When the Sky fell to Earth

It turns out that Nepalese hospital beds are made for Nepalese people. And Nepalese people are considerably shorter than Western people are. This was just one of many thoughts that popped into my head, back suspended, hair sweeping the floor, as I gazed just a little nervously at 4 pairs of flip flops hosting a collection of Nepalese doctors all peering over me to watch the spectacle. Another thought was for my mother who had arrived in the country only 5 hours previously and, now prohibited from joining me in the ward, was on the floor in the litter strewn corridor trying to make polite conversation with a crowd of incapacitated hacking invalids.

Varanasi, one of the holiest and also one of the dirtiest places in India, was the cause of the unfortunate state of affairs. It is one of the most auspicious places for Hindus to be cremated and it was here that my foot went septic and a red line started rising up my leg. Amputation was the only thing on my mind when I met my mother at the airport. Speed was the only thing to take us to one of the worst hospitals in Kathmandu, and severe pain was what led me to let out a guttural bloodcurdling scream as they plunged a 3-inch blade into my foot prior to administering an anesthetic. My mother had had a crash course initiation into the secret lore of Nepal's crumbling health care system.

But I quickly disregarded any subsequent feelings of violent pain, for there was no place for attachment to the material body where we were going. We were heading to the Roof of the World, to become initiated in the esoteric lore of Tibet's tantric Buddhism. We were to seek out the ancient Bonpö shamanists, occult masters, magicians and mystic lamas, for this would ensure us supreme spiritual illumination, freeing us from all worldly struggles and ambitions.

There was only one thing standing in our way: the Chinese and their communist ideology. It seems that they don't like people who don't do things their way, and they have developed a rather particular way of doing things. Not only do you need to hire your own private jeep to visit almost anywhere outside Lhasa, but you need a Chinese approved guide and a handful of inexplicably expensive permits. Never one for guides, or for collapsing in the face of authority, I decided that we should play the Chinese at their own game (my mother's attempts at protest were swiftly cut short with a quick reminder that the whole state of affairs was essentially her fault for letting me read too much Tin Tin as a child).

So we stole out of towns before dawn, hid from patrol cars in ditches, sneaked onto buses, hitched rides in the back of lorries, slept in caves, and in monasteries, and incognito in local Tibetan's cattle sheds.

Our first stop was the politically sensitive area of East Tibet, officially off-limits to independent travellers. It is illegal for bus drivers to take foreigners and hitching would bring attention to ourselves, so we decided to first make ourselves invisible and to then get onto the bus. Invisibility is quite a simple technique Tibetan ascetics use, and involves stilling ones being and vibrations as completely as possible so that the physical body makes absolutely no impression on the mind or memory of others. Judging by the bus driver's reaction when he looked our way, it appeared we hadn't totally mastered the technique and, despite our back up plan of back seat dwelling, large rimmed hats and shrunken spines, we were fairly quickly noted.

Luckily, our refusal to understand anything he said and a couple of Dalai Lama pictures not only secured our ride, but the protection of 3 nun's robes as we hid under their seats while passing the checkpoints en route.

Only once were we forced back to Lhasa. Having reached the Yarlung valley through various means, and after the success of our previous bus ride, we attempted to take a bus half way back to Lhasa, to Mindroling Monastery. Clearly not many foreigners had attempted this before as everyone at the bus station was thrown into a state of turmoil trying to work out how we had managed to get there without a guide in the first place. After being thrown off 3 buses by officious uniformed men we had attracted a fairly large crowd of Chinese listing the reams of paperwork we needed before entering the bus. I decided to deal with things the Tibetan way and, assuming the character of a Tibetan hermit, proclaimed that I had to get on the bus as I had "seen it in my meditations". Unfortunately, this didn't get the response I was looking for, so I instead assumed the character of a thoroughly pissed off English person and tried "why the fuck don't you bastard Chinese get the hell out of this country and leave the Tibetans to get on with their prostrations in peace", further proclaiming that they would have to either kill me or throw me in jail before I got off the bus (at this point a slight intake of breath from my mother suggested that this was not a situation she would have been best pleased with).

20 minutes later I was alive, not in jail and off the bus leaving behind 20 thoroughly confused Chinese officials and a collection of Tibetans, collectively thoroughly amused by the confusion of thoroughly uncollected Chinese officials. Stalemate. We just could not continue indefinitely discussing the various pointless merits of having all appropriate permits, documentation and insurance. And as every good little Buddha knows "thou must bow down to the Chinese when they start becoming real obstinate pigs". We hitched back to Lhasa.

So we had slept next to butter lamps in the assembly halls of crumbling monasteries, we had been to the subtropical forests of Eastern Tibet, we had slept on the shores of Tibet's sacred lakes, we had had tea with the nomads of the Northern plateau, and finally we had slept at the foot of the tallest mountain in the world.

But what about our search for nirvana? Our search for the inexpressible reality: for an end to desire and suffering; eternal bliss? I had a feeling that we may be able to learn something from the naljorpas, ascetics living in the recesses of Tibet's highest mountains. These were people who had renounced everything in order to spend a life of deep contemplation and meditation, seeking salvation through the mystic "short path".

We had heard about a whole warren of such caves at the top of Drimong mountain, one days walk from Samye Monastery. These caves, collectively known as Chim-puk hermitage, were once a retreat for Guru Rinpoche, Tibet's infamous superstar, renowned for suppressing Tibet's malevolent forces in the 8th century and clearing the path for the spread of Buddhism.

So as the first rays of the sun escaped over the horizon mother and daughter, already heady with altitude, set off along the banks of the Brahmaputra toward the base of Drimong mountain. And as the luminous sun of central Asia beat a path from east to west, they climbed higher and higher until the sun disappeared and the sky and the mountains became one. And the clouds exploded into a blizzard of snow into which they were swept and finally discarded in the cave of one of the very naljorpas they had set off to find.

Shivering on the floor under fleecey layers, I noticed that our new host sat perfectly at ease in only a ragged cotton cloth. Could this man have been an adept of the practice of tumo, the art of using ones mental power to warm oneself up without fire? A common belief among Tibetans is that everything that can be imagined can be realised: I could only gaze into the sparkling eyes of this man of the mountains and muse over the trances he must have been able to cultivate, materialising visions to weave into his dream like states.

As the blizzard subsided we continued further up the mountain to Guru Rinpoche's cave and, as the snow settled on the mountains of the Tibetan tableland, the moon rose glistening in the sky.

These hermitages are now slowly disappearing from Tibet's landscape as monks and nuns now need a special permit in order to go on a retreat. The numbers of monks and nuns in monasteries is also decreasing as the Chinese continue to place strict quotas on numbers. Children below the age of 18 are prevented from joining monasteries and many of the most senior and learned monks have been expelled for their ability to "corrupt the minds of the young monks". Such restrictions make it nearly impossible to receive a complete religious education and forces many into exile.

Schemes such as the "Patriotic re-education" campaign ensure that the majority of monks and nuns left in Tibet remain uninspired and frustrated. This campaign is part of the Chinese administration's plan to adapt Buddhism to the socialist ideologies of the state and forces all monks and nuns to study party policy as well as to submit written denunciations of the Dalai Lama. Furthermore, re-education through labour camps is still enforced as part of China's "Strike Hard" campaign for anyone who expresses support for Tibetan independence. As recently as 2004 a 40,000 square foot new re-education camp came into operation in the Ngari County.

Although China's constitution allows "freedom of religious belief", in practice they view allegiance with the Dalai Lama as a threat to the legitimacy of their rule in Tibet. They remain active in their control over religious expression and deal brutally with those who dissent. Cases of torture and ill-treatment of political prisoners, arbitrary imprisonment, and indiscriminate use of the death penalty are still found on a wide scale in Tibet.

Of the Tibetans we spoke to, few were prepared to discuss their political viewpoint with us. Those who did see little hope for the future of an independent Tibet.

So when did the sky fall to earth? For me it seemed that the sky and earth were in an inextricable unity at every moment. Mountains rose out of the earth to meet plump clouds, so close you could pluck them from the sky before they were swept up by the wind, as snow fell upon snow beneath the great starry expanse that came to meet the stark desert landscapes below.

For the Tibetans, "when the sky fell to earth" is a reference to the Cultural Revolution. A time when Mao's Red Guards carried out the systematic destruction of virtually every religious object in Tibet. Today the cultural genocide persists: Tibetan culture continues to be suppressed, the surveillance of religious activity is unrelenting and the policy of Han Chinese immigration continues without restriction.

Yet no matter how hard they try, there is one thing the Chinese will never be able to remove, and that is the opportunity the Tibetan plateau offers to be in a place of stark overwhelming silence: no wind, no people, no trees, and no birds in a silence that cloaks vast mountain ranges in a hushed stillness. Mountains of such timeless majesty that, just for a moment, they reveal the deluded importance of all our anxieties and fears, fears which are dissolved and then absorbed back into the silence they came from before being carried away on one of those perfectly formed little clouds.