Mount Kailash

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Mount Kailash is a 6,638-meter peak in the Transhimalaya range of western Tibet, held sacred by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and followers of the indigenous Bon religion. It stands apart from the main Himalayan chain — not a ridge in a wall of summits but a single mass rising alone above the Barga plain — a near-symmetrical dome of dark rock capped with snow, with horizontal strata banding its sides and a vertical cleft scoring the south face. Two lakes lie at its foot: Manasarovar, round and freshwater, and the crescent Rakshastal beside it, joined by a channel that runs only in the highest years. Near the mountain rise the headwaters of four of the great rivers of South Asia — the Indus, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra, and the Karnali, a feeder of the Ganges — each draining toward a different quarter of the compass. The Indus runs north and west to the Arabian Sea; the Sutlej falls west toward the Punjab; the Brahmaputra, the upper Yarlung Tsangpo, runs east the length of southern Tibet before turning down into Assam; the Karnali drops south through Nepal to meet the Ganges on the plain. That a single massif should feed rivers running to four quarters — rivers on which the better part of a subcontinent has always depended — fixed its reputation, across several traditions and long before any of them measured it, as the center of the world.

The cosmic mountain

The conviction that the world has a center, and that the center is a mountain, is older and wider than any one of the faiths that converge on Kailash. In the cosmology shared across the Indic traditions, the axis of the universe is Meru, a golden mountain about which the continents, the heavens, the sun, and the planets are arranged in concentric order; the rivers of the world pour from its slopes, and the gods have their cities on its terraces. Meru is a figure of sacred geometry, not a survey point, and no expedition was ever sent to find it. But where the abstract axis is given an earthly seat, Kailash is the seat it is given. The match is not arbitrary. A symmetrical peak standing free of its range, ringed by lakes, sending four rivers to four directions, reads on the ground like the diagram of the cosmos drawn in stone — and the traditions read it that way, each in its own grammar.

Four sacred geographies on one rock

In Hindu cosmology the mountain is the earthly counterpart of Meru and the abode of Shiva, who sits upon its summit in unbroken meditation with his consort Parvati, the ash-smeared ascetic-god enthroned at the still point of the turning world. To the pilgrim of this tradition the circuit of the mountain is a circuit of the deity himself; the snows are his matted hair, the form of the peak the shape of his seat. The mountain belongs, in this reading, to the same imaginative order as the river that falls from his head — Shiva’s catching of the descending Ganges in his locks is the same cosmology told as water rather than stone, and the asceticism the god embodies on the summit is the discipline his devotees carry up to it.

Tibetan Buddhists call the mountain Kang Rinpoche, the precious snow mountain, and read it as the body-mandala of the tantric deity Demchok — Chakrasamvara — whose wrathful-blissful form is held to abide there, the peak itself the palace of an enlightened mind. Their accounts preserve the founding story of the mountain’s conversion: the contest of the yogi-poet Milarepa, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with the Bon priest Naro Bönchung for mastery of Kailash. The two matched feat against feat — riding the drum, splitting the rock, circling the peak — until, by the tradition’s telling, Milarepa won the decisive round by riding a beam of dawn light to the summit while his rival was still laboring up the slope, and the mountain passed to the Buddhist dispensation. The Bonpo was granted a lesser hill nearby and a place in the sacred landscape, not expulsion from it. The legend is not a chronicle; it is the form in which the Buddhist tradition narrates its supersession of an older custodian without erasing the older claim, and it belongs to the same cycle of contest-and-conversion that runs through the lives of Tibet’s early teachers. (The Naro Bönchung of this story is the Bon adept of the Milarepa legend, not the eleventh-century Indian master Naropa whose lineage Milarepa received.)

For the Jains the mountain is Ashtapada — the name means eight steps — the place where Rishabha — Rishabhanatha, Adinatha, the first of the twenty-four tirthankaras and by Jain reckoning the founder of the present cosmic age’s dispensation — shed the body and attained final liberation after long austerity. The name recalls a legendary tower of eight terraces said to have been raised at the site by his son, the emperor Bharata, to honor the liberation; the southern face is the face this tradition marks. Not every Jain authority agrees that the peak now called Kailash is the Ashtapada of the scriptures — some hold the true site lost or located elsewhere — and the disagreement is itself part of the record, a tradition keeping faith with a sacred geography whose ground has slipped out of certain reach. Jainism’s claim on the mountain is a claim on a liberation, the first in a long line, achieved at the roof of the world.

Older than the Buddhist arrival in Tibet, the Bon tradition holds the mountain as the seat of its own founding revelation. In the Bonpo account the religion’s teacher, Tönpa Shenrab, descended at or near the peak, and the mountain stands at the heart of the homeland — Olmo Lungring, within the wider land of Tagzig — from which the doctrine spread; in some tellings it is the nine-storeyed swastika mountain, the Yungdrung Gutseg, the cosmic pillar of the Bon world. The pre-Buddhist religion of Upper Tibet centered its devotion on sacred mountains as the seats of territorial gods, and Kailash, rising alone over the old Zhang Zhung country whose capital lay in the upper Sutlej valley, was the greatest of them. The same rock, in other words, anchors four distinct sacred geographies at once — cosmic axis, deity’s throne, place of a first liberation, and seat of a revelation — and none of the four is willing to read it as merely a mountain.

Going around, not up

What the traditions share in practice is the act of going around the mountain rather than up it. Pilgrims perform the kora, a circumambulation of roughly fifty-two kilometers over high ground, begun and ended at the settlement of Darchen on the southern side and crossing the Drölma La, the pass at some 5,630 meters that is the circuit’s highest and hardest point. Buddhists and Hindus walk it clockwise, keeping the sacred center always to the right; Bonpo and Jains walk it counter-clockwise, the reversal a marker of identity as much as doctrine, so that on a single track pilgrims of different faiths pass one another going opposite ways around the same holy thing. Most complete the walking circuit in three days. The most devout measure the whole of it in body-length prostrations — lying full out, rising, stepping to where the hands had reached, and lying down again — a circuit that turns the fifty-two kilometers into the labor of weeks and the body itself into the instrument of the journey. A single circuit is held to wash away the faults of a life; a hundred and eight, the auspicious number, to end the round of rebirth altogether. The architecture of the practice is the architecture of the mountain read as a center: one does not summit a center, one orbits it, and the merit is in the turning. Among sacred sites it shares this logic with the circumambulated stupa — the processional ascent of Borobudur in Java is the same devotional geometry built rather than found — and with the destination-pilgrimage of a holy land, though Kailash differs from a Jerusalem or a Mecca in having no shrine at its heart, no relic, no building: the object of the pilgrimage is the natural mass itself.

The untrodden summit

The summit is, by long convention, not to be trodden. To set foot on it is held to violate the holiness of the place, and no recorded ascent has been made — Kailash is, on the evidence, the most significant peak on earth that has never been climbed. The convention has been tested and has held. In the mid-1980s the Chinese authorities are reported to have offered the mountaineer Reinhold Messner, then the foremost Himalayan climber alive, permission to make the ascent; he declined, on the grounds that some mountains are worth more unclimbed, and that to stand on this one would be to take something from a great many people. In 2001 a permit granted to a Spanish expedition drew swift objection from Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain bodies, and was withdrawn before any attempt; climbing was thereafter declared off-limits. The taboo is observed by believers and respected by the state that governs the region, and the result is a high peak, surrounded by some of the most-trafficked pilgrimage ground in Asia, whose snows hold no footprint at all.

The textual and scholarly record

The record of Kailash is far thicker in scripture and pilgrimage literature than in chronicle. Lying in a remote and long-restricted corner of western Tibet, the mountain drew few outside accounts before the modern era, and what is told of it descends through the canonical and devotional texts of the four traditions rather than through travelers’ report. The Hindu material is diffuse and ancient: Meru and Kailasa appear across the epics and the Puranas, and the mountain as Shiva’s seat is woven through the Sanskrit corpus surveyed in the older public-domain translations — the bulk of which were gathered into the Sacred Books of the East under Max Müller (Oxford, 1879–1910), still the broadest open-access window onto the texts. The Tibetan Buddhist material reaches the West chiefly through the life and songs of Milarepa: Tsangnyön Heruka’s late-fifteenth-century biography, translated by Kazi Dawa-Samdup and edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz as Tibet’s Great Yogi Milarepa (Oxford University Press, 1928), is the foundational English source for the Naro Bönchung contest, to be read — as the early Theosophically framed translations always must be — as a document of Western reception as well as of Tibetan tradition.

The serious modern scholarship belongs to the academic Tibetology of the past half-century and remains in copyright. David Snellgrove’s The Nine Ways of Bon (Oxford University Press, 1967), produced with the Bonpo scholar Lopön Tenzin Namdak, opened the Bon textual tradition to Western readers and gives the Olmo Lungring cosmology in which Kailash stands as a cosmic pillar. Samten Karmay’s The Arrow and the Spindle: Studies in History, Myths, Rituals and Beliefs in Tibet (Mandala Book Point, 1998) is the indispensable treatment of the Tibetan mountain cult and of the pre-Buddhist devotion to sacred peaks that Kailash crowns. John Vincent Bellezza’s Zhang Zhung: Foundations of Civilization in Tibet (Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2008) maps the archaeological substrate of the old kingdom over which the mountain rises. The pilgrimage itself has its own literature, indexed and described through scholarly programs such as the University of Colorado’s Tibet Himalaya Initiative, which gathers the route, the prostration practice, and the multi-tradition contest of meanings into a single field of study. The general scope of the mountain’s geography and shared sacrality is set out in the standard reference account in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

One mountain, four readings

Across the literature one observation recurs and is hard to improve upon: the traditions that revere the mountain do not agree on what it is, only that it is to be revered. Meru is a figure of cosmology, not a coordinate; Demchok’s palace, Shiva’s throne, Rishabha’s place of liberation, and the Bonpo pillar of the world occupy the same dark dome of rock and never resolve into one account of it. The convergence is genuine and the divergence no less so, and both are held at once by the people on the circuit. Four rivers run out from it to four quarters, and four faiths walk its circuit — some clockwise, some against — and none of them sets foot on the summit. They are circling the same rock. They are not circling the same god.

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