It was a freezing night. I had difficulty sleeping because a chill had worked inside my sleeping bag. I woke and had to put on more clothes. At 5:30 a.m. my friends good-naturedly shook my tent and shouted goodbye as they started off. I unzipped my bag and put more clothes on while still lying down. Inside and out everything was frozen: boots, toothpaste, the pegs holding the tent down. I rushed my packing. Breakfast was cold biscuits and juice crystal slush.
The Zanskaris were long gone. I could see them far up the slope, ants on the horizon. Faint words and melodies from Hindi film songs trickled down to me; Padma was reliving his New Delhi summer.
The surface of the snow was firm, and a dusting of hoar frost made for good walking, but by 7:30 a.m. the temperature was rising and the crust was fracturing with each step. It was heavy work, and every fifteen minutes I stopped to catch my breath. Once again I found myself following the tracks of a yak. My oxygen-starved mind became absorbed in the trail of prints. I began to interpret the mechanics of its motion. Each hoof-mark lay almost exactly the same distance apart; its gait was slow and methodical. The hoofs were lifted with precision, dragged through the snow and placed, slightly angled backwards, with metronomic consistency. The stride length varied little and the depth of the impression related more to the amount of snow than the angle of slope. The yak had created an imprint that stood uncannily at ninety degrees from the vertical and I used the tracks as a single-laned stairway.
Morning wore on. I moved, literally, at a yak’s pace. It felt natural; the yak is probably the mammal most adapted to that landscape. As the steps wore on the economical, unhurried disposition of the yak permeated me. I realized the only rhythm that agrees with high altitude is slow and contemplative. I was drifting into the true nature of walking: the absolute focus on each step, a subconscious awareness of my physiology. The physical mantra of walking was evolving in the steps of the yak.
I don’t know what came first, my fascination with the Himalayas or my love of walking. About the same time I was reading Chris Bonington’s Everest South West Face my mother decided in a fit of maternal dictatorship that the family (minus my dad since he was beyond dictatorial edicts) should be out walking after dinner. We four kids and Mum would set out in the long summer evenings along lanes and pathways on the outskirts of Belfast that in those days were bush-lined and cobblestoned. Little streams and untamed copses bisected the trails. I discovered a peaceful, composed and yet wild place was within walking distance of our house. That space was probably the closest I could get to the Himalayas of my dreams and therefore it was doubly attractive.
Eventually, my brothers and sister returned to watching TV after dinner but I couldn’t let that wildness go, and to walk there, to be for the first time in my life in complete control of my movement, made those places doubly precious.
When Gareth died my Himalayan dreams were resurrected, so in a way it was only natural that I would venture to those mountains to walk. Walking over the years has become a medium for me, a way to interpret the world. Walking is what human beings were designed to do. I think our natural speed of thought is four kilometres an hour, a pace in time with our moving feet. For me the motion – the drop of the heel, the roll onto the ball of the foot, the flex of toes and the push off with a bend of the knee – is so embedded that there is home deep within the movement.
By ten o’clock I could see the stupas marking the top of the pass. As I moved towards them they came at me like a half-speed, overexposed film. I reached the summit in an altitude-induced dream-state. Prayer flags snapped in the wind. The sky’s azure brilliance faded to pastel at the horizon and there melted into the ice of the peaks guarding the pass. The snow that drifted to one side of the stupa was as fine as baker’s flour. I leaned against the mud-brick monument. My rucksack dug into my spine. I unslung it and dropped onto the bottom step of the stupa’s foundation.
I liked that stupa. It was not neat or clean like city stupas in Kathmandu or Lhasa. It was off-kilter, unwashed, earthen, its steeple bent. There was nothing perfect there, just a homeliness that encouraged you to sit, a roughness that reminded me of the stupa’s role as intermediary between Buddhist philosphy and the simple beliefs of the local people. For lay people, stupas are not just repositories of the Buddha’s teachings but, because of the power they symbolize, guardians past which evil spirits cannot proceed. Without those stone spires gracing every major Himalayan pass, Buddhists believe that negative forces would congregate in a particular valley and tip the scales of good and evil towards the side of immorality.
A few hundred metres below the pass on its southern slope the snow petered out. By 4,000 metres the trail had dried and the footing was solid. The sun warmed me. I heard the chirping whistle of marmots and here and there in the shallow soils violet gentians bloomed. At one point a snow cock exploded from behind a patch of prickly sea buckthorn, and I shouted in surprise then laughed at my panic.
The Kanpa-la and Murgam-la, mere bumps compared to the morning’s climb, floated past and by six o’clock I was looking down on Lingshed Gompa.
The monastery was quiet in the hour before sunset. Lingshed is a jumble of mud-brick buildings, perhaps thirty in all, built into a fifteen-degree slope. The complex is crumbling and yet has remained solid in that position for centuries. The gompa looks to be pulled by gravity; architecturally dense at the top of the slope, it is centred on the large prayer hall and shrine rooms, then the buildings thin downwards until the hillside levels and fields of barley take over. There is no road to Lingshed, no electricity, no flush toilets, no bottled gas to cook on. The village looks much as it would have two or three hundred years ago.
Legend has it that Lingshed was founded in the eleventh century by the great Tibetan translator and monastery builder Lotsawa Rinchen Zangpo. At age seventeen Rinchen Zangpo had been sent from the western Tibetan kingdom of Guge to Kashmir to develop a written Tibetan language, and then translate Buddhist texts into that language. He returned to Guge seventeen years later with his translations in hand and on his homecoming was responsible, under the patronage of the local king, for building 108 monasteries in West Tibet and what is now northwestern India.
Lingshed’s positioning on the main trade route from Ladakh to Zanskar made it an important stopover for traders and travellers. But now, with a road pushed into the Zanskar Valley from the north via Kargil, Lingshed has become a backwater. Merchants and ascetics have been replaced by foreign trekkers, the new pilgrims attracted by the village’s distance from highways and electric grids. Lingshed is a Luddite Shangri-la.
By the time I reached the gompa night had fallen. From the last pass I had seen the monastery in golden, late afternoon light and the buildings had looked intriguing, but with sunset they turned ominous; narrow alleys were dark and littered, guard dogs barked close by and the acid smell of urine clung to walls. Eventually, a young monk led me inside the gompa and in the firelight of the monastery kitchen I found my old friend Lama Karma.
We had met a couple of years before when I had been in Lingshed on a previous trek. He had been more than generous with his time, guiding me around his village and introducing me to his family. Since then we had met again in Leh. There was always something to talk about as the lama was interested in not just his religion but also in the history, agriculture and economic development of the community. When we met in the kitchen, he embraced me and almost immediately took me off to his room.
“Come, come,” he said. “You are tired and hungry, my friend.”
The room was a three-metre by three-metre mud-brick cell with one roughly glazed, wooden framed window. The lama’s bed was pushed against one wall, while against the other were low tables stacked with books, a pair of candles, a Walkman-style cassette player, an open tin of biscuits and a plastic bag of dried Zanskari cheese. Almost immediately from beneath his bed Lama Karma pulled out a single burner kerosene stove and by candlelight busied himself preparing a thukpa that put Tenzin’s fare to shame. We talked, ate, laughed and drank cup after cup of hot, salty, butter tea.
Lama Karma was in his late twenties and had been a monk for nearly two decades. For Buddhist families it is auspicious for at least one child to join the monastery, traditionally the youngest son. The tradition creates a blood connection between every clan and the community’s spiritual and administrative centre, the monastery.
Lingshed Gompa belongs to the Geluk-pa school of Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism is split into four main schools of thought, the largest and arguably the most influential being the Geluk-pa tradition of which the Dalai Lama is the head. It was founded in the fourteenth century by the philosopher Je Tsongkhapa. The second largest school is the Kagyu who trace their lineage to Tilopa (the teacher of Naropa) in the eleventh century. The Sakya tradition was founded by Khon Konchog Gyalpo in the eleventh century and the Nyingma, which literally means “ancient ones,” is the original school of Tibetan Buddhism created in the eighth century by Padmasambhava.
The monastery’s central purpose is the same as that of all Buddhism – the elimination of suffering for all sentient beings. To achieve this the community must produce enlightened teachers or bodhisattvas who will guide the population to a higher state of consciousness through the teachings of the Buddha. Everyone in Lingshed Gompa, from the cooks to the Abbott, to artists and farmers, is engaged directly or indirectly in that goal.
But like every aspect of Himalayan culture the brotherhood is in transition. There is an awareness within the sangha – the order of monks and nuns – that the villagers have material needs. Strong steps on the spiritual path can only be taken when the belly is full. So a new variety of monk is evolving in India, Nepal and Tibet to address the questions of development in the twenty-first century. The Dalai Lama is at the forefront of the movement, as he has said, “In Tibet we paid little attention to technology and the environment. Today we realize that this was a mistake.”
Lama Karma is a remote example of this new wave. Interested in language, agriculture and science, he is trying to promote growth in Lingshed through instruction in Western subjects and an emphasis on Ladakhi values. As he said, “Knowledge, not money, is the key to contentment.”
When I asked how he was applying this, he chuckled and said, “Well, I must start with the children. I tell them that instead of begging for rupees or candy they should rush up to trekkers and shout, ‘We need a new school, we need a new school.’”
I stayed that night on the floor of Lama Karma’s room. I laid my sleeping bag on top of a thick handmade woolen carpet, which featured a pattern of interconnected dragons. In Tibetan mythology the ubiquitous dragon represents gentle power. The dragon thunders out of the heavens trumpeting the sound of compassion, a deafening roar that cannot be ignored. Between Lama Karma’s snoring and the howling wind that ripped at the tiny window I too was deafened, but after climbing the Singe-la, Kanpa-la and Murgam-la, not even dragons could keep me from sleep.
The following day was spent with the monastery’s painter, Lama Padma Stanzin, a man whose smooth face and easy smile implied a sense of contentment from his life’s work. He wore the high-peaked yellow hat of the Geluk-pa Buddhist school, but it was forever off-kilter and with every third or fourth brush stroke he would nudge it. I liked that; brush, brush, brush, adjust the hat, refocus on the work, brush, brush, brush.
Lama Padma was decorating a new prayer room, a project that had taken him and two senior painters almost ten years to complete. On my last visit to Lingshed three years before, the room had been a colourful construction zone. Back then half-painted Buddhas and bodhisattvas, deities and mythic creatures evolved from what looked like roughly sketched, paint-by-number murals over the four walls. Colour-splattered floors appeared beyond repair and rickety waste-wood scaffolding had been draped in tattered tarpaulins.
Now the room was nearing completion. The space was about ten metres long, ten metres wide and three and a half metres high; two walls exhibited the major deities of the Geluk-pa school, a third was dedicated to the life stories of the Buddha and the fourth bore hundreds and hundreds of identical, thinly outlined, uncoloured Buddhas, a representation of the many manifestations of the one being. The fourth wall interested me the most because it was for the viewer to mentally fill in, to generate the Buddha in their own minds.
By the rear wall was the temple’s focus, a two-storey, cast-metal statue of Maitreya. It was an amazing piece of religious art mainly because of its scale. The statue must have been cast in a workshop hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away and then transported piece by piece on trucks and then on the backs of yaks or donkeys over the high passes. In Lingshed it would have been reassembled, appliquéd with gold leaf and then had the details of its face and hands painted on. The figure was a brass jigsaw puzzle on a massive scale. Yet I found the statue disconcerting because it felt too large for the space. The temple roof had been heightened and the head was above the ceiling, its eyes staring through windows to the outside, not back in blessing to its devotees. There was a coolness about the image; it was aloof, removed from Lingshed’s amicable dust and clutter.
To the local people, though, as Lama Karma explained to me, the immensity of the figure was moving. In a land where anything not made of wood or earth had to be imported on the backs of humans or animals, the statue’s scale held power. To the villagers its size spoke of the teachings’ authority.
I sat with Lama Stanzin. He was painting Buddhist imagery, dragons, snow lions and wheels of law on the cabinets that would hold the monastery’s ritual objects. His concentration was unshakable. Tibetan Buddhist art is antithetical to modern styles because it shies away from spontaneity. The work is produced in strict accordance with thousand-year-old manuals. The lama had sketched the images in charcoal on the cabinet surfaces and was now painstakingly colouring the designs section by section. What moved the work from rote painting to spiritual practice was the lama’s focus and understanding of the symbolism; his work was a meditation. Whereas critics can speak for hours on the possible meanings of modern art, the Tibetan style is formulaic, but within it is a millennium-old set of keys that opens the way to higher states of consciousness.
The deities the lama had painted on the walls were abstract representations of particular states of mind; many of the images symbolize the emotional impediments for individuals striving to achieve a higher state of consciousness. Tibetans believe that if a devotee meditates intently on the deity chosen for them by their teacher, they can connect with it, understand it and then the “problem” that the image characterizes will disappear. With the obstruction then out of the way the practitioner can move closer to a reality beyond the cycle of birth, suffering and death – the state known as nirvana.
The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung had a great interest in Tibetan Buddhism, and the formulation of his dream theory, where the content of a person’s dreams are analyzed and discussed, can be attributed partly to his readings in Tibetan religion (Jung wrote the introduction to one of the first major works of translation from Tibetan to English, W.Y. Evans-Wentz’s Tibetan Book of the Dead).
But for the villagers of Lingshed the high philosophy of Buddhism is something best left for the monks on the hill. For them, Lama Stanzin’s paintings are a source of security, evidence that the Dharma is alive in their village and that the power of Buddhism will keep the gentle balance that generations have lived with.
Lingshed in September is a busy place. From dawn until dusk families work their land. There are no internal combustion engines or power tools to distract you from the harvest work, just people moving at a slightly quickened pace in fields and on pathways. Everything is done by hand or with livestock. It is the season that demands the most of the village, but the pace is sane and I loved that people made time to sing and that the children – babies, toddlers, schoolkids of all ages – were out in the fields helping or observing. The harvest is a necessary labour but its importance for the community also makes it a social undertaking. For me, a person to whom groceries are acquired in an air-conditioned supermarket, my time there was a lesson in how not to take food for granted.
Barley is the main crop in Lingshed simply because it is the only cereal that will grow with any vigor at 3,800 metres and the harvesting of it at that altitude is time-consuming, back-breaking work. First the barley is cut and loosely baled using home-forged scythes. Then the spiny bales are transported from the fields by humans, donkeys or yaks to the threshing grounds outside every home. At the grounds the stalks are threshed to separate the seed from the stalk; then a bed of grain is laid on the threshing ground’s hard-floored circular space. The family’s draft animals are tethered to a central pole and walk the circle. The pressure of their hooves cracks the barley, separating the hard shell from the nutritious core. Finally, the grain is winnowed using wooden pitchforks, the chaff taken by the wind, the kernels falling to the earth. The seed is now edible, but Himalayan barley takes a final step.
The grain is cleaned in a nearby stream and then roasted on metal plates over open fires. The roasting decreases the water content, producing a durable cereal called tsampa. The grain can be stored for years and ground into flour at any time. Tsampa is the taste of the Himalayas, and its smoky, nutty flavor can be found in everything from unleavened bread to home-brewed beer. Tsampa is the Himalayan staff of life, a fact you appreciate when you realize that every major occasion in the Tibetan calendar, from new years, to weddings, to the birth of a new child is celebrated by the tossing of tsampa to the wind.
I joined Lama Karma’s family in transporting the crop from the fields to the threshing circle. The travesty of my attempts to coerce a fully loaded, irritable mule down a narrow trail sent the relatives into fits of laughter. The teasing wasn’t cutting, but more an expression of surprise at my inability to manage the animals that Lingshedites grow up with. My comic management of the rowdy mule was quickly followed by a crash course in muleteering, patiently taught by the lama’s uncle. He was a stern, smiling man who had a tendency when the mules would go their own way to grab the animal’s ears with both his hands and wring them as if they were towels. It looked painful, but seemed to work.
Outside the family house we had lunch. The sunshine worked its way into everyone; chatter mingled with work songs, braying mules, crying babies and far-off chanting from the monastery. The meal was tsampa mixed with a flour of ground, dried peas and then kneaded with butter into a doughy lump. It was surprisingly tasty but required many swigs of steaming butter tea to wash it down.
In the afternoon I spent hours with Lama Karma’s cousins winnowing the grain, throwing shovelfuls of the broken barley into the air and letting the wind take the rough husks. It’s a skill that requires a deft touch, and by the end of the day itchy chaff had permeated every part of my body. The tickle in my clothes persisted for weeks.
At the upper end of village, inside the gompa, the late summer meditation retreat was underway. For the advanced monks prayer services were being held three times a day. The sound of drums, horns and chanting reverberated through the buildings and the sandstone cliff behind the monastery amplified them, delivering blessings to riverside fields at the far edge of the community.
In the evening I spent time in the monastery kitchen. I came to think of it as the warm, cluttered guts of the gompa. The low-ceilinged, dark and smoky room was a throwback to another age. Huge copper and brass urns glinted in the dim light produced by a single slit window. Fires burned constantly in the central stove, their amber light flickering on the glossy black walls. Shadowy men moved briskly through the shadows in silent woolen-soled boots. The kitchen staff’s robes were the gompa’s patchworked remains, stained with yak butter, soot and clouds of flour. In a poor, remote monastery like Lingshed the young monks inherit the robes of their recently deceased elders.
The older kitchen monks’ hands were rough and scarred like rock, their skulls shaved clean. They were the monks whose practice is serving their more spiritually inclined brethren and yet they appear the happiest of the sangha.
The kitchen supplies meals and butter tea, not only to the monks, but to the families who labour in the fields owned by the gompa, so a stream of kettle-carrying novices flowed in and out of the fragrant darkness, all shouting and joking and spilling tea on the way. The tiny monks, some as young as seven, are constantly underfoot; for them the space must be a reminder of the mothers they left behind. For the older brothers it is a worldly sanctuary, a place removed from the rituality of the prayer hall. It’s easy to see why that subterranean kitchen was the gompa’s social centre.
Lingshed in those few days was magical. Time had shifted onto a different plane – it pooled in the silences between activity and rushed along during the haste of the harvest’s work. I was happy eating thukpa made by compassionate hands and helping people who had no need for my ineptitude. Elements fell into place; the community and the land they were working on functioned symbiotically. I thought of the Vietnamese monk Thich Nath Han’s words: “If there is harmony and awareness the Dharma is there.”
The Dharma is a cornerstone of Buddhism, simultaneously the natural law that underlies life and the actual teachings of the Buddha. I had read about the Dharma before I started on the trek, but was confused about its true meaning. To say that now I have an understanding of Dharma would be a lie, but in Lingshed for the first time I had a feeling of what Dharma might be. In Lingshed I felt I understood how a community works together, how individuals apply themselves in the process of assuring their village’s survival. The practice of local wisdom, the selflessness displayed by everyone and their absorption in working for the greater good resonated with me as something integral to what the Buddha had taught. Thinking about the Dharma and the stability it creates has in some way helped me with Gareth’s death. Yes, he’s gone, yes, the Gareth I knew will never be here with me again, but although I don’t completely understand it, I feel that Dharma in some universal sense must have compensated for the void he left behind.
In the morning, somewhat reluctantly, I pulled my sleeping bag from Lama Karma’s floor and stuffed it in my pack with the clothes and books and maps I had scattered around the little room. Lama Karma had invited me to stay as long as I wanted, but because of the length of the trek I had to think months ahead. There were high passes hundreds of kilometres away that could be covered in fresh snow anytime in the next months. I had to leave. On the way out of the village I stopped dozens of times to shake hands and say goodbye. Everyone was asking when I would return, but all I could say was, “Soon, I hope.”
From Lingshed it was south again to the Hanuma-la, a tiring set of switchbacks ending in a snow-covered summit. A pair of magpies escorted me up the start of the pass, the sun flashing on their iridescent plumage. They jousted back and forth, cackling and eyeing me suspiciously – talking behind my back.
On the stupa, at the divide, prayer flags had been worn to threads by the wind. I looked back to see the monastery, a collection of white matchboxes set against sandy cliffs. They looked so small, so impermanent against the crumbling massif behind them and yet for the village the monastery was the unwavering axis upon which the universe spun. Barley fields fanned out below the gompa – layers and layers of history. I thought of the work that had created those hundreds of hand-built paddies. My time there had been so rewarding, but Lingshed was distant from my history; I was not a barley farmer or a monk. Had the magic I had experienced there been merely the result of synchronicity and environment? I hoped there was something in me that could incorporate the goodness I had been part of.
From the base of the Hanuma-la into Zanskar the trail is lined with a procession of cliffs. The rock walls are the sedimentary remnants of the 250-million-year-old Tethys Ocean, evidence of the incredible forces involved in the creation and continual growth of the Himalayas, forces that have pushed what had been an ocean floor centimetre by centimetre five kilometres high.
Four hours into the day’s walk I came across one cliff that stood out. Almost a kilometre long and 150 metres tall, it rose from a turquoise creek and dissolved on its upper lip into emerald pasture. The wall’s geologic tattoo was coloured in golds and ferric red, dusty micas and jet-black slate. The colours were muted but subtly distinguishable. From every angle the pattern was hypnotic in its asymmetry.
The trail skirted the opposite embankment atop a hundred-metre-high precipice. This was disconcerting because when I took my eyes from the path I was drawn to the cliff wall, something disturbing on such a precipitous track. When I focused on the rock there was no scale; the wall was so immense and complicated that it could only be viewed as a whole. The cliff was new every time I looked at it. It was a million years captured in a line of stone.
The Parfi-la is the last major pass before Zanskar. Like the Hanuma it is a long slow set of switchbacks, but on the slope occasional springs released dark trickles and in the hollows greenery flourished; briery clouds of sea buckthorn stood beside tall patches of Cirsium falconeri thistle, purple and gold beds of milk vetch and potentilla. Red robins and brown accentors chirped and in the dry underbrush I heard the rustle of mice. Farther up the slope I saw plump marmots basking on flat stones in the sun, always with one eye to the sky, alert to circling hawks. Their whistled warnings rattled around the hillside.
Once again I was dropping into the clear world of walking. The beauty of the hill lay in its consistency – one step I would inhale, the next exhale – simple, symbiotic and yet in its detail complex. My world became focused on the relationship between the steps and the breath, yet birdsong and the plant’s green sway reached me as complements to the movement. On the summit the ever-present stupa greeted me, the prayer flags snapped in the breeze and overhead a golden eagle circled slowly.
The first thing I saw on the far side of the pass was the Zanskar River flowing fast and dark. On the drier south side of the crossing there was no sign of plant life, only a khaki desert. This was the northern end of the Zanskar Valley, the farthest western outpost of Tibetan Buddhism.
I camped at the base of the pass, pitching my tent on a stony plateau not far from the river. I cooked my dinner, now back to my standard fare of rice and dal, and for the first time in days listened as the steam-engine rumble of my little kerosene stove was drowned out by the roar of whitewater.
The first village on the northeastern route into Zanskar is Hanumil, two homes set along a limpid creek that feeds half a dozen, grey-soil fields on a level below the houses. When I arrived the villagers were predictably busy with harvest business, but I lingered on the far side of the stream remembering my last visit.
Two years before, I’d joined three friends and walked into the valley during winter on the frozen Zanskar River. I had always wanted to visit Zanskar during the cold season because, with snows blocking the high passes, the area is completely cut off from the rest of India. People had told me the feeling in the valley during winter is like Tibet before the upheavals of the Chinese Communist invasion in 1949.
The winter walk can only be done after an extended cold snap – ten days of minus-fifteen-degree Celsius temperatures, then the river freezes, not solidly, but thick enough for groups to take advantage of the ice shelves that form along the riverbanks. For a few weeks in mid-winter Zanskaris can walk the flat ice to Leh in only six days, as opposed to the two weeks it takes to cross the high passes in summer. Groups undertaking the winter traverse sleep in caves along the riverbanks. At Hanumil, for the first time in almost a week, we could have slept indoors, out of the extreme cold, but the guides arranged for us to spend yet another night in an open cave on the opposite bank. They would not venture into the village because the district’s most powerful shaman was in the midst of his winter retreat. The superstitious Zanskaris had no desire to disturb such a formidable power.
Zanskar is devoutly Buddhist and yet shamans and oracles, the men and women who harness the energy of local animistic forces, abound. Tibetan Buddhism has a multi-layered recognition of shamans and local deities; they consider them removed from the high religion of the monasteries and yet are certain these indigenous protectors have been “pacified” and turned for the good of the community by Buddhism. Today many monasteries and even the Tibetan government-in-exile consult oracles on topics ranging from crop yields to foreign policy. The relationship harks back to Padmasambhava. In his mission to rid Tibet of demons and bring Buddhism to the people, he converted many local deities to the cause of Buddhism. Guru Rinpoche proved to Tibetans the power of Indian Buddhism while simultaneously incorporating many of Tibet’s old ways into what would become the Tibetan form of Buddhism.
The shamans of Zanskar generally act as healers, channelling local spirits for the benefit of paying clients. The Zanskari approach to treating illness is an example of the intercourse between ancient animistic forces, Buddhism and contemporary medicine. When I asked my Zanskari friend Namgyal about what he and his wife Dolma did when their children were sick, he said their first course of action was to take the child to a local monk who would perform a prayer ceremony or puja and arrange traditional, specially consecrated herbal medicine. If this had no effect, then they would seek the services of a shaman who would attempt to exorcise the afflicting demon. If the shaman’s ceremony had no effect, their last option was to take the child to the district medical post in the main town of Padum. There, if the local medical officer was on duty, they would spend much of their meagre savings on prescribed allopathic injections and pills.
The valley between Hanumil and Pishu is a rolling landscape. On either side of the river rose disintegrating rock walls animated by late afternoon’s fragile light. I moved past Pidmo, another village in the throes of harvest. Zang-la, on the opposite, eastern side of the Zanskar River, moved into view. Man-made entities almost indistinguishable from the landscape, its castle and monastery were just visible on their hilltops. Eventually, I saw Pishu off in the distance, a cluster of earthen houses huddled together against the gritty wind.
In the village I went in search of my friend Namgyal Dorje only to discover he was off in the pastures tending to his yaks. His wife Dolma invited me into their house and was only too happy to ply me with butter tea and flatbread. She catered to me while watching over her four children, all of whom were grappling for attention. She looked different than the last time I had seen her. Swaddled in five layers of felted wool shirts and jackets it was difficult to discern her shape, but after fifteen minutes of sideways glances I realized Dolma was pregnant. When I inquired in Hindi, she indicated with her fingers that she was in her eighth month. While I was in Dolma’s house she never stopped working. Dolma was three weeks from giving birth and doing the work of a small army with only a light sheen on her forehead to betray the strain.
That afternoon while I relaxed and drank my tea I became absorbed in watching her feed the fire with jagged sticks and cow dung, placing the fuel expertly and blowing on it only enough to ignite the kindling; both wood and breath are precious commodities at that altitude. There was an artistry to the way she made a task I laboured at for hours appear elementary.
Namgyal arrived just after sunset; his eyes widened when he saw me. Namgyal and his father Aba-lay had been the guides on my walk into the valley on the frozen river. We shared good memories of that trip and had met in Leh and Manali since then. As he gave me a hug, I smelled yaks, his homemade cigarettes and the dry grass he fed his animals. Namgyal declared it was time for chang. Dolma poured us each a measure in chipped teacups and then one for herself.
On our first cup I congratulated Namgyal on the pregnancy. He shook his head saying it was not a good time for a child; his wife was needed to help with the autumn fieldwork. I was surprised. I interpreted his comment as a laying of blame on Dolma for an unwanted pregnancy, but he quickly took responsibility. The conception had occurred in deep winter, and as Namgyal said, “It was my fault. I had no patience. I was too quick.” Whether his haste was in the actual event or the seasonal timing I didn’t pursue.
It turned into a long evening of barley beer and tsampa thukpa with Namgyal narrating the problems of the Himalayan farmer under the glare of a kerosene lamp. The winters were too cold, the river was not the right level in the spring for good irrigation, one yak had died from an undiagnosed disease that summer and his wife’s vegetable patch was producing less than usual. He had thought of moving away, south to Manali or east to Ladakh. Namgyal worked occasionally as a trekking guide and pony man, and had travelled throughout Northwestern India. To him life beyond the mountains appeared easy. He had seen hundreds of Westerners on holiday, but admitted to knowing little of the intricacies of life on the other side of the Himalayas and in his heart he was afraid to leave the barren security of his fields.
Dolma left us to put the children to bed. Our conversation slurred when my friend substituted distilled rice wine, arak, for the brewed chang. We were talking in contented circles touching everything from local politics to the insemination of yaks. Then out of the darkness Dolma returned with one baby awake but quiet in her arms. She sat at the edge of the arc of silver light and out of nowhere began to sing. In a voice that fluctuated from monastic chanting to the high-pitched call of a shepherdess, she sang local songs, accompanying herself with a hand-held, metre-wide, single-skinned drum. Her voice was ambrosia. Almost imperceptibly her voice altered between a crooning ballad and an adult lullaby.
I lay back amongst the rugs and sheepskins, the alcohol and altitude working through me. The kerosene lamp sputtered out and in the leftover flickering candlelight Dolma transformed into a fur-clad shaman. She smiled, her many layers heaving with her long breath. She caressed the drum, her hair shimmered – night black flecked with gold – the baby dozed angelically in her lap. She had come to lead her followers into that state where dreams and truth are irresistibly mixed.
It was a late groggy start, but with only five hours of walking to make the monastery village of Karsha there was no rush. The way follows the course of the Zanskar River past villages and shrines, along narrow ledges and through spartan fields. Sporadic canyons lead down from the cliffs. I could see trails winding up the muscular scarps to the east. The valley is wide but curves gently southwest. Down the path the wind blew steadily against me, warm like a desert scirocco. A gauzy layer of glittering sand coated everything.
By mid-afternoon I was within sight of Karsha Gompa. The monastery buildings, dozens of them, drop down a steep hillside. It was a chaotic assembly of mud-brick cubes in every size, from a single room to gymnasium-size prayer halls and shrine rooms. Parts of the complex looked to be forgotten, the adobe walls falling apart, door frames hanging without doors, faded curtains blowing through tiny openings, while other buildings were freshly whitewashed with new glass in the windows.
I moved along the base of the escarpment below the main gompa. An old man shouted greetings. I turned to wave and in that split-second a flock of snow pigeons, fifty or sixty, erupted behind him in a slate grey thunderhead. The sudden whoosh of their action caught me off guard. I released a concentrated breath. The similarity of the sounds, my breath and the autumn land exhaling through the pigeons’ flight, impressed me. The earth and I were both drained from summer’s efforts.
I struggled up the hill opposite the main monastery and reached the Karsha nunnery. There my friends, the nuns, Ani-Garskyid and Ani-Pema (Ani means nun in Tibetan), chatted busily between themselves at my unexpected arrival. I had met them when I had come to Zanskar a few summers before. My friend the anthropologist Dr. Kim Gutschow had lived in the nunnery on and off for many years and introduced me to the nuns. Kim spoke perfect Zanskari, but I had to communicate with them in a combination of Hindi, sign language and a smattering of mutually understood Tibetan and English words. Quickly, with great slaps on my back and lots of laughter, they ushered me out of the wind and into the warmth of their kitchen.
Ani-Garskyid and Ani-Pema were tiny women who barely reached my chest. It seemed their smooth, sun-darkened faces were forever struck with smiles. They had just returned from twelve hours of fieldwork, cutting and carrying loads of barley and clover, helping the families who were working the monastery’s land. Their patched burgundy robes were permeated with the smell of smoke and goats. I thought they must be tired and so sank down on a cushion expecting us all to relax. But as soon as I sat they rose and moved to the miniscule kitchen where they began to prepare dinner. They would not accept my offers of help.
With a man in the house Ani-Garskyid went to see their neighbours and somehow procured chang. I complained of being uncomfortable drinking alcohol in the nunnery, but they would have none of my protests and never let my glass get more than half empty. In the kitchen I heard the sound of chopping and boiling and the metallic clang of pots and pans. Thirty minutes later they emerged with a small miracle, the most delicious Zanskari thukpa I have ever tasted. The soup was thick and buttery, laden with chunks of local cheese, tsampa gnocchi, spinach, potatoes and turnips, all fresh from the nunnery’s garden. They had created a dish that brought out the flavours of the valley: dairy produce, seasonal vegetables, the gamey taste of roasted barley.
The two of them chatted in Zanskari, seriously and excitedly. Every once in a while they posed questions to me in the free-form combination of languages and signs we were using to communicate. They asked about nuns in my country, how many Buddhists there were, what did Christians think of the Buddha, what did women do if they didn’t work in the fields? They were genuinely excited to have a visitor. The meal wound down, the chang bottle emptied. I sat back, replete in that atmosphere of affection, and when they considered their duty with me complete, they proceeded on to their responsibilities to the Buddha. Side by side, in unorthodox harmony they sang mantras before the tiny Buddhist statues and photos on their altar. I thought of my Nana singing hymns, not in church but around her house. She had such a beautiful voice, I could have listened for hours. An Irishman, drunk on Himalayan barley brew, lullabied by smiling Buddhist nuns. I dropped my head in thanks.
The night before the anis had almost carried me to a room removed off to one side of the nuns’ living quarters. There on a raised shelf of mud bricks they had made up a bed for me. They had even spread my sleeping bag out. I lay down and almost before they had left the room I was asleep.
In the morning they brought me sweet milky tea and from the courtyard in front of the nunnery showed me, far down the hillside, where they would be working and then they left me on my own. After a slow breakfast I walked down to the fields and spent the morning with them carrying loads of wiry barley stalks to the threshing grounds near people’s homes.
In the afternoon I joined the nuns in their small hall for the daily prayer ceremony, sitting quietly off to one side as they chanted mantras, lit incense and waved ritual objects before the paintings and objects on the main altar.
In the evening I was invited to dinner with the Karsha Lon-po in his house next to the convent. The Lon-po is the last in a long familial line of advisors to the King of Zanskar. He was a tall, straight man in his sixties and wore long burgundy, monastic robes and the golden hat of Tibetan Buddhism’s Geluk-pa school. His thin face, relaxed eyes and long-fingered, unscarred hands implied a life of attentive thought. The Lon-po exudes nobility.
He is a man of many experiences – a father, husband, politician, chief minister, doctor, teacher and finally, when his wife had passed away, he took religious vows and became a monk. He still teaches at the village high school in Karsha and every summer walks in the mountains collecting the herbs he needs for his Tibetan medicine consultations. Nowadays, though, most of his time is spent in religious practice. The Lon-po even has a mischievous side, a half-smile here, a twinkle of the eye there and with that rascally undercurrent he leads a conversation to new questions and more complete answers.
The Lon-po has seen his valley through independence from Britain, invasion from Pakistan, the implementation of a Muslim bureaucracy from Kashmir, the building of roads and now, a new incursion, tourists seeking the last Shangri-la. When I asked him if all these changes in such a short time had been difficult, he said that for some in the valley it had been trying but for him it was not so hard because he understood his history and religion: “Change is what we deal with every day.”
We talked for hours on Buddhism, education, modernization and at the end I had to ask how he stayed so vigorous at an age well past the lifespan of the average Himalayan. For the first time in our talk he laughed out loud, an infectious rumble that had me chuckling. His eyes glimmering, he said, “Well, yes, this is easy – I just stay happy.”
The five kilometres from Karsha to the Zanskari capital, Padum, is a transition zone; it is a movement from an ancient Buddhist culture with its roots in religion and the landscape to a community wrangling with the idea of what the future could be. The dusty plain that stretches between the two is where the Doda River from the northwest and the Tsarap River flowing from the south meet and form the Zanskar River. Across the Zanskar hangs a neglected, wooden-planked, steel-cable suspension bridge. When I arrived, a caravan of two dozen pack horses were at a standstill on the north side. The wind was blowing the bridge back and forth and the horses refused to move on to it. They dug in their hooves and bucked their loads almost as if they feared crossing the cleft between Karsha and Padum. I made my way around the crowd, the pony men pulled back the horses blocking the entrance and I crossed the river with both hands clutching the frayed cables.
From the river it’s a gentle climb to the main town. Along the route a bare concrete mosque with a tin-roofed minaret sits two hundred metres from a derelict gompa. Farther up the hill a bus stand with a single broken-down vehicle off to one side made an effort to be the town’s centre. Around that widening in the road the up-valley smells of dung fires, aromatic ground cover and fresh-cut barley were replaced by those of diesel fumes and human excrement. The few hole-in-the-wall shops lining the turnaround were filled with packaged foods, milk powder, butter, freeze-dried soups, minute noodles, jars of Nescafé coffee and White Rabbit brand chewy candy from China. I couldn’t help but notice that most of the boxes and bags were long past their date of expiry. It seemed Padum was the last place on earth for merchants to offload their merchandise.
I stayed that night in a concrete-block guest house a hundred metres from the bus park. My bed’s metal frame screeched every time I took a deep breath. The window was set with a warped wooden frame that looked like something out of Alice in Wonderland, and through it the wind moaned and whistled. But in the evening men came to the café for tea and chang and thukpa, and over dinner I met with one of the organizers of the summer’s anti-government protests, Tsewang Chosdor.
Mr. Chosdor, a local politician, is rich by Zanskari standards. He has an impressive house ten kilometres from Padum, drives a red jeep and spends his winters south of the mountains in the state capital, Jammu. He is a big man with a large head that hints at the personality he affects, that of a bull yak. Quiet, but inclined to outbursts, he had a slightly bellicose air that I had not detected from anybody else in Zanskar. As our talk wore on I couldn’t help but think that he was a caricature of the Indian politicians he undoubtably chummed around with in Jammu.
Mr. Chosdor explained that Zanskar was being abused by the state government. The war in Kashmir and the ensuing collapse of the region’s thriving tourist industry made Zanskar, a valley untouched by the insurgency and increasingly attractive to foreigners, an appreciable part of the regional economy for the first time in its history. It was Zanskari culture that was drawing tourists and generating hundreds of thousands of rupees in tax revenue and yet little of that money was being reinvested in the valley. The Zanskaris wanted more say in the decisions affecting their home, but after years of ineffectively lobbying the government the activists had to play the only card big enough to make the state politicians take notice. By shutting their borders, the Zanskaris attracted attention from the central government in Delhi and within a month state officials were visiting Padum on fact-finding missions.
However, to their credit the style of the protest was decidedly peaceful. According to Mr. Chosdor, the tourists had only been barred from the area around Padum and those who were already there were invited to dinner at local homes, told about the situation, and offered transportation to Kargil on the main Srinagar-Leh road.
In Leh the story had been reported quite differently. There, tour operators peddled rumours of trekkers being stoned, guides being beaten to a pulp, and even the possibility of kidnappings. Mr. Chosdor said there was only one “minor” confrontation (he didn’t explain what the incident was or what had sparked it) but swore that foreigners were not involved. The tour guides in Leh had taken the rumours for truth because in India, where violence frequently explodes for lesser reasons, all rumours are believable.
I went to bed as the crowd emptied from the restaurant. I climbed the outside steps to my room and above the wind heard two happily inebriated Zanskari men singing Bollywood hit songs from five years before.
I left Padum early, following a track that, with the recent storms, had lost its gravelled surface and been returned to mud. I marched beside trains of yaks and goats on a greasy surface that brought frequent hilariously uncontrolled collisions between me and the animals.
Bardun Gompa, ten kilometres south on the Tsarap River, is renowned for its prayer wheel, the largest in the region. The vertical wooden drum is over five metres tall and encased in brass and silver. Inside are 108,000 handwritten prayers. One hundred and eight is the most auspicious number in Buddhism as it is the number of impediments in the way of individuals reaching a higher state of consciousness. I was looking forward to pushing the cylinder round and round. There is something satisfying about walking in circles while pressed against 108,000 mantras. Tibetans believe that with each rotation every individual prayer is sent off on the wind to help whoever is in need of them. But my arrival at the building was dampened by a seemingly rabid Tibetan mastiff guard dog chained at the entrance to the monastery. I retreated after the snarling beast lunged at me repeatedly. There were no monks or a caretaker in sight, so there was no point in waiting and I moved on. It was a frustrating start to the day.
However, the situation was explained to me that afternoon five kilometres farther on in the village of Mune. A man at the tea shop said since most of the monks were at home helping with the harvest, the lone caretaker, who was also involved in his own harvest preparations, was concerned about icon thieves and had left his dog to guard the monastery while he went about his business. It was sobering to think that people were willing to steal religious artifacts from such a poor area, but unfortunately there is a booming market for Tibetan Buddhist artwork and the statues and paintings in monasteries are often unprotected. They are easy pickings for criminals in need of something more than a cultural identity.
Ten kilometres farther up the river I reached the fields below Ichar village. It was late in the day and from the stretch of hand-built paddies that stepped down from the village I could see the harvest was almost complete. Neatly laid sheaves of barley were spread atop the plateaus like golden fans against the battleship grey soil. On other fields pea vines were rolled into tidy rings and arranged in interlocking circles.
I sat down on a flat rock above the terraces and watched as two hundred metres away a trickle of people headed home after the day’s work; children sang while their mothers hummed, baby-toting fathers whistled out of tune and grandparents wheezed along in time. It was a symphony of laboured wind.
Ichar is separated from its fields by a fifty-metre-deep canyon, at the bottom of which flows a small stream. The path winds down into the chasm and then up the other bank. Topping each side of the trail are protective stupas. High above those monuments I could see the work that had brought the community into existence – a narrow channel sliced and built into the cliff wall to deliver water through an irrigation system to the fields below. Before the canal had been dug the plateau would have been an arid hillside. I could see five hundred metres or so into the canyon but the start of the canal was still farther back.
It was an impressive piece of engineering completed centuries before the advent of power tools. The work had been the product of many families and generations, a true community effort. In a way, the channel was evidence of the population’s faith in the landscape. Before they started the work they would have to had trusted that snow-melt water would continue to flow. They needed confidence that earthquakes would not destroy their work. They had to believe that the soils of the new paddies would stay fertile for generations.
I descended the divide between the fields and the village in the last hour of evening. A flock of sheep, half of them black, half white, appeared from farther up the canyon. They moved in a single dense mass, a checker-patterned carpet, their oily wool glinting in the late light. Noiselessly they entered my line of vision. The shepherd, absorbed in their movement, ignored me, and just as silently they flowed out.
Out of Ichar I was followed by a dog, a scruffy, grey-brown mongrel with black patches dotting its flanks. He was a runt, shunned I assumed, by the mastiff guard dogs who dominate every village. He skipped along at my feet, staring up, tongue lolling to one side. He tagged along for kilometres. I was of two minds about my new friend. I was lonely, and it would be nice to have a partner by the stove, a sentinel outside my tent, but what would I do when the trek finally came to an end? It would be impossible to bring my new friend home. I was torn. I wanted him to join me but knew any relationship was doomed.
I picked up a rock, deciding I would give him three chances. I threw the stone near his paws. He tucked his tail between his legs and scampered away, looking back with true puppy dog eyes. That was it, I thought, but five hundred metres farther on and he was back, clambering up the rocks close to my left, eyes still on me, paws lightly padding along the scree. I took another rock and aimed. He shot off again. But another five hundred metres and he was back, shadowing me through the boulder fields. I chucked my last stone, praying he would understand my tough love, hoping he would ignore my callousness one more time. He leaped away. I moved on. When I looked back after five minutes there was no sign of him.
It was difficult for me not to think of Gareth, how as a teenager I had ignored him. He was my little brother and little brothers don’t have much to tell an older sibling in those trying years. It’s easy to regret in retrospect, but that is part of growing up. It’s best to dwell on the shared laughs and mutual discoveries.
In the watered draws along the path sparse birch and poplars grew, while on the open hillsides thyme, sage and saxifrage poked through the stones and sand. The trail kept to an even grade along the banks above the river. In winter that stretch is one of the most hazardous on the river-ice walk from the upper Tsarap Valley down to Padum. The hillside’s grade, the lack of trees and the even, shaly surface make it extremely prone to avalanches. A Zanskari once told me that some men prefer to navigate that section under the drunken influence of chang. They sing, shout and laugh their way through the danger zone hoping, as he explained, that the antics would make the vengeful earth spirits happy and thus let them pass without mishap.
After lunch I moved through the prosperous village of Cha, situated on a plateau up the east bank of the river. Its fields were spread across the lower tableland in a seamless patchwork. The little gompa at the centre of the village was freshly painted and draped with colourful banners in blue, white, red and gold. The village was in a festive mood, ready for the arrival of Dagom Rinpoche, a renowned Buddhist master who makes annual teaching visits to the upper valley.
In Purne, across the river, the villagers were also in the throes of organizing for the teacher’s visit. They were whitewashing stupas, sweeping the areas between houses and grooming horses tied to the walls by the fields.
I stopped for tea at a roadside chai shop and chatted with the woman who owned the local guest house. Drolma was a square-jawed mother of four and a shopkeeping entrepreneur. Before I was halfway through my cup she was bemoaning the lack of tourists in the area that season. She estimated the protests in Padum had cut the number of trekkers by more than half. Drolma had spent a considerable amount of money on stock for her little store and most of it would now sit unsold over winter. She was in the process of scratching out the packages’ date of expiry markings, saying, “I don’t know why they put these on the boxes. In Zanskar we eat tsampa that has been in the granary for two or three years.”
I tried to explain the significance of the dates, but Drolma had invested hard-earned money and she needed a return; if tourists bought the products next season without checking the dates, it was their own fault – caveat emptor. I thought about the stock on the shelves of the little shops in Padum and wondered if it too would sit there until some unsuspecting travellers bought it.
At Purne the Tsarap River, which flows from the east, is joined by the Kurgiakh River from the south. The main trail now followed the Kurgiakh, but I wanted to make a detour up the Tsarap to see Phuktal Gompa. It was late in the day and I knew I would have to hurry to reach the monastery before dark.
I moved fast but the pace didn’t bother me. I was absorbed in the scenery. The trail wound through a terra cotta gorge where the Tsarap River flowed aquamarine. In midstream, spray-shined ochre boulders glimmered. The scene reminded me of the coral and turquoise birthstones every Tibetan child wears as protection from evil spirits. Those colours in the landscape lent it a sense of security. I felt the closeness of the land around me. In the cliffs, the water, the sky, semi-precious stones were mirroring the environment. In those colours there was a connection between children and the landscape. I felt safe and strong and as the sun’s last rays illuminated the path I rounded a bend to see the gompa, carved into the cliffside.
Phuktal monastery wraps around a spring-bearing cave set into a hundred-metre-high cliff above the Tsarap River. Over time its buildings have spilled out of the grotto and down the hillside. Centuries of what looks like impulsive construction have produced a series of buildings and rooms that have been built to fit the rock they are attached to. The result is a labyrinth of nooks and crannies, secret passageways and hidden rooms.
The gompa dates from the fifteenth century. It is far removed from Lhasa, the intellectual heart of Tibetan Buddhism, and possibly its remoteness made it a favourite destination for meditators and mystics. Its most famous resident, however, was the Hungarian explorer and linguist Alexander Csoma de Koros. In the 1820s and 1830s he walked, with only his rucksack and a knowledge of twenty-seven languages, from Europe to Central Asia in search of the ethnographic roots of the Hungarian people. Arriving in the Himalayas he wrote, at Phuktal and Zang-la, the first Tibetan-English dictionary. From Zanskar he eventually made his way to Calcutta where he worked for the British government as a linguist. He never returned to his homeland and never fully accomplished his goal of discovering the background of the Magyars. He died young in 1842 of an undiagnosed fever in Darjeeling, Bengal, the summer capital of the British Raj.
In the monastery I was shown a room for the night by one of the older monks. It was a Spartan cell without even a window – strange, I thought, since its positioning above the river meant it must have a great view back towards Purne. The monk left me, closing the door. He had given me a small kerosene lamp made from an old tin can of sweetened condensed milk. Amber shadows wavered on the walls. After the spacious, colour-shot walk up the Tsarap the room felt claustrophobic.
The next day I spent in the fields below the gompa doing something I enjoyed, helping with the harvest. Seeing four young monks, two boys and two teenagers, heading out to the fields that morning I asked in Hindi and sign language if they were working on the harvest and whether I could give them a hand. They nodded and waved for me to follow them. Tenzin, Tinley, Karma and Thondup were excited as it was a chance for them to interrogate me on the ways of Westerners. The questions were the result of personal experiences with trekkers and what the boys had heard on the radio or read in magazines. Only the oldest boy, Tenzin, knew much Hindi so he translated.
“Why do your people always wear so many clothes?”
“Why are Western ladies never with their children?”
“Why do your people only want to eat rice and not tsampa?”
We went to the other side of the river. I had a tingle of pride in my understanding of the mechanics of the harvest. When we arrived at the cut barley I immediately got the smallest monk, Tinley, who looked no more than eight or nine years old, to stack the sheaves on my back. The little monk giggled, intentionally rubbing the barley around my shoulders to make sure that the itchy stalks worked well into my clothes. I followed the older monks towards a family’s home and dumped the barley in a neat pile on the threshing ground. Four days in the fields and I was an expert!
We spent the morning weaving back and forth between the fields and the threshing grounds where the family’s yaks and donkeys were breaking down the grain. By the house the grandfather of the family laughed every time I returned with a load, shouting at me in Zanskari and pretending to whip my backside with the rope he was using to keep the livestock circling. I asked Tenzin what the old man was saying, and the monk laughed, “He is saying hurry up, white yak, hurry up.”
Late in the afternoon we made our way back to the gompa and after an hour of trying to extract prickly barley stalks from my shirt and jacket I joined the monks for dinner in the granite cavern that serves as the monastery’s kitchen. The boys sat on either side of me, smiling. Tenzin told me the senior monks were impressed that I had helped in the fields. On the other side of the kitchen sat the elders, ancient, gap-toothed men in handsewn robes. The room smelled of bitter fresh-churned butter tea, juniper smoke and thukpa. There was no electricity, no gas, not even a glass window. Looking at the old men slurping soup from wooden bowls with handmade wooden spoons it was hard to believe we were not in another era. But thoughts of those possibly simpler times were snapped back to the twenty-first century when the head cook extracted a bread-box size battery-powered radio from a cloth sack and, setting it gently on the stone wall by the stove, tuned the crackling receiver to a cricket game between India and England happening somewhere thousands of kilometres to the south. The younger monks gathered around the set. The older men finished their meal and left the kitchen.
I was up early. Tenzin was brushing his teeth on the edge of the monastery courtyard, which looked south over the river. In the background was a ragged line of 5,500-metre peaks freshly dusted with snow. When he spat out his foaming toothpaste it fell for seconds before silently staining the rocks far below.
I returned to Purne and crossed the Kurgiakh River back to the main trail. There I met a caravan of six men and thirty horses heavily laden with government-supplied rations – rice, wheat, sugar and kerosene. These were their winter stocks, subsidized by the Kashmiri government and trucked in from Srinagar and Kargil to Padum. Those staples would be added to the hundreds of kilos of tsampa, dried cheese, goat meat, dried apricots and preserved vegetables the mens’ families would consume during the long cold season.
The pony men were smiling, holding hands, joking between themselves. The company was almost home. It was only five kilometres to their village of Testa. In the short time I was with them the group repeatedly erupted into a sing-song uproar, a musical wail that careened off the steep walls lining the river. When I asked the lead man, Samdup, why they made so much noise, he told me they were excited to see their families and wanted to insure their people knew they were coming.
Near the village their families, many of whom were working in the fields, ran to greet them and joined the caravan. By the time we reached Testa there were dozens of women, children and grand-parents all singing, dancing, whistling and telling jokes.
The Kurgiakh Valley widens after Testa and meanders along a narrow plateau to Kuru. There the harvest was complete. The fields were barren and leathery, and pigeons and horses rummaged through the stubble, salvaging what little the humans had left. Along irrigation ditches and between fields neatly stacked loads of fresh-cut grass lay weighted down by flat stones. These would be fodder for the animals. Nothing was wasted; everything was needed to survive the seven-month winter.
Another five kilometres on, to the far side of Tanze village, a procession of a dozen people emerged from behind a house. The lead pair of figures held high two burgundy and gold banners. Following them, four monks and two laymen, all in silk brocade and the high-peaked golden caps of the Geluk-pa school, rode powerful horses, bronze and smoky greys. Two of the men held flags, which snapped in the breeze. It looked like a scene out of an Akira Kurosawa samurai film.
As I drew closer I saw the village people were all in their best attire, men in clean one-piece, neck-to-foot woolen robes in navy blue or brown. Some of the older women wore their heirloom, turquoise-studded peraks, the broad, flat, feltedwool headdresses that stretched from their foreheads to their backs and were sewn with semi-precious stones. The monks sparkled in their vestments. Their horses’ bridlery was polished to glittering. I knew it had to be Dagom Rinpoche departing for the next village.
I had been wanting to meet him and so hurried up the small rise to catch the parade, but by the time I crested the hill the horses had disappeared in a cloud of dust. Making their way back home through the powdery mist the villagers came towards me. They were surprised to see a single white man and seemed ecstatic about their recent audience with the Rinpoche. They crowded around, patting me on the back, chatting in broken English. They assumed I must have been there to meet the teacher and, as if in consolation for a missed opportunity, one of the families invited me for tea.
The cup of tea turned into a meal of steamed dumplings, momos, in the kitchen of the Dorje family. The room was amazing. It was centred around a woodstove that reminded me more of a lady’s brooch than a kitchen appliance, with its sides and front door covered in hammered brass Buddhist symbols. The walls were lined with shelves stacked with steel plates, cups, saucers, bowls, hand-carved wooden spoons and ladles and sparkling pots and pans in brass, copper and aluminum. It was cluttered but organized and very clean. It was a space that spoke of the family’s pride in their home. The father, Phuntsok, was a teacher in the local school and spoke some English. He invited me to stay the night and when I agreed he translated my answer to the three small children. Modup, Tsering and Tashi all cheered and climbed onto my lap.
I woke in the Dorjes’ kitchen with Tara, Phuntsok’s wife, lighting the fire to make the day’s first tea. She smiled and indicated for me to stay sleeping, but I couldn’t and instead watched from my sleeping bag as she made the tea. Then she went and fetched her youngest child, Tsering, who nestled into his mother’s lap as she mixed dark tsampa flour and water, kneaded the dough and made fresh chapatis. There was a beautiful economy to the way she worked. I remembered Dolma working in her kitchen in Pishu and was reminded again of how impressive Himalayan women are. By the time Phuntsok and the other children had woken, the breakfast of fresh bread, home-churned butter and steaming tea was ready.
After a week of tracking him, I finally met Dagom Rinpoche in Kargyud. It’s only a seven-kilometre walk from Tanze to Kargyud but as soon as the village came into view it was apparent some kind of festival was underway. Many horses were hitched to buildings on the outskirts of the village. Houses were freshly whitewashed and small crowds dressed in their Sunday best mingled in the dusty spaces between houses. When I asked an old man if the Rinpoche was in the village, he nodded seriously and pointed in the direction of the largest house.
In front of the home I joined a queue of people by the main door waiting to meet the teacher. After fifteen minutes a young monk ushered me through a pair of low archways into a simple, five-metre by five-metre wood-panelled room. One wall was lined with windows looking out over the stark, rugged mountains that dominate the village, and another was stacked with shelves of the Kangyur and Tangyur, the canonical texts of Tibetan Buddhism.
In the midst of this knowledge and beauty, sitting in cross-legged lotus position, was the teacher. He was a large man with a soft face and inquisitive eyes. He stared at me but it was more investigative than invasive, a part of the confidence he exuded. There were two other monks in the room but he dominated the space. I bowed and presented him with a kathak, a silk blessing scarf. He accepted it and placed it around my neck, conferring his benediction. He motioned me to sit beside him on a stool just below and off to one side of his dais. He introduced himself and asked my name, nodded and smiled, then continued on with his audience.
I enjoyed watching the interaction between the master and his students. Each of the villagers prostrated, offered their kathak, received blessings, and then presented the teacher with an offering which an attendant monk then added to a pile of gifts off to the left. The Rinpoche accepted, keeping his eyes completely focused on the devotee until the next entered his vision. Cotton bags of dried cheese, balls of aged butter, slabs of fresh cheese – dairy products, the specialty of Zanskar, spilled off the small mountain of gifts.
The Zanskaris venerate Dagom Rinpoche, not so much for what he is as for what he embodies. The Rinpoche represents one of Tibetan Buddhism’s key concepts, that of the reincarnate master. He is the latest in a line of teachers who trace their lineage back to the eighteenth century. Rinpoche literally means “precious one” and to Tibetans that is what their teachers are: jewels of knowledge capable of lightening the lives of all who come in contact with them. Rinpoches are the repository of the Buddha’s wisdom and living examples of the Dharma.
I had been anxious to meet the Rinpoche. I had a fantasy that by being in his presence I would refind the faith I had had as a child saying my prayers every night by the side of my bed.
In Belfast I had spent every Sabbath morning at Sunday school. It wasn’t that my family were devout; it was more a community event in 1960s Northern Ireland. I enjoyed learning about Jesus, absorbing myself in the mythology, and with a childlike trust believed in the miracles he had performed. It was so beautifully simple – one God, one messenger, one saviour, it was all there. I took seriously my commitment to Jesus and every night I would kneel by my bed and repeat the Lord’s Prayer, adding my own flourish at the end by asking God for special protection for everyone in my extended family. The groundwork had been laid and sometimes I wonder why I didn’t hold on to that, why I couldn’t sustain my own Christianity.
In retrospect, I know it was Belfast and the unconscious loathing of its sectarian violence that planted the seeds of my disillusion. The move to Canada, a place at least geographically removed from the tribalism of competing faiths, nurtured the idea and it was reading and self-determination that brought about my separation from those early beliefs. Simple faith, I know now, is empowering but one-dimensional while the considered faith, one derived from personal exploration, is a belief you can call your own, something that will survive the storms of everyday life.
I was impressed with Dagom Rinpoche. He was a compassionate, wise man but still I was hesitant. Unlike the Rinpoche’s Zanskari devotees I had not prostrated in front of him. When I had bowed before the statue of the Buddha in A-Tisey I had felt the power of being absorbed, but I was a step away from laying myself bare before another human being. After an hour of watching person after person putting their forehead to the floor I excused myself, shook the Rinpoche’s hand and left the room feeling empty. I was worried I had missed something.
Kargyud was full of people. The local families, friends and relatives, those who had come from other villages to meet the Rinpoche, were sitting everywhere chatting, smiling and drinking tea. I had no desire to impose myself on those gatherings, so I walked another kilometre farther up the valley and found a meadow on which to pitch my tent. After the press of the crowds in the reception room it was good to be back out in the open. I made my dinner, washed the dishes and lay down in the open to watch the stars. My body was buzzing, but still I was concerned I had lost an opportunity.
I rose early and continued up the Kurgiakh Valley. Two hours into the day’s walk, while caught in the rhythm of my footsteps, a flicker of movement on the scree slope above me caught my attention. I stopped, heard the river and the wind and between them the beating of my own heart, then I saw them, nine bharal, Himalayan blue sheep. Just a shade greyer than the surroundings, only their motion betrayed them, skipping from stone to stone one hundred metres up the hill. They must have gotten my scent because they were moving fast in a tight group over rough ground. It was magnificent to watch. They were effortlessly agile. I kept my eyes on them, unblinking, scared they would dissolve into the landscape. They topped a small ridge and disappeared.
It was barren ground beyond Kargyud; the cultivated paddies stopped not long after the village. The valley narrowed and the land looked only fertile enough for grazing. The slopes were a mixture of scree and patches of low scrubby juniper. Even the golden-leaved poplars I had seen in the watered draws lower down the valley had petered out.
The sky, which had been bright and sunny for weeks, clouded over in the afternoon and with the loss of the sun the temperature dropped. It was strange how the landscape I was so used to seeing in full sunlight from dawn until dusk was now grey and shadowy. It was a more threatening place. For the first time I saw how the mountains stared down on the valley, how they penned the people in.
I halted at the base of the Shingo-la, the 5,000-metre pass that would take me out of Zanskar and into Himachal Pradesh. My plan was the same as on the Singe-la – start early on icecrusted snow and not stop until I reached bare ground on the far side.
My camp that night was a desolate grey-green meadow in the process of receding to winter. Sheep and goats had sheared the grass to stubble. There were loose rock walls built at strange angles around the clearing, remnants of shepherds’ camps. I cooked dinner on my chugging stove but the noise brought out neighbours, a family of mouse hares, chubby, guinea pig-like animals with long, spiky ears and wide observing eyes. They monitored me intently from twenty metres away, their long ears turning, listening for danger, their noses twitching, trying to catch the smell of my rice and dal dinner. They ventured no closer and I fell asleep to a chorus of their high-pitched whistles circulating around the scree slopes.