment is rather a hard sell. That the final goal is merging with a void seems unduly pessimistic to many, though others argue there are translation problems – after all, the way of the Buddha was only written down centuries after his death.

  In any ca
se, the original teachings were never designed to be a world religion like Christianity, which was spread by the Roman empire; Buddhism was dispersed by the Indian King Ashoka.

  Ashoka’s grandfather was one of the great warrior kings of India. Using mass enslavement and tumultuous battles where thousands were vanquished, he wrote his will in blood and tied the vanquished kingdoms into a fledgling empire. Following the lead of his grandfather, Ashoka subdued a neighbouring state, employing the family’s tried and trusted methods of axe, sword and slaughter. Instead of revelling in bloodshed – as he had been taught by his granddaddy – he was repelled by it. To soothe his conscience, he began to meditate and follow the Dharma – the way of the Buddha. He turned his back on war and devoted his life to spreading the peaceable teachings of Buddhism. He endowed temples, had the scriptures written down in Pali – which his son took to Sri Lanka, where they remain to this day. Ashoka found that Buddhism gave a unity and meaning to the empire his grandfather had simply desired; in so doing, he created from the seedlings of the Buddha’s example a world religion.

  By the first century AD, Buddhism began to change. The original, rather austere version, which implied that enlightenment would take many lives to attain, remained as Theravada or Hinayana Buddhism. But a new and more hopeful version, Buddhism 2.0 so to speak, was Mahayana – the ‘greater vehicle’. With Mahayana Buddhism we get the concept of the Bodhisattva, a being capable of achieving Buddhahood, who returns to Earth, is reborn in the world of suffering to help others on their way to enlightenment. By reverse reasoning, one can see that anyone helping others achieve enlightenment might well be a Bodhisattva and therefore a mere single step away from Buddhahood – which is a lot more comforting than thinking you’ve got several lives ahead as a stick insect or a muskrat to endure. Mahayana Buddhism opened the doors to all sorts of new concepts.

  Partly this was due to its rivalry with Brahmanical Hinduism. The Brahmanist method was intellectual and the original simplicity of Buddhism became complex and rather subtle. And this complexity increased as Buddhism began to absorb the tantric traditions that probably predate Hinduism and have always been present on the fringes of Indian religion. The central tenet of tantrism is that enlightenment can be achieved in one lifetime given the right discipline and the right techniques. This injection of tantrism into Buddhism produced Vajrayana Buddhism, which was the variety that made its way to Tibet. In a way, the tantric techniques shared common ground with the folk magic and religion of Tibetan Bon; finding this common ground, it took root and prospered. Vajrayana is known as ‘the diamond or thunderbolt’ variety of Buddhism, because like a diamond bullet it can shoot you to ultimate understanding.

  Religions spread fastest when they are adopted by kings and rulers. Gampo – the Genghis Khan, if you like, of Tibet – took the scattered population of nomads and welded them into an efficient fighting force that enabled him to create the first Tibetan empire, which included much of Turkestan and Nepal. In the Kathmandu valley – an important Buddhist centre visited by Ashoka some centuries before – Gampo requested the hand of a Nepalese princess to seal his control over the land. The devout Buddhist Bhrikuti at first refused his hand, then acquiesced on condition she could bring her Buddhist retainers, tantric images and monk instructors with her. Gampo must have been smitten because he fell in with her plans and built a temple for her at Ramoche in the newly established capital of Lhasa. Perhaps there was also an element of cunning in his adoption of a new religion – it got him away from the powerful influence of the Bon priests. At that time, Bon had neither scripture nor much doctrine beyond magical appeasement of the many gods of the land, but it did have some uncomfortable rules that limited the power of kings. Once a king had a son who had reached the age of thirteen and could ride, he had to step aside – or risk being killed. One can see the shadow here of the later practice of using incarnation as a way of avoiding dynastic rule by a single family, and the practice of using a regent to mentor an adolescent ruler. It seems the Tibetans have always been aware of the dangers of tyranny in the institution of kingship.

  Gampo had heard of Ashoka and thought perhaps that Buddhism might bring him, too, a vaster empire. Having married a Nepalese, he sought a bigger prize in the form of a Chinese princess. The Tang dynasty saw him as a mere frontier upstart and ignored his overtures. To force their hand, Gampo pillaged and slaughtered his way across half of China. This humbled the arrogant Chinese and brought them to the negotiating table with their own eligible princess, also a Buddhist. Presumably, parting with a princess seemed a small price to pay for peace. In a rather clever inversion of the truth, the current Chinese dynasty base claims to Chinese sovereignty on this piece of reverse engineering by Tibet. It is as if Italy laid claim to France because Napoleon invaded Italy and concluded long-dead treaties with them. But then colonial powers will use almost anything to justify occupation of a country.

  Wen Ch’ing, the Chinese princess, did not want to share monks and images with Princess Bhrikuti, so she too brought her own entourage of monks, images and Buddhist retainers. She, too, after the manner of second wives the world over — and who can blame them – demanded her own temple. Gampo agreed, but perhaps he was a little half-hearted. The second temple kept falling down, which the Bon priests interpreted as a sign that Tibet’s native demons were enraged. It was found that the temple had been sited on an ancient underground lake. Gampo was now in a tough spot – if he gave in to the Bon priests he would lose prestige in not just his own but his wife’s eyes. A compromise was reached, which shows exactly how the Bon religion would impact on Tibetan Buddhism to make it the curious mix of demonology and piety we see today. Buddhist Chinese wonder-workers were employed to transport the underground lake spirit to a new location – out of Tibet (presumably because most places already had resident spirits) and into Western China, where the spirit manifested as a huge inland sea called Koko Nor. Many people drowned in the creation of the lake, which satisfied the bloodthirsty Bon priests in their demand for a suitable restitution for the disturbed underground spirit.

  The site of the Chinese princess’s temple was called Jokhang and faced towards Nepal; the Nepalese princess’s temple, known as Ramoche, faces China. Nevertheless, Jokhang became the main temple in Lhasa – central to Tibetan Buddhism and standing in the old centre of Lhasa.

  Through the impact of the two Buddhist princesses, artists, artisans, builders, monks and scholars came from Nepal and Tibet to create the first flowerings of Tibetan Buddhist culture. After a while, Tibet produced its own scholars who travelled to the world’s first universities in India. It is interesting to note that these universities are also of accidental origin. Monks who saw their main task as living on the road, teaching, preaching and tending to the sick, had nowhere to stay during the wettest months of the monsoon. The first universities were hostels for such men, who, gathered together and with nothing to do except watch the drips fall from the banana-leaf roofs, started to teach each other and share what they knew. Most importantly, it was found that books could be centralised and more efficiently used and lectures could disseminate knowledge much more quickly than one-to-one conversation. Soon a permanent institution took root – as they usually do – and the vast early universities of India appeared. Nalanda, founded a thousand years before Oxford and Cambridge, had over 10,000 students (about the size of Oxford’s undergraduate population today), eight colleges and three vast libraries. The monasteries of Tibet were founded in imitation of these universities and retain the same focus and interest in knowledge. Even today, anyone who has met a Tibetan monk usually remarks on their curiosity and thirst for information. The then North Indian alphabet was adapted to writing Tibetan, which wasn’t an easy job, but this marked the beginning of Tibetan history in a way, as events could at last be recorded. It also meant that the great Sanskrit sutras could be translated and the Bon religion could at last get its own liturgical canon and vie on an equal footing with the upstart Buddhist religion.

/>   It has been remarked – in this book and elsewhere – that here began the strange process of symbiosis between Bon and Tibetan Buddhism. Indeed, an uninitiated stranger can enter one of the few remaining Bon temples and see no huge differences between that and a Buddhist temple. But whereas Bon gained a scripture and some Buddhistic teachings, Buddhism gained demons, oracles and numerous other borrowings that derived from the folk religion of the country. Interestingly, many of these are similar to the folk religious rites we have in Europe, namely:

  • Scapegoat rituals

  • Maypole dancing

  • Fear of witches and witchcraft

  • Festival welcoming the first cuckoo of the year

  Many other elements of present-day Tibetan Buddhist practice derive from folk religious origins. In addition to the above, these include:

  • The wind horse prayer flag symbolising a mystic journey (shamanistic flying), but in Buddhism tasked with transporting prayers

  • Interest in numerology

  • Faith placed in astrology

  • Luck ritual performed on rooftops after a wedding

  • Kusang festival – burning incense barley and beer at high points and passes

  • The central column placed in the Jokhang, the most sacred temple

  But outside Lhasa the Dharma did not make much headway. Tibetan nomads and farmers preferred to propitiate their demons, and the Bon priests who ministered to them and the village shamans who cured all ills were not keen to give up the power they wielded. The demons who controlled the weather, the sparse rain of Tibet, the deep snows, the biting cold, the floods and misfortunes of an extreme climate provided something the well-meaning and long-suffering Buddhists could not: someone to blame other than one’s own crappy former lives, and someone to get help from.