The most telling moment in Colin Thubron's To A Mountain in Tibet comes just before he reaches the summit of Drolma pass while making the kora or circumnavigation of Mount Kailasa. At 18,000 feet, he is struggling with each step to reach the high point of his journey, and pilgrims come zipping past him in their quest for redemption. This is the month of Saga Dawa, when Tibetan Buddhists and Indian Hindus come to the mountain to "dispel the defilement of a lifetime." For Hindus, Mount Kailas is the home of Shiva, the dancing god of ceaseless change and destruction, while for Buddhists, Mount Kailas is "the mystic Mount Meru," the axis-mundi, the center of the universe, inhabited by numerous buddhas and bodhisattvas. For Tibetans it is also the center of the old kingdom of Zhang Zhung, where Tibetan kings descended from the sky and where Padmasambhava ousted the ancient Bon worship and established the domination of Buddhism in Tibet.
As the pilgrims hurry past Thubron, "They look unquenchably happy...what they are seeing, I cannot tell...Buddhist lore claims that if the eyes are purified, the land transforms." Yet so little of this happiness or this transformation comes through in Thubron's description of his trip. He spends days trekking to the mountain, describing, sometimes in exquisite detail, the land, the people, the temples and shrines that he passes, and everything seems bleak and depressing. Now on the high point, both literally and figuratively, of the kora, the final image of his journey is neither joy nor remdemption, not even accomplishment, but depression: "a shadowy melancholy descends: the bewilderment when something long awaited has gone."
Of course, that feeling that something long awaited or cherished has vanished is the essence of Buddhism. The central tenet, the first of the Fourfold Noble Truths is the truth of suffering--dukkha. All existence is empty and impermanent (anatta and anicca), and suffering arises when we try to hold on to the past or even the present. There is no there there, and suffering arises when we try to grasp what is not there. Thubron perceives this, I think, although he doesn't mention it explicitly. Much of it arises when he thinks of his recently deceased mother, or his long-dead father and sister, knowing that they live only in his grief and his memories: "You cannot walk out your grief, I know, or absolve yourself of your survival, or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are."
Thubron chooses not only to make the kora, the 34 mile circumnavigation of Mount Kailas but to spend ten days trekking along the Karnali River to get to the mountain. Along the way, he describes the poverty and the hopelessness of the lives he passes through: "And what happens to the villages?...they become the ghetto of the unenterprising, the sick, the old." But this deterioration of village life is nothing compared with the devastation of Tibetan culture by the Chinese. "In a land maimed since 1950 by Chinese occupation, by mass killings and displacement, the Cultural Revolution, with its wholesale destruction of things old, struck at Tibet's heart." He stops at the shrines and the temples on his journey, describing the monks, the statues, the deities in a confusing welter of details where Hindu, Bon, and Buddhist stories compete for attention. It is a cold and dismal place full of alien beings in an alien culture. It is a world pervaded by chortens and prayer flags and trash--and death.
"Perhaps, as some say, the Tibetans' is a death-haunted culture. Certainly their death cults haunts others." At one point Thubron visits a durtro on the side of Mount Kailas where Tibetans take the bodies of their dead to be hacked into small pieces and left for the vultures. It is also a place where some Tibetans go to lie among the remnants of the dead and enact their own passing. Thubron is sickened by the site and rushes away: "Only a belief in reincarnation might alleviate this bleak dismay. Without it, the once-incarnate dead become uniquely precious, and break the heart." Even at the top of Drolma pass, Tubron finds another cemetery not for physical corpses but pieces of memory of the dead. "This cemetery, for all its squalid aspect, is for many the heart of their kora."
This is also where Thubron finds the contradiction inherent in Buddhism, for "the Buddhist living cannot help the deceased, whose souls do not exist...nothing cherished or even recognizable endures...nothing of the individual survives." That becomes the lesson that Thubron finds so hard to bear: "From all that he loves, a man must part." Thubron has ben lugging the memory of his mother, his father, his sister up and around the mountain with him, but what he really mourns is the loss of himself. It's not only regret for lost chances and all that he has not become but also for what has been and will never come again. Not just the life unfulfilled but the life fulfilled as well. It's all gone now. All that is left is "pure loss: the loss that mourns the tang of all human difference, of a herdman's impromptu song, perhaps, the lilt of a laugh in Grindelwald, or the fingers that caress a favourite dog." It is the universal feeling of a life that has come and gone, forever, never to return. That is the lesson of the Buddha, and it is a bitter, bitter pill to swallow.
Author: Thurbron, Colin
Date Published: 2011
Length: 227 pp.
electronic print
