Circling the Sacred Mountain

In the western fastnesses of Tibet, Mount Kailash is considered sacred by both Buddhists and Hindus. The point is not to climb it: it takes us Westerners a long while to realize that for Tibetans climbing a holy peak is a desecrating and ludicrous egotism, rather worse than a poodle pissing on a great Sequoia. The pilgrimage is to do the several-day clockwise trek around the base, and on the north face of the mountain, Robert Thurman’s teacher told him, is a site of enormous spiritual power, where “one can plant one’s deepest wish for the world, and all the Buddhas and gods and dakini-angels would see to its accomplishment.” CIRCLING THE SACRED MOUNTAIN (Bantam, 1999) is the story of a trek to Kailash and to the neighboring holy lake, Manasrovar, told in two voices. One part of the text is the dharma talks by Robert Thurman in his role as longtime student/master of the Vajrayana. This is Tibetan kamikaze Buddhism, going at the preoccupations of the ego with a diamond-point drill, and the talks have the special vernacular efficacy of being from someone who speaks English as a first and very lively language. The narration proper is by Tad Wise, Thurman’s student/friend and the trek’s resident groundling. His tone is the candid amusement of one too well familiar with his addictions—wine, women, song, and in one case a round of billiards. Beneath that is clearly a hope of breaking the shackles these addictions have become—of receiving a crack in the skeptic, materialist viewpoint, which seems to be the special, even unique promise and gift of Tibet. From these two voices we triangulate the presence of Kailash—we circle around it, as they do. Thurman’s wish was to plant a prayer not just for the freedom of Tibet but for the releasing of its spiritual vision into “a world that has very nearly blown it.” CIRCLING THE SACRED MOUNTAIN is not so much armchair travel as a contagion of that hope: like those hidden Tibetan treasure texts, a thought-pilgrimage of its own.