Back of Beyond

by David Yeadon

  see it that way—

  a gay celebration

  everything’s okay

  and there’s no need to pray

  for wealth, and forgiveness

  and bliss and delay in divine retribution

  for life—

  is a time to play

  making love in the hay

  gazing up at the day

  letting come what come may

  (and never saying nay)

  but rather

  hey hey—

  and “Hey Hey!”

  And when its all over

  (there’ll be nothing to pay)

  you’ll merely return, just the same way,

  to where you once loved

  and lay

  in a peace, in a place, far far away

  (and right now, today)

  And maybe—who knows—

  you’ll come back here someday. Hurray!

  So—don’t you delay

  Just say…(and repeat the whole thing all over again!)

  Well, if s hardly grand philosophy but it seemed to fit the mood of that moment. At least the gloom was gone, and I was free to explore the city again with a bunch of newfound friends.

  One was a young man, a Buddhist scholar, who had lived in Kathmandu for a number of years working with the rural blind out in the Himalayan valleys, far beyond the city. His task was not an easy one. Buddhism teaches that bodily afflictions and other ailments are divine retribution for past karmas, punishment for acts in previous lifetimes, and the idea of trying to overcome such afflictions is considered by many believers to be ill-advised. But, with great charm and tact, my friend has persevered and changes were coming slowly to the villages. The blind were being encouraged to assert their independence, become full participatory members of the community, operate small farms and businesses.

  It was slow, slogging work but in Nepal nothing changes quickly in spite of the thousands of dedicated field-workers sponsored by well-meaning organizations from the West. And they were all here—agricultural specialists encouraging tree planting on the rapidly eroding slopes of the foothills; health workers; engineers; financial whiz kids trying to untangle the complexities of Nepal’s subsistence economy; missionary teachers; medical technicians; dam builders; Peace Corps volunteers. It seems at times that there are as many foreign volunteers and specialists as tourists. There’s something about this little nation that warms the hearts of wealthy philanthropists. The people, the scenery, the still-dominant royal family, the endurance of its varied cultures, locked in time, away in the remote valleys, reachable only by long weary treks on difficult mountain paths. A wonderful place!

  Back in the boardrooms of Europe or America, Nepal seems manageable—a compact kingdom hardly larger than New England. Send some cash, a few enthusiastic specialists backed by a bevy of volunteers, and the job will be done in no time. Great public relations, a satisfying tax write-off, and a chance to spend some time in one of the world’s most beautiful remote hideaways.

  Only it doesn’t always work out quite so easily. Nepal is Nepal and Nepalese ways of life are not as malleable as the “let’s-make-some-changes” guys would like to think. And there’s another problem. Nepal is very seductive. Centuries of slow, isolated cultural development have produced a beguiling mélange of architectural form, spiritual intensity, and societal richness, unique in the world. Just as I was, outsiders are often overwhelmed by the power of the place; half-baked schemes for “modernization” and social enlightenment suddenly seem inappropriate—even threatening—in a place offering itself as a touchstone to these more eternal values and truths, which Western nations have often forgotten in their wild pursuit of wealth and material abundance. The teachers are often the taught here. It comes with the territory.

  My friends entertained me royally, and I remember one afternoon in particular that three of us sat drinking chhang (homebrewed millet beer) served from a communal bowl in the shady garden of a restaurant famous for its Tibetan wontons or momos. We had gorged our way into a pleasantly loopy state. Over the garden wall I could hear the spinning of prayer wheels in a temple courtyard. A flight of white pigeons curled over our heads. The ceaseless prattle of the city seemed a long way away.

  “I’d like you to meet an artist,” the girl said, filling my glass with chhang for the umpteenth time.

  “Lovely,” I said. I had no special plans. Kathmandu does that to you. Time becomes seductively elastic and nothing seems particularly urgent in this lovely rice-paddied valley under the mountains.

  Eventually we finished the bowl, and she led the way past the temple and into a monastery at the end of a muddy track. We were greeted by monks in orange robes and led to a small cell at the rear of the compound. And there he was, a tiny elfin creature sitting on a stool in a bare room furnished only with a bed and an old wood chest. A single bulb hung down on a frayed wire from the ceiling.

  He turned and smiled, and the room seemed immediately brighter. It was a smile I shall always remember. His whole face shone, his eyes sparkled and seemed translucent; I felt as if I’d been immersed in silky warm water. We were all smiling. I looked at my friends and their faces shone. The whole room was one big grin.

  The girl introduced him to me, but I’ve long forgotten his name. It doesn’t matter anyway. I was mesmerized by him. His aura was almost tangible, evoking stillness and joy and something much deeper.

  “He’s from the Dolpo,” she said.

  Now, like many of the ancient Himalayan kingdoms that once existed all along the Himalayan range, Dolpo is still a remote and unexplored region, three hundred miles to the west of Kathmandu.

  “How did he get here?”

  “He walked.”

  Of course. Even Nepal’s single major road, the “Rajpath” to India, one of the most tortuous mountain roads in the world (and one I was to experience first-hand later), was only completed in 1959. The rest of the country is still virtually roadless, bound together only by a spiderweb network of narrow paths.

  “That must have taken a while.”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Alone?”

  “Oh no,” she laughed. “He is a very famous artist in the Dolpo. Two hundred of his followers came with him.”

  “Why did he come?”

  “He was invited to paint a series of tankas for the temple here.”

  Now tankas (or thangkas) are one of the major art forms of Nepal’s strange blending of Buddhist and Hindu faiths. They are a written record usually composed in circular mandala form, depicting the lives, deeds, and incarnations of the various deities and the supreme power of Brahman, the metaphysical absolute, the beginning and the end. They are works of the most exquisite detail painted with tiny brushes and using natural dyes made from cinnabar, lapis lazuli flower petals, and gold dust. While the broad themes are constant, artists are given unlimited freedom to interpret all the various facets of Buddhism’s four truths—pain, suffering, desire, and nirvana—and all the entangled attributes and activities of the deities—erotic, comic, cruel, demonic, loving, and lethargic (the gods are often appealingly human in their foibles).

  The result is a staggeringly rich panoply of teeming images, pulsing with life—an artwork of great beauty and subtlety but also an important visual aid to meditation and religious insight.

  The smiling artist said something in a soft singsong voice.

  “He’s asking if you’d like to see one of his tankas.”

  “Yes, I would, very much.”

  The elfin nodded, opened up the wooden chest in the corner of his cell, and carefully lifted out a rectangle of stretched canvas, about four feet high and three feet wide.

  Slowly, almost shyly, he turned the canvas toward us.

  It exploded with color—bright emerald green mountains, golden-edged clouds, pink and sapphire-blue lotus blossoms, curling traceries of leaves, haloed gods, some black and fierce, some with elephant’s faces, others with huge mouths and horns and a welter o
f gracefully waving arms, some almost transparent with long-fingered upraised palms and gentle almond-shaped eyes, and all clad in meticulously detailed robes. There were scores of separate images, each one tingling with symbolic gestures that I couldn’t begin to comprehend. And yet the painting possessed a swirling unity of composition so that each detail could be enjoyed separately and yet still form an integral part of the whole. Far more structured than the rambling fantasies of Hieronymus Bosch, but just as filled with life and movement—and humanity. These were gods, but gods reflecting all the kaleidoscopic miasma of human experience and knowledge.

  My friends had seen tankas before, hundreds of them (you can buy ones of questionable quality throughout Kathmandu), but even they were silenced by the power and vitality of this little artist’s work.

  “How long…?” I began.

  The girl asked how long the tanka had taken to paint.

  “He says about three months—three months of twelve-hour days.”

  “And he’s painting more?

  “Six. He’s been asked to do six.”

  “And then?”

  “He’ll go back to Dolpo.”

  “Walking?”

  “Walking.”

  “Three hundred miles.”

  “Right. Three hundred miles.”

  “And when he gets back?”

  “He’ll paint more tankas. This is his whole life.”

  We thanked the artist. His smile felt to be warming my shoulders as we left the cell.

  Outside it was dusk and the Himalayan ridges were flushed in a peach glow. Prayer wheels were still turning in the temple courtyard, spun by worshippers as they walked clockwise, round and round the white stupa, topped by the eyes of Buddha. Endless circling. The great mandala of creation, slowly turning, through all the centuries, ever changing, always the same. A universal centering here, in this little isolated mountain kingdom.

  I wondered about the wheel spinners. Most were dressed in layers of old, poor clothes. Maybe they were peasants from the lonely valleys making merit by their long pilgrimages, living hard lives in a harsh climate, snatching subsistence crops from tiny patches of cleared earth in a land of broken rocks, ice, and burning summers. Surely it couldn’t be hard for them to recognize the dukkha of Buddha—the teaching that all so-called reality is empty and full of the “suffering of desire.” But had they found sunyata by being awakened (buddha is the Sanskrit word for awakened) to the freedom that exists beyond hopes and fears and desires? Their faces were shadowy in the half light. It was hard to detect emotion in them—any emotion. Maybe that’s what enlightenment looks like. A blank indifference to reality. Merely a part of the cycle, moving slowly around the stupa, turning the wheels….

  Time to head for the hills.

  I’d spent a day with a group of weary but starry-eyed trekkers who had just returned from a three-week hike to the base of Everest, way to the northeast of the city.

  First came the warnings of littered trails, unreliable and greedy Sherpa guides, altitude sickness, the overabundance of other trekkers, expensive supplies, wild dogs, smoke- and animal-filled mud-walled houses, and, of course, diarrhea (the notorious “Kathmandu crud”!).

  Then they told me the things I wanted to hear—of crisp nights spent in sleeping bags under the stars; meals of tsampa (ground roasted barley mixed with chilies) and dhal bhat, and mellow intoxication from home-produced brews of chhang and rakshi (rice liquor); the endurance of their barefoot porters carrying loads in bamboo baskets (dokos) hung on straps from their foreheads; tattered lines of prayer flags and mani walls—piles of stones carved with the Buddhist inscription “Om Mani Padme Horn” (“Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus”); stumpy stupa shrines topped by Buddha eyes; the incredible wild beauty of valleys, glaciers, ice fields, and glimpses of Himalayan peaks across meadows brimming with alpine flowers; flocks of snow pigeons, pheasants, choughs, eagles; strange dhami shamans (spirit mediums and medicine men), and the one feature that set them all nodding and smiling—tremendous pride in their individual feats of endurance.

  I left them, elated by the prospect of days among the mountains. The sun was shining. The high white peaks behind the city beckoned. All the arrangements had been made…

  And then cancelled.

  This was one dream that didn’t materialize at all. I was hit by a full barrage of bad luck—an ankle twisted badly in one of Kathmandu’s muddy potholes on a night when all the lights went out, a roaring pneumonic cold, and another Costa Rica-type attack of dysentery, which left me flat on my back for days, weak as a baby.

  I was unable to muster much of the Buddhist capacity for acceptance of fate. This wasn’t predestiny. This was just bloody unfair! To come all this way to fulfill a boyhood promise, and then to be stuck in a cold hotel room, hearing all the trekker talk outside in the street and the thump of boots and the final farewell of a friend.

  “Tough luck, Dave. There’s always next time, mate. Those hill’s ain’t going nowhere!”

  Right.

  And apparently, neither was I.

  13. INDIA—THE KUMBH MELA

  Swamis, Sadhus, and Instant Salvation

  The ultimate cleansing of body and spirit! At Allahabad in north central India one splash, paddle, and body-wash in the fast-flowing Ganges—the holy mother of rivers—at the right moment of the right day “reaps the benefit of bathing on ten million solar eclipse days.” It’s an offer any self-respecting Hindu cannot possibly refuse. A whole lifetime of sin, debauch, and spiritual uncenteredness, washed away in a few wet moments. A new beginning, a promise of eternal bliss, salvation, Nirvana!

  “You should see the Kumbh Mela at Allahabad,” I’d been advised by a friend in Kathmandu. “It’s an incredible festival of cleansing. Fifteen million people—all coming to the Ganges once every twelve years. Incredible. You might just make it. It’s worth a try!”

  At first glance Allahabad is not a particularly prepossessing city. (Second glances don’t help much either.) Nonetheless this dusty, hot place is a renowned center of learning, an intellectual nexus, for students from all over India. But much more important, it is the meeting place of the three most sacred rivers, the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the “invisible river,” Saraswati.

  “From time immemorial,” reads the local brochure, “Prayag (Allahabad) has been regarded by pious Hindus as the most sacred place in the country and as the God Brahma performed many yajnos or sacrifices here, it is called Tirthraj or the holiest of the holy places.” (Usually I don’t enjoy the language of guidebooks, but this one has such a pleasant, almost Victorian English flow to it.)

  “King Harsha Vardhana, the beloved emperor of India, used to hold at Prayag, where the fair water of the Ganges plays with the blue waves of the Yamuna, a quinquennial fair, at which rich and poor, saint and sinner from every part of India gathered. These gatherings had great advantages. People from different provinces met together, exchanged their thoughts, and profited by discourses with learned men from places other than their own. Those who came from backward districts were imbued with advanced thoughts and ideas and returned home with changed minds. Sadhus and saints solved the queries of many an inquirer. Trade flourished and wealth circulated.” (This is always an important criterion of Indian festivals.)

  The brochure continues in its delightful prose: “The Mela or fair is a very old Indian institution. A number of pilgrims, not to be reckoned in thousands of lakhs [Note: The Indian system of counting is a rather confusing conglomeration of hazars (thousands), lakhs (one hundred thousand), and crores (ten million).] assemble here to bathe at the confluence where a temporary township springs on the riverbed. Some of the pilgrims live there in temporary huts in order to obtain religious merit by taking a plunge in the river every day during the whole month and they are known as Kaplabasi.”

  Apparently there’s some uncertainty about the origins of this amazing gathering of up to fifteen million devotees from all over India, but the Chinese traveler-historian Hinen Tsang
described his experiences here in 644 A.D.:

  The pilgrims were people from all ranks of life, from the Emperor Harsha Vardhana with his ministers and tributary chieftains, down to the beggar in rags. Also among the participants were the heads of various religious sects as well as philosophers, scholars, ascetics, and spiritual aspirants from all walks of life. The emperor performed all the rites with great eclat and ceremoniously distributed the wealth of his treasury to people of all denominations…The people responded enthusiastically for they were given a three-fold opportunity of improved personal wealth, winning fresh inspiration through consorting with the sadhus, and redemptive bathing in the sacred rivers.

  And all this for a river—the great river Ganges—symbol of all rivers and all water in India. Legend has it that by bathing or drinking the sacred Ganga water, one attains salvation. The water itself is said, even by scientists, to contain mystical properties. A quote from The Times of India:

  The Ganga water, even when it is polluted, becomes pure again after traversing a distance of 8 km. It is considered that the mixing of various herbs in the water is why it has such qualities. The Goddess Ganga expressed the fear that the people of the earth would pollute its waters but Bhagirath promised that coming generations would cleanse it again. This task has now been commenced by the Government of India…

  From the distance it looks like a vast military encampment: Thousands of square white tents with four-sided pyramidal roofs lined up in endless rows fill the dusty flats around the Triveni Sangam, the confluence of the three rivers (you can actually see only two but in India nothing is what it seems and everyone insists that it is the third, invisible river of Saraswati that endows this place with unique significance).