TRAVEL NARRATIVE
“There are no mountains like the Himalaya for in them are Kailash and Manasarovar. As the dew is dried up by the morning sun, so are the sins of mankind by the sight of the Himachal.”
Mt. Nanda Devi, second highest mountain in the Indian Himalaya, behind the Sutlej Canyon in west Tibet. © Bruno Baumann
NOTHING HAS GIVEN HUMANKIND A BIGGER SENSE OF DIVINITY THAN MOUNTAINS, and no place can make you more aware of their power than the Himalaya. According to the Vedas, their vision may change your life, and when the traveler walks around the crowded city streets or enters the different temples and hotels throughout Asia, they are unwittingly seeing mountains and finding hidden messages about them. Such is the Himalaya’s influence that they are at the core of Asian religions shaping Asian cosmology, art, and daily life.
According to the Vishnu Purana, a Hindu myth, the creation of the universe started when Vishnu counseled the gods to seek cooperation with the demons to churn the great ocean together, which would reveal the gems, herbs, and the nectar of immortality they were both seeking. To do so, they uprooted Mt. Mandara. They also summoned the sacred serpent Visuki which wound himself around the mountain as a churning rope. It caused chaos, the water turned into clarified butter and from it, they emerged the sun and the moon, all the sacred elements, animals and gods, the wish-fulfilling jewel, and Mt. Meru, the center of our universe and the beginning of human life.
The legend of Mt. Meru spread to Buddhism through two different systems which explain the universe’s structure. One is derived from the early Abhidharmakosha composed by the Indian Buddhist master Vasubandhu during the 4th-century a. D. The second is called The Kalachakra Tantra, the Wheel of Time, and was introduced to Tibet in a. D. 1024, becoming the highest esoteric teaching in this country.*1
Mt. Meru appeared at the center of the cosmic ocean, and surrounding it, seven concentric rings of golden mountains arose, each separated by an inner sea formed of rainwater, and surrounding these was a vast circular saltwater ocean bounded on its outer circumference by a fence of iron mountains from them came out the four directional continents surrounding Mt. Meru as islands. Paintings of these maps are in the walls of many gompas all over Tibet.
The mountain legend also became part of Asian architecture. The classic Indian temple structure spread throughout Asia; from the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia to Mandalay’s ones in Burma, represent Mt. Meru, surrounded by a mountain chain. Therefore, what the travelers see and what they step into, even in the cities, is part of a legend inspired by the Himalaya’s sight.
In Tibet ceremonies, Buddhist monks create Torma; offering cakes made of flour and butter, which convey deities or depict deities on their summit. Tibetans place Tormas in altars to please the gods or to appease wrathful spirits. Later, they consume these mountains, and the leftovers are offered to lower beings after being blessed.
Mt. Kailash southern face behind a yak skull carved with a mantra. Ngari prefecture, Tibet. © Bruno Baumann
Four major religions; the Hindus, Buddhist, Jainas, and Bon identified Mt. Meru with Mt. Kailash located in southwest Tibet, in the Transhimalaya. All of them place their deities on its top. On Kailash southern face, the rocks form a carved swastika, a symbol of the Wheel of Dharma in motion. Near the mountaisn shoulder, on that side, you can also see a small mount replica of the giant peak. This is the reason why Hindus believe the Tantric god Shiva and his consort Parvati dwell on its summit. Parvati once asked Shiva to teach him the secrets of the universe. Shiva then, sat her on his lap and instructed her on all the different forms of lovemaking. The image of Parvati on his lap, sometimes with her feet placed on his, is the one of the two lovers who has been more frequently depicted. All the Hindu goddesses are avatars of the primordial feminine principle and source of creation called Shakti and the name of the goddess Parvati comes from Parbata, the Sanskrit word for the mountain. Parvati, who resides at the summit of Mt. Kailash, is the daughter of Himavat, also called Parvat; the personification of the Himalayan mountain range. Her name means ‘She of the mountains,’ and with her mythology, the creation source is again associated to the Himalaya.
Nevertheless, what makes Mt. Kailash the most sacred mountain of all is the fact that it is the source of four of the main rivers of Asia, which flow strictly in all the four cardinal points; the Sutjet (west), Karnali (south), Brahmaputra (east) and the Indus (north).
Think in symbols, the first eastern sacred one that comes to our minds is the mandala, A mandala is a cosmic map created to help the practitioner visualize a journey. It is sometimes described as a palace with four cardinal entrances and a throne on which a god and goddess embrace. Mt. Kailash is a natural mandala and the primary model for the meditational map. Once more, what religion encourages you to stare at and worship is a mountain.
The same happens with the Kalachakra seal, the central esoteric teachings in Tibet. The entire symbolism of the seal, with the all-powerful ten syllables, is exceptionally complex, containing meaning related to all the Tantric teaching; the external, internal, and secret. The external aspects deal with cosmology, astronomy, and astrology, but the image of this seal named the ‘all-powerful ten’ mantra in the seal relates to Mt. Meru and its surrounding universe.
The Kalachakra first aphorism is "As it is outside, so it is within the body." The same elements that configure the cosmos explained in the external teachings are placed inside ourselves. As the Axis Mundi, Mt. Meru is our spinal cord; without that mountain within ourselves, we could not stand not walk. Furthermore, there are Hindu Yoga treatises such as the 1899 Yoga manuscript in the Braj Bhasa language that portraits the painting of a man’s chakra system together with a whole pantheon inside him, the different sacred stories of the gods and, of course, entire mountain ranges depicted inside his arms.
This Tantric idea of having the whole cosmos inside one’s body inspires Theravada monks to tattoo in themselves a yantra named the Gao Yord representing Mt. Meru surrounded by its nine peaks. It is part of the Sak Yant tattooing tradition performed in Thailand, Laos, Burma and Cambodia.
Eventually, in the East, not even in the afterlife can’t we avoid the presence of the Himalaya. The Thangka, paintings made into clothing and colored with semi precious stones, often show a deity in their own paradise, emanated from their enlightened mind after they died. The Himalayan range is often part of them as if their mind could not forget them and recreated them, as if they could not leave those mountains behind. The Tibetan most important sage Padmasambhava, the man who in the 8th-century a.D. brought Buddhism from Pakistan to Tibet, formed from his enlightened mind a copper mountain to be his entire paradise.
2
The Axis Mundi, or center of the universe, is a common fixation in a worldwide mythology, the Mecca is one of those places. Not surprisingly, it was in a mountain nearby that the Quran is revealed to Muhammad, the prophet. According to the Bible, Moses came down a mountain with the ten commandments. There is also a Greek legend in which Zeus places two eagles on each edge of the world and commands them to fly to one another. The place in which they met became the center of the earth. Some say it is Mt. Olympus, where the Greek gods abide. Mt. Fuji was the center of the world for the Japanese, and the landscape poetry and paintings in Japan and China express in images their belief that mountains and rivers are Buddha ancestors. From the siddhis in India to the Yamabushi in Japan, most sages gain their supernatural powers in mountain retreats. Thus, Mt. Meru has its expression in every single culture and religion. It has roots that descend to the underworld and is so high that it reaches heaven. Mountains fulfill our desire to transcend our world, and water; life itself, comes from them.
However, any mythology can compare to the one created by those born near the Himalaya. There, mountains become lovers you want to breathe in, become one with.
Mt. Gaurisankar, named after the Hindu goddess Gauri and her consort. The Rolwaling Himal, Nepal. © Bruno Baumann
I have a favorite legend from each religion. The Hindu one regards Lord Krishna. The young god came to earth during the preparations for the annual sacrifices to Indra, the god of thunder and rain. Krishna debated with the villagers about what the Dharma indeed was. Because they were farmers, they should do their duty and concentrate on farming and protecting the cattle, never conducting sacrifices for natural phenomena. The villagers were convinced and did not proceed with the special ceremony, but Indra, not being workshipped as he used to, was angered and flooded the village. Krishna then lifted Mt. Govardhan with one finger and held it up to protect his people and cattle from the rain. Krishna represents the ecstatic devotion, the Bhakti, and he teaches us not to worship the sky for rain but to turn our devotion to the mountains instead, the protective force who is the source of the water we need and gives without asking for anything in return. The Diwali, the most important Hindu festival and a memory of the triumph of light over ignorance, dedicates a day to this legend by celebrating
the mountains.*2
From Buddhism, I felt inspired to climb when I read about the life of Milarepa, the first human who attained enlightenment in just one lifetime after he decided to live his life as a yogi on a mountain instead of becoming a monk. Doing so, he created the fast path to nirvana, the Tibetan Tantric path. Milarepa’s story also reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the book Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, “Short is the little which remains to thee of life. Live as on a mountain.”
Paul Thoreaux once said, a tourist is someone who doesn’t know where he has been. I grew up surrounded by amazing mountains, but Canary Islanders like I belong to a culture much more related to the sea. I was lucky to study a subject on South Indian studies in college, and it made me dream for years until I left it all to travel the Humla-Tibet traverse. Only when I came back from that journey, I noticed the mountains ranges on the island and revered them. But what happens to those who remained insensitive to the Himalaya and blind to the hidden messages? Well, there is hope if they seek guides who have been constantly exposed to them; the people who made the mountains into food and eat them, turned into speech and chant them or carved to feel enveloped by them, the ones who earn their living in the mountains; the sherpa.
These are people who burn juniper incense as an offering to the mountains not only before the climbing, but as long as anyone remains up there, which beyond worship is an exercise on caring about others. After the earthquake in 2015, some climbers in Everest described how everyone crouched in fear when the earth started shaking, they all waited helplessly listening to the earth roaring and with it, the loud mantras the sherpa were chanting to appease the mountain. Their beliefs and way of life is made of all these stories and rituals, and the biggest gain for the ones who are guided by the sherpa is this sacramental way of living.
We only need to travel to the Himalaya once, to feel how the mountains and even the altitude’s thin air have shaped their beliefs and spirituality. Only the insensitive would not respect their environment, would not learn their teachings, or climb their mountains just to cross them from a bucket list.
A Western story goes that after the first Everest summit, Tenzing Norgay turned his face back on the way, looked up, and shouted full of gratitude, “Thank you, Chomolungma!” calling the mountain by its Tibetan goddess name. However, Edmund Hillary never looked back, and his first words as he reached base camp were, “We knocked that bastard out!”
Choose the one you prefer to be… and then climb.
1-2 The encyclopedia of Tibetan symbols and motifs by Robert Beer