"The Snow Leopard"

[fiefoe]

Spoiler: Peter Matthiessen never saw the snow leopard, but he saw a lot of other wild animals that sound spiritually uplifting too.

• somewhere called the Crystal Mountain, was a true pilgrimage, a journey of the heart. Since the usurpation of Tibet by the Chinese, the Land of Dolpo, all but unknown to Westerners even today, was said to be the last enclave of pure Tibetan culture left on earth, and Tibetan culture was the last citadel of 'all that present-day humanity is longing for, either because it has been lost or not yet been realized or because it is in danger of disappearing from human sight: the stability of a tradition, which has its roots not only in a historical or cultural past, but within the innermost being of man. . . .'
• Of GS, I had written earlier that 'Tie is single-minded, not easy to know,' and 'a stern pragmatist, unable to muster up much grace in the face of unscientific attitudes; he takes a hard-eyed look at almost everything.'
• it had rained without relent for thirty hours. In the calamitous weather, the journey was losing all reality, and the warm smile of a pretty tourist at the hotel desk unsettled me; where did I imagine I was going, where and why?
• * to the north a deep tumult of swirling grays was all that could be seen of the Himalaya. At dusk, white egrets flapped across the sunken clouds, now black with rain; on earth, the dark had come. Then, four miles above these mud streets of the lowlands, at a point so high as to seem overhead, a luminous whiteness shone—the light of snows. Glaciers loomed and vanished in the grays, and the sky parted, and the snow cone of Machhapuchare glistened like a spire of a higher kingdom.
• for want of better fare, both pigs and dogs consume the human excrement that lies everywhere along the paths. In fair weather, all this flux is tolerable, but now at the dreg end of the rainy season, the mire of life seems leached into the sallow skins of these thin beings, ... Confronted with the pain of Asia, one cannot look and cannot turn away. In India, human misery seems so pervasive that one takes in only stray details
• The people smile —that is the greatest miracle of all. In die heat and stench and shriek of Varanasi, where in fiery sunrise swallows fly like departing spirits over the vast silent river, one delights in the smile of a blind girl being led, of a Hindu gentleman in white turban gazing benignly at the bus driver who reviles him,
• stone terraces are built up around the trunks in such a way that the shade-seeking traveler may back up and set down his load while standing almost straight. These resting places are everywhere along the trading routes, some of them so ancient that the great trees have long since died, leaving two roimd holes in a stonework oval platform.
• * The fire-colored dragonflies in the early autumn air, the bent backs in bright reds and yellows, the gleam on the black cattle and wheat stubble, the fresh green of the paddies and the sparkling river—over everything lies an immortal light, like transparent silver.
• I hear again my own wife's final breath. Such sights caused Sakyamuni to forsake Lumbini and go in search of the secret of existence that would free men from the pain of this sensory world, known as samsara.
• _ The meeting and parting of living things is as when clouds having come together drift apart again, or as when the leaves are parted from the trees. There is nothing we may call our own in a union that is but a dream.
• In GS's view, Asia is fifteen to twenty years behind East Africa in its attitudes toward conservation, and the gap may well prove fatal All of the region from western India to Turkey, and all of northern Africa as well, has turned to desert in historic times,
• I should warn you, the last friend I had who went walking with George in Asia came back—or more properly, turned back—when his boots were full of blood. . . .'
• Now the air is struck by the shrill of a single cicada, brilliant, eerie, a sound as fierce as a sword blade shrieking on a lathe, yet subtle, bell-like, with a ring that causes the spider webs to shimmer in the sunlight. I stand transfixed by this unearthly sound that radiates from all the world at once, as Tukten, passing, smiles.
• * The generous and open outlook of the sherpas, a land of merry defenselessness, is by no means common, even among unsophisticated peoples; I have never encountered it before except among the Eskimos.
• How strange everything seems. How strange everything is. One 'I' feels like an observer of this man who lies here in this sleeping bag in Asian mountains; another 'I' is thinking about Alex; a third is the tired man who tries to sleep.
• * The child was not observing; he was at rest in the very center of the universe, a part of things, unaware of endings and beginnings, still in unison with the primordial nature of creation, letting all light and phenomena pour through. Ecstasy is identity with all existence, and ecstasy showed in his bright paintings
• And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters from free-swimming life into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.
• here and there in my prose readings, strange passages would leap like unicorns out of the page. 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn'9 was an early example, and a description of singing fishes in a novel by Hamsun, and a passage in Borges, and another in Thoreau, and many in Hesse, who wrote of little else. Hamsun's characters tend to destroy themselves, and Hamsun and Hesse, with the authority of failure, warned of the fatal spell of the mystical search—so did Kierkegaard, who declared that too much 'possibility' led to the madhouse. But when I came upon these cautionary words, I already had what Kierkegaard called 'the sickness of infinitude,' wandering from one path to another with no real recognition that I was embarked upon a search, and scarcely a clue as to what I might be after.
• at my behest, GS crops my long hair to the skull. For years I have worn a wristband of heavy braided cord, first because it was a gift, and latterly as an affectation; this is cut off, too. Finally, I remove my watch, as the time it tells is losing all significance.
• In the clear night, bright stars descend all the way to the horizon, and before dawn, a band of black appears beyond the peaks, as if one could see past earth's horizon into outer space. The circle of silver peaks turns pink, then a fresh white as the sun ignites Churen Himal, 24,158 feet high, and Putha Hiunchuli, just four hundred feet below. The air is ringing.
• had a pet raven while attending the University of Alaska, and this bird brought about his first encounter with the girl who became his wife:
• One friend remarked, 'She has no mud on her soul.'
• * I remembered the Istafahan bowl... Had I given it to her earlier, she would have understood just what it meant; but by January, D was in such pain and so heavily sedated that any sort of present seemed forlorn... But when I prepared to take it back, she pressed it to her heart, lay back like a child, eyes shining, and in a whisper got one word out: 'Swit-zerland.'
• the two outcasts dip up tsampa, the roasted maize or barley meal, ground to powder and cooked as porridge or in tea, that is subsistence food in the Himalaya. Weathered faces crusted with white paste, they hunch like specters over the fire stones and blackened pot; perhaps they will rise and, in dead silence, perform the slow dance of the sennin — wild mountain sages of the ancient days in China and Japan who give no formal teaching but redeem all beings by the very purity of their enlightenment.
• * instructions for passage through the Bardo are contained in the Tibetan 'Book of the Dead' which I carry with me—a guide for the living, actually, since it teaches that a man's last thoughts will determine the quality of his reincarnation. Therefore, every moment of life is to be lived calmly, mindfully, as if it were the last, to insure that the most is made of the precious human state—the only one in which enlightenment is possible. And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.
• a companionable mound of pony dung. When one pays attention to the present, there is great pleasure in awareness of small things;
• To the east, a peak of Dhaulagiri shimmers in a halo of sun rays, and now the sun itself bursts forth, incandescent in a sky without a cloud, an ultimate blue that south over India is pale and warm, and cold deep dark in the north over Tibet —a blue bluer than blue, transparent, ringing. (Yet that 'blue' went unperceived until quite recent times: in the many hundred allusions to the sky in the Rig Veda, the Greek epics, even the Bible, there is no mention of this color.6)
• * Where the Saure plunges into its ravine, a sheer and awesome wall writhes with weird patterns of snow and shadow. The emptiness and silence of snow mountains quickly bring about those states of consciousness that occur in the mind-emptying of meditation, and no doubt high altitude has an effect, for my eye perceives the world as fixed or fluid, as it wishes. The earth twitches, and the mountains shimmer, as if all molecules had been set free: the blue sky rings. Perhaps what I hear is the 'music of the spheres,' what Hindus call the breathing of the Creator and astrophysicists the 'sighing' of the sun.
• seeking in vain to find words for what had happened, I called it the 'Smile.' The Smile seemed to grow out of me, filling all space above and behind like a huge shadow of my own Buddha form, which was minuscule now and without weight, borne up on the upraised palm of this Buddha-Being, this eternal amplification of myself. For it was I who smiled; the Smile was Me. I did not breathe, I did not need to look; for It was Everywhere. Nor was there terror in my awe: I felt 'good,' like a 'good child,' entirely safe... For the first time since unremembered childhood, I was not alone; there was no separate 'I.'
• It is not so much that we are going back in time as that time seems circular, and past and future have lost meaning. I understand much better now Einstein's remark that the only real time is that of the observer, who carries with him his own time and space. In these mountains, we have fallen behind history.
• * However, I am getting hardened: I walk lighter, stumble less, with more spring in leg and lung, keeping my center of gravity deep in the belly, and letting that center 'see.'* At these times, I am free of vertigo, even in dangerous places; my feet move naturally to firm footholds, and I flow. But sometimes for a day or more, I lose this feel of things, my breath is high up in my chest, and then I cling to the cliff edge as to life itself. And of course it is this clinging, the tightness of panic, that gets people killed: 'to clutch,' in ancient Egyptian, 'to clutch the mountain,' in Assyrian, were euphemisms that signified 'to die.'
• The wildwood brings on mild nostalgia, not for home or place, but for lost innocence—the paradise lost that, as Proust said, is the only paradise. Childhood is full of mystery and promise, and perhaps the life fear comes when all the mysteries are laid open, when what we thought we wanted is attained. It is just at the moment of seeming fulfillment that we sense irrevocable betrayal, like a great wave rising silently behind us, and know most poignantly what Milarepa meant: 'All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: acquisitions end in dispersion;
• Moving upright in near darkness, we find a bear's nest in a hackberry—our first sign of the Asiatic black bear, called the 'moon bear.' The bear sits in the branches and bends them toward him as he feeds on the cherry-like fruits; the broken branches make a platform which the bear may then use as a bed.
• Left alone, I am overtaken by that northern void—no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and snow, thrust an implacable being into the blue. In the early light, the rock shadows on the snow are sharp; in the tension between light and dark is the power of the universe. This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning here than a gust of snow... Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one's own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound. Yet as long as I remain an 'I' who is conscious of the void and stands apart from it, there will remain a snow mist on the mirror.
• * On my way here, I entertained visions of myself in monkish garb attending the Lama in his ancient mysteries, and getting to light the butter lamps into the bargain; I suppose I had hoped he would be my teacher. That the gompa is locked and the Lama gone away might be read as a karmic reprimand to spiritual ambition, a silent teaching to this ego that still insists upon itself, like the poor bleat of a goat on the north wind.
• The pack stops each little while to gaze at us, and through the telescope we rejoice in every shining hair: two silver wolves, and two of faded gold, and one that is the no-color of frost:
• eastern Tibet is known as Khams, and western Tibet was composed formerly of small kingdoms such as Do (Mustang) and Dol. I think of Tsurton-Wang-Gay— like Milarepa, a disciple of Marpa—who came from the Land of Dol; if, as may be, the ancient Dol and Dol Po are the same, then the oldest prayer stones deep in the stone field west of the gompa might have been carved in the days of the eleventh century when Tsurton-Wang-Gay walked these mountains,
• Rock, and snow peaks all around, the sky, and great birds and black rivers—what words are there to seize such ringing splendor? But again something arises in this ringing that is not quite bearable, a poised terror, as in the diamond ice that cracks the stone. The brain veers; the sun glints like a weapon. Then Black Canyon writhes and twists, and the Crystal Mountain looms as a castle of dread, and all the universe reverberates with horror. My head is the sorcerer's skull cup full of blood, and were I to turn, my eyes would see straight to the heart of chaos,
• that energy pours through me, joining my body with the sun until small silver breaths of cold, clear air, no longer mine, are lost in the mineral breathing of the mountain. A white down feather, sun-filled, dances before me on the wind: alighting nowhere, it balances on a shining thorn, goes spinning on. Between this white feather, sheep dung, light, and the fleeting aggregate of atoms that is 'I,' there is no particle of difference. There is a mountain opposite, but this 'I' is opposite nothing, opposed to nothing. <> I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched.
• From Tsakang comes the weird thump of a damaru, or prayer drum, sometimes constructed of two human skulls; this instrument and the kangling trumpet, carved from the human thigh bone, are used in Tantrism to deepen meditation, not through the encouragement of morbid thoughts but as reminders that our time on earth is fleeting.
• Then he says, 'You know something? We've seen so much, maybe it's better if there are some things that we don't see.' He seems startled by his own remark, and I wonder if he means this as I take it—that we have been spared the desolation of success, the doubt: is this really what we came so far to see? <> When I say, That was the haiku-writer speaking,' he knows just what I mean, and we both laugh.
• 'Of course I am happy here! It's wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!'
• * I stare about me, trying to etch into this journal the sense of Shey that is so precious, aware that all such effort is in vain; the beauty of this place must be cheerfully abandoned, like the wild rocks in the bright water of its streams.
• Doubtless I have 'home' confused with childhood, and Shey with its flags and beasts and snowy fastnesses with some Dark Ages place of forgotten fairy tales, where the atmosphere of myth made life heroic. <> In the longing that starts one on the path is a kind of homesickness, and some way, on this journey, I have started home. Homegoing is the purpose of my practice, of my mountain meditation and my daybreak chanting, of my koan: All the peaks are covered with snow—why is this one bare? To resolve the illogical question would mean to burst apart, let fall all preconceptions and supports. But I am not ready to let go, and so I shall not resolve my koan, or see the snow leopard, that is to say, perceive it. I shall not see it because I am not ready.
• * I say that I'm sorry as hell to leave; I try to express inexpressible thanks as we shake hands. 'I've been very very moved . . .' I say, and stop. Such words are only clutter, they do not say what I mean; I am moved from where I used to be, and can never go back.
• Safe from the dogs and the night cold, my belly placated by anda, Cannabis, and pink lightning, I lie back in near-spiritual bliss: why in hell do I work so hard at meditation? Someone once said that God offers man the choice between repose and truth: he cannot have both.
• ** Walking along the Bheri hills this afternoon, I remembered how careful one must be not to talk too much, or move abruptly, after a silent week of Zen retreat, and also the precarious coming down from highs on the hallucinogens; it is crucial to emerge gradually from such a chrysalis, drying new wings in the sun's quiet, like a butterfly, to avoid a sudden tearing of the spirit Certainly this has been a silent time, and a hallucinatory inner journey, too, and now there is this sudden loss of altitude. Whatever the reason, I am coming down too fast—too fast for what?
• How can he know, poor stinking bastard, that it is not his offensiveness that offends me, the pus and the bad breath of him—no, it is his very flesh, no different from my own. In his damnable need, he returns me to our common plight, this pit of longing into which, having failed in my poor leap, I sink again.
• Remembering the depression of my first descent from Tarakot into the Bheri Canyon, I have convinced myself that sudden loss of altitude is the main clue to my veering moods. A change is taking place, some painful growth, as in a snake during the shedding of its skin—dull, irritable, without appetite, dragging about the stale shreds of a former life, near-blinded by the old dead scale on the new eye. It is difficult to adjust because I do not know who is adjusting; I am no longer that old person and not yet the new.
• 'Of course I enjoy this life! It's wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!' <> And perhaps this is what Tukten knows—that the journey to Dolpo, step by step and day by day, is the Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus, the Tao, the Way, the Path, but no more so than small events of days at home. The teaching offered us by Lama Tupjuk, with the snow leopard watching from the rocks and the Crystal Mountain flying on the sky, was not, as I had thought that day, the enlightened wisdom of one man but a splendid utterance of the divine in all mankind.
• The red panda—this one is lustrous red-and-black—must be the loveliest of all forest animals in the Himalaya; with the wild tracts of the Suli Gorge behind us, I had given up all hope of seeing it. And it makes me happy that the sherpas take such pleasure in it;
• * (This same official was to turn up again at the next check post, closer to Jumla, and intervene there on behalf of the Westerner who had been so rude to him at Muni, commanding his minions to let us through at once. It is hard to adjust to the intricate hostile deference of Hindus
• Rather, there is a thread between us, like the black thread of a live nerve; there is something unfinished, and he knows it, too. Without ever attempting to speak about it, we perceive life in the same way, or rather, I perceive it in the way that Tukten lives it. In his life in the moment, in his freedom from attachments, in the simplicity of his everyday example, Tukten has taught me over and over, he is the teacher that I hoped to find: I used to say this to myself as a kind of instinctive joke, but now I wonder if it is not true. 'When you are ready,' Buddhists say, 'the teacher will appear.'