"There is no word for Buddhism in Tibet. Tibetans are either chos-pa (followers of chos —the Dharma or Universal Law as revealed by Buddha) or bon,pos (followers of bon)."20 Yet in practice, B'on has adapted itself so thoroughly to Buddhism, and vice versa, that in their superficial forms they are much the same.
At Ring-mo, OM MANI PADME HUM is carved on the river rock, and a blue Buddha manifestation on the frescoes represents the great scourge of B'on, Padma Sambhava; incidental decorations inside and outside the stupas are common symbols of Tibetan Buddhism, such as the conch-shell trumpet of victory, the intertwined snakes, the four-way yin-yang, and the four-and eight-petalled lotuses. B'on has degenerated into a regressive sect of Buddhism and is so regarded, here at least, by its own practitioners. As one of the townsmen says, a little sheepishly, "I am a Buddhist, but I walk around the prayer stones the wrong way."
The path to the B'on monastery crosses the torrent, traversing potato field and pasture to the evergreen forest by Phoksumdo Lake. Ring-mo is a quarter mile or more south of the lake, yet the inhabitants use its Tibetan name, Tsho-wa, or "Lakeside"—could this have been the name of the drowned village? Except for the monastery, there is no habitation near the water, and no boat has ever sailed its surface; its translucent blue-green color must reflect a white sand on the lake floor far below. There are no aquatic animals, and even algae find no place in this brilliant water rimmed around by stone. Truly it is a lake without impurities, like the dust-free mirror of Buddhist symbolism which, "although it offers an endless procession of pictures, is uniform and colorless, unchanging, yet not apart from the pictures it reveals."21
The sacred eyes on small stupas by the water's edge follow me along a path of lakeside birch. On the far side of this wood stand the monastery buildings, backed up against the cliffs of the lake's east wall. Seventeen years ago, there were two B'on lamas and twelve monks at Ring-mo, but now it is locked shut, all but abandoned. An ancient caretaker, plagued by goiter, makes wood water casks and prayer stones of poor quality; his old wife squats in a potato patch so small that she can hoe all corners of it from the center. There is a B'on lama up at Pung-mo—they point toward the western peak—but they have no idea when he will come. I go away disappointed. Two days north of Shey is the monastery of Samling, which is said to be the seat of B'on in these far mountains. But if we are to believe these people, our chances of reaching Shey is very small.
OCTOBER 24
A cold wind out of the north. I wash my head. To reduce the drain on our food supplies, Tukten and Gyaltsen leave today for Jumla, where they will obtain some rice and sugar and perhaps mail; if all goes well, they will join us at Shey about November 10.
Yesterday I wrote letters to send off with Tukten, and the writing depressed me, stirring up longings, and worries about the children, and bringing me down from the mountain high. The effort to find ordinary words for what I have seen in this extraordinary time seems to have dissipated a kind of power, and the loss of intensity is accompanied by loss of confidence and inner balance; my legs feel stiff and heavy, and I dread the narrow ledge around the west walls of Phoksumdo that we must follow for two miles or more tomorrow. This ledge is visible from Ring-mo, and even GS was taken aback by the first sight of it. "That's not something you'd want to do every day," he said. I also dread the snow in the high passes that might trap us in the treeless waste beyond. These fears just worsen matters, but there's no sense pretending they are not there. It is one thing to climb remote mountains if one has done it all one's life; it is quite another to begin in middle age. Not that forty-six is too old to start, but I doubt that I shall ever welcome ice faces and narrow ledges, treacherous log bridges across torrents, the threat of wind and blizzard; in high mountains, there is small room for mistake.
Why is death so much on my mind when I do not feel I am afraid of it?—the dying, yes, especially in cold (hence the oppression brought by this north wind down off the glaciers, and by the cold chop on the cold lake), but not the state itself. And yet I cling—to what? What am I to make of these waves of timidity, this hope of continuity, when at other moments I feel free as the bharal on those heights, ready for wolf and snow leopard alike? I must be careful, that is true, for I have young children with no mother, and much work to finish; but these aren't honest reasons, past a point. Between clinging and letting go, I feel a terrific struggle. This is a fine chance to let go, to "win my life by losing it," which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but nonattachment.
If given the chance to turn back, I would not take it. Therefore the decision to go ahead is my own responsibility, to be accepted with a whole heart. Or so I write here, in faint hope that the words may give me courage.
I walk down around the ridge to where the torrent falls into the Suli. Beneath evergreens and silver birch, ripples flow along the pale gray rocks, and a wren and a brown dipper come and go where water is pouring into water. The dipper is kin to the North American water ouzel, and the tiny wren is the winter wren of home—the only species of that New World family that has made its way across into Eurasia.
Drowned boulders knock beneath the torrent, and a rock thuds at my back. Transfixed by the bright gaze of a lizard, I become calm. This stone on which the lizard lies was under the sea when lizards first came into being, and now the flood is wearing it away, to return it once again into the oceans.
OCTOBER 25
We must leave Ring-mo before word comes from Dunahi that we must not. But still these B'on-pos yell and shout about their loads until Jang-bu takes cord thongs from their boots, mixes them up, and lays one on every basket, giving each man the load on which his cord is laid. The B'on-pos accept this way of dispensing justice with much grumbling.
Gloomy and restless, I set out ahead, and am some little way along the lake ledge when the rest catch up. Parts of the ledge have fallen away, and the gaps are bridged by flimsy scaffoldings of saplings. Certain sections are so narrow and precarious that more than once my legs refuse to move, and my heart beats so that I feel sick. One horrid stretch, lacking the smallest handhold in the wall, rounds a windy point of cliff that is one hundred feet or more above the rocks at lake edge, and this I navigate on hands and knees, arriving a lifetime later—but still in my old life, alas—at one of the few points in that whole first mile where one can lean far enough into the cliff to let another man squeeze by. Gasping for breath, I let the expedition pass.
For some time now, the chattering, laughing voices of the B'on-pos have been coming up behind. At that dangerous point of cliff, an extraordinary thing happens. Not yet in view, the nine fall silent in the sudden way that birds are stilled by the shadow of a hawk, or tree frogs cease their shrilling, leaving a ringing silence in the silence. Then, one by one, the nine figures round the point of rock in silhouette, unreal beneath big bulky loads that threaten each second to bump the cliff and nudge them over the precipice. On they come, staring straight ahead, as steadily and certainly as ants, yet seeming to glide with an easy, ethereal lightness, as if some sort of inner concentration was lifting them just off the surface of the ground. Bent far forward against the tump lines around their foreheads, fingers wide spread by way of balance, they touch the cliff face lightly to the left side, stroke the north wind to the right. Light fingertips touch my upper leg, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine hands, but the intensity is such that they seem not to distinguish between cold rock face and warm blue jeans. Mute unknowing, dull eyes glazed, the figures brush past one by one in their wool boots and sashed tunics, leaving behind in the clear air the smell of grease and fires. When the bad stretch is past, the hooting instantly resumes, perhaps at the point where they left off, as if all had awakened from a trance.
The sherpas come, and Phu-Tsering smiles gold-toothed encouragement from under his red cap. GS appears, moving as steadily as the rest; I am glad that the cliff corner hid my ignominious advance on hands and knees. Squeezing by, GS remarks, "This is the first reallyinterest
ing stretch of trail we've had so far." How easy it would be to push him over.
The second mile of the ledge path is pleasant, and I am able to enjoy the mythic view. Below lies the turquoise lake that has never known paddle or sail, and above, all around the sky, rise the snow mountains. A ravine that falls from a small glacier splits the rock face, opening out on a small beach of smooth pebbles. From here the trail climbs once again toward the ramparts at the northwest corner of Phoksumdo.
High above the lake, GS turns to wait; he points at something on the trail. Coming up, I stare at the droppings and mute prints for a long time. All around are rock ledges, a thin cover of stunted juniper and rose. "It might be close by, watching us," murmurs GS, "and we'd never see it." He collects the leopard scat, and we go on. On the mountain corner, in hard gusts of wind, GS's altimeter reads 13,300 feet.
The path descends through snow and ice to silver birch woods by the shore. At its north end Phoksumdo has two arms, not visible from Ring-mo, each leading to a hidden river valley. The eastern arm, across the lake, is very beautiful and strange, rising steeply into the shadows of the mountains. This northwestern arm is the valley of the Phoksumdo River, and its delta of boggy tundra streams, of gravel bars and willow, is so like Alaska that both of us exclaim at the resemblance. A cold wind drives waves onto the dead gray beach, and when the sun sinks behind the Kanjiroba Massif at the head of the valley, it is still very early in the afternoon. Shey is two thousand feet higher than our present camp, and therefore considerably colder; with precious little fuel for lamps and no way to heat the tents, we can only hope that the western mountains there are low, and sunset later.
At dusk, the northern sky is lavender. The cold lake nags at the gray pebbles, and there is no sign of a bird.
From down the lake shore, where the Ring-mos have made camp, comes sound of singing. All day I have thought about the eerie trance state of these people as they passed me on the ledge, and wonder if this might be a primitive form of the Tantric discipline called lung-gom,22 which permits the adept to glide along with uncanny swiftness and certainty, even at night. "The walker must neither speak, nor look from side to side. He must keep his eyes fixed on a single distant object and never allow his attention to be attracted by anything else. When the trace has been reached, though normal consciousness is for the greater part suppressed, it remains sufficiently alive to keep the man aware of the obstacles in his way, and mindful of his direction and goal."23 Lung-gom is, literally, wind-concentration, with "wind" or "air" equivalent to the Sanskrit prana, the vital energy or breath that animates all matter: if matter is energy, thenlung-gom may be simplistically regarded as a manifestation of mind over matter, of matter returning to energy (with a corresponding reduction of weight and gravity) so that it flows. The same yogic command of the physical body might account for the "invisibility" achieved by advanced yogins, who are said to still their being and its vibrations so completely that their corporeal aspect makes no impression on the mind or memory of others; and also for the re-crystallizing of energy into other forms, as when Milarepa, to confound his enemies, resorted to his black Nyingma-pa Tantra and transformed himself into a snow leopard at Lachi-Kang (Mount Everest). That holy men and sorcerers of Asia are capable of such feats has been attested to by astonished travelers since the time of Marco Polo; and very similar trance practice has been reported among native Americans and other traditional people.
In other days, plain levitation was described in Christian and Muslim faiths alike: thus. Saint Joseph of Cupertino, in times of ecstasy, was observed to fly into low trees, and on one occasion, according to a seventeenth-century witness, rose "from the middle of the church and flew like a bird onto the high altar, where he embraced the tabernacle."24 Such unusual gifts, whether cultivated or not, may deflect the aspirant from his path to true mystical experience of God, and have never been highly regarded by great teachers;25 one of the four cardinal sins in the monastic order of the Buddha—after unchastity, theft, and killing—was laying claim to miraculous powers. It is related that Sakyamuni once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity for a yogin by the river who had wasted twenty years of his human existence in learning how to walk on water, when the ferryman might have taken him across for a small coin.
By firelight, we talk about the snow leopard. Not only is it rare, so says GS, but it is wary and elusive to a magical degree, and so well camouflaged in the places it chooses to lie that one can stare straight at it from yards away and fail to see it. Even those who know the mountains rarely take it by surprise: most sightings have been made by hunters lying still near a wild herd when a snow leopard happened to be stalking. (One explorer of Central Asia and Tibet encountered wolves, wild asses, argali or "Marco Polo sheep," orongo antelopes, wild camels, bears, and even the Turkestan tiger, but makes not a single mention of a snow leopard.26) In years of searching, GS has seen but two adults and one cub. He got his first look at Panthera uncia in the Chitral Gol of Pakistan, in 1970; this past spring, in the same region, after an entire month of baiting with live goats, he made the first films ever taken of this creature in the wild.
The snow leopard is usually found above 5,000 feet and occurs as high as 18,000 feet. Though nowhere common, it has a wide range in the mountains of Central Asia, from the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan eastward along the Himalaya and across Tibet into southern China, and also northward in the mountains of the U.S.S.R. and of west China to the Sayan Range, on the Siberian border of Mongolia: the few captive specimens caught in the wild come mostly from the Tien Shan Mountains of the U.S.S.R., where trapping is limited and the animal is otherwise protected.
The typical snow leopard has pale frosty eyes and a coat of pale misty gray, with black rosettes that are clouded by the depth of the rich fur. An adult rarely weighs more than a hundred pounds or exceeds six feet in length, including the remarkable long tail, thick to the tip, used presumably for balance and for warmth, but it kills creatures three times its own size without much difficulty. It has enormous paws and a short-faced heraldic head, like a leopard of myth; it is bold, and agile in the hunt, and capable of terrific leaps; and although its usual prey is the blue sheep, it occasionally takes livestock, including young yak of several hundred pounds. This means that man would be fair game as well, although no attack on a human being has ever been reported.
The snow leopard is the most mysterious of the great cats; of its social system, there is nothing known. Almost always it is seen alone; it may meet over a kill, as tigers do, or it may be unsociable and solitary, like the true leopard.
OCTOBER 26
Last night a bonfire was made from deadwood at the mouth of the Phoksumdo River, and for a long time I sat beside it, watching the stars rise from the mountains. The Ring-mos came, singing and laughing, from their own camp in a cave by the lake shore, and mimicked everything that was said by sahib or sherpa. "Thak you!" "Ferry good!" "Ho! Dawa!" They are jolly and colorful, but there is aggressiveness in their good nature, and we cannot trust them. Yesterday morning, having stalled for two hours before departure to insure themselves three short days rather than two long ones on the trail, they stopped constantly to rest, and now this morning one man is complaining, and stirring up the others to protest their loads. Because Jang-bu seems indecisive with these people, GS shouts to the man to shut up or go home. Today this works, for we are only a few hours out of Ring-mo, but in the snows it may be a different matter altogether. These Red-faced Devils have us at their mercy, and all know it. Perhaps we should adopt the imperial methods of dealing with unruly Tibetans, as described at the turn of the century: "Throwing myself on him, I grabbed him by his pigtail and landed in his face a number of blows straight from the shoulder. When I let him go he threw himself down crying and implored my pardon. Once and for all to disillusion the Tibetan on one or two points, I made him lick my shoes clean with his tongue. . . . He tried to scamper away, but I caught him once more by hi
s pigtail and kicked him down the front steps which he had dared to come up unasked."27
(This forthright Briton was constantly harassed by bandits in western Tibet—one reason, perhaps, why he called his book In the Forbidden Land. But Tibet was not always a "Forbidden Land"; it welcomed its rare visitors before the Gorkha invasions of the late seventeenth century and the several Chinese invasions since, including those of 1910 and 1950. Still, it has always been remote and inaccessible, more so than any land on earth; before the last Chinese invasion, the journey from Peking to Lhasa took eight months.28)
We left Kathmandu a month ago today: theoretically, we shall arrive at Shey tomorrow, almost two weeks later than expected. GS has been worried by the setbacks, but among the blue sheep on the mountains above Ring-mo there is still no sign of rut. The main effect of the repeated delays has been extra expense: over and over, the porters have been paid to sit and sleep. GS figured his budget rather closely—he is rigorous in his responsibility to the societies that sponsor him—and at Pokhara the expedition was already so short of money, even with my own thrown in, that we could not afford an extra porter to carry more kerosene for the lamps, or more canned food to vary our diet, or even a single bottle of strong drink. The sausage, crackers, and coffee are all gone, and sugar, chocolate, tinned cheese, peanut butter, and sardines are nearly finished; we shall soon be down to a pallid regimen of bitter rice, coarse flour, lentils, onions, and a few potatoes, without butter. With short days, no heat, dwindling lamp fuel, and white food, life promises to be stringent at Shey Gompa, where much time will be spent in sleeping bags, in order to keep warm; writing notes in this wretched tent, I cannot even sit upright, but must hunch forward with a bent and aching neck.
The Snow leopard Page 14