Himalaya Read online

  A few years after Songtsen’s death, the statue of Buddha that Wencheng had brought from China was moved from its original temple to a new site, one that would eventually become the spiritual heart of Lhasa and by extension Tibet, known as the Jokhang, the ‘house of the statue’, and more commonly in Tibet as the Tsuglakhang. Walking round the temple today, following the devotional circuit known as the Barkhor, the sacred smell of juniper incense in the air, alongside hundreds of Tibetans, many counting off their mala, or prayer beads, a few spinning prayer wheels, the hum of mantras on their lips, is a humbling reminder of the many centuries of shared spiritual effort. Yet Buddhism had some way to go in the late seventh century before it became the spiritual practice of ordinary people, and not just foreign princesses and well-travelled nobles.

  When Songtsen died, his grandson, the next tsenpo, was still a small child. So his chief minister Gar became regent and proved no less capable in charge than he had serving Songtsen, using the invention of writing to get a firmer administrative grip on the empire and relying on his sons as military leaders. The Chinese emperor Taizong had died in the same year as Songtsen, and the Tang’s hold on the city-states of the Silk Road had weakened. The revenues and opportunities the Silk Road offered were impossible to resist. When the Tibetans came down from their high plateau to lay siege to Khotan, the city was as famous for its intellectual openness as it was for its devotion to Buddhism. None of that impressed Tibet’s warriors, in their leather scale armour, faces painted with red ochre; as far as the cosmopolitan people of Khotan was concerned, their sole motivation was money. They seemed determined to humiliate Buddhism, not adopt it. Khotan’s religious freedoms suffered miserably under the Tibetan army’s occupation.

  Buddhism’s reputation within Tibet fluctuated after Gar’s regency ended and the tsenpos reasserted their power. In 710, another Chinese princess, Jincheng, arrived in Lhasa to marry the young tsenpo Tride Tsugtsen, then only a boy and in the control of his mother, who ruled as proxy. Jincheng was a devout Buddhist and used her influence to support her faith; she was known as a temple-builder. The Tang had by now reasserted its control of the Silk Roads, and after a wave of anti-Buddhist purges, refugees began arriving in Lhasa seeking her protection. This she happily gave; as numbers swelled, so resentment rose among the indigenous population. When an epidemic broke out – probably smallpox – killing many Tibetans and the princess herself, it was easy to pin it on the foreign religion. The message was clear: don’t meddle with the old ways. Attitudes at court hardened; Buddhism was banned.

  Like many new states experiencing rapid change, Tibet struggled to balance notions of traditional identity with ideas from the wider world it now inhabited. Inevitably, factions arose. Those aristocrats that had built links with Buddhist institutions in China chafed at the reactionary tilt of the tsenpo and his ministers. The state itself was under pressure. A treaty of convenience with Arab forces in Central Asia had compensated for the loss of the Silk Roads to some extent, but Tibet needed trade to finance its security. Tride Tsugtsen grew old: his nickname was Me Agstom, or ‘bearded grandfather’. His death, however, was at the hands of hired assassins, in the year 755. At the end of that year, the brilliant Tang general An Lushan launched a rebellion against the emperor Xuanzong, a rebellion that ultimately failed but which weakened the Tang dynasty. For the next few years, the new tsenpo, Trisong Detsen, watched as the tide of Chinese power consumed itself and ebbed away. The Tang dynasty, which had promised to ‘swallow the peoples of the four directions’, stripped its best troops from recently established garrisons in north-east Tibet. The way was open for Trisong Detsen to send his troops back onto the Silk Roads.

  When the city of Dunhuang fell, having held out against a Tibetan siege for more than a decade, the Tang were forced to acknowledge it could no longer control its borders with Tibet. In 763, Tibetan troops briefly occupied the Tang capital Chang’an, and although they soon withdrew, their presence nearby was a constant threat. China made deals with the Uighurs in the north and the Arab Abbasid Caliphate to the west, relieving pressure on their borders and at some cost to the Tibetans. But the complex power structure in Central Asia had shifted for good. In the early 820s, China and Tibet signed a peace treaty recorded in a famous stele that still stands in front of the Jokhang. Despite modern Chinese propaganda, it was a treaty made between equals. It would be almost a thousand years before China was able to reassert control in Central Asia.

  Tibet’s political fortunes soared under Trisong Detsen. The Old Tibetan Chronicle records: ‘Externally, they expanded the kingdom in all four directions; internally, welfare was abundant and undiminished.’ Yet it is his religious leadership for which modern Tibetans so warmly remember him today. He is the second of the ‘dharma kings’, and comfortably the most important. While later Tibetan histories sometimes conflict with the Dunhuang manuscripts, to the advantage of the Buddhist establishment, there is much more accord when it comes to Trisong Detsen. The success of Tibetan Buddhism – and the reason why most people in the West know something of it, even while they have never heard of the Tibetan Empire – is rooted in Trisong Detsen’s determined patronage, though admittedly it was only achieved on the back of Tibet’s political success and access to international trade. It was an investment that paid off in unexpected ways. Although the Tibetan Empire would collapse four decades after Trisong Detsen’s death, his spiritual legacy has endured, against the odds, for far longer.

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  Tibetan Buddhist historians wrote from the perspective of their religion being an inevitable spiritual destiny, but there was nothing certain about it. Before Trisong Detsen, Buddhism had been one of several competing options for the spiritual future of Tibet. The Tibetan elite was well aware of Islam. While seeking Arab support against their enemies in the early 700s, Tibet had requested an Islamic scholar be sent to instruct them on this new religion. A golden Buddha was sent to Mecca, although it was melted down for coins soon after. The Tibetans also knew about Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and its prophet Mani, and Chinese philosophies like Taoism and Confucianism. In the minds of their rivals the Chinese, meanwhile, they were barbarians, people who worshipped spirits in the earth and air and gods of war that needed placating: fearsome warriors but little else. Tang records describe them as mostly nomads, their way of life savage, covered in filth, never bathing or washing their hair.

  As an ambitious man, and one exposed to the sophistication of Chinese culture, Trisong Detsen set about adding some philosophical breadth and depth to Tibetan society. Whatever his personal spiritual beliefs, of which we know little, Buddhism was the obvious candidate: it was already present and acknowledged at court and as an institutional model it was the most completely understood. Islam and Christianity were too exotic, Taoism too Chinese, and Manichaeism, as far as Trisong Detsen was concerned, flat-out fraudulent. Buddhism was truly international. It had adherents among the nomad tribes of the north, in the hot flatlands on the south side of the mountains, and in the Tibetan Empire’s vassal state of Nepal, or Balpo as the Tibetans knew it. It was in Buddhism’s intellectual heartland of Kashmir as well as the Chinese imperial capital of Chang’an, and in the cities of the Silk Road. Tibet could either retreat into itself or go out and meet the world around it. Trisong Detsen chose the latter.

  Before Trisong Detsen, the introduction of Buddhism had been piecemeal, episodic and often inspired by foreigners like the Chinese princesses. This time, once the tsenpo committed, its spread was systematic, ambitious and farsighted. Foreigners, inevitably, still played a central role. The greatest teachers were from the Buddhist universities and monasteries in India, and among students of Zen in China. Yet their presence at court was problematic and created suspicion. A Tibetan nobleman called Selnang, from the Ba clan, was a key figure in recruiting foreign scholars. His role is described in the Testament of Ba, a document that describes the establishment of Buddhism in Tibet and the founding of Samye monastery, the first of the g
reat monastic institutions that would direct Tibet’s story for the next thousand years. Fragments from an early version of this story were found in the Dunhuang Caves dating from the ninth or tenth century. They reveal a process that was fraught with tension.

  Selnang travelled to Nepal and brought back an eminent scholar called Santarakshita, abbot of Nalanda, the Buddhist monastery or mahavihara in what is now the Indian state of Bihar, a little south of Kathmandu. In later versions, the abbot is politely quizzed about the teachings of Buddha. In the earliest version he is imprisoned in the Jokhang until the Tibetan court can be reassured that Santarakshita wasn’t about to cast a spell over them. That done, plans for a great monastery, modelled on Nalanda’s neighbour Odantapuri, were laid, but a series of natural disasters reawakened local fears of foreign gods. Santarakshita was sent away and only recalled when nerves were calmed. This time he brought with him a tantric master. Padmasambhava was born in the Swat valley, west of the Indus, now part of Pakistan but then a Buddhist centre. The foundation myth of Samye monastery tells how Padmasambhava identified and then drove out the demons blocking the spread of the dharma. The story can be read as a metaphor, naming and disempowering the spirit enemies of Trisong’s progressive vision; it is also the foundation story for Tibet’s powerful Nechung Oracle, a protective spirit still consulted by the Dalai Lama. Padmasambhava was a fiery and unwelcome presence at court, and he was encouraged to leave once he’d worked his magic, yet in time he would become immensely popular, a folklore hero, known as Guru Rinpoche, the ‘precious teacher’.

  The temple of Samye was designed in the shape of a mandala, literally a circle, but meaning a geometric metaphysical diagram, reflecting the four cardinal points of the universe with Mount Meru at its centre, a design from the heart of Indian Vedic cosmography. The temple at the centre had three storeys, the first in Indian style, the second Chinese and the third modelled on the temples of Khotan, a statement of Tibet’s cosmopolitan intent. Samye still stands, and its original layout is preserved, although war, earthquake, fire and the destruction inflicted in the 1960s and ’70s under China’s rule during its Cultural Revolution have all taken their toll on the buildings. It became the foundation stone of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, the oldest of the four great schools, Nyingma meaning ‘old ones’, with Guru Rinpoche a founder of the tradition but its origins a fusion of Tibet’s indigenous religion and Buddhist philosophy.

  Samye would be the location for one of the great dramas of Trisong’s reign, an encounter between two competing visions of Buddha’s teaching. Just as he had brought Santarakshita, Selnang also brought Zen monks to Tibet. The two traditions clashed over how best to transcend the earthly cycle of suffering and achieve enlightenment. The Indian sutra tradition took a gradualist approach, conceptualising the path to nirvana in day-to-day practice, sutra meaning ‘discourse’. Zen promised a more dynamic, immediate route to non-being, regarding the step-by-step approach as pedantic, unworthy of a brilliant, incisive mind. Trisong decided the two sides should meet at Samye in debate. He called on Kamashila, a student of Santarakshita, to present the sutra approach. A monk called Moheyan offered the Zen perspective but Kamashila outfoxed him, won the argument and as a consequence Tibetan Buddhism became rooted in the Indian tradition, and Zen faded from view. Although some scholars doubt such a pivotal debate took place, the story reflects a broader struggle for ascendancy between the different schools of Tibet’s Buddhist missionaries.

  When it came to Buddhist scriptures, however, there was no competition. The thousands of sutras and their commentaries were to be found in monasteries and universities across the Himalaya in India. Trisong embarked on a hugely ambitious and wildly expensive process of bringing translators from India and Nepal to work with Tibetan scholars who had learned Sanskrit. Terms that simply didn’t exist in Tibetan had to be created; the language itself grew and morphed as it swallowed a religious culture whole. This work more than anything rooted Buddhism sufficiently well for it to survive the Tibetan Empire’s later collapse and the fall of its divine emperors. Trisong’s legacy lit a flame, turning Tibet into a spiritual beacon, a process instigated and funded by an empire that soon after disappeared from view. When that happened, the flame of Buddhism guttered but was not extinguished. It was nourished back to life not in Lhasa, the city of the gods, but in a now obscure corner of western Tibet, in the northern shadow of the Himalaya, by a long-forgotten empire whose last embers were the first glimpse any European had of the Tibetan world.

  4

  Lost Kingdoms

  As you leave the scruffy frontier town of Saga, seven hundred kilometres west of the capital Lhasa, Tibet dries up like a husk. Travelling the same latitudes as Algeria, you pass sand dunes within sight of white summits. The light at dawn is sumptuous, turning the lower hills the colour of honey and caramel, but it’s hard to imagine anything living in such austerity. Then you spot wild asses, khyang in Tibetan, cropping the meagre white grass struggling out of the stony ground. The air is thin at fifteen thousand feet; everything feels closer, yet the vast scale of the landscape reduces you. It’s easy to see why a philosophy stressing the illusory nature of an individual consciousness, as Buddhism does, might prosper here.

  The road west follows the broad valley of the Yarlung Tsangpo river, which becomes the Brahmaputra when it reaches India, one of the four great rivers of Asia that have their source in western Tibet. To the north are the mountains of the Lungkar Shan, a range that contrasts sharply with those to the south: isolated snowy peaks overlooking broad valleys where nomads watch year by year as the glaciers that feed their pasturelands wither and die in the face of climate change. The Chinese carved a militarily strategic road along this ancient route in the 1950s; it stretches two thousand kilometres between the Tibetan town of Lhatse in the east and the far western province of Xinjiang, crossing the disputed Aksai Chin region along the way. Now tarmacked, the G219 is one of the most spectacular drives on earth.

  At Punsum, the road passes a line of three rounded hillocks topped with prayer flags fluttering in the wind. Ancient trade routes turn south from here to cross high passes into far western Nepal. Then the road climbs towards a pass more than 5,200 metres high, the Mayum La (‘la’ means ‘mountain pass’), on one of the world’s great watersheds, between the Tsangpo flowing east and three other great rivers: the Indus, Sutlej and Karnali.

  Late in 1715, Ippolito Desideri and Manuel Freyre, two Jesuit missionaries, were likely the first Europeans to cross this pass, travelling in the opposite direction: they were on their way from Ladakh in the far west to Lhasa, journeying under the protection of a widowed Tatar noblewoman returning to the capital. Escaping what he called the ‘Great Desert’ of Tibet was a relief for Desideri, a formidable scholar cruelly prohibited from publishing by his own church. A few days before, he had set eyes on ‘a mountain of excessive height and great circumference, always enveloped in cloud, covered with snow and ice, and most horrible, barren and steep, and bitterly cold’. This was Kailas. Staring at this dazzling peak, without any protection for his eyes, had left him blind, the pain alleviated, at his hostess’ recommendation, by rubbing snow in his eyes. The party rested beneath the mountain on the shores of Lake Manasarovar before continuing onto the Mayum La, Desideri speculating shrewdly on the identity of the great rivers whose sources surround the mountain that had temporarily blinded him. So it was that Europeans discovered the axis of the world.

  Manasarovar is Sanskrit, meaning ‘the mind’s waters’, the mind in question being Brahma’s, primal lord of creation in the Hindu tradition. According to legend the lake was placed there to give the followers of Shiva, god of creative destruction meditating atop Kailas, sacred waters with which to refresh their souls. Drink from them and after death you will join him. One of several Tibetan names for the lake is Mapham-pa, the ‘unconquerable one’, denoting the place where Buddha’s mother bathed before dreaming of him entering her womb, from the right side, in the form of a white
elephant. The lake’s ninety-kilometre shoreline is a place of pilgrimage not just for Hindus and Buddhists but Jains and followers of Bon, Tibet’s second-most popular faith. More material narratives are now elbowing some room, too. Where the G219 passes the lake’s northernmost shore, there is a new visitor centre fringed with mobile phone towers. A large advertising hoarding features the Chinese president Xi Jinping and a slogan in Mandarin: ‘Don’t depend on the sky, don’t depend on the earth, depend on ourselves to get rid of poverty.’

  A few kilometres further west, a spur road leads to Darchen, the starting point for a ritual circuit, kora in Tibetan, of Kailas itself. Darchen was until fifty years ago a small hamlet; thirty stone houses were reported here at the turn of the twentieth century by a visiting Japanese monk. During the Cultural Revolution of the mid 1960s the mountain was almost abandoned but in recent years Beijing has invested heavily in infrastructure, cashing in on a boom in religious tourism, especially among Indians who don’t bother much with acclimatisation, crossing the border in dangerous and sometimes fatal haste to visit the most sacred mountain and lake in the world. A busy main street is flanked with bleak hotels and solar-powered streetlights, seasonal restaurants and souvenir shops. The trail around Kailas itself is marred with garbage and human waste but the peak rises above it all: exquisitely proportioned, a near-perfect cone of searing brilliance. The meaning of the name Kailas is contested, but the Sanskrit word kelasa, meaning ‘crystal’, seems appropriate.