“But more than that: what is happening in Tibet is symbolical for the fate of humanity. As on a gigantically raised stage we witness the struggle between two worlds, which may be interpreted, according to the standpoint of the spectator, either as the struggle between the past and the future, between backwardness and progress, belief, and science, superstition and knowledge -or as the struggle between spiritual; freedom and material power, between the wisdom of the heart an knowledge of the brain, between the dignity of the human individual and the herd instinct of the mass, between the faith in the higher destiny of man through inner development and the belief in material prosperity through an ever-increasing production of goods.”
—Lama Govinda
The nomadic expanses, the absolute horizon, the phenomenological wonder beckon as few places on Earth. Tibet has occupied a central place in the Western imagination for centuries. We arrived from Kathmandu with fellow Italians, Oregonians and Frenchmen. We are reminded of the tremendous flooding in the Yangtze Valley. The Chinese are altering their land and ecology in the name of globalization in catastrophic ways. Since their invasion of Tibet more than 70 years ago, the Chinese have seen the land of the lamas as a military and economic base; forests and vast deposits of uranium lurk under the surface of one quarter of China’s land mass. Tibet has been the largest penal colony on Earth for quite a while now, once the greatest pilgrimage destination the world has ever known.
Everywhere around Lhasa and the imposing Potala Polacca palace of the Dalai Lama, villages embody the ethos of a land-based culture whose roots are fed from Tibet’s endless valleys and soaring sky where vultures fly as reminders of the afterlife. Multicolored prayer flags billow in respect to the invisible deities that are part of the Tibetan pantheon. In the Barkhor Market the military presence is everywhere. Each soldier with the communist green uniform, almost a clone of the next. Dogs and traffic noises abound. It is a rambunctious place where the wares and trade of the 20th century collide with the still lingering piety of a civilization built on the edifice of diamond faith.
The agrarian beauty of the mud skin of the homes reflect the textured skin of the older people who have labored in some of the thinnest oxygen on Earth. It is truly a medieval world whose pace is light years behind the modernizing reality of the big cities. A Chinese pasta maker puts flour through the press, as hundreds of strands of pasta emerge. As the Han population outnumbers the indigenous Tibetan population, the assimilation, homogenization of Tibetan culture into the larger ethnic gene pool is increasing every year
Photo credit: Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson
In the nunnery in Tselang, one senior nun is kind enough to disclose a little about Shambhala. She once had a dream about climate change but she is unwilling to disclose any more information. Perhaps it was a portent about the glaciers all round us. Samye, Tibet’s first monastery built in the 2nd century AD was miraculously left untouched during the Chinese invasion of 1949. White and red, surrounded by a wall, Samye exudes a magical aura. Inside, a lama is giving a talk to Taiwanese tourists. Another lama oils his Tsampa (barley) sculptures, while another recites Tibetan scripture. Behind the physical evidence of things seen, there is the aura of Chinese domination even here. There is so much that may never recover. The wall mandala is superb and the colors, although subdued still dazzle the mind. A lama tells of a prophecy that said that in some future eon, seven suns would appear in the sky and create great heat as all the elements and earth itself would turn to fire. Has the process already begun? “We can see only one sun, after the world change, in the sky there will be seven suns, all natural elements will change to fire leading to world suffrage.” Is what has happened to Tibet the beginning of the suffering?
In much of Tibet’s uncanny landscape one feels as if one is going to drive into the sky. The superlative becomes almost banal. Explorers and wanderers such as Alexandra David Neel in whose town just outside of Paris I was also born, logged many thousands of miles over the ineffable landscape of this hauntingly bewildering land, the top of the world. In 1924, at 55 she was the first woman to cross the Himalayas to enter the fabled and forbidden city of Lhasa. She was the consummate explorer, who would yearn for vast steppes of Tibet, translate sacred texts, live inimitable mysteries, be accosted by brigands on horseback on the high plateau and hold sacred an ancient wisdom no-one will ever be able to match, until the age of 101.
Tibet, what is left of that land, after 6,000 monasteries were destroyed by the Chinese. The Drepung Monastery, which used to hold 10,000 monks, now holds 500. It is entirely being rebuilt after the scourge of the invasion. A picture of chairman Mao lies at the entrance of the main hall. A few intact relics and statues remain in the temple but otherwise the walls have been gutted. It feels like a neglected museum. Monks are taught the Heart Sutra and many others under the watchful gaze of China’s Big Brother. The contradiction is perhaps the grandest on Earth. The few papers one can find all contain propaganda about how happy the Tibetan people are with the new economic “progress.” Women are better off. Medieval shackles have been cast off. Glory be to the Middle Kingdom indeed.
Photo credit: Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson
As the great German mystic and writer Lama Govinda once wrote, “Why is it that the fate of Tibet has found such a deep echo in the world? There can only be one answer: Tibet has become the symbol of all that present day humanity is longing for, either because it has been lost or not yet been realized or because it is in danger of disappearing from human sight: the stability of a tradition, which has its roots not only in a historical or cultural past, but within the innermost being of man, in whose depth this past is enshrined, as an ever present source of inspiration.
We pass the deep blue water of the Scorpion Lake, one of the most mesmerizing blues on Earth, a light cobalt blue painted by a deity it seems. The waters are covered in mist. It is a holy lake. The beholding of it engenders a landscape from another realm, once caught between heaven and Earth. We ascend to a stupendous view of a glacier at the Karo-la pass at 5,700 meters. At Nojin Kangstar, at 7,191 meters we witness our first nomads with their near mythic black yak hair tents under the sweeping mass of white snow. The contrast is delirious. Herders accost us with their cattle. We have crossed over into another dimension. It is hard to believe we are still on Earth. Or rather this is the real Earth. Everything else seems like an illusion.
At Shalu monastery monks in cadet red robes bundle prayer flags for the anniversary of the Buddha’s first sermon at Sarnath. Here David Neel spent time meditating 70 years ago. One monk explains that every twelve years, after meditating in a cave, doing yoga, the monks would have a competition, drying wet blankets on their bodies by inducing internal heat. The trance walk lung gum pa, where adepts were able to bound fifteen feet in a single leap, is long gone, but occasionally there are stories that surface of monks who are able to cross distances in half an hour that would take normal humans twelve hours. They could go to Lhasa and back on foot in a few days. One monk at Shalu mentions Guru Rinpoche’s Commandment teachings and its commentary which said the old masters knew about flying machines and ways to make a bomb (witness the Chinese lust for uranium in Tibet). Whether this story is apocryphal or not, it makes one wonder about the ethical principles underlying our so called civilization. If the ancients knew about the nature of the atom and simply chose not to tamper with the Earth, can we really consider modern civilization more sophisticated? Today, it certainly seems that mind and matter have never been more at loggerheads. The monks of all people, know this well.
Photo credit: Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson
Finally we enter the indomitable Changtang vastness, the roof of the world. The entire domain is an exercise in great space. This is the song of Tibet. It is the body of the void become vastness. We observe a few wild asses on a hill waiting for our supply truck from Kathmandu. We see our first Changtang antelope. Decades ago there were thousands. Until the Chinese came. Four kindly nomads pose for pictures. One has a great Tibetan nomad hat, another braids. We take Polaroids and then take pictures of them enjoying these strange articles from a foreign world. They hold onto their pictures as if they were sacred talismans. It is a joyful moment but one fraught with the elements of a people facing the potential extinction of a way of being not likely to ever be replaced.
We make to the far West and to Tsaparang the most spectacular ruin on Earth. The road is a spectacle of colossal proportions: giant sandstone buttresses surround us. Sandstone walls enclose you for miles. This is a herculean landscape. One expects giant soldiers to appear over the horizon. Phantasmagoric sculptural forms emerge from the geology. The magical kingdom of Guge once ruled here. Southern Utah reminiscent landscapes with snow capped peaks. Everywhere the gargantuan rocks have been eroded, a kingdom in upheaval made for a race of titans.
There are mountains and then there is the axis Mundi of Creation. Mt Kailas. Some peaks are beyond earthly description. While most Westerners seem to enjoy the prospect of having conquered a mountain and climbed its face to the highest altitudes, some mountains are there simply to be praised. As a divine presence, many pilgrims come to Kailas to be in the presence of a micro cosmic replica of the universe. Its near perfect face resembles a snow-clad tetrahedron from which flow the four rivers of the Indus, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra, and the Karnali. India’s gods are fertilized from the high waters of Tibet. We are in the center of the world. In Tibet, the mandala of reality and the perception of the cosmos held together just as the four faces of Kailash respond to a need for order, the four faces of the Buddha. Had we in the West lost our essential mandala or map of reality? It once existed in the rose window of the great cathedrals. But that zodiac of experience was lost over 700 years ago.
Rosan, our incomparable cook, tells the magical story of a young man of fourteen who lost both his legs in a car accident and so became a saddhu. Rosan first met him by the waters of Lake Manosarovar, where the Buddha was mystically conceived. The pilgrim had attached a string to his waist to go around a car tire which was then pushed by sticks all the way from his home in India, across Nepal’s valleys to this most sacred lake in all of Asia. Perhaps the greatest pilgrimage of all time.
Photo credit: Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson
In recent years, besides the enormous human rights abuses that started decades ago in Tibet and now the forced labor in detention camps of hundreds of thousands of Uighur men in Xinjiang, China has deployed anti-aircraft guns to lace clouds with silver iodide or liquid nitrogen in an effort to expand its weather modification program. Thickening water droplets so they fall as rain or snow already employs tens of thousands of people in the Middle Kingdom’s bid to “control” the weather. Planes, almost 900 rocket launchers and 1,900 digital control devices would operate over 970,000 square kilometers, a lot of it over the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. The Tianhe, sky river plan could help the northern dry sector of China but impact Southeast Asia including the flow of the Mekong River. In the 1970’s China even concocted a scheme to use nuclear weapons to blast a channel through the Himalayas to allow warm humid air to flow from the Indian subcontinent to the dry regions of central and northern China passing through Tibet! Weaponizing the weather is surely something the monks in Tibet could never have divined. Or could they?
Photo credit: Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson
Learn more about Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson’s work at their website.
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