Circling the Sacred Mountain: A Spiritual Adventure Through the Himalayas Paperback - 2000

First line

Mt. Kailash is the axis mundi, the cosmic pillar that upholds the vault of heaven.

Excerpt

At the center of the earth, there stands a great mountain, Lord of Snows, majestic, rooted in the sea, its summit wreathed in clouds, a measuring rod for all creation.
--KALIDASA (4TH CENTURY CE)

TAD

It's the end of May 1995, a week after my thirty-ninth birthday. I'm the proud father and Cynthia the proud mother of new-baby Anna on display at a Woodstock breakfast spot. We're gaily jabbering away, drinking far too much coffee, as beneath this "happy family" the ground rumbles. Cynthia wants out of Woodstock. As usual, I'm not sure what I want.

Through the screen door I hear high, imperious European tones, looking up I find Tenzin and Nena Thurman--that larger-than-life royal couple of Tibetan Buddhism--totally filling the door. I've known the Thurmans since I was seventeen, having been off and on friend, student, house sitter, stonemason, and jester to the court. But I haven't seen them in a year or two; they've never met Cynthia or, obviously, Anna. There are hugs, introductions, congratulations; pancakes are ordered, and more coffee.

Tenzin means simply Upholder of Teaching in Tibetan. That's what he was called when Nena met him, because that's what he was. He was the first American to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, though his teacher, Geshe Wangyal, privately counseled him not to take full vows of celibacy, even while introducing him to His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama. It was as if the old Mongolian lama knew this "white monk" would also be first to ask to be released from monastic vows. His Holiness was younger then, and gave Thurman whatever he requested, along with his religious name. Tenzin is what his friends and family still call him.

When we first met I didn't know what to call him. My stepfather introduced me to Bob Thurman, who'd built one of the domes featured in Woodstock Handmade Houses. Bob had tall, beautiful children with strange names, who looked like they'd been sculpted from marzipan. The entire family was other-worldly and proved a great comfort to me at uptight Amherst College, where Bob had become Professor Thurman. This really complicated matters, for though I was coming down with a clear case of hero worship, I still wondered what to call this glass-eyed giant, who had lost one eye in his youth, at the start of his road to wisdom.

Twenty years later this academic who cleared his own land, built his own house, and roughhoused three sons into manhood has become the American firebrand of Buddhism. Under thirty pounds of restaurant-food roll, he's solidly muscled and not in the least bit shy about putting you in a headlock to prove it. With a voice that pinches with a nasal insistence like Dudley Do-Right, then thunders like Richard Burton, Robert Tenzin Thurman is a combination of opposites: an apostle of peace who grapples in debate like the hockey player in a clinch that he was when he played for Exeter in high school.

Our breakfast nook soon takes on the air of an Irish pub at last call, with gesture, laughter, and language lashed together in happy storm. Tenzin is pounding the tabletop, Nena howling like a tea kettle, Cynthia and Anna gurgling brooks of laughter. "Now tell us, Tenzin," I inquire, "are you going to Tibet again soon?"

"Absolutely!" he thunders. "Next fall in all likelihood. An expedition to Kailash, the holy mountain, the center of the universe. In October, I wish it could be sooner, I'm off to most remote Western Tibet--quite high up and an ordeal in itself just to get there. Incredibly powerful place. Really the most powerful place. I've been trying to get there for years!"

At the sound of the word "Kailash" a bell goes off in my head, and at the end of this speech I hear my own voice blurt back: "I'm coming with you." If I'm shocked, Cynthia must be reeling. A knowing glance is exchanged between Tenzin and Nena. As I would later learn, acquaintances were constantly asking for a place on the Kailash trip, then backing out again.

"Really? How interesting," Tenzin responds politely, his huge, handsome face glowing like a jack-o'-lantern, one eye following me, the other, glass, staying put. "Well, it's only nine thousand dollars to go. Come up with that and we'd love to have you along."

My mind doesn't register the cost. I'm somewhere  else; swirling in snow and wind. Looking around the  table I drink inthe sight of Cynthia and Anna with a mixture of joy and grief. I'm leaving them. No one else realizes it yet, but I'm already ten thousand miles away. For some inexplicable reason, the instant I hear "Kailash" I know exactly where I'm bound.

Though impressed with my audacity, this incredibly over-scheduled scholar of Tibet is still a bit leery of my sudden Buddhist resolve. I've been a slapdash disciple, in and out of favor for years. The next weekend I drive up to the tumbledown Dharma castle to talk about the trip. Both Nena and Tenzin speak in high voices and peer at me through narrowed eyes; there is an air of audition to the visit. Unintimidated, I ask more about what will happen.

"I give Dharma talks on these trips," Tenzin says, seated at his rough-hewn desk-throne. "Really an A-to-Z primer on Tibetan Buddhism and the path to enlightenment. Between your personal odyssey, the mind-crunching altitude, and the unfamiliar terrain and climate, you'll be quite overwhelmed, I think. You'll be facing the throne of Shiva, the destroyer, confronting death every step ofthe way. No breaks for wine, women, and song."

"That's right, Tad," Nena chimes in from the next room, reclining, as usual, on the broken-down velvet couch with a view of the back side of Meads Mountain through a huge circular window. "This is a remarkable opportunity for you. To really get it--and not play the Artful Dodger yet again!"

"Because," Tenzin continues, grabbing back the verbal baton, "I'm going up there with a very clear purpose. I want to plant a specific prayer in the mind-stream of the planet, to get us beyond this moment of impending doom. For one reason or another I've been prevented from doing this earlier. Nena and I were close severaltimes, but now it looks like the time is finally right for a pilgrimage, to make offerings and meditate upon a solution for a world that has very nearly blown it." He examines my face carefully before continuing. "These days the Chinese have been upgrading their equipment at the borders. If my passport number goes into a computer I may not get through at all. Or they could follow us . . . it could get a little rough and you could end up leading the expedition!" He laughs, muttering, "Heaven forbid."

"Heaven forbid is right," echoes Nena. Then, in a more conciliatory tone, she begins one of her favorite sentences: "I have a favor to ask of you, Tad."

Years ago I gave the Thurmans a capstone left over from one of my masonry jobs to serve as the hearth beneath a woodstove. The woodstove has since been removed and Nena now wants to use the stone as a bridge at the front of the property. I rouse the youngest son, Mipam, from his science-fiction novel for help. Together we carry out the monster and stand it up next to a huge, curvaceous wall I built five years ago. Mipam starts philosophizing, as Thurmans will, while I make a few preparations, and--singlehandedly--lay the stone across the gurgling brook. It's solid. The Thurmans are delighted. Inconsequential as this may sound, it is an extremely important moment for me, harking back to the complicated relationship between Tibet's most famous saint, Milarepa, and his guru, the translator Marpa.

The eleventh-century Milarepa was the son of a prosperous Tibetan whose early death reversed his family's fortunes. The executor of the will was the dead man's brother, Mila's uncle, who reduced the widow and two children to maids and stableboy in their own mansion. After suffering beatings and humiliations at the hands of his own relatives, Mila apprenticed himself to a local warlock of great power in pursuit of vengeance. Bringing a sorceror's curse upon the farm of the usurpers, Mila created a hailstorm that blew down their house, killing thirty-five people. With the locals up in arms, Mila fled.

Searching for a teacher and for atonement for this profound crime, Mila encounters Marpa the translator and his wise and loving wife, Damema.

Marpa drinks wine and treats Mila like a serf. Though Damema tries to intervene, the relationship deteriorates. Marpa tells Mila to build a huge stone tower of a certain shape, and Milarepa accomplishes this feat, only to hear that the tower must be dismantled and rebuilt in another shape. Uncomplainingly Mila resets every stone, but not without bruising himself. Marpa tells him to rebuild it again, and upon completing it, to rebuild it again, until it has been rebuilt a total of four times. By now Mila is a broken mass of blisters and bruises. Withdrawing into seclusion, running away, coming back, and finally resolving to commit suicide, he is at last summoned by Marpa, initiated, and made his adopted son. Armed with strong teachings, Milarepa is instructed by Marpa to search out a deserted cave, to give up associations with men and women and to dedicate his life to meditation for the good of all sentient beings. Overcoming numerous hardships both natural and supernatural, the spiritual progress of this onet
ime warlock is so momentous as to propel him into buddhahood in a single lifetime.

Like several other resonances in our relationship, my relocating the hearthstone recalls the Milarepa-Marpa archetype. To me it seems like an obvious joke.

"Good," Nena says, smiling approvingly at the new bridge. "You've become quite strong. If Tenzin has a heart attack, you can carry him off the mountain." Through much resulting laughter she insists: "You will, in fact, promise to do precisely this, if need be!"

There's no turning back. I'm committed, with only a few short weeks to prepare for the trip of a lifetime. I help Cynthia and the baby move to a charming apartment in Portland, Maine. I reassure my ten-year-old daughter, Riley, who lives with her mother in Woodstock, that I'll send postcards at every opportunity. I send a similar message to my son in London. I lay a few stone walls for a few bucks and read everything on Tibet and Mt. Kailash that Tenzin recommends.

The trek itself will take between twenty-five and twenty-eight days, depending on whether we fly to Lhasa from Kathmandu and drive west straight across the Tibetan Plateau, or if, road conditions permitting, we drive overland straight from Kathmandu north through the Himalayas, swerving east and then west to Kailash. In either case we'll be on the road four or five days. The trip around Kailash itself takes about the same. Then we'll visit holy Lake Manasarovar, drive south to the Tibetan border and hike out through the Nepali Himalayas to Simikot.

Day by day I work at making it happen. Passports, visas, reservations, money, physical conditioning, attempts at spiritual practice. I journey to the holy mountain predisposed to  a Buddhist point of view but not made much happier by it.  I falter on the central tenet of "selflessness" since, like many committed to the arts, I suffer from an enlarged sense of self-importance. Some might say I am not a Buddhist at all, simply a huge admirer of buddhas.

Once I begin to research Mt. Kailash I soon realize it is, indeed, the most astounding place. Prophecies are heard there and it is said to be protected even from nuclear war. The Hopis acknowledge it as the other end of the world backbone that sticks up as their Black Mesa. But Kailash, the eastern spine-tip, is better protected, sublimely worshiped, and the most divinely ornamented place on Earth. It is called Mt. Kailash by Europeans; Kang Rinpoche, or Snow Jewel, by Tibetans; Mt. Meru by Indians. It is the spiritual crown of the planet, atop the very northernmost sector of the Himalayas, in the most remote region of Tibet.

The first European to see it and live to tell was a mad Swedish explorer named Sven Hedin. Early this century he came back to the Swedish academy affirming the ancient myths that tell of an ice-encased, perfect four-sided pyramid, at whose foot nestles the highest lake in the world and the source of all the major rivers of Asia. He said Kailash is this jewel mountain, which pilgrims of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain faiths spend years journeying to, through all sorts of weather, in order to walk clockwise around the thing, never attempting the peak.

When people ask me about my impending journey to Tibet, I explode with all this. Heads nod and mouths mutter appreciations. Sometimes I feel the glow of good fortune, sometimes, a shadow of dread. I shouldn't talk about it anymore, I realize. There are hundreds of preparations to make.

Media reviews

"In Circling The Sacred Mountain, Thurman and Wise take turns recounting their trip to Mount  Kailash...Wise sculps a memorable word-frieze of the peoples and landscapes of Tibet and of his journey through them [and] Thurman's verbal virtuosity shines on these pages, as does his immense talent as a teacher, his ability to relate Buddhist ideas to everyday life and to inspire students to go further ."
--Tricycle

"A fine adventure and a brilliant direct pipeline to the ancient teachings of Tibet."
--Jack Kornfield, author of After the Ecstasy, The Laundry

"Combines the intimacy of a memoir with the true grit of an adventure story-an into thin air for the spiritual set."
--Harper's Bazaar

"A lively circumambulation of Asia's holy mountain in Tibet, illuminated by Tenzin Thurman's passionate teachings."
--Peter Matthiessen, bestselling  author of The Snow Leopard