Tibet: Plateaus and Mountains (cont.)

The valleys below of barley-flowers were a shifting sea of gold peppered with mud-brick homes on the fringe: above was deep blue sky near enough to touch. Herds of yaks, decorated in bright cloth, blocked the road as their owner, astride a pony, tried to nudge them to the side. The rumble of our motor caused them to stampede; and they galloped ahead of us, swinging their immense horns in agitation, cloths flapping.

Ahead, the dizzying expanse of land echoed away into the distance, overwhelming me with an aching loneliness. The higher we climbed, the more barren and windswept the land became until at last we left the final hardy weed behind, ascending until we were level with the clouds themselves. The emptiness of the plateau extended on all sides with only the biting wind and striated rock for company.

On the horizon of the flat plateau the Himalayas towered impossibly high; the peaks wreathed in stratospheric clouds.  The mountains were raked in striations that folded in and over each other, revealing a ripple of fossilized sandbars millions of years old.

Eventually we stopped at a half-abandoned little monastery at the foot of a five-mile trail, at a gasping altitude of 16,000+ feet. Ahead of us, instead of the spectacular view of the world’s tallest mountain, was an impenetrable wall of cloud and rain. After nearly two hours of exhausted hiking, we arrived at our base camp to find a collection of canvas tents amid a polluted tourist dumping-ground.

I watched tourists barter angrily with the Tibetan workers who lived there, or stumble off to relieve themselves at the edge of the blue river flowing from the mountains, or toss their plastic wrappers on the ground. Disheartened and gasping from the thin air, I trudged up the path to a lookout hill capped in bleached prayer flags.

And before me stood the mountain: a silent, sentinel, blazing silver like a second moon holding back the dark. 

In Tibetan it is known as Qoomolunga or “Queen mother of the universe.” In Nepal: Sagarmatha, “Goddess of the Sky.” And in the West: Everest.

It was the tallest mountain in the world, and at the same time it was every mountain in the world. At the heart of its existence it was every river winding its way to the ocean. It was the exuberance of youth, a small shell cradled in a loving hand, or a violet springing from a crack in an asphalt sidewalk. It was the purple lighting on the Tibetan plateau, the smudged and smiling faces of children, and the blue of a glacier lake.

In its bedrock roots it held all of these illuminated truths and more, standing and reminding me how small a role I played; and it was liberating to be relieved, for just a single moment, of the enormous pressure humankind puts on itself to turn the world, to accomplish extraordinary things, to be godlike and glorified.

In Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, these rare moments of wide vision of universal unity, of the interconnection of all things, is an integral part of the underlying order of the universe.

Here was the mountain, the mountain that was every mountain, every river, every tender moment, all of the glory that humans kill ourselves to achieve in all the wrong ways, it was all of that without ever even trying.

“Everything is inextricably interrelated: we come to realize we are responsible for everything we do, say, or think, responsible for ourselves, everyone and everything else, and the entire universe.”

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

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