In the fall of 1984 I trudged northward across a broad, flat snowfield. Its highest point arose in the form of a stout wooden pillar, marking the border between Nepal and Tibet. This was the legendary Nangpa La, the 19,050-foot (5,800-meter) pass located in the shadow of Cho Oyu, a peak that rises to the west of Mount Everest. I tied a kata prayer scarf to a tangle of others on the post and recited Buddhist mantras common to Tibetans of the Tibetan Plateau and to the Sherpas of Nepal to the south. Retracing my steps, I caught a fragrance that blew in gently from the south: pine and juniper forests warmed by the sun, melded with dust and incense and wood smoke from the lowlands of Nepal and the Gangetic Plain of India.
Descending on the Nepal side of the border, I followed a maze of granite rubble that had been churned up and deposited on the glacier’s surface. Yaks can follow the scent left by previous caravans, but lone travelers must decode their way through the monochromatic scree. I found no sign of yak dung—every scrap had been thrown onto the loads of the yak trains for use as cooking fuel. And the cairns meant to mark the trail were just as the Tibetan traders had described them: imaginary piles of stones that moved and disappeared like phantoms.
The route over the Nangpa La has long been a conduit of history, trade, and culture for Tibetans and their Sherpa kin—the people of Everest. I was entering Khumbu, the Sherpas’ homeland—a region circumscribed by the headwater valleys that drain the Nangpa La and the south side of Mount Everest. Khumbu’s waters eventually merge into the Dudh Kosi River and flow toward India. One monk described the outline of Khumbu and its veins of rivers as “shaped like a flower bud about to bloom.”
Nearly 500 years ago, Sherpa legend says, hunting dogs belonging to a man named Kira Gombu Dorje chased a wild sheep across the Nangpa La. The dogs, in turn, were pursued by the hunter—the first Tibetan to settle in Khumbu’s fertile, temperate valleys. The south side’s greener pastures soon drew a pioneer community of shar-pa, “people of the east,” who became citizens of Nepal.
In winter, when farming and herding is relatively dormant in Tibet, people from the north side of Everest still climb over the Nangpa La. They are either traveling on Buddhist pilgrimage or as refugees from China, seeking opportunities in India or the West. Their bid to reach the outside world—by scaling the spine of the Himalaya—underscores the Tibetans’ irrepressible desire to experience the freedom that the Sherpas to the south enjoy.
THE SPIRIT OF KHUMBU
The Sherpas of Khumbu barely number more than 3,500, with a parallel population of 17,000 more in Solu, a region three days’ walk to the south. For at least a century these two enclaves, distinguished by subtle differences in dialect and dress, have been closely linked by marriage. From the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, the arcane laws of Nepal’s Rana oligarchy restricted trade with Tibet to men who lived in border districts. This made Khumbu husbands especially desirable to brides from Solu, by allowing their families to marry into a valuable trade connection.
But the Sherpas’ connection with Tibet was maintained as much for religion as it was for trade. Beginning in the early 1900s, many of the Khumbu Sherpas sent their boys north, back across the Nangpa La, for monastic training at the Buddhist monastery of Rongbuk, near Everest’s Base Camp on the Tibet side of the mountain. From this monastery the Sherpas drew much of their formal religious traditions.
Tenzing Norgay, who climbed Everest with Ed Hillary in 1953, grew up in the Tibetan village of Kharta, directly to the northeast of Everest. After studying briefly at Rongbuk, he crossed the Nangpa La, in the 1920s, and settled with his parents in the Khumbu village of Thame. At age 18, he left Khumbu to search for work in Darjiling—a hiring and staging point for foreign climbing expeditions to Everest.
Tenzing’s nephew Nawang Gombu—who climbed Everest with Jim Whittaker in 1963—also studied at Rongbuk for two years, until he could no longer endure the strict monastery regimen. One night he bundled up his clothes, sneaked out through the hole of a latrine, and walked over the Nangpa La to Khumbu.
The Cultural Revolution began in 1966—seven years after the uprising against the Chinese in Lhasa. During that chaotic period, the Rongbuk monastery was destroyed. Fortunately, most of Rongbuk’s arcane and colorful Buddhist traditions had already regerminated, with a distinctive flair, and were thriving in the Sherpa monasteries of Solu and Khumbu.
SACRED SITES
Below the Nangpa La lies no ordinary mountain valley. I was now descending into a beyul: one of several “hidden valleys” of refuge designated by Padmasambhava, the ninth-century “lotus-born” Indian saint, revered by the Sherpas as Guru Rinpoche, who subdued the often wrathful territorial deities of the mountains and converted them into defenders of the Buddhist faith.
In order to protect Buddhist beliefs and teachings during times of adversity, Guru Rinpoche’s female consort is believed to have hidden “treasure texts” in the valleys’ forests and hillsides. These sacred documents are time capsules, essentially. When revealed in future eras, devout people will be able to recover their faith and relearn the wisdom of the ancients.
These beyul are blessed with spiritual energy, and the Sherpas say that one should behave with reverence when passing through this sacred landscape. Here the karmic effects of one’s actions are magnified, and even impure thoughts should be avoided.
Sites of spiritual power are scattered throughout Khumbu: ancient meditation caves, “self-emanated” handprints and footprints impressed in rock, and curious snakelike intrusions that for Sherpas represent the lu serpent spirits. Small shrines and bamboo wands, adorned with prayer flags, are set up at springs, wells, and stream confluences—places graced by the nourishing flow of water. Villagers say that the rain from the sky and the water in their springs can dry up if these sites are defiled—for instance, if a lowlander were to slaughter a goat nearby and dress the meat in the water source. This offends the lu and can cause them to flee.
Khumbu’s harsh environment only seems to invigorate the Sherpas’ faith. Just as the Himalaya were formed by intersections and accretions of geologic material, the religion of the Sherpas is accretionary—a blend of shamanism, pre-Buddhism, and Bon and Tibetan Buddhism—while pantheons of clan gods and territorial deities lurk and cavort on the hillsides.
~~Call Of the Everest -by- Conrad Anker
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