Ascension

Ascension

Paying respects at Lake Manasarovar.

Opposite: Stone chortens below Mount Kailash, along the path of the pilgrimage.

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february 2016 / tr av el andleisure asia .com

Mount Kailash is Asia’s most sacred peak. On a personal pilgrimage in western Tibet, Joe Cummings heads over the hills where the spirits fly. photographed by thomas kelly

know we’re supposed to stay at a teahouse near Zutrul Phuk Monastery tonight, but I don’t know much longer it will take to arrive there, nor how far away the rest of my group and our guides are. Yet I’m thinking with dismay— far ahead. Anxious to reach the monastery before nightfall, I trudge on without stopping in what I hope is the right direction. Over glacial ridges and false summits, down treacherous gravel slopes, and through Mars-meets-Middle-Earth landscapes. I munch a chocolate bar while hiking. I’m hungry, but my louder internal grumble is a stream of self-admonishment for getting lost in the TransHimalayan Mountains, 5,000 meters up in the sky, with a bum knee and just a bit of candy. After seven hours alone, I come upon a pilgrim’s tea tent, where a wrinkly Tibetan lady in traditional dress hands me a sealed bottle of drinking water. She refuses to accept my offered payment. I pray this little kindness foreshadows salvation ahead.

From Egypt’s Mount Sinai, where god handed laws down to the Israelites, to Japan’s Mount Fuji, the home of Shintoism’s eternal youth goddess Sengen, certain peaks lend themselves to spiritual passage more than others.

In Asia, no mountain is more venerated than 6,638-meter Mount Kailash, an isolated peak in far western Tibet, part of the Trans-Himalayas, which run parallel to, and north of, the Himalayas. Four religions make it the mythological center of their theology. For Hindus, it’s the home of Shiva and his wife Parvati, who enjoyed a 10,000-year sexual union here. Buddhists see the earthly reflection of Meru, a mountain that reaches underground to the lowest of hells and ascends to the highest heaven. Tibetan Buddhists call the mountain Kang Rinpoche, presided over by meditation deity Demchog and once the abode of famed guru-poet Milarepa. To followers of BÖn, Tibet’s animist, pre-

Tibetan pilgrims with a prayer wheel in Shigatse. left: At Shigatse Monastery.

Below right: The long and winding China National Highway 219.

Buddhist faith, the mountain was the earthly arrival point of their primeval god Tonpa Shenrab. The Jains, meanwhile, believe this is the place Rishabha, the first of 24 founding tirtankharas, achieved enlightenment.

All that cosmic energy can be ascribed to the fact that the glacier-capped, four-sided peak forms a massive natural pyramid, almost as symmetrical as one of Egypt’s Greats, a quadrangular Buddhist stupa, or a Hindu shikara—a shape people through the ages and around the world have been drawn to worship as a symbolic launch pad to heaven.

No other mountain of similar height stands alongside it. Records of religious pilgrimages to Kailash date back 1,700 years, when a journey on foot from India to the base of the mountain might take months. Over the centuries, thousands of devotees died of exposure, malnutrition or acute mountain sickness, often without having laid eyes on their holy goal.

Although it only takes three days to make the 52-kilometer circumambulation (many Tibetans do it all in one go), Kailash remains one of the most demanding pilgrimages in the world. Even in the relatively mild May-through-November open season, a hard weather front adds hypothermia to the list of risks. Luckily I don’t have to walk from India; I’m arriving at the kora’s starting point at Darchen from Lhasa by tour bus. Still, the high-altitude, seemingly endless-switchback, 1,400-kilometer drive, coupled with the unexpected last-minute hurdles in procuring permits to ascend the mountain ratcheted up the difficulty factor even before I set foot on it. Or subsequently got lost and began to wonder whether it was a stairway to hell rather than heaven. In all, it was a trip that offered equal parts of each in a true test of body and soul.

I’d been to Tibet once before, in 1989, but I only got as far as Lhasa, Shigatse and Sakya because permits were only available for the eastern part of the country.

Nowadays it’s much easier, and thousands of pilgrims and tourists make it to Mount Kailash every year.

tr av el andleisure asia .com / february 2016

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