Glacial tsunami

I started the day with this. (US media were slow to pick it up.) You may have seen it, and the longer take posted later by Chinese authorities, which confirmed it's not AI, and including longer footage of the many people who fled the building, only to be engulfed by a torrent powerful enough to collapse a parking garage and send buses bouncing. Or the other videos of enormous surges of brown and black water tearing down valleys in Nepal, sweeping away bridges, pulling down buildings, washing away all in their path... 

The apparently glacier-triggered cascade tumbled at the edges of my consciousness all day. The border crossing to Tibet looked familiar. I remember my anxiety as guards looked through our things, leafing through some books I'd brought and tearing out a few pages, worried they might not let me through. And when I later learned that at least a hundred Indian Kailas pilgrims are among the missing, it seemed to confirm that this was the very place we'd passed through on the 2013 Kailas kora. The scenes of jumbly Nepali towns downriver (the flood barreled through mile after mile after mile of them) brought back memories of busy streets full of market stalls and children. All gone?

I've established now that this was not the place we were, which was one river valley farther to the east, Zhangmu-Kodari rather than Gyirong-Rasuwa. (Unsurprisingly, Chinese border buildings all look the same.) 

But this makes the reality of the horror even greater, washing away the self-pity of my having lost places of precious memory, as if this calamity were somehow about me - and somehow containing it as that kind of loss. 

No such thing. All gone.

Even the Himalayas mourn with us

Multifaith Mondays' witness continues. Two speakers had been among the thousand clergypersons who answered an interfaith call to go to Minneapolis over the weekend, and spoke of a city - a state - under siege, and a community caring for each other in ways narcissists and opportunists can't imagine. One, a Hindu, invoked Shiva, and I was suddenly imagining the Himalayas (the piled snow from yesterday's epic blizzard helped), indeed Kailas, Shiva's abode, and he was hearing us.

In search of cognizance

My Kailash adventures seem like a long time ago, but a memoir just published by one of our young Nepali team members is taking me back to the summer 2016 circumambulation. I posed a selfie of myself reading it (with curious spider plant in the background), and he beamed it back, a FaceBook yatra! I've been going back to my pictures from the epic journey in renewed astonishment. 

(It's been diverting reading about our demanding trek, too, because I've been housebound for a few days with a sciatic flare-up.)

K-AI-lash

Somehow the algorithm that sends uninvited TikTok-aspirant "reels" to my FaceBook account discovered I had an interest in Mount Kailas. It's a very special mountain, no doubt, which means many things to many people, but still the variety of images is a little confounding. The fourth and sixth of the images below show Kailas as I saw it. All the others are, at the least, AI-enhanced, giving the sacred mount different shapes - pointy, symmetrical, crowned with special clouds - and often attended by vast numbers of (mainly Hindu) pilgrims,  

almost none of whom are dressed for the altitude. But how did the AI generate a mountain which - like the first - looks so like a snow-covered temple? In the vast world of images on which AI trains, realistic images of Kailas may be outnumbered by stylized devotional ones, easily rendered "photographic" by AI. But they're not just bunk. As I once suggested, you need to approach Kailas with something already in mind - and maybe that's what you (are) then (able to) see. 

One more round

The Sacred Himalayas Initiative had something like an official end today. Ostensibly we were celebrating the publication of Kevin Bubriski and Abhimanyu Pandey's Kailash Yatra (with an Afterword by yours truly) and the multi-lingual Folk Gods series (publishing tales gathered in the field in English, Nepali, Hindi, Tibetan and Chinese). Photographer Bubriski showed slides from the gorgeous book, including the one above, of pilgrims coming down from Drolma La, the highest point of the kora, and, below, of our party at Rakshas Tal, the demonic lake sharing Kailas with holy Manasarovar (186, 136), and all sorts of memories came rushing in. Was I truly in that extraordinary place?

At the mini-reunion of yatris, time came rushing in, too. On a happy note, the long-time graduate assistant to the program defended his dissertation on Tuesday. Less happily I learned that one of my fellow New School faculty yatris is leaving, and that Bubruski, too, is without a job - his college just suddenly went belly up. Ambivalent was news that several motorable roads and bridges we saw being built on the Nepali part of our trek have been completed; Humla is isolated no more. And Mount Kailas? Someone had heard that permits are no longer available for western visitors, though that may just be a rumor. Did I really...?!

It comes around

A book of gorgeous photographs chronicling our 2016 pilgrimage has just been published, Kailash Yatra: A Long Walk to Mt. Kailas through Humla. There's one picture where you can see me (and my lamented 
backpack, too!). And there's an abridged version of the talk I gave as part of our panel presentation at the ISSRNC conference, about how to encounter the mountain without "world religions" getting in the way.

Return to Kailas!

While I was away, the new issue of the Episcopal New Yorker appeared. This monthly newspaper is put out by the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and always has a theme. Most of the the contributions are by 

clergypeople and have a sermonic flavor. This month's theme is pilgrimage so I thought I might be able to make a contribution. Mine is one of about three dozen reflections. I guess it's a little sermonic, too!

More kora

Perhaps I'm the only new yatri willing to supplement, perhaps supplant, my own Kailas kora experience with those of others. But how beautiful to keep discovering more, like this view, taken from the point, on the first day of the (three-day clockwise) kora, where you're closest to Kailas itself, shot by a non-PRC Chinese guy - his photo essay, "Kailash kora: washing away a lifetime's bad karma," is written in traditional characters: 岡仁波齊 轉山 . 洗盡一生的罪業 . Nice to be reminded that the part of the kora's sense of epic significance is the great variety of mountain formations you encounter on your way, including some that are so strangely shaped as to pretty much force you to tell some sort of story about them. This traveler has a good eye for these, and had great luck with weather and light. His 4.5 minute kora is worth a try.

New yatris

My latest piece on Kailas (so far there have been a few talks, one five minutes long, and another soon to appear in a volume of photographs one of our party took last year) is going to be rather playfully structured. Its subject is people (including me) for whom Kailash, and the trip there and around it, don't have a set, given meaning, as arguably they do for those Tibetans who come circumambulate, and those Saivites who come seek darshan of the god. The experiences of these people - new yatris, I might call us - are worth considering, I argue, because there are more and more of us, and because negotiating between the needs and desires of the more fixed and the more exploratory visitors will be an increasing challenge as Kailash becomes a more accessible world religions tourist site.

This point is a little different from that of Alex McKay, who laments the 20th century framing of Kailas by "world-religions" discourse. It functioned before, as most sites in the Himalaya did, in much more local ways, defined by idiosyncratic "renunciates" and existing well beyond the reach of organized systems of ritual and scripture. The idea that Hindus and Buddhists have since time immemorial been making their way there is itself part of this modern framing, McKay argues. (It seems some think his argument exaggerated and wilfully ignorant of local-language literatures. I found my way to the new yatris - I originally called them "yatris of the future" - in part as a way of referring to McKay's historicizing without pretending to be able to assess it.)

Whoever the yatris of the past were, and of more distant pasts, more and more of the yatris of the future will be different from them. Even those who hail from the Hindu and Tibetan world will be engaged in something new, and understood in new terms (perhaps including heritage, nature, spirituality). But those from farther afield, from China, Russia, the West... we are the most uncontroversially new yatris. While some of us may be devotés of one of the historic traditions for which Kailash is important, most will be coming to a place known to have great spiritual significance for many other people. "You are trekkers," I will never forget a South Indian man in a red duffle coat passing me at Dolma La saying as he looked down from his pony, "we are pilgrims."

The "mountain sacred to four religions" description names the trekker's awareness, and I'm coming to think that only really means something for the new yatris. Old yatris encountered people from other traditions, sure; that's common enough across Asia. A few of them might have triangulated from this (the way Bernbaum thinks encountering different religious accounts of a place refreshes our depth experience of its "sacred mystery") but most were presumably some kind of uninterested inclusivist: others rightly sensed there was something going on here but didn't get the whole picture. There was nothing to learn from their misconception. (You wouldn't make the arduous trip just to find out if something was really going on there, if Shiva really had his abode there, if it really was the crystal palace of Denchog!) (On the other hand, this didn't mean the misconceptions of others were dangerous and needed rooting out, just uninteresting.)

The new yatri is a pluralist - which in many cases (as Tomoko Masuzawa forcefully argued) is universalism under another name, but might (also) include all manner of seeker openness. Each of the different takes on the mountain seems potentially significant, even if none of them can be taken as final. (The closest to final might be what each person gets from their encounter with the mountain.) The experiences of other yatris, new and old, are an object of fascination. Old yatris arrived with manuals telling them what a properly primed mind and heart would be permitted to perceive. The new yatri knows there are many manuals. She might think minds and hearts can be primed to perceive different realities, but hasn't come in search of only one of these realities.

Now have I any evidence for my claims, and especially for the gross generalization that all these "new yatris" have structurally similar experiences? Not a lot. But also not just nothing (or nothing but my own inchoate gut feelings). Since returning from my second kora last year I've watched more than my share of videos and read more than my share of accounts of other new yatris. With faux modesty I'll say I'm just discussing those which I found most interesting, but they should add up - as they have for me - to a vivid sketch of this emerging breed.

Kailas again

(Photo from here)

I've recently read the account of a very special circumambulation of Kailash in 2006, the first (perhaps only) one performed by a western person doing full body prostrations. (The idea came not from her US teachers but from dakinis, she tells us.) It took her twenty-eight arduous but not lonely days, poignantly recorded in her diary. This is from Day 4, an expression of her hunger for the cosmic love which she ultimately finds everywhere - even in herself:

Two young women from Taiwan stopped, one in particular had so many questions, and the other one was quiet but attentive and kind. The one with questions asked if I was a Buddhist. I paused and said, "I'm everything." "That's a good sentence," she said.

Tracey Alysson, Dying & Living in the Arms of Love:

One Woman's Journey Around Mount Kailash (XLibris, 2012), 113

World mountain

I've come across a fascinating argument (not yet published so I can't give a reference) that "Kailash" for at least some people sometimes meant the entire rise of what we now know to be the Tibetan plateau, a protuberance on the earth's surface so great as to make it pear-shaped. The source of all rivers (check), so big a mountain that you can't see it (the astonishment of travelers north across the Himalaya arriving not at a peak but a vast plain, a sea floor...) Among his illustrations is the one from which I've clipped the above, an 1866 cross section of Asia.

Press

Some flowers from the Kailash trip, safely preserved in a diary...

Challenges of a shared sacred landscape

Our Kailash project has been written up on the grant spotlight page of the Henry Luce Foundation, its funder. I wouldn't have written about it in quite the way they do -

The center of the universe—according to many Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Bonpos—can be found at the heart of the Himalaya where the borders of China, India, and Nepal converge. It is the home of Shiva; it is the site where Buddhist sage Milarepa defeated the Bon shaman Naro Bon-chung; it is the birthplace of the world.

- but overall it's a nice description. (Yours truly is even quoted, though I can't remember where/when I said what was quoted; the syntax sounds like me, though!) Apparently they don't feature most of the grants they disburse in this way, so it's a sign we're doing something right!

Figuring out how to write about it is something I'll have to work out for myself soon. I'm to be the editor-in-chief of the volume coming out of our project, tentatively titled "Challenges of a Shared Sacred Landscape." Our larger argument will be that the Kailash Sacred Landscape is a "landscape in motion," which has always been characterized by often competing flows of people. My part, beyond editing the various submissions, will be to explore how and why Kailash as "center of the universe" allows and even encourages the elision of contexts and causes exemplified by, for instance, the lines just quoted.

帰日

Yesterday's classes both ended in Japan! (So did today's stroll through the BBG where we saw the last sakura and the first tree peonies.)

In the sacred mountains class, Japan came as the end of a trifecta. We first watched the final half hour of Zhang Yang's documentary "Kang Rinpoche," witnessing the arrival at Mt. Kailas of a group of Tibetan villagers who'd started their 1200 km full body prostrating pilgrimage a year beforehand. Then we discussed Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s last sermon. And finally it was Dogen's "Mountains and Waters Sutra," a piece of which we'd encountered before. What all three had in common was movement. The Mangkang villagers show the effort of pilgrimage. Dr. King chronicles the progress he's seen, progress which has taken him to the"mountaintop" from which he can see the road that has brought them so far, and the Promised Land. And Zen Master Dogen tells us that mountains walk - and don't say they don't! To doubt the walking of the mountains means that one does not yet know one's own walking.

In the Confucian ethics class it was, by coincidence, the person most responsible for anyone beyond the Soto School of Zen's knowing about Dogen, Watsuji Tetsuro. I've spent a lot of time in Watsuji's company over the years, going back to my year at Tokyo University in 1992-93, but this was the first time I'd approached his Rinrigaku from the perspective of Confucianism. It makes more sense than the Buddhist- or Heidegger-focused readings common in the West would lead you to expect. The 倫 rin of Watsuji's ethics (倫理学 rinrigaku), template for his famous 間柄 aidagara, are Mencius' five relations! And his attention to everyday interactions has a Confucian feel to it, too. But then he was the son of a Confucian scholar, a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine! The Western and Buddhist legacies are there, too, of course, and Watsuji's (he would say distinctively Japanese) appreciation of cultural plurality. But it makes a nice denouement for our course on Confucianism's prospects beyond the Middle Kingdom.

The courses continue for another week. Teams of students will give reports on assorted sacred mounts, from Nanda Devi to Shasta (but not Fuji). And our Confucian book club will return to the Analects.

Next year in Kailash-Manasarovar

Today was the last meeting of the Sacred Himalaya Initiative researchers, a final debrief after a conference within the larger ISSRNC conference. We've brought together fascinating material from Tibet, India, Nepal, which adds up to a distinctive portrait of the Kailash Sacred Landscape on several scales. We hope the papers can be brought together in a special focus for a journal. Guess who's to spearhead that editing work?

Over the mountains

The ICI-hosted ISSRNC conference "Mountains and Sacred Geography" was, like every big conference, a doozy. Going in I was frustrated, as at every event with parallel sessions, that there were so many things you'd have to miss, no matter what you chose. On top of that, I was committed to attending half a dozen Sacred Himalaya Initiative-related events. But now that it's over, and having attended pretty much full time starting at 8:30 each of the last three mornings, I'm glad there wasn't more of it! I think I'll be adding ISSRNC to my world in the future, if its meetings aren't too far away.

As for sacred mountains... I think I'm ready for a rest. The final panel I attended this afternoon included a paper refreshingly not about mountains. Indeed, the presenter remarked, her subject of swamps and marshes was something like the antithesis of the supposed clarity and enlightenment associated with mountains. When she argued that the idea of the "slough of despond" (swamps were associated in ancient and medieval Europe with acedia, the slothful vice of those who cannot turn to God) illuminated the paralysis of many regarding climate change, I had an aha moment. Mountains are a temptation, even a danger to ecological thinking, because they're imagined as breaks from - escapes from - the slog of the ordinary flatlands. They seem like self-contained worlds, connected more to the sky (and also perhaps the underworld) than to their surrounds. Marshes were avoided (and drained) for being neither solid land nor flowing water, but we now know how ecologically crucial wetlands are precisely because of that fecund messiness. The clarity of mountain perspectives, especially if they encourage distaste for swampy messiness, might offer false comfort.

That said, it was still loads of fun to be talking to people about Kailash. In my own remarks I bracketed the question of the antiquity of the kora to our Western Himalayan mount, discussing instead the contemporary appeal of the idea of a mountain sacred to many world religions, and proposing ways of deepening and complicating it for the yatris of the future. (My main suggestion: don't go around once, go twice!) Kailas cropped up in lots of other places, too, always mythicized, like in this image from someone's powerpoint, where it has the inverted cone shape of Meru!

Kailas darsan

You could see Kailas from The New School today! As the hosts of the ISSRNC conference on Mountains and Sacred Landscapes, India China Institute got to devote a plenary session to our Kailash project, and so seven of us yatris shared some of our experiences and takeaways from last year's trek/pilgrimage
Also on our panel was the director of the ICIMOD Kailash Sacred Landscape initiative, who dazzled us with this (too) charming map of the area, and then with a visualization of the various components of the initiative in the form of a mandala. It was nice to reconnect with people, remember our times together and learn where their thinking has taken them since. The audience got a nice view of our project, too.

Coming conference

Starting a week from today!

My turn

For the upcoming ISSRNC conference on "Mountains and Sacred Landscapes," hosted by our India China Institute, I will be part of a plenary panel sharing the findings of our Sacred Himalaya Initiative. Ten minutes isn't very long (for a speaker!) but I'm preparing a longer written version, too. It's called "First there is a mountain: Kailash beyond the world religions." What is it/am I going to say? Structured around a Zennish aphorism-turned popular song you've heard about before, it falls into the category of my writings which might be called "unsolicited advice."

First there is a mountain

I'll start by rehearsing the contemporary myth about a mountain in the Western Himalaya that has not only been an object of reverence and pilgrimage since time immemorial but is sacred to four great religions: it's regarded as the center of the universe by two billion people! This is a mind-boggling thing - you can imagine millions of tour operators salivating - but it is a myth. That mountain has only relatively recently been the object of these attentions. Even before you complicate the modern constructs of "world religions" it is hardly all "Hindus" and "Buddhists" that revere it - just Saivites and a small subset of Tibetan Buddhists, respectively. And when they come together they ignore each other. If it's "common ground," this is hardly seen as important, at best a sign but in no way a constituent of its sacredness. Such religious stories as are told about it aren't about comity either, but about conflict and usurpation: Ravana almost getting away with stealing it, Milarepa evicting the Bön magician Naro Bonchung from it.

Then there is no mountain

Whence, then, this myth? Alex McKay has laid out the components, spanning Hindu, Buddhist, Bön and more modern colonial sources. He argues against understanding the cult of Kailas (which is older and involves several more places than this in the Western Himalaya) in terms of "world religions," starting with the "sanskritization" of those practices too quickly subsumed under "Hinduism." There are stories in ancient texts about a snowy abode of Shiva above two lakes, a source of four rivers. But the people to who actually made their way to this and other Himalayan peaks were "renunciates" outside all formalized "religion." Kailas is mapped onto religions only in modern times, as a British colonial official plans a pilgrimage route to generate revenue in his remote district of the Indian Himalaya. The idea of Kailas as a shared cosmic center comes even later. But the idea of such a place is immediately intelligible. Why? "World religions" discourse constructs religions as isomorphic enterprises. Everyone has heard of the multiple paths to a single summit. And of course colonialism shaped ideas of a "mythical East" attractive in colonial metropoles and peripheries alike. In this context, a western Himalayan hillock's coronation as the most sacred spot on earth seems overdetermined. Wasn't Eden - another source of four rivers - in the Himalaya anyway? (The one who seems to have brought all these together around our peak was the German-born Lama Anagarika Govinda.)

Then there is

The consequence of this might be no more than that some of the travelers to Kailas, gliding in on new Chinese roads, bring with them the baggage not of particular traditions but of a cosmopolitan pluralism. It might not even be a bad thing: isn't it better that religions be thought to be in harmony in this way? Western travelers could stand to learn from the different way in which religious plurality is managed in most Asian settings. And yet (this is where the unsolicited advice comes in) world religion discourse, even in it pluralist form, is not benign, implicitly supporting centralizing and often fundamentalist elites even as it glosses over meaningful differences in cosmology and practice... (I won't go into the ways in which it aligns with the policies regarding religion of the Chinese Communist Party.) Visitors will in any case be coming in ever greater numbers, irrevocably transforming a place once defined by its remoteness. Are there other lessons today's Kailas might teach in the place of the world religion mythology many travelers will bring with them? And not just about historical contingency - which I appreciate only academics take pleasure in.

• What if one made clear that for most South Asians Kailas is part - perhaps not even the most important part - of a complex with Lake Manasarovar, and perhaps with other sites too, like Tirthapuri. This might lessen the charisma of the supposed axis mundi and draw more attention to concrete histories and landscapes, including, crucially, the rivers and lakes intimately connected to mountains.

• What if one laid out its relations and resonances with other mountains, too - other abodes of Shiva, the place of Gangrimpoche in larger Tibetan sacred geographies, regional as well as ritually constructed Kailases? Sacred mountains work in many more, and more edifying ways, than just as single breaks in a horizontal world.

• What if one took the encounter with Kailas as an opportunity to introduce visitors to the dynamic understanding of coupled opposites in Tantra, a pan-religious tradition embracing many of the "Hindu" and "Buddhist" experiences in the region? This could be the start of an understanding of Kailas as not only related to other sacred sites, but as a node in a cosmology of fecund contradiction. Mountains may be conceived as the quintessentially stable features of our world, but mountains in this part of the world change shape, fly...

Each of these would suggest different itineraries for visitors, different places to be shown or told about. A final lesson might be attached to the experience of circumambulation most visitors engage in. (Not all, and even some of these have their peak experience in some contact with the mountain itself...) Going around the mountain, ideally multiple times, could be explained as a ubiquitous practice in South Asian and Himalayan traditions, but it needs to be engaged in actually to mean much. Going even once the circumambulator is impressed by those who move at different speeds (the full body prostrators especially), and by those going in the opposite direction. Going more than once s/he will move beyond experiencing the trip as a discovery, a journey into the unknown, and feel a part of the many who circumambulate here (and elsewhere); they may even realize that the mountain spins.

It's for the individual to decide if the mountain spins or is spun by us.

After the snow

Because of the snow day, the Religious Studies roundtable has had to be rescheduled (probably to April 27th). But tomorrow's opening of the art exhibit curated by one of my Kailash fellow yatris is still happening!

You'll notice a second event in the poster, too. On March 30th, the New School participants in last year's Kailash kora will be getting together to share reflections on our experiences together. The event will include photo highlights of the expedition.