Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  For all its desolate beauty, Kailas, like Jerusalem, is a crowded spiritual space. The trail around it is punctuated everywhere with shrines and monasteries of many religions and sects. However, it is the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, which, as we saw in the last chapter, emerged in the eleventh century through mahasiddha like Naropa, that dominates Kailas, thanks to a fabled struggle that took place here between an eleventh-century Kagyu poet and yogi, Milarepa, and the champion of the Bon faith, Naro Bonchung. At stake, according to legend, was the spiritual future of Tibet.

  Milarepa’s battle with Naro Bonchung is related in a biography written several hundred years later, in the fifteenth century, by a Kagyu monk named Tsangnyon Heruka, who wore his hair long and drank from a kapala, or skull-cup. His name translates as the ‘madman of Tsang’, the region of central Tibet he was born in, but his madness was far from pathological. The nyon-pa, the mad or wild ones, practised what might be called ‘crazy wisdom’, wandering as beggars and meditating far from the controlled environment of a monastery. They broke their vows of celibacy, grew their hair and drank alcohol, spiritual vagabonds whose public displays of wild, aberrant behaviour seemed uncontrolled but were part of a disciplined spiritual practice characteristic of the Kagyu lineage. It was a restatement of the concepts that had inspired the Kagyu school in the first place. Milarepa appealed to Tsangnyon because of the way he lived and the things he did, but also because Milarepa was part of the founding lineage of the deeply tantric Kagyu order: there is a direct line of teachers and students that links him with the Indian tantric adept, Tilopa himself.

  Tsangnyong’s biography of Milarepa was one of the first books printed in Tibet using wood blocks and was an instant hit. At every turn, Bonchung is thwarted by Milarepa. When Bonchung breaks a rock with magic, Milarepa cuts it in two with a yogic stare. Having seen his best efforts easily surpassed, the Bon priest acknowledges Milarepa’s superiority but then gambles everything on a final race to the summit. Milarepa’s followers wake early to witness Naro Bonchung sitting astride his magical flying drum, playing on a trumpet made from a human thighbone and dressed in a green cloak. Milarepa is dozing, unconcerned as those around him panic. He merely makes a sign towards his rival that pins him in a holding pattern around the mountain. Then, as the first rays of the sun touch the summit, he clicks his fingers and is instantly transported there. Relic traces of this cosmic encounter are still visible to the faithful on their ritual circuit of the mountain. Thanks to Milarepa’s victory, it was the Kagyu school that controlled the spiritually prestigious Kailas region. Milarepa’s life story is still popular, translated for today’s generation into manga comics and movies; he’s often pictured with green skin, from drinking too much nettle soup. But this fantastical legend also has a historical backdrop, one that raises fundamental questions: about what Tibet’s cultural and spiritual world looked like before the arrival of Buddhism; how that preliterate world was absorbed into the new Tibet; and how regional politics would impact on the new state religion.

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  Kailas has another name that is older than the rest: Tisé. Its meaning is obscure but its etymology lies rooted in another language altogether, that of the Zhang Zhung culture, also written as Shangshung. This language used to be described as Indo-European, as opposed to Tibeto-Burmese, but even that broad categorisation has since been called into question. There are simply not enough written examples to be definitive. Five texts that may yet prove to be Zhang Zhung have emerged from the Library Cave near Dunhuang but the fragments we have aren’t sufficient to reconstruct its origins. Some scholars have claimed Zhang Zhung is related to ancient languages spoken in Indian Himalayan districts like Lahaul and Spiti, immediately on the other side of the Himalaya. Others argue the language of the Zhang Zhung originated in the Chinese and Tibetan borderlands far to the north-east some time in the Neolithic, thousands of years before the great castles, temples and tombs that characterise the later culture were built in the first millennium. This group migrated west, it is argued, in response to a worsening climate of lower rainfall and desertification, forcing people to adopt nomadic practices to survive. Only now is the archaeological work underway that may answer the mystery of the lost kingdom of Zhang Zhung and deepen our understanding of the exceptional bond Tibetans have with their landscape.

  In 1962, in his landmark work Tibetan Civilisation, the historian Rolf Alfred Stein recounted how the growing kingdom of Songtsen Gampo, expanding west in the seventh century into the upper Yarlung Tsangpo valley, ‘encountered a distinctly foreign nation – Shangshung with its capital Khyunglung’. He described Zhang Zhung as the home of Bon, ‘a religion adopted by Tibetans before Buddhism’. That begged several questions Stein couldn’t answer. Just how ‘foreign’ were the Zhang Zhung? Had they originated in the same place as Tibetans? Stein also found it hard to picture Zhang Zhung as an organised state. Yet the first wife of the powerful king Songtsen Gampo, long before the Chinese princess Wencheng and his many other wives, had been the daughter of Zhang Zhung’s king. In return, Gampo had offered his own sister, forming a double bridal alliance between the rulers. Given how shrewd he was in his dealings elsewhere, especially with the Tang, it’s unlikely Songtsen would have wasted the political advantages of his sister’s marriage on an inconsequential band of nomads.

  We also know, however, that the marriage was not a success. Songtsen’s sister is identified in Dunhuang texts dating from the mid ninth century as Sadmarkar. In some of the earliest Tibetan lyrics we have, written from her point of view, she bemoans her situation:

  The place that it’s my fate to inhabit

  Is this Silver Castle of Khyunglung.

  Others say:

  ‘Seen from the outside, it’s cliffs and ravines,

  But seen from inside, it’s gold and jewels.’

  But when I’m standing in front of it,

  It rises up tall and grey.

  She acted as a spy for her brother for a few years of isolated misery until Songtsen sent an army to ambush and kill the king of Zhang Zhung as he travelled with his men north-east towards Amdo: his dynasty then swallowed the vast territory of western Tibet whole. In this way Songtsen the king became an emperor.

  Historians writing about Tibet’s emergence have generally focussed on the arrival of major powers that would dominate future relationships: those from China, from the subcontinent, and nomadic tribes from the steppe. Zhang Zhung has been a footnote, one of many lost Himalayan kingdoms whose very obscurity has bred a kind of esoteric intrigue. It is also associated with Shambhala, the mythical lost kingdom that appears in Hinduism and is mentioned in the Kalachakra, perhaps the best-known and most complex tantric practice in Tibetan Buddhism. Yet modern scholarship suggests that Zhang Zhung played a significant role in early central Asian history, a potential rival to the emerging Yarlung valley kingdom and a culture whose origins stretched back well over a thousand years before Tibet’s ‘dharma kings’ ended its power in the seventh and eighth centuries.

  In the modern era, driving west from Kailas on the G219, one looks out toward a Hindu and largely Muslim world – to the northern Indian states of Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, and beyond to northern Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran – seen from one that is Buddhist. During the putative thousand years of the Zhang Zhung kingdom, that world was widely Buddhist: the vast Iron-Age Maurya dynasty whose most famous ruler was Ashoka, a Buddhist convert; the Graeco-Buddhist zenith of the Gandhara Empire in northern Pakistan; the Central Asian Kushan Empire which in the first century broke like a wave around the bulwark of the Himalaya much as Islam and the British would later. At the time of Zhang Zhung’s fall, Kashmir remained a major centre of Buddhist culture. Given that the Tang dynasty to the north and the Newars of Kathmandu (not to be confused with the modern-day term, Nepalis) to the south-east were also Buddhist, western Tibet can be seen as encircled by what had become an international religion practised by Asia’s elite, which is why a newly ambiti
ous Asian polity like Tibet wanted to adopt Buddhism for itself.

  In conquering Zhang Zhung and taking control of the Silk Roads, the Tibetans plugged into the seventh century’s information highway, carrying goods and ideas between China, Persia and the Christian kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. (It’s worth remembering that the people most commonly found along its length were refugees.) Alongside the dominant Buddhist narrative already familiar to Tibetans, they were exposed to new faiths, such as Christianity. The presence along the Silk Roads of the Church of the East, known, somewhat pejoratively, as the Nestorians, would feed into European fantasies about Tibet a thousand years later. Yet, even though Buddhism was adopted among the Tibetan elite, it had not yet taken root outside of the court. Tibet’s indigenous gods still held sway.

  The lost world of Zhang Zhung is a good place to look for clues about those gods, and modern archaeology is discovering plenty of them. Rolf Stein may have argued that Zhang Zhung was just a lofty desert bridge spanning the eastern and western parts of the Tibetan Empire, but new evidence shows that before Tibet took control, Zhang Zhung was a substantial kingdom at the confluence of intersecting long-distance trade routes, a conduit for ideas and cultures from beyond the plateau. In turn, Zhang Zhung had plenty to offer: gold, salt and musk, as well as medicinal plants. Artefacts found in Zhang Zhung cemeteries at Guge in western Tibet have been shown to originate in northern India and beyond, showing that trade was crossing the main Himalayan chain as well as moving east and west. The chance discovery of a tomb in 2006 that contained silk from the Han dynasty shows this trade extended northwards too. In 2016, Chinese archaeologists announced they had found the chemical traces of tea in another tomb in western Tibet dating back to 200 CE, firmly in the Zhang Zhung period, revising our notion of the arrival of tea in Tibet by some five hundred years. The archaeologists speculated that a side shoot of the Silk Roads had run across central Tibet, a notion that chimes with modern China’s ‘belt and road’ initiative. It seems no less likely that tea arrived from the Silk Roads on a prehistoric north–south trade route.

  Our knowledge of Zhang Zhung remains both tantalising and frustrating. In 1933, a group of scholars led by the celebrated Italian Tibetologist Giuseppe Tucci visited the village of Khyunglung, at the head of the Sutlej valley, recording a number of sacred buildings as well as residential areas. They judged these ruins to be the location of Khyunglung Ngulkhar, the ‘horned eagle valley silver citadel’ mentioned in sacred Bon texts and in manuscripts recovered from the caves near Dunhuang. The horned eagle or khyung is a central motif in Zhang Zhung culture, later conflated with the more familiar snake-eating Hindu deity Garuda. Until quite recently, these remains were the only known centre of Zhang Zhung culture, but that picture is now filling out. American and Chinese archaeologists Mark Aldenderfer and Huo Wei excavated several buildings in Dindun, a village of semi-subterranean houses with two cemeteries dated to between 400 BCE and 100 BCE. Chinese archaeologists led by Dr Tong Tau have identified a major site at Khardong fifteen kilometres or so upstream from the village of Khyunglung and close to the tombs at Gurgyam where the Han Dynasty silk was found. This substantial settlement, Dr Tong believes, is a far more likely location for the capital of the Zhang Zhung kingdom. Khardong is also close to a major Zhang Zhung cemetery at Chunak where excavations have revealed items from all over Asia, including bronze mirrors similar to examples found on the Eurasian steppe and a gold mask linked with similar objects in northern India and Nepal.

  Despite all this new material, there is still much to learn. It’s not clear, for example, whether Zhang Zhung was simply the name given to a far more complex and varied political entity or if it referred, perhaps, to the culture from which that entity grew. The oldest Tibetan texts, dating roughly from the early ninth century, refer to this region more commonly by other names such as Mrayul Thangyye or Tod. We know Zhang Zhung neighboured another kingdom to the east, known as Sumpa, which had some cultural features in common but lacked others. It’s also likely that Sumpa was overshadowed, even controlled by Zhang Zhung, suggesting a wide sphere of influence. Yet the wild country north and north-west of Kailas and Khyunglung is so vast that much remains to be discovered and studied.

  The independent archaeologist John Vincent Bellezza has travelled more widely in this region than any academic before him, recording hundreds of sites, from citadels occupying high ground to temples and tombs; he has also documented ‘warrens’ of small windowless rooms whose architecture contrasts markedly with that of prehistoric eastern Tibet. These are among the highest dwellings constructed in human history. Bellezza has drawn particular attention to the practice of raising stones upright at tombs, often configured in haunting rows in the middle of the plateau or else in mortuary buildings. The most dramatic site is at Yul Khambu where Bellezza saw thousands of these standing stones between three inches and eight feet in height. Nowhere else in Tibet was this done, not even in the neighbouring kingdom of Sumpa, suggesting some kind of cultural watershed. It is perhaps too early to assign these practices to the Zhang Zhung but it’s clear that a very particular kind of culture developed high in the western plateau. They have more in common with cultures in north Asian locations like southern Siberia, the Pamirs and Mongolia than anything in central Tibet or further east.

  This pattern is repeated in the stunning rock art discovered all over the upper reaches of northern Tibet, much of it concerned with hunting game and located at rock shelters found in old encampments. There are also images here of the khyung, the horned eagle so closely associated with the Zhang Zhung. Among more symbolic images, the swastika is a favourite emblem, apotropaic protection to ward off evil spirits and assure long life; the Tibetan for swastika, a Sanskrit term, is yungdrung meaning both ‘unborn’ and ‘undying’. It’s a symbol that could have arrived via the Indus valley or else from the semi-nomadic tribes of central Asia, even Mongolia. Both the clockwise and counterclockwise versions appear: it was only later that these were divided along sectarian lines, the clockwise being associated with Buddhism, anticlockwise with Bon.

  So what exactly was the religious tradition that predated Buddhism’s arrival? The meaning of the word bon in the context of Tibetan religion is complex, even controversial. Bon is used routinely to indicate a wide range of non-Buddhist Tibetan religious practices over the ages, both before and after Tibet’s conversion. The Milarepa saga, for example, is the moment when a landscape sacred to Bon was appropriated for the dharma, the Buddhist spiritual path. Before Buddhism, a supernatural world of spirits and demons was negotiated by bonpo, local shamans involved in rites of propitiation and healing. Such rites, rooted in a harsh natural world that both nurtured and threatened those who relied on it, varied widely across the plateau, and yet were merged together in the popular imagination following the adoption of Buddhism. The indigenous religion, the mi cho or religion of men, responded by reformulating itself, adopting many of Buddhism’s key features, including the role of the lama (the Tibetan translation of guru, or teacher), and ideas of enlightenment, and developing a sacred literature that retrospectively pushed its origins backwards through time, beyond those of Gautama Buddha. This retrofitted sacred narrative became the religion now practised as Bon, but its rites and beliefs are profoundly different to those old ways practised in Zhang Zhung and elsewhere in Tibet.

  Under the surface of both this reformulated Bon and Buddhism itself it’s possible still to trace the shape of Tibet’s original spiritual landscape. Bon absorbed the ideas of the elite’s new religion while keeping its indigenous roots. At the same time, Buddhism, like Christianity in Europe, adapted itself to animist practices that were millennia old. As a result, there is still a myriad of powerful spiritual and cultural tropes that suffuse contemporary Tibetan culture predating the arrival of Buddhism. One example are zi beads, also spelled dzi, patterned agates characterised by lines and dots that form propitious geometric patterns. These have been found in many parts of Asia including Persia
and India, but it’s among Tibetan peoples throughout the Himalaya that they have held their fascination – and immense value. The most coveted zi have nine dots or ‘eyes’, mi in Tibetan, nine being a sacred number in Bon. Even in Giuseppe Tucci’s day, those of highest quality were too expensive for him to afford. The origins and even the manufacture of these prized antiques is something of a mystery but it’s now widely accepted that far from being imports, the finest examples originated in Tibet. That Dr Tong and his team of Chinese archaeologists should find them in graves at Chunak is no surprise: the Zhang Zhung kingdom has been mooted as a putative origin for the most precious of these sacred beads.

  Another lucky charm that has in recent decades seen its value soar is the assortment of copper alloy amulets called thokchak, meaning ‘the first metal’. Tang chroniclers acknowledged the excellence of Tibetan metalworkers, whose chain mail was of the highest quality: the elegance of these amulets also attests to that. Some were functional objects, like buttons or clasps; others were more obviously symbolic. Some of the finest that Tucci included in his influential book Transhimalaya were from western Tibet: beautiful representations of the motif so closely associated with Zhang Zhung, the khyung or horned eagle, in some examples looking like a yak’s head on a bird’s body. Like the standing stones of north-western Tibet, many thokchak speak to the influence of nomads from the Eurasian steppe, echoing the stunning metalwork of the Scythians. The influence of India and China on the Himalaya is well documented; this northern strand has yet to be fully assimilated into our understanding.

  The amalgam of indigenous local spirits, with all the richness of their mythologies embroidered into the landscape, and Buddhism, with its moral austerities and political muscle, could provoke conflict: over the killing of animals for meat for example, or drinking alcohol. But the interaction of the two would come to form a culture both unique in the world and rewardingly complex. Nowhere was that more true than here, in western Tibet, which played a critical role in the centuries-long struggle to establish Buddhism in Tibet, in what is known to Tibetans as chidar, translated as the ‘second diffusion’.