A Mountain as Multiverse

Abstract

This article explores the mountain as a site of pilgrimage. It considers the efficacy of pain and peril in bringing value to the 'sacred' point of arrival in the contexts of pilgrimage, expedition and objective exploration, focussing on the contextual history and contemporary experience of walks around Mount Kailash in Tibet, referring back to the other examples to form a comparative argument around the broader issues of relativity connecting the embodied to the spiritually realised. There are facts here, imaginings, reconstructions and subjectivity but these find consolidation in three foci:

1. The peaceful and unanimous appropriation of a single sacred space by multiple religions;

2. The ritual liminoid efficacy of a pilgrimage in a genuinely perilous environment;

3. The intertextuality of the symbolic space and the real space as they are performed within the unique natural mandala of Mount Kailas in Tibet.

Kailash is the spiritual centre of the universe in Tibetan Buddhism, the home of Siva in Hinduism and is also a holy site in Bonism; it is therefore a multi-faith site with multiple symbolic existences operative at once. However, it was also once perceived to be the possible source of great rivers such as the Ganges and as such is bound up with colonial tales of secret and disguised Victorian expeditions to survey and map, usually ending in great peril. Pilgrims and expeditionaries walk around the mountain - indeed it is claimed to be a pilgrimage route to a 5th of the world's population - in a circumnavigation that takes them to some 18600 feet in the outer kora, higher on the inner, and as such the 'walk' claims lives annually. The article will draw upon experiences of the walk, both secular and non-secular, both physical and meta-physical, exploring written accounts from the multiple perspectives of authors such as Krishna Yadav, Colin Thubron, Shri Swami Satchinanada, Gibbons & Pritchard-Jones, John Snelling, Charles Allen.

The article will conclude with a consideration of the higher space and a state of liminal realisation gained only when something is risked through the traversing of that space; it will look at the crucial and causal link that connects exposure to self-endangerment, the charging of a sacred venue and the attainments realised.

Notes

1 As a result of this contest, victorious Milarepa instructed Naro Bonchung that his followers would have to proceed anticlockwise around the mountain, which they do to this day, counter to all others.

2 This stacking of planes, from the heavens to the underworld, is also reminiscent of Yggdrasill with worlds existing beneath the three roots and Asgard above (Davidson 1993: 68–70), but Anders Andrén provides a particularly detailed analysis that connects the origins of the ‘world tree’ and the ‘world pillar’, even in Christian theologies, and returns them ultimately to early India (Andrén 2014: 27–36).

3 Mansarovar is one of two lakes, the other being Rakshar Tal, to the south of Kailas. It is also a sacred site of pilgrimage, ringed with the ancient caves of religious hermits, the ruins of monasteries. The aspect of water is liminoid and the shallows of Mansarovar can be bathed in ritually by Hindu pilgrims, before their circumambulation of Kailas.