The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (45 page)

But within an hour he was standing by the Salween, tearing grass from the muddy sward and chewing. Tenzin's folk treatment had somehow cured him.

 

The subtropical damp seeped into everything we owned; a warm mist floated in the air, settling clammily on our skins. Surely this was 100 percent humidity: I huffed onto my camera lens and the moisture would not evaporate. It was therefore with consummate relief that, at noon on our fifth day, we stopped for lunch in a fire-heated tent kiosk of sorts that sold Pepsis and (un-Buddhist) beer and the usual buckets of instant Chinese noodles to pilgrims. A grizzled smiling elder, who, despite his age, had just fathered a son he kept swaddled floppily to his back, offered us his hearth to cook lunch over.

The fire lifted our spirits. I took the chance to dry socks I had washed two days ago. I draped them on my walking stick and hung them over the flames.

The elder sat back, his smile fading. Anadorma stopped stirring her pot and regarded me with cold eyes.

“Ah, what's wrong?” I asked.

Said Tenzin solemnly, “Please remove the socks from the fire. Fire is sacred to us, and may not be used to dry socks or underwear. It could offend the gods.”

“Oh, I'm sorry!”

I did as I was told. Everyone smiled again. How alien Tibetan Buddhism was proving to be! The rational precepts I so admired took second place to Bon-inspired superstitions. My pilgrimage around this holy mountain was not enhancing my belief, strongly held, in Buddhism's possible role as a potentially saving (rational) ideology, but was rather driving home the fact that once in the hands of man, it had been encumbered with all the trappings of local religion and thus unsuited for universal application.

An hour later we slipped through a tangle of prayer flags and crossed over Nantulaka Pass, out of fog and into light. The sun straightaway burned off our sweat. Gone was the jungle. Dry pink gravel, not mud, now skid underfoot as we descended through groves of pines, looping down toward the village of Abe. The temperature rose into the 90s, wearying us, slowing us down. Ticks now replaced leeches, skittering toward us, hungry for blood, over the pebbly ground whenever we stopped.

Perched on a promontory jutting above the valley floor, Abe was all stone houses and cornfields occupying terraces of dry earth. As evening fell we marched in, covered with dust, and made for the pilgrims' shelter (a concrete veranda under a wooden roof) on the outskirts. Clamorous gangs of rag-clad children skipped by; women in chupas (traditional pink woolen shawls) and floral skirts trudged along, sweating under baskets of produce. Goats, sheep, and donkeys snooped through refuse heaps, prodded by toddlers scarcely udder-high.

Soon two Buddhist monks, smiling dusty fellows dressed in robes of burgundy and saffron, stopped and peered into our courtyard, studying me with amazement as I set up camp. I went out to greet them. Li Qi Zhaxi was 27; Zhaxi Jansu, 36. They belonged to a monastery of the Nyingmapa (“Old Order”), the Tantric school founded in Tibet in the eighth century by the Indian monk Padmasambhava (Guru Rinpoche, in Tibetan), who allegedly converted Bon's gods to Buddhism. Tantric Buddhists recite the Sanskrit mantram
Om mani padme hum,
or “Hail the jewel in the lotus,” in meditation as a means to enlightenment, and to invoke the deity of compassion, Avalokiteshvara, the patron saint of Tibet.

Before the Chinese reoccupied the feudal theocracy of Tibet in 1950 (the current Dalai Lama was then its ruler, and remains the head of the government in exile, in India, to which he fled in 1959), an estimated 25 percent of Tibetans were monks, and monasteries numbered around 2,700. The Chinese, especially during the Cultural Revolution, destroyed large numbers of monasteries, perhaps leaving as few as eight (though many are now being restored). Li and Zhaxi told me that monks in their monastery outside Deqin numbered about a hundred, and everything there was fine. They buttressed the impression I had that at least in the remoter parts of historical Tibet, the authorities did little to interfere with traditional Tibetan life.

“We're doing this pilgrimage for the second time,” Zhaxi said. “We've taken two months to get this far.” He glanced at our mules. “We carry all we have on our backs.”

Two months! Surely they traveled following the path laid out by Shantideva in the Bodhicaryavatara, “taking [their] rest and wandering as [they] please . . . a clay bowl [their] only luxury.” With my pack animals and GPS, I felt like a profligate on a luxury tour.

“Are you begging for alms,” I asked, “as Buddha's disciples did?”

“No, we're buying our food,” said Zhaxi, showing me a wad of yuan.

I told them of my interest in Buddhism and queried them about their practices. Had they read the Dhammapada?

“The what?” both replied.

Neither had heard of it; they read the Nyingmapa texts. I sensed again how deeply the (Indian) Buddhism I studied differed from theirs. I felt an even deeper alienation when they pulled out their Pö Bas, thumb-size leaden statuettes of the Buddha on what looked like stout triangular knife blades. Good-luck charms, they said, asking me to show them mine. I had none, and told them I didn't believe in such things.

“What, you don't carry a Pö Ba?” said Li. “Aren't you worried on such a pilgrimage? With my Pö Ba, I know no harm will come to me!” Tenzin looked equally alarmed. What the heck was I doing out in these dangerous mountains without a Pö Ba?

 

We were picking our way along a narrow trail circumventing a wall of rock and packed earth. A drizzle was falling—bad news.

“Weixian!”
—dangerous—Tenzin declared, slowing and pointing to cracks in the trail. Boulder-size stretches of it, sodden by rains, often broke free and slid down the mountain during the typhoon months, which were also avalanche season—that is, now.

The next morning had come on foggy but torrid. We had left Abe kicking up dust, following a tenuous, foot-wide path; one slippage of earth, and we would tumble hundreds of feet into the Salween below. Death could strike, in Shantideva's words, like “a shattering thunderbolt from nowhere.”

Floods had washed out the pedestrian bridge we needed to cross, which compelled us to detour up along the Yakura (a river as frothy and violent as the Salween), our destination, I assumed, another bridge.

But no. Between steel fixtures on opposing banks, 50 yards apart, a pair of rusty cables hung over the water.

“We'll have to cross by pulley,” Tenzin shouted above the current's roar. “I'm afraid now. This could scare the mules and hurt them.”

The wild-haired pulley masters, a man and a boy as wiry as they were grimy, allowed for little ceremony. Anadorma presented herself at the cable first. The man swung the “saddle” (a loop of doubled-over canvas dangling on a chain hooked to the cable) around her behind. He grabbed a mess of weeds (to protect his hand), settled into his own saddle, embraced her tightly with his free arm, and kicked off. The two zinged down over the rapids—he controlled their speed with his weedy grip on the cable—and landed with a bounce on the other side. The boy transported our gear the same way. The man then zinged back over to us from the second, higher pole-and-cable arrangement.

“Bring on the mules!” he shouted, switching the cloth saddle with heavier tackle.

Tenzin led unsuspecting Ramo to the pulley master. Without ado, the man looped and locked him into the tackle, placed his foot on his flank, and shoved the poor beast bug-eyed over the edge. The mule, whinnying insanely, swung out three-quarters of the way and lost momentum, halting above the rapids, where he hung kicking and neighing in blind panic.

A frenzied exchange of shouts ensued, with the man issuing commands to the boy on the other bank; the lad strapped himself into his saddle and pulled himself along the cable, stopping well clear of the lethally flailing hooves. He swung a hooked cable that latched on to the mule's line, and then pulled himself and his terrified charge back to the other bank. He nearly caught a horseshoe in the face releasing him from bondage.

Hujya and Tenzin went next, leaving me last. “Cross the river bravely,” said the Buddha, referring to the torrents of fear and desire one must ford to attain Nirvana. I managed to be brave enough, though the cable somehow scraped my shirt, shredding it and singeing my chest. But I alighted otherwise unharmed.

We set out to rejoin the Salween, traipsing through barrens where prickly pear cacti replaced pines, with the sun hot on our necks and the temperature rising into the 90s. Now and then Tenzin severed cactus leaves with his knife, split them, and offered me the icy, pulpy green fruit within—a cooling consolation as the heat mounted.

By late afternoon, caked in grit and mightily tuckered out, we reached the shepherds' huts of Wencuan, a clearing by the river at a mere 5,800 feet, where we would rest for a day—our seventh on the trail, and the halfway point in the pilgrimage.

 

The Salween eddied and seethed beyond our camp, which stood beneath tawny serrated cliffs, 15 or 20 feet from the water. After pitching my tent, feeling filthy after having taken only occasional bucket baths for a week, I grabbed my soap, shampoo, and towel, and climbed across boulders to a secluded cove, fed by a spring, where a depression of stone, ringed by ferns and flowers, formed a thigh-deep pool emptying through a tiny channel into the river.

I stripped and climbed down into the pool, expecting the shock of frigid water. But it was warm! (
Wencuan,
I later learned, means “warm springs.”) Nothing could have raised my spirits more. I soaped and splashed, heated further by the bronzing afternoon sun, my aching joints soothed and loosening. A week's worth of dirt swirled away into the Salween. Bathing here seemed like a sacred ablution.

I finished and spread out to dry my clothes, money belt, and boots, all of which had been damp for days and smelled of mildew. Then I climbed up the main boulder and stretched out on its hot surface, to let the sun heal me further. Above me dangled prayer flags, and someone had carved Tibetan verse around a pair of open eyes etched into the rock wall above me, reminding me of the Buddha's words: “The disciples of [the Buddha] are wide-awake and vigilant, rejoicing in meditation day and night.” Avoiding intoxicants, ever wary of desire's deceits, one strives purposely for Nirvana—the state of truth and bliss beyond self, passion, and cravings.

I meditated, my thoughts gradually disappearing into the river's entrancing roar, until I surrendered to the Void. Or, more succinctly, fell asleep.

Back at camp a while later I found that Tenzin and Anadorma had also bathed. They sat, spiffy and burnished, by the fire sipping cups of
bai jiu
(moonshine), enjoying the evening cool.

“Like some?” asked Tenzin.

“No thanks.”

I wanted nothing to interfere with my senses' imbibing all such a healing evening had to offer.

The moon soon waxed; bats circled and dipped in the gloaming. We chatted, really relaxing for the first time, and stayed up late. (We were to rest the next day.) They told me about their daughter and how she has to study in another village because remote Yongzhi has only a (poor) primary school. Though belonging to a minority people exempt from the one-child law, they found one child was enough—all they could afford, in fact. The politics of repression never came up. Villagers in remote areas such as theirs had little to do with the Chinese authorities.

Tenzin said, “I'm happy with my work. I get to make the pilgrimage over and over; the more times, the better.” The merit he gained would return to him. He had chosen what the Buddha called the “right livelihood”—a prerequisite for enlightenment.

 

On a black stormy night two days later all notions of bliss had passed. We found ourselves beyond the village of Tsana, struggling up another splashing cataract-path, never having recovered from the previous day, when the sun broiled the mercury to a hundred degrees, the earth turned ashen and sterile, landslides had destroyed stretches of the trail, and not even servings of cactus fruit could quench our thirst. Trekking in the dark here was madness, for obvious reasons; but, having no Tibet permit (which Nuoji had lacked the time to arrange for me in Zhongdian), I could not afford to be seen by the Chinese authorities in Tsana. So we crossed through it after midnight, encountering no one.

Now we clambered up and up, slipping on the rocks. My headlamp cast enough light for me to see, but not, of course, for the mules, which often stumbled. Stone walls soon hemmed in the watery trail—we were, it seemed, cutting through a village. Finally, on hearing Tenzin's plan to forge ahead to Sondula Pass all night and all the next day, I objected. Tsana was behind us, and now we had to rest and wait for dawn.

He assented. We turned off the gutter and into a village home's courtyard. Relieved, I got careless. I took two steps and fell over a pile of firewood, landing on my hands. As I pulled myself up, my left hand burned with pain. I trained my lamp on it to discover I had dislocated my ring finger, knocking it out of joint at the main knuckle, leaving the last two phalanges nearly perpendicular to the first.

Tenzin and Anadorma gasped, aghast. Straightaway urgent thoughts assailed me: How could I go on like this for another week? How could I endure even the three-hour hike back to Tsana and whatever crude medical center they had, a hike that would probably end with my expulsion from Tibet and the failure of my pilgrimage?

I grabbed my finger and wrenched it back into joint.

I fell, dizzy, onto the logs, stars spinning before my rain-pelted eyes. A wave of nausea swept through me. I closed my eyes and tried to blank my mind.

Several minutes later, I timidly tried to flex my fingers. They all worked. I lay there panting for a while, under my guides' distressed gaze. Then I rose, and we set up camp. Until sunrise we slept.

A true pilgrimage must involve suffering, I reasoned, watching my finger swell and turn blue.