by Ed Douglas
It would be easy to overstate the scale of the Jesuit interest in the lost world of Prester John. Tibet was mostly a footnote to their main concerns: China, Japan and India. In 1596 Matteo Ricci, leader of the Jesuit mission to China, did call for an exploration of the lands between the Mughal and Manchu empires. And Monserrate’s description of a lost Christian congregation living in the Himalaya certainly inspired the Portuguese António de Andrade, head of the Jesuit mission in the Indian city of Agra. Andrade joined a party of Hindu pilgrims to Badrinath, in the modern Indian state of Uttarakhand, travelling with his fellow priest Manuel Marques up the Alaknanda river towards the Tibetan border. Leaving Marques behind, Andrade followed the valley, travelling in the shadow of the mountain Kamet, only twenty-five kilometres north of Badrinath, to reach the Mana Pass at 5,600 metres. Suffering from snowblindness and the ‘noxious vapours’ Andrade believed were the source of his altitude sickness, he saw before him the high barren plateau of Tibet: the first European to describe the wearying reality of Himalayan travel. He must have thought himself in some sort of purgatory.
Andrade returned to Badrinath and after a month retraced his steps, this time with his companion Marques, entering Tibet to witness the dying embers of the Guge kingdom. Much of its power had by now drifted east to Lhasa and west to a resurgent Ladakh. The king of Guge was nevertheless open to the idea of Christianity. It was possible, Andrade argued, that bodhisattvas might have arisen in the West. And since truth could not harm truth, why shouldn’t he preach the gospel in Guge and challenge the teachings of Buddha? Andrade returned home and in 1625, with permission and funds from his superior in Goa, established a chapel at the palace fortress of Tsaparang, the astonishing citadel and monastic complex in the Sutlej valley. A small number of priests struggled to keep the mission going through the late 1620s and their accounts provide valuable insights into the religious and economic life of Guge. Andrade was intrigued at how closely the Tibetan monastic orders resembled Christian ones. Yet their efforts were in vain. In 1630, Tsaparang fell to the great Ladakhi king Sengge Namgyal. He enslaved the few hundred converts the Jesuits had made including two of the priests: it took a concerted diplomatic effort to extract them from his palace at Leh. The kingdom of Guge now began its swift and final decline into the obscurity Tucci witnessed in 1933. Climatologists have recently discovered that the monsoon weakened considerably in the early seventeenth century, plunging western Tibet into a period of desertification, suggesting Guge’s failure was as much a consequence of climate change as invasion. The last king of Guge died in 1676. When the East India Company became aware of western Tibet and its lucrative wool trade into Kashmir, that trade was controlled through Leh in Ladakh. The ancient Guge kingdom had faded into near-oblivion.
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Jesuit attempts to convert Tibet might have come to nothing, but there was a curious legacy. In February 1627, two more missionaries, Estêvão Cacella and João Cabral, became the first Europeans to enter Bhutan, where they were soon robbed and thrown in prison. They did, however, encounter the first king of Bhutan, the Kagyu monk Ngawang Namgyal, and following Antonio Monserrate’s lead, asked about neighbouring regions in hopes of locating any lost communities of Christians. They were told about Shambhala, which they mistook as being Cathay, whose location was a question of burning geographical interest to Jesuit missionaries across Asia. (Was Cathay the same as China? Or somewhere else?) So it was that their account of their journey included the first reference from a European to the mythical paradise of Shambhala, its origins in the half-forgotten shamanic past of western Tibet.
This lost world of perfection, such an obvious parallel to Eden, and the tenuous linking of Christianity and Buddhism, would become a compelling subject to adventurous spiritual seekers in the late nineteenth century. Switched on to Tibet by growing academic and philosophical interest in Buddhism – Hegel was fascinated by the notion of emptiness – new-age mystics climbed on board the bandwagon, including the Theosophist Helena Blavatsky, whose concocted band of enlightened beings, the Masters of the Ancient Wisdom, she claimed to have met in Tibet. All these disparate strands coalesced in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, whose exotic setting is the hidden world of Shangri-La where moral and spiritual perfection endure: for some in the West it’s an idea that almost defines the Himalaya.
Hilton’s hero Conway and three companions are kidnapped on board an aircraft, which crash-lands near the remote monastery of Shangri-La. Its mysterious head ‘lama’ is in reality a Christian missionary priest who arrived in the early eighteenth century and has achieved immense longevity. The setting, a lost world of moral purity, is largely emblematic. Hilton’s novel has little to do with the reality of Tibet and more to do with its reputation as somewhere unexplored. None of the central characters are Tibetans: they are almost exclusively cast as servants and characterised as noble savages. Almost nothing of Tibetan culture emerges from its pages. In the monastery’s library, Conway finds some of the books Hilton drew on in his research in the British Library, including Andrade’s account of Tsaparang and the lost kingdom of Guge. The sacred mountain Hilton locates near Shangri-La bears close comparison to Kailas. But the mystical order who inhabit the monastery echo Theosophist fantasies. Lost Horizon is not about Tibet at all; its themes are moral exhaustion after one world war and anxiety about the next, and a critique of consumerism. Yet the notion of a hidden sanctuary promising spiritual refreshment and healing resonates in Tibetan culture, represented in the idea of beyul, sacred valleys whose secret locations are concealed in texts waiting to be read by spiritual masters. There’s a need for Eden, or Shambhala, in all of us.
The fictional Shangri-La’s status as a refuge from modernity’s consumerist values didn’t stop the Chinese government renaming Zhongdian, a small town two thousand kilometres east of Tsaparang in Yunnan province, as Shangri-La City. They spent $200m on this spiritual Disneyworld, building an airport and other infrastructure in the lush and forested mountains of south-west China. The palace fortress of Tsaparang, on the other hand, stands aloof in its arid, remote valley, dramatic testament to the true story of Tibet. The sacred sites in nearby Tholing are being slowly restored, although to what standard is hard to say. The temple complex still feels like a broken fossil from a lost epoch. The village itself has become a garrison town for the People’s Liberation Army, forward post for the latest dynasty controlling the ancient network of trade routes across the Himalaya.
5
The Architects of Xanadu
It had been a glittering autumn’s day in Kathmandu. The usual layer of smog was gone, unveiling the city’s mountainous backdrop in adamantine clarity: Ganesh to the north-west, the snow pyramid of Langtang Lirung to the north and to the north-east the white diamond of Dorje Lhakpa, all of them seven kilometres or so above sea level and seeming so close I felt I could touch them. From Ratna Park in the middle of town, a place ordinarily cloaked in fumes, I’d even spotted the distant shark’s fin of the world’s highest mountain: Chomolungma.
Older inhabitants must have thought of their youth, when the city was more often like this, before everything changed. In the span of a generation, from the 1980s onwards, hundreds of thousands of migrants from all over Nepal had moved into the city, drawn by economic necessity, or as refugees from the Maoist insurgency that had plunged the nation into war. Modest Kathmandu had become one of the fastest-growing cities in South Asia. New neighbourhoods of dismal concrete sprang up, turning the valley from green to grey. A city that for much of its history was concerned with ritual pollution became swamped with the real thing: plastics, fumes and filthy rivers.
These days, tourists are often in a rush to escape Kathmandu. In the popular imagination, the Himalaya are a place for adventure, of wild new horizons, not urban sprawl. And yet even now the valley’s ancient cities remain among the most elegant and richly complex achievements in human history, not just for the breathtaking quality of their architecture and decorative arts, but for t
he ways of living that evolved alongside the built environment. Despite the impacts of mass production and global communication, these exquisite urban centres remain so culturally compelling and intricate that the city itself becomes a narcotic. You can lose yourself here, following the arc of festivals as the weeks tick by, finding something new and beautiful to ponder on every walk through the narrow streets. A place where, as the scholar Giuseppe Tucci put it, ‘all the terror, the anguish and the hope of India are expressed with a frankness that approaches exultation’.
Now it was dusk, and light on the distant snows was darkening from pink to indigo. Among the temples and palaces of Patan, south of the Bagmati river, a large crowd was gathered around a dabali, a raised platform, where a dancer in a white lion-mask was menacing a stout fellow wearing a silver crown and armed with what looked like a papier-mâché mace. Red scraps of cloth tied at the lion’s wrists and elbows streamed from his arms as he whirled around the dais, making him a blur of extravagant fabric, the long mane that reached down to the small of his back catching the light from braziers at all four corners of the stage. Every so often the lion performed a stunt, leaping into the air and gathering his legs underneath him, or spinning round nimbly, or else pawing the air with imaginary claws, and every time he did so the children watching shrieked with excitement, their squeals competing with the raucous noise of clashing cymbals and parping trumpets. As the lion skipped and prowled, the king waggled his cudgel and backed away, legs wide apart, feet turned out, weighed down with garlands of marigolds, awaiting his fate.
This was the Kartik Naach, or Kartik dances, Kartik being the month in the Hindu calendar when they’re held. The story is drawn from the Puranas and tells how Narasimha, an avatar of Vishnu whose name translates as ‘man-lion’, overcomes the asura or demon, Hiranyakashipu, who has been persecuting his followers. Hiranyakashipu is angry because an avatar of Vishnu has killed his brother. He wants revenge. Hiranyakashipu goes through great austerities so Brahma will protect him with magical powers: no man or animal can harm him. Yet even as he wages war, he can’t dissuade his own son, the saintly Prahlada, from his devotion to Vishnu. So Hiranyakashipu resolves to have him killed in a sequence of outlandish assassination attempts. Prahlada’s virtue saves him every time. Hiranyakashipu then mocks his son. Pointing to a pillar of stone, he asks if Vishnu exists even in this lump of rock. But when he hits the pillar with his mace, Narasimha emerges and because he is half man and half animal, neither wholly one nor the other, the man-lion poses a fatal threat. In the story, Narasimha eviscerates Hiranyakashipu. As the dance reached this climax in the story, Narasimha simply touched the demon on the chest, who fainted dead away, born aloft like a crowd-surfing rock star while spectators held up their smartphones to share the triumph of good over evil on social media.
There are far older and more famous festivals in the Kathmandu valley. The chariot procession that each spring carries the god Bunga Dyah, giver of rain, around the streets of Patan under the auspicious gaze of Patan’s Kumari, or living goddess, is well over a thousand years old and means a great deal more to the original Newari population of the city. (Sacred to Buddhists and Hindus, Bunga Dyah is for some synonymous with Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion known in Tibet as Chenrezig.) The Kartik dances on the other hand began during the reign of Siddhi Narasimha Malla, king of Patan, in the mid seventeenth century, a few years before the first Europeans reached the city. Across the border in Tibet, the Guge kingdom was in its final death spiral; in Lhasa the fifth Dalai Lama and his powerful proxy Sonam Rabten were exerting control for the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism after decades of sectarian and regional conflict. This was good news for the Malla kings who ruled the Kathmandu valley: during the rule of the ‘Great Fifth’, as the Dalai Lama became known, they were given the job of minting Tibet’s currency, a lucrative industry that bankrolled the chief and hugely expensive preoccupation of Kathmandu’s Malla kings: competition with each other, often expressed in the extravagance of their architecture, and their decorative and performance arts.
Although there were a thousand years between the deep-rooted people’s festival for Bunga Dyah and the courtly theatre of the Kartik dances, both were built on Kathmandu’s unique collection of advantages, beginning with its propitious location, nestling in mountains at 1,400 metres, and its generous climate. The month of Kartik runs from late October to late November. The weather is fine but not yet too cold. It’s an auspicious month, the start of the wedding season, right after the hugely popular festival of Dasain. In mythology, the eleventh day of Kartik is when Vishnu awakes from his four-month yogic doze to marry his bride Laksmi. There’s no better time to tie the knot.
As Kartik wears on, the temperature drops and you’re grateful at night for a fire. Until the jungles of northern India were cleared, the cold temperatures also put an end to the deadly malaria season. Known as aul in Nepal, malaria didn’t just affect the plains. As the British resident Brian Hodgson wrote in the mid nineteenth century: ‘No elevation short of 3,000 to 4,000 feet above the sea suffices to rid the atmosphere of the low Himalaya from malaria.’ Villagers would build their farmhouses above this line so they could escape the mosquitos, walking down to their lower fields in the morning. Climate change seems to be raising the mosquito’s ceiling, creating new problems in remote villages. There’s an argument that Nepal’s history has been shaped as much by the mosquito as by any great king.
The valley’s original inhabitants, arriving in the first millennium BCE, a shadowy group called the Kirata who spoke a Tibeto-Burmese language from which Newari developed, must have pinched themselves at their good fortune: a largely flat valley with some of the most fertile soil in the region and above the malaria line. The valley’s location had another benefit. It was conveniently close to the high mountains and developing trade routes into Tibet. Merchants and pilgrims would wait until the cold season to cross the malaria-infested jungle. By then it was also winter in the high mountains, where snowfall and low temperatures posed a different kind of fatal hazard. So they would wait for spring in the Kathmandu valley, where there was sufficient food, for the passes to clear and Tibetan traders to come down from the plateau, or else to continue their own journey. The seventh-century traveller and Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who travelled to Indian Buddhist sites seeking inspiration, was among the first to record how trade funded the valley’s complex religious life, with Buddhist and Hindu institutions coexisting side by side.
Trade was already well established by the time the first literate dynasty established itself in Kathmandu, early in the fifth century. The Licchavi were an offshoot of a long-established polity based at the ancient city of Vaishali, across the Ganges from Patna in north-east India. This was the dynasty that Songtsen Gampo had known as a vassal state to the emergent Tibetan Empire. The Licchavi period coincided with the Gupta Empire in India, centuries of immense artistic achievement, which reached their apogee in Kathmandu from the late fifth to early seventh centuries: stone sculpture from this period remains unsurpassed. The Licchavi founded many of Kathmandu’s most sacred temples on sites that were already revered: the great Buddhist stupa at Swayambhu, the Shaivite Pashupatinath beside the Bagmati river, and Changu Narayan, a temple to Vishnu with the valley’s oldest inscription, dating from the fifth century. At Budhanilakantha, on the northern rim of the Kathmandu valley, is a colossal seventh-century statue of Vishnu in his incarnation as Narayan: asleep in a sunken pond, resting on the endless loops of a naga, or snake spirit, in the shape of a cobra whose hooded heads shade him as he sleeps. The pond represents the primordial cosmic ocean. When he awakes, Vishnu will take his place in heaven in a universe created by Brahma, himself born from a lotus that grew from Vishnu’s navel as he slept. The god Shiva provides the predominant Hindu narrative strand in the Himalaya, and his incarnations dominate the Kathmandu valley, but Vishnu’s royal influence also stretches back deep into the city’s past; as the story of the Kartik dances shows, Vishnu was centra
l to the Malla kings. Those who replaced them, the now defunct Shah dynasty, last kings of Nepal, regarded themselves as incarnations of Vishnu.
When the Buddhist Pala dynasty emerged in the late eighth century, the Licchavis still controlled the valley but were beginning their decline. The rulers that followed had links to the Pala Empire and the Buddhist universities – Nalanda, Vikramasila and Odantapuri – in what is now the Indian state of Bihar. (The name ‘Bihar’ derives from the Sanskrit and Pali term vihara, literally ‘abode’ but meaning monastery.) From this world the tantric influences that are the hallmark of Newari culture emerged; the teacher Atisa, who as we saw in the last chapter brought this late Indian Buddhist renaissance to Tibet, was ordained at Nalanda and received his most important teaching at Vikramasila. Under the Pala, new artistic traditions developed, stunning images in bronze and gold, a cultural explosion that filled Kathmandu with tantric gurus, drawing students from Tibet. The artisans were monks themselves, and from the tenth century, as Tibet took up the rage for tantric Buddhism, their work was in high demand there as well. Around the time of the Norman Conquest in England, something extraordinary happened in the heart of the Himalaya, a combination of bold, dangerous philosophy and exquisite art. As the writer and long-time resident of Kathmandu Thomas Bell put it: ‘The rise of tantrism in medieval Kathmandu turned the city into a magical garden.’ And the ideas and psychological insights that grew in that Indian garden were soon transplanted to the high plateau of Tibet beyond the Himalaya.