The Snow leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

  Yet morale is high, with Dhorpatan behind us. I am in no hurry to get anywhere, and GS is busily composing haiku. Belatedly, though they were not asked to do so, Dawa and Gyaltsen are digging rain trenches around our tents—in the case of my tent, a more or less useless precaution—and the others have rigged a fly over the fire and are making tea for us in this downpour. Phu-Tsering's sweet infectious laugh rings out at something said by Tukten, who is after all a Sherpa, and drops his porter's load at the day's end to help the others pitch the tents or fetch the firewood and water.

  Tukten has been an expedition hand since 1960, when he accompanied a British team to Annapurna; that same year, he was cook-sherpa to a British botanical expedition into eastern Nepal. The next year he joined the 6th Gurkha Regiment of the British Army and served in the cook corps for ten years, coming out in time to sign on as cook for the British Annapurna South Face Expedition; later he was a sherpa on a Japanese expedition to Dhaulagiri One. Last spring he was again cook-sherpa to a British botanical expedition, this time to the Tscharka region of eastern Dolpo. On his way home, he stopped off at a Sherpa community near Pokhara, where Jang-bu found him.

  "Dolpo village many smelly, sah," says Tukten, the only man among us who has been there: one senses that, in one life or another, he has been everywhere on earth. Of his wide experience, Tukten tells tales in that soft voice, and so the other Sherpas listen, but he is not one of them. Ordinarily Tukten would remain among the porters who have taken shelter in a cave down in the canyon, but he is helpful and ingenious, and his mesmerising voice, coming and going on the wind and rain, seems to fascinate the younger Sherpas, although they are wary of him, and keep their distance. One feels they are afraid of him—not of his violence, though they say he fights when drunk, but of his power. Whatever this man is—wanderer or evil monk, or saint or sorcerer—he seems touched by what Tibetans call the "crazy wisdom": he is free.

  The young Tamangs, being inseparable, are exclusive, and so Tukten dines commonly with Bimbahadur, who is dull and gentle, a stumpy old lump-headed humbler with gnarled legs and worn feet, who clings to his guardsman's mustache and remnant regimental rags. He, too, merely tolerates Tukten, for Bimbahadur has withdrawn from life; he must be with people, to earn his keep, but not among them—in the world but not of it, as the Sufis say. Side by side, hunched low in the light rain, the two outcasts dip up tsampa, the roasted maize or barley meal, ground to powder and cooked as porridge or in tea, that is subsistence food in the Himalaya. Weathered faces crusted with white paste, they hunch like specters over the fire stones and blackened pot; perhaps they will rise and, in dead silence, perform the slow dance of the sennin — wild mountain sages of the ancient days in China and Japan who give no formal teaching but redeem all beings by the very purity of their enlightenment.

  The sennin are a favorite subject of the great Zen painters, and sometimes their dance of life is staged against a landscape copied from these paintings, as if to suggest that such free beings perceive a master work in all of nature. Kanzan is studying a scroll while Jittoku leans easily on a broom; when the painting comes to life, the sennin begin the steps of a strange dance.

  Soon Kanzan pauses, stands apart, gazing away into infinity. Jittoku, much moved, lifts his hands in an attitude of prayer and circles Kanzan with simple ceremony, kneeling beside him and lifting his gaze in reverent expectancy. Becoming aware of him, Kanzan inclines his head in acquiescence and kneels with dignity beside Jittoku. Together they open the scroll and hold it before them; the audience cannot see what is written, can only watch as the sennin read silently together. Now the two are struck by a perfect phrase, and they pause in the same instant to regard each other; the power of the revelation lifts them to their feet as they read on, eagerly nodding. Soon they finish, sigh, and turn away into the dance; for a moment, the scroll's face comes into view. It is pure white, void, without the smallest mark. Kanzan rolls it with great attention as Jittoku, smiling to himself, retrieves the broom.

  Now Jittoku brings wine, but in his transport, he is holding the flagon upside down; the wine is gone. Not caring, he refills it from the stream, and the sennin are soon intoxicated on this pure water of high mountains. Kanzan must be supported in the dance, and for a time it seems that the two might sink away in drunken sleep. But they are summoned by the sublime song of a bird, and complete the dance by resuming the attitudes seen in the painting. Kanzan seems to smile, while Jittoku, regarding the audience for the first time, laughs silently, with all his heart. Before the audience can grasp what this might mean, the screen is drawn in a swift rush; there is only silence and the empty curtain.2

  In early afternoon, when the downpour ends and the sound of the brook is audible under the oaks, the pony man appears, sniffing the weather; he has decided to return to Yamarkhar with his five animals. Sheepishly he says goodbye, and from his tent, GS bursts out, "Goodbye, you sonofabitch: I don't like fair-weather people who back out on an agreement, leaving others stranded!" Jang-bu does not bother to translate this rhetorical address, since the speaker's sentiments are clear.

  Tibetans say that obstacles in a hard journey, such as hailstones, wind, and unrelenting rains, are the work of demons, anxious to test the sincerity of the pilgrims and eliminate the fainthearted among them. GS has certainly been tested: still three days short of the Jang La, we are now stranded in heavy rain, with no help to be had from the only settlement between Dhorpatan and Tarakot, which lies on the far side of the Jang. To make things worse, Bimbahadur, who has passed this way before, says that tomorrow this trail climbs above tree line, and that besides the loads, we must carry enough firewood for the next three days. But perhaps because GS is not fainthearted, there falls almost immediately a stroke of luck, as astonishing in its timing as the cutting of the stave that saved me from that mastiff in Dhorpatan. Since leaving Dhorpatan, we have seen not a single traveler going in either direction, yet it turns out that travelers came last night and took shelter in a nearby cave, that they, too, are bound for Tarakot, and that their leader, who is the headman of that village, has agreed to let his men serve us as porters.

  This miracle comes slightly tarnished, since the headman is demanding and receiving three times the normal porterage—They know we are stranded, and they have us against the wall, it's perfectly natural, GS says, instructing Jang-bu to cut down the number of load baskets by two and spread the extra weight among the Tarakots—but it is great good fortune all the same.

  The wind freshens, and blue patches appear among the treetops. Surely the monsoon has broken at last, with fair weather certain for tomorrow. Or so GS believes: I feel superstitious in this realm of mountain gods, and knock on one of the wind-warped oak trees in the grove. Fires have been built against the greatest of these trees to kill and bring them down, and all the rest are girdled and cropped for firewood and goat fodder; the deformed shapes twist on the restless sides.

  OCTOBER 14

  Last night, for the first time in my life, I was conscious of hallucinating in a dream. I was sitting in the shadows of a hut, outside of which the figure of a friend was sitting with a dog beside a rock. Then everything became vibrant, luminous, and plastic, as in psychedelic vision, and the figure outside was seized up by some dreadful force and cast down, broken and dead. Throughout, it seemed to me that I stood apart, watching myself dreaming, watching myself stand free of my body: I could have gone away from it but hesitated, afraid of being unable to return. In this fear, I awoke—or rather, I decided to awake, for the waking- and dream-states seemed no different. Then I slept again, and a yellow-throated marten— the large Himalayan weasel whose droppings we have seen along the trail—jumped with cub in mouth into a tree. As it set the cub down in a crotch of branches, a squirrel leaped from a higher limb, and the marten intercepted it in midair. For seconds, gazing at me, the marten remained suspended in the air beside the tree, mouth grotesquely spread by the squirrel's body; then it was on its branch again, gutting the squirrel, and letting fa
ll the head and skin of it. From the ground, the squirrel's eyes in its head gazed up at me, alive and bright. Bodi dreams seemed more like hallucinations, experienced in the waking state, and left me with a morbid feeling in the morning.

  These dreams do not seem to evaporate—can I be dead? It is as if I had entered what Tibetans call the Bardo—literally, between-two-existences—a dreamlike hallucination that precedes reincarnation, not necessarily in human form; typical of the dream-state visions is the skull cup full of blood, symbolizing the futility of carnal existence, with its endless thirsting, drinking, quenching, and thirsting anew.

  In case I should need them, instructions for passage through the Bardo are contained in the Tibetan "Book of the Dead" which I carry with me—a guide for the living, actually, since it teaches that a man's last thoughts will determine the quality of his reincarnation. Therefore, every moment of life is to be lived calmly, mindfully, as if it were the last, to insure that the most is made of the precious human state—the only one in which enlightenment is possible. And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.

  Thus one must seek to "regard as one this life, the next life, and the life between, in the Bardo." This was a last message to his disciples of Tibet's great poet-saint the Lama Milarepa, born in the tenth century, in the Male Water-Dragon Year, to a woman known as "The White Garland of the Nyang." Milarepa is called Mila Repa because as a great yogi and master of "mystical heat" he wore only a simple white cloth, or repa, even in deepest winter: his "songs" or hortatory verses, as transcribed by his disciples, are still beloved in Tibet like Sakyamuni, he is said to have attained nirvana in a single lifetime, and his teaching as he prepared for death might have been uttered by the Buddha:

  All worldly pursuits have but the one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings, in destruction; meetings, in separation; births, in death. Knowing this, one should from the very first renounce acquisition and heaping-up, and building and meeting, and ... set about realizing the Truth. . . . Life is short, and the time of death is uncertain; so apply yourselves to meditation. . . .3

  Meditation has nothing to do with contemplation of eternal questions, or of one's own folly, or even of one's navel, although a clearer view on all of these enigmas may result. It has nothing to do with thought of any kind—with anything at all, in fact, but intuiting the true nature of existence, which is why it has appeared, in one form or another, in almost every culture known to man. The entranced Bushman staring into fire, the Eskimo using a sharp rock to draw an ever-deepening circle into the flat surface of a stone achieves the same obliteration of the ego (and the same power) as the dervish or the Pueblo sacred dancer. Among Hindus and Buddhists, realization is attained through inner stillness, usually achieved through the samadhistate of sitting yoga.4 In Tantric practice, the student may displace the ego by filling his whole being with the real or imagined object of his concentration; in Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear, pure stillness of a sea-shell or a flower petal. When body and mind are one, then the whole being, scoured clean of intellect, emotions, and the senses, may be laid open to the experience that individual existence, ego, the "reality" of matter and phenomena are no more than fleeting and illusory arrangements of molecules. The weary self of masks and screens, defenses, preconceptions, and opinions that, propped up by ideas and words, imagines itself to be some sort of entity (in a society of like entities) may suddenly fall away, dissolve into formless flux where concepts such as "death" and life," "time" and "space," "past" and "future" have no meaning. There is only a pearly radiance of Emptiness, the Uncreated, without beginning, therefore without end.5

  Like the round-bottomed Bodhidharma doll, returning to its center, meditation represents the foundation of the universe to which all returns, as in the stillness of the dead of night, the stillness between tides and winds, the stillness of the instant before Creation. In this "void," this dynamic state of rest, without impediments, lies ultimate reality, and here one's own true nature is reborn, in a return from what Buddhists speak of as "great death." This is the Truth of which Milarepa speaks.

  At daybreak comes a light patter of rain on the tent canvas, although there had been stars all night before, and GS, who is not often profane, is cursing in his tent. As soon as the rain ceases, we break camp. Setting out ahead, I meet almost immediately with a hoopoe, oddly tame. Such tameness must be a good omen, of which we are in need, for the hoopoe walks around before my feet on the wet grass under the oaks as if waiting to conduct us farther.

  The path enters a narrowing ravine that climbs to a high cleft between boulders, and the cleft is reached at the strike of the rising sun, which fills this portal with a blinding light. I emerge in a new world and stare about me. A labyrinth of valleys points toward the snows, for the Himalaya is as convoluted as a brain. Churen Himal looms in high mist, then vanishes. A pheasant hen and then three more sail down off a lichened rock face with sweet chortlings; the crimson cock stays hidden. Far below, over dark gorges where no sun has reached, a griffon circles in the silence. The forest on this ridge is oak and maple, and a mist of yellow leaves softens the ravine sides all around: on a golden wind comes a rich humus smell of autumn.

  Now GS comes, and we climb quickly to 12,000 feet. The paths around these mountainsides are narrow, there is no room for a misstep, and at this altitude, one is quickly out of breath. Gradually I have learned to walk more lightly, legs loose, almost gliding, and this helps a lot in times of vertigo. Some of the cliff-side trail is less than two feet wide—I measure it— and skirts sheer precipice; nor is the rest very much better, for these mountainsides of shining grass are so precipitous, so devoid of trees or even shrubs, that a stumbler might tumble and roll thousands of feet, then drop into the dark where the sun ends, for want of anything to catch hold of.

  My sense of dread is worsened by last night's lingering dreams. "The dream . .. wherein phenomena and mind were seen as one was a teacher: did you not so understand it?" I have not quite apprehended this idea —that man's world, man's dreams are both dream-states—but Milarepa has been of help in other ways. Returning to his village after many years (he was born about fifty miles north of Kathmandu, on the Tibetan side of the present-day frontier), Mila discovers the decayed corpse of his mother, no more than a mound of dirt and rags in her fallen hut; shaken by grief and horror, he remembers the instruction of his guru, the Lama Marpa, to embrace all that he most fears or finds repugnant, the better to realize that everything in the Universe, being inseparably related, is therefore holy. And so he makes a headrest of the sad remains of the erstwhile White Garland of the Nyang and lies upon them for seven days, in a deep, clear state of samadhi. This Tantric discipline to overcome ideas of Terror, often performed while sitting on a corpse or in the graveyard in the dark of night, is known as chödSince trusting to life must finally mean making peace with death, I perform some mild chöd of my own, forcing myself to look over the precipice whenever I can manage it. The going in the weeks ahead is bound to worsen, and hardening myself might make less scary some evil stretch of ledge in the higher mountains. It helps to pay minute attention to details—a shard of rose quartz, a cinnamon fern with spores, a companionable mound of pony dung. When one pays attention to the present, there is great pleasure in awareness of small things; I think of the comfort I took yesterday in the thin bouillon and stale biscuits that shy Dawa brought to my leaking tent.

  The trees die out in a rock garden of dwarf rhododendron, birch, and fire-colored ash, set about with strap fern, edelweiss, and unknown alpine florets, fresh mineral blue. Then a woodpecker of vivid green appears, and though I know that I am awake, that I actually see such a bird, the blue flowers and green woodpecker have no more reality, or
less, than the yellow-throated marten of my dream.

  Sun comes and goes. The monsoon is not done with us, there is wind and weather in the east, but to the south, the sky of India is clear. GS says, "Do you realize we haven't heard even a distant motor since September?" And this is true. No airplane crosses such old mountains. We have strayed into another century.

  This wayfaring in shifting sun, in snow and cloud worlds, so close to the weather, makes me happy; the morbid feeling of this dawn has passed away. I would like to reach the Crystal Monastery, I would like to see a snow leopard, but if I do not, that is all right, too. In this moment, there are birds—red-billed choughs, those queer small crows of the high places, and a small buteo, black against the heavens, and southbound finches bounding down the wind, in their wake a sprinkling of song. A lark, a swift, a lammergeier, and more griffons: the vultures pass at eye level, on creaking wings.

  At a low pass stands a small cairn topped with sticks and rags, and an opening on the eastern side for offerings: the rag strips or wind prayers bring good luck to travelers who are crossing a pass for the first time. Perhaps because we ignore the cairn, the mountain gods greet us with a burst of hail, then sun, then both together. A patter of ice dies away as the clouds turn. We wait. Tukten, an hour behind us, is a good half hour ahead of all the rest and, for his pains, is chastised by GS as representative of the lead-footed porter breed. Slowly, he puts down the load that he has humped two thousand feet uphill, observing GS in the equable way in which he observes everything: giving thanks for his arrival at the pass, he places a small stone upon the cairn.