…and why you must scale it, at least once
in your life.
The Snow Leopard was lying on my bookshelf for more than five years before I picked
it up. In those five years, it beckoned me often. But somehow, the silent pull
wasn’t strong enough for me to make a physical move.
Until now. Beset by a strong desire to go
visit the mountains, especially the Himalayas, but unable to do so for multiple
reasons, I possibly did the next best thing: Picked up the book and traveled
with its author, Peter Matthiessen, on a mystical journey of self-discovery to
the Crystal Mountain on the Tibetan Plateau, near the border with Nepal.
When I was almost finished reading, a
combined sense of fulfillment, dread, sadness, and joy took hold of me. Sadness
at the knowledge that a wondrous journey was coming to an end; joy at the
treasure chest of beauty and wisdom Matthiessen opened up, scattering its
pearls all along the way, for countless readers like me.
The author undertook this journey along
with the field biologist George Schaller in the 1970s, walking hundreds of
mountainous miles for a little over two months. They wanted to study bharal,
the wild blue sheep-goat of the region, with a faint chance at being among the
lucky few to spot the amazing, revered cat, the snow leopard.
The book, The Snow Leopard, at first
appears to be a diary-like account of that journey (date-wise entries of
varying lengths double as chapters within sections). It is that but,
thankfully, much more.
I’m in agreement with this blurb taken from
a review by Jim Harrison for The Nation: “A magical book: a kind of
lunar paradigm and map of the sacred…The book has transcended the usual limits
of language.”
The Snow Leopard is indeed transcendental, and not just on account of language. It is a timeless travel classic that can very well serve as a spiritual refuge in times of distress and doubt.
Besides Schaller, Matthiessen is
accompanied by a curious mix of porters (Sherpas and Tamangs) to help with
their load, cooking, and other routine tasks. Throughout the journey, he
portrays these characters in witty detail and draws your attention to the rich
variety of life ever-present in nature in a way that makes you feel as if you
are right there, witnessing all this firsthand. His writing is not grandiose or
lavish but simple, natural, endearing.
The most important bits, if you ask me, are
his inner detours in which he talks about the workings of Buddhism’s various
streams, the revered figures like Milarepa and Avalokiteshwara, what it means
to seek one’s place in the universe, and what truly gives us peace and
happiness. Profound as these things are supposed to be, Matthiessen makes them
come alive and within easy reach as he melds his noble thoughts effortlessly
with the daily ‘step and stave’ of walking on snowy, alpine paths, and
surviving with barebone necessities in the company of strangers that seem to be
living in another century yet whose simple acceptance of life and its harsh
ways are so disarming, so uplifting at times.
Among the most charming, intriguing parts I
found are the ones where Matthiessen describes Tukten, the enigmatic sherpa,
and his equally enigmatic relationship with him throughout the journey (and
possibly beyond it in another life).
Take this early passage, for instance:
“Tukten has elf's ears and a thin neck, a yellow face, and the wild wise eyes
of a naljorpa, or Tibetan yogi. He radiates that inner quiet which is
often associated with spiritual attainment, but perhaps his attainment is a
dark one. The other Sherpas are uneasy with him; they mutter that he drinks too
much, uses foul language, is not to be trusted…This disreputable fellow is
somehow known to me, like a dim figure from another life.”
Despite his “reputation,” Tukten exerts an
extraordinary influence on Matthiessen—without actually doing any exertion. For
he is an effortless, easygoing being who seems unperturbed in the most trying
of circumstances.
Toward the end, when Matthiessen is parting
ways with Tukten, shaking his hand and watching him go in the cab, he draws
parallels between the sherpa and himself: “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…”
There appears to be a fine, mystic example
at one place in the book of how some Tibetans “live” what most ordinary folk
merely “perceive.” It occurs when the traveling party needs to pass a narrow
stretch of cliff about a hundred feet above rocks at the edge of a lake.
Matthiessen, who has been walking ahead, pauses at this point, leaning into the
cliff to let the nine porters in his entourage pass by. What he witnesses next
is nothing short of surreal:
“At that dangerous point of cliff, an
extraordinary thing happens. Not yet in view, the nine fall silent [the porters
were chattering before that] in the sudden way that birds are stilled by the
shadow of a hawk, or tree frogs cease their shrilling, leaving a ringing
silence in the silence. Then, one by one, the nine figures round the point of
rock in silhouette, unreal beneath big bulky loads that threaten each second to
bump the cliff and nudge them over the precipice. On they come, staring
straight ahead, as steadily and certainly as ants, yet seeming to glide with an
easy, ethereal lightness, as if some sort of inner concentration was lifting
them just off the surface of the ground. Bent far forward against the tump
lines around their foreheads, fingers wide spread by way of balance, they touch
the cliff face lightly to the left side, stroke the north wind to the right.
Light finger-tips touch my upper leg, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight, nine hands, but the intensity is such that they seem not to distinguish
between cold rock face and warm blue jeans. Mute unknowing, dull eyes glazed,
the figures brush past one by one in their wool boots and sashed tunics,
leaving behind in the clear air the smell of grease and fires. When the bad
stretch is past, the hooting instantly resumes, perhaps at the point where they
left off, as if all had awakened from a trance.”
I read the above passage a couple of times,
as if in a trance myself.
Later on, Matthiessen wonders about the
incredible incident, thinking it to be a form of lung-gom, a Tantric
discipline that permits the adept to glide along with uncanny swiftness and
certainty, even at night. He also compares it to the yogic concept of prana:
lung-gom literally means wind-concentration and prana is the
vital energy or breath that permeates everything.
There are several passages in the book
where Matthiessen shines a light on meditation—both by dwelling on
Tibetan-Buddhist teachings and by his own sincere attempts at its practice.
What I really liked is the author’s
openness in not restricting his writing to any one particular sect but
embracing multiple streams and cultures. So, even as he is talking about
Tibetan yogi Milarepa’s teachings, he doesn’t shy away from dwelling on meditative
experiences as varied as those of bushmen and dervishes. Consider the following
excerpts:
“Meditation has nothing to do with
contemplation of eternal questions, or of one's own folly, or even of one's
navel, although a clearer view on all of these enigmas may result. It has
nothing to do with thought of any kind—with anything at all, in fact, but
intuiting the true nature of existence, which is why it has appeared, in one
form or another, in almost every
culture known to man. The entranced Bushman staring into fire, Eskimo
using a sharp rock to draw an ever-deepening circle into the flat surface of a
stone achieves the same obliteration of the ego (and the same power) as the
dervish or the Pueblo sacred dancer. Among Hindus and Buddhists, realization is
attained through inner stillness, usually achieved through the samadhi state
of sitting yoga. In Tantric practice, the student may displace the ego by
filling his whole being with the real or imagined object of his concentration;
in Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear, pure
stillness of a seashell or a flower petal…
“Like the round-bottomed Bodhidharma doll,
returning to its centre, meditation represents the foundation of the universe
to which all returns, as in the stillness of the dead of night, the stillness
between tides and winds, the stillness of the instant before Creation. In this
"void", this dynamic state of rest, without impediments, lies
ultimate reality, and here one's own true nature is reborn, in a return from
what Buddhists speak of as "great death". This is the Truth of which
Milarepa speaks.”
In November 1971, before Matthiessen
started his Crystal Mountain journey, he and his wife (her name is Deborah but
he affectionately refers to her as D), who was suffering from cancer, attended
a Zen meditation retreat in New York. In one of the meditative sessions, they
both happened to sit opposite each other. Just the night before, Matthiessen
had quietly perceived his wife to be dying and on that morning when they both
meditated, his heart was full of compassion. He chanted the Kannon Sutra, which
is dedicated to the Bodhisattva of Compassion who is known by several names,
including Kanzeon, Guanyin, Avalokiteshwara and, of course, Kannon (an aside:
the popular Japanese company Cannon derives its name from it.)
Matthiessen recalls, with incredible grace,
what happened in that deeply-moving session during his Himalayan journey:
“Before dawn on Sunday, during morning
service, D chanced upon to sit directly opposite my own place in the two long
facing lines of Buddha figures—an unlikely event that I now see as no
coincidence. Upset by what I had perceived the night before, by pity and
concern that this day might be too much for her, I chanted the Kannon Sutra
with such fury that I “lost” myself, forgot the self—a purpose of the sutra,
which is chanted in Japanese, over and over, with mounting intensity. At the
end, the Sangha gives a mighty shout that corresponds to OM!—this followed
instantly by sudden silence, as if the universe had stopped to listen. And on
that morning, in the near darkness—the altar candle was the only light in the
long room—in the dead hush, like the hush in these snow mountains, the silence
swelled with the intake of my breath into a Presence of vast benevolence of
which I was a part: in my journal for that day, 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 without weight, borne up on the upraised
palm of this Buddha-Being, this eternal amplification of myself. For it was I
who had 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. Wounds, ragged edges, hollow places were all gone,
all had been healed; my heart lay at the heart of Creation. Then I let my
breath go, and gave myself up to delighted immersion in this Presence, to a
peaceful belonging so overwhelming that tears of relief poured from my
eyes, so overwhelming that even now, struggling to find a better term than
“Smile” or “Presence”, the memory affects me as I write. For the first time
since unremembered childhood, I was not alone; there was no separate “I”.”
Peter Matthiessen died in November 2014, a
little over a year after I started my own meditation practice. My only
“interaction with him” has been through reading The Snow Leopard—and
yet, I can see some of my own experiences reflected in the crystalline waters
of many of its passages. How gladly I would have treated him “as my own Tukten”
were we to meet somehow!
When Matthiessen describes nature and the
birds and the streams and his own presence in their midst, he does so with an
effortless mastery over words, stringing them together in a beautiful, fragrant
garland:
“The ground whirls with its own energy, not
in an alarming way but in slow spiral, and at these altitudes, in this vast
space and silence, 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. The blinding snow peaks and the clarion air, the sound of earth
and heaven in the silence, the requiem birds, the mythic beasts, the flags,
great horns, and old carved stones, the rough-hewn Tartars in their braids and
homespun boots, the silver ice in the black river, the Kang, the Crystal
Mountain. Also, I love the common miracles—the murmur of my friends at evening,
the clay fires of smudgy juniper, the coarse dull food, the hardship and simplicity,
the contentment of doing one thing at a time: when I take my blue tin cup into
my hand, that is all I do. We have had no news of modern times since late
September and will have none until December, and gradually my mind has cleared
itself, and wind and sun pour through my head, as through a bell. Though we
talk little here, I am never lonely: I am returned into myself.”
Matthiessen’s is one of the few books I’m
sure to return to more than once—one of the few, too, I cannot recommend highly
enough. There’s so much more I wanted to excerpt from the book, but I must
pause now and content myself with what follows (and no, there’s no conclusion
to this; only continuity):
“Near my lookout, I find a place to
meditate, out of the wind, a hollow on the ridge where snow has melted. My
brain soon clears in the cold mountain air, and I feel better. Wind, blowing
grasses, sun: the dying grass, the notes of southbound birds in the mountain
sky are no more fleeting than the rock itself, no more so and no less—all is
the same. The mountain withdraws into its stillness, my body dissolves into the
sunlight, tears fall that have nothing to do with “I”. What it is that brings
them on, I do not know.
In other days, I understood mountains
differently, seeing in them something that abides. Even when approached
respectfully (to challenge peaks as mountaineers do is another matter) they
appalled me with their "permanence", with that awful and irrefutable rock-ness
that seemed to intensify my sense of my own transience. Perhaps this dread of
transience explains our greed for the few gobbets of raw experience in modern
life, why violence is libidinous, why lust devours us, why soldiers choose not
to forget their days of horror: we cling to such extreme moments, in which we
seem to die, yet are reborn. In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled,
however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from
life, we are life, our being fills us; in ecstasy with another being,
loneliness falls away into eternity. But in other days, such union was
attainable through simple awe.
My foot slips on a narrow ledge: in that
split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects
with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice,
sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute
awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the
lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the centre of things,
have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now
lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us, what one lama refers to
as "the precision and openness and intelligence of the present.'' The
purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention
even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present,
to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. To be
anywhere else is "to paint eyeballs on chaos". When I watch blue
sheep, I must watch blue sheep, not be thinking about sex, danger, or the present,
for this present—even while I think of it—is gone.”
Before I bid adieu, just one more thing,
which rings like a divine chant throughout the book: Om Mani Padme Hum
(Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus.)
Namaskar! Thank you for reading :)
