UNITED STATES, March 10, 2011: (by Charles Desnoyers) From the time we human beings began to develop a sense of the sacred, mountains have played a central role in our religious experience. Colin Thubron’s latest work, To a Mountain in Tibet, takes us to perhaps the world’s highest pilgrimage site as well as its most popular, sacred to one fifth of humanity – Mount Kailas in Tibet. Because its sacredness is almost entirely the province of Hindus and Buddhists, the 22,000-foot peak is almost completely unknown to Americans and Europeans. The mountain’s location near the sources of the sacred rivers Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, and Sutlej has imbued it with sanctity for millennia, and it was already a prominent pilgrimage site for Hindu devotees of Shiva when Mahayana Buddhism arrived in Tibet in the eighth century.
Both Buddhists and Hindus follow the same pilgrimage trail to the mountain and circle it clockwise in a ritual journey called the kora, passing through a host of local shrines, monasteries, prayer walls, and natural features with a sacred geography known only to the believers and their guides. No climber is known to have reached the 22,000-foot peak; the pilgrim trail’s highest point is 18,600 feet. Even here, altitude sickness for those not carrying oxygen takes its toll. Impassively presiding over it all are Chinese soldiers, by education and training taught to see the entire enterprise as the kind of rank superstition from which the People’s Republic has pledged to ‘liberate’ Tibet.
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