West Tibet, October 2006 #2

DAY 8

“Nature has been for me, for as long as I remember a source of solace, inspiration, adventure, and delight; a home, a teacher, a companion”. – Lorraine Anderson

Leaving Darchen in the early morning, we continued to head deeper and deeper into the heart of western Tibet, heading to the ancient kingdom of Guge, the lost city of Tsaparang and the monastic artistic treasure of Thöling monastery.

The drive was more of the same which we passed through before, but eventually we came to what was the Badlands of South Dakota on steroids. Huge cliffs and small mountains of melted rock and banded soil. It’s like the Earth was made of brown, red and yellow wax and God took a magnifying glass to the sun and melted the world into these massive piles of deeply eroded gullies and steeply faced protuberances. The landscapes here just continue to get weirder and weirder the farther we get from civilization!

A brief history: It was within this eerie, barren, parched and surreal landscape of melted rock and stone that the former kingdom of Guge was situated. Thöling and nearby Tsaparang are the ruined former capitals of this kingdom of Ngari (west Tibet). This crazy land seems a strange place for a full civilization to develop and thrive, but being an important stop on the trade route between India and Tibet and a minor but busy port on the Silk Road helped to make this place prosperous during its heyday. The Kingdom of Guge was established in the 9^th century after the assassination of the anti-Buddhist king Langdarma and the break up of the Yarlung Empire (central Tibet). One of the king’s sons, Wösung, traveled west to the upper Indus and Sutlej river valleys and founded Guge, establishing Tsaparang as its capital. In the 10^th century, King Yeshe Ö reinstated Buddhism in this part of Tibet and over 100 monasteries were built – the most important being Thöling and Tsaparang. By the end of the 10^th century it was a wealthy center supporting several thousand people. It was during this time that Kashmiri artists came to paint the unique murals still visible today. A further expansion of the religion occurred in the 11^th century, when Atisha, the renowned Indian master, was invited to Thöling to teach. For many, many years Atisha resisted this invitation but then one night he had a dream Tara, female Buddha of accomplishment is one of her many identities, told him he should go to Guge and teach but it would decrease Atisha’s lifespan noticeably. After Atisha arrived and spent three years teaching there, Tibetan Buddhism gained the foothold in the country that we still see today. In 1624, Antonio de Andrade, a Portuguese Jesuit missionary from Goa (India), was the first European to visit the isolated kingdom. He was well received by the King and succeeded in setting up the first Christian Church in Tibet the following year. Buddhist lamas at Tsaparang, upset by the spread of Christianity, enlisted the help of neighboring Ladakh King to overthrow the Guge kingdom in 1630. The kingdom fell into ruin just a couple decades later and was never re-inhabited again.

Our first visit was to Thöling monastery because it is located at the bottom of what is Zanda, a somewhat modern but still very small Chinese town. Located on the cliffs just above the primary stages of the Sutlej river, it is a prime location and to our sincere surprise actually had trees, the first in hundreds and hundreds of kilometers! Thöling was Ngari’s most important monastery, with its influence reaching from Kashmir all the way to Assam in the east, and was still functioning in 1966 when the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution arrived, shut the doors and left a badly damaged set of buildings and ruins. (I still find it so hard to believe that such meticulous and enthusiastic destruction was rampaged by such numbers with just a few words of encouragement from some very important, but human nonetheless, political voices).

The monastery’s surviving murals are why people drive 1500 km to see them. This is the only place to see such styles of painting and execution within Tibet. The murals are exquisite, colorful, totally interesting (even to the lay person like me) and completely unique to the Tibetan plateau in their styles and subject. These 15^th – 16^th century murals are stylistically very close to those in Tsaparang. Painted in the ‘Guge’ style, they represent an incredible synthesis of Kashmiri and Nepalese styles. When looking at these paintings, it is apparent that this kingdom was much more a part of western India, Nepal and Kashmir’s influential range than anything coming from central Tibet (the influential shift began to happen though in the 17^th – 18^th century). We spent several hours in the afternoon getting a guided tour (the remaining 5 monks living there – down from its heyday number of 500 - would never have allowed us to walk around within the chapels unescorted) through the monastic complex and all the different chapel houses. Again, I must say just how remarkable the paintings are in these two places. Truly magnificent even to the untrained eye…so you should have seen Leigh….she was in hog heaven!

Strangely, within many of the chapels, the partially destroyed statues that used to be housed there and their respective pieces were not swept away and thrown away after the Red Guards did their dirty work. In my opinion, disturbingly, the pieces of what used to be straw and clay painted statues were on display where their former glorious incarnations used to stand. So in several alcoves there were these weird piles of painted broken figures, many times with the smashed but still recognizable head and face sitting atop the pile with what I swear looks like silent screams etched on their now dusty faces. Our debate was whether the monks/Tibetans were leaving the ‘remains’ of these once proud figures as a memorial and a display of the wrath and mindless destruction that happened a few decades ago, or if the caretakers were merely lazy and didn’t want to bother with the proper disposal of these sanctified effigies. Was there enough thought into leaving this for a museum like display of the atrocities that were affronted them? Were we giving them more credit then deserved for complex and undermining thinking? Regardless of the reasons, entering a chapel and witnessing the wanton destruction caused by ideology left a gaping hole in one’s soul for all that has been lost, not just here in Tibet (where it is very apparent and very recent and very widespread – consensus is that Tibet suffered some of the hardest blows throughout China from the Cultural Revolution), but all over the world, at any time in history. For example, legend has it that the knowledge lost during the ancient fire at the Library of Alexandria (which I believe was set intentionally) set back the human knowledge table centuries with so many irreplaceable tomes….some would even go so far as to say it precipitated the ‘Dark Ages’ of Europe).

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. – George Satanyana

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe”. – H. G. Wells

DAY 9

The journey through the past continues….

The citadel of Tsaparang has been gracefully melting into ruin ever since it’s slide from prominence in the 17^th century. Because Tsaparang was already partially abandoned at the time of the CR, the Chinese did not attack it with quite the same level of vandalistic fury that they vented upon other religious complexes in Tibet. The ruins are spectacular, to be sure, but I’m of the opinion that a little money going towards restoration would go a long way to securing a few more rooms/houses/chapels/palaces before they are lost to us forever in a combination of wind, sun and rain. Although I must admit that there is something very, very Buddhist about the nature of impermanence (and the patient power of Mother Earth to clean her self) watching this one-time kingdom of thousands slowly rot back into the same earth it was raised from. The ruins, which do have a very organic feel, seemingly growing out of the major outcrop they are built upon over looking the Sutlej river, makes for quite the spectacular and photogenic landscape. And I’m all about finding the subtle battles between Man and Earth in my personal photography anyway….this place was so interesting to me, both historically but also on a deeper, more subconscious level where creativity seems to have it’s birth.

The winding trails that take you up and into the ruins complex make for a good fun time exploring the ruins, ducking into the random caves and monastic quarters that were carved literally out of the rock of the mountain (some of them quite large with numerous room, shelves and kitchen areas). One does get the distinct impression that it’s a huge, ancient anthill. This feeling is only reinforced as you move higher and higher up the ridge and literally have to climb through a long stairway tunnel that connects the residential quarters to the palatial complexes on the crest of the mound. The views from here are absolutely wonderful. It strikes me as funny sometimes the importance kings and royalty put on being higher than others. Symbolically this makes sense, but here in Tibet, where the higher you go, the less oxygen and water you have access to, I would think that they should prefer the lowland, the river banks and the fertile plains. In Bolivia that’s exactly what has happened – the rich live at the lower, more oxygen rich altitudes forcing the poor to higher and oxygen starved areas. Guess I don’t know much about the workings of royalty minds.

We spent almost the whole day walking around this immense and impressive complex, gazing in awe at the incredible artwork on the walls, the complex and intriguing architecture and generally wondering things like how did they live, where did their food come from, who did they trade with, who lived here, why did they come/live here and similar wanderings through the past musings.

DAY 10 – DAY 13

“When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable”. – Clifton Fadima

Finally we turn back to the East and drive back to where once we came.

The drive was pretty monotonous and uneventful (except for all the animals we saw – wild asses, wild horses, antelopes, picas, brown eagles, brown hawks, falcons, hares and so many ducks) on the way back except for a strange, strong and unexpected snow storm that caught us unaware at the Lake Manasarovar-side monastery of Chiu. As the day was ending and we were making our way through the blowing snow and quickly gathering accumulation on the ground, passing poor tractors and mini buses full of Tibetans who were caught just as unaware as we were (though thankfully we had a good jeep, an excellent driver and powerful 4x4). Huddling close and eating the last of our instant noodles with boiled snow (yum!), we made it through the night just fine and awoke to a very early winter wonderland of first snow. The white blanket of silence spreading out for as far as the eye can see, muffling sounds and distorting distances. I went for a long walk that morning out to the lake shore. I felt like the only man on Earth. It was exhilarating and exhausting. The cold, bitter, crisp air. The glorious blanket of pure white everywhere. The raw, biting wind reminding me that I’m not really supposed to be out. God, I love the first snow of the year!

DAY 14

Finally, we stopped in Gyantse, a surprisingly Tibetan city for its size, for an overnight visit before returning to Lhasa.

There was a lot of old religious stuff. Leigh loved it. I was bored. Typical.

Now, we are safely and snugly back in our little ‘cave’ in Lhasa. The tourists are leaving, the pilgrims and nomads are arriving and we are looking forward to sleeping in, eating good food and just quietly being with one another like we haven’t been able to for 3 months….

Oh, and it’s already started snowing and getting pretty cold. You should see us in our little cave, all bundled up (Leigh even wears her ‘chesty puffy coat’ – the full down jacket – sitting around our room). Winter seems to have come a little bit early to the high plateau!

“It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end”. - Ursula K. LeGuin