Shadow of the Himalayas

What lingers from a tough, wondrous 9-day trek

If I start to tell the story of this trek, which I—in my late 70s—undertook in the second half of October at the invitation of two close karate friends in their early 50s, I’ll be writing for hours, painstakingly trying to do it justice. And particularly our extraordinary 30-year-old guide, Dawa Tsangpo Bhutia, who had to hang back with me because my old knees made me take six hours to cover a stretch of steep bouldery loggy muddy trails he could have flown down in about twenty minutes. So we got to know each other, perforce, and I daresay became friends. He told me about his life. I sang to him to relieve his patient boredom, from James Taylor

damn this traffic jam
how I hate to be late
hurts my motor to go so slow

to Flanders and Swann

Mud, mud, glorious mud
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood

And he told me about the history/mythology (inseparable) of how a Tibetan/Nepali avatar of Gotama Buddha founded Sikkim. Me: “But how did he get here?” envisioning something like our trek to the tenth power, dodging rockslides through trailless jungle edging up and down precipitous, plunging slopes with at most a yak for beast of burden.

Dawa, simply: “He flew.” (More believable, actually.) Also, he was blue.

See, I can’t resist getting sucked into the story and I have to wash out my cat’s water fountain and do other household chores. So for now, I’ll link to our photo album for you to dabble in. It’s visual TMI, worth thousands of words.

But I had a point in risking starting to write this. What has lingered most from the trek is a sense of the vastness and richness of the non-Western worldview. Sure, I had read books (Dawa was surprised I knew the name Padmasambhava), but having a physical sense of it is very different. We are so locked into our hysterical Abrahamic eschatology over here, we think it’s everything, and how provincial it is! Two-thirds of the world, at least, lives in otherly organized realities—or would if we would let them be, listen to them, instead of trying with force and guile to make them be like us.

Not that I would have an inkling of any of this without the wonders of Western-born technology. Our trek would have been not just unachievable but inconceivable without the Internet and jumbo jets as well as beasts of burden. I would never have crossed paths with Dawa, who in this reality has an iPhone and is a filmmaker who’s made a documentary about the high-altitude yak herders he grew up among. Now he’s working with scientists to make one about snow leopards. His calling is to be a protector of nature, and filmmaking is one of his tools. Leading revelatory treks into his high home terrain is another. Organizing crews of young nature protectors and educators in the mountains is another.

But I keep thinking how different the world would be if, say, Buddhism had dominated it, instead of Judeo-Christo-Islamism. A paradox right there: Buddhism didn’t dominate the world because, for the most part, it doesn’t dominate. (And when it does, as in Myanmar, it’s usually been infected by Western political philosophy.) It aims to conquer the self, not the other.

I felt it physically: the majority of it, the non-Judaeo-Christian heritage of most humans like an ocean of shadow covering two-thirds of the earth, patiently gathering gravitation, a tide perhaps waiting to ease in when our noise and clamor stops.