Searching for nirvana in high places

The holy city of Rishikesh, the spires of its ashrams poking, needle-like, out of a fog, looks indeed, divine. Yet, as we drive away from our ashram — run by a sleepy swami found often stretched out on a couch in the reception area — I feel only relief. In our two days of wandering this city, I had not found that spring of spirituality which inspired friends to come back, time and time again, to India to sit at the feet of holy men. Across from our ashram one could still see the ruins of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Ashram, where Mia Farrow and the Beatles frolicked. Even then, celebrity brought with it all its attendants — falling outs, drugs and charges of manipulation for publicity ends. The oppressive heat may have contributed to my ill will. And the rain when it came pouring down made things worse, turning narrow alleys crowded with tourists, gurus and gods fetid with mud and steaming oxen.

Over a suspension bridge linking one side of Rishikesh to the other — the city is built on opposing banks of the Ganges — is a shrine to that most capricious and ubiquitous of India’s beasts. In a niche, bathed in dim light, is a statue of a smartly dressed monkey, resembling a penny arcade machine. A few yards away, we shed our shoes and join a crowd watching devotees chanting on a stage.

Manali

A herd of mountain goats and their minders just over the Rohtang Pass

I was dragged here to find a yoga school and to experience the spirituality my traveling companion had found in this country. Instead, I was appalled by the gaudy marketplace quality of this holiest of cities. You could buy divinity here, I thought, as we sipped coffee and chewed on croissants in an Israeli bakery perched on a cliff overlooking a bend in the river. I comforted myself with the thought that I had, at the very least, managed to see where the Ganges, the mother of all rivers, crashes onto India’s northern plains. One day we walk down a public ghat and stand on the soft ash-colored sand, the edge of the river sipping our toes. The gray river dwarfs the gargantuan ashrams on its banks. A woman draped in a thin and dirty sari walks out of the mist. When we leave, she is still standing there watching candles float away on the grainy water.

It takes 19 hours to travel over land from Rishikesh to Manali. The route traverses cultivated fields, winds through deep green pine forests and zigzags dizzyingly upwards only to flatten out at the very end into a long corridor. As the sun set on our day, the light flooding the valley narrowed, as one’s vision does before one loses consciousness. We arrived in Manali at night so it is not till morning that we see the splendor of the Kullu valley’s alpine landscape — emerald slopes dotted with white waterfalls, an ice-blue glacial river rushing down its center, pretty villages clustered around ornate castles, wooden houses bent with age in the middle blossoming apple orchards and, in the near distance, glittering white peaks.

Aside from a popular spot for backpackers to rest before heading into the Himalayas, Manali is a favorite of honeymooners and day-trekkers. Alongside backpacker joints are well appointed lodges and romantic river-side restaurants serving bony silver trout. Trails for every level of hiker are within striking distance. The people indigenous to the area are round-faced, rosy-cheeked and languid. Manali is so restful and bucolic, we found it difficult to leave and lingered.

The Manali to Leh Highway

A mist hovers over the Ganges and shrouds its ashrams.

On a clear morning, we headed, with our young Ladhaki driver, up what seemed like the completely vertical Rohtang Pass (“Rohtang” in Persian means “Piles of dead bodies”). The ominous name is deserved, being the most beautiful but also the most precarious pass we would traverse on our two-day journey. Within minutes sunlit glades were replaced with a landscape of shattered rock, herds of sure-footed mountain ponies and scuttling clouds. Descending from the peak into a valley as green and lush as the one we had left, I see, for the first time with my own eyes, the Himalayan ranges — an ocean of giant mountains stretching to the horizon. At our first checkpoint, near Keylong, we rest in a stone shack where a seasonal peddler, here only for the summer, makes us milk tea and flat bread. Once the snows come he, and others like him scattered throughout these great ranges, will return to Manali or Leh to wait out the winter.

After a few hours of driving, the landscape loses its alpine quality completely and turns lunar — dry, desolate and uninhabitable. We pass the petrified carcass of a pony at the bottom of a treacherous incline. The wind seemed to be blowing it apart.   Nothing, it turns out, survives this high up and this close to the sun. There is no soil, just rocks — everything from pillars and arches to lakes of pebbles. We tackle the mountains every which way possible — up, down, sideways, diagonally, across. For a long while, there is just us in our small van and the occasional careening TATA truck kicking up dust on roads carved remarkably out of the sides of these towering rock walls. We dip into and climb out of countless bowls of emptiness and I realize, with a start, that the earth is a place that does not need life. The relentless nothingness and the migraine that had stalked me for days depress my spirits. I realize much too late what my body had recognized as far back as Manali — that this is a place of very thin air.

Citizens of Leh listening to the Dalai Lama speak

At dusk we drift silently onto Sarchu, a tundra, 3,500 meters above sea level, and bunk down for the night at a tent camp. Night falls swiftly and an infinity of stars appear. I eat too much, throw up and after downing the pills I had begged off fellow campers, crawl under my pile of blankets. Throughout the night, the wind whistles outside and flaps the sides of our tent, reminding me that the world outside our shelter is harsh. My last thought before I fall into an uneasy sleep is that I do not know why I do these things to myself.

At dawn, as the sun crawls up from behind the surrounding hills, we set off on the final leg of our journey. In the pale light, the tundra is all beige rock, bluish-pink sky and thin yellow grass. The pills, whatever they were, had worked and I feel great. My companion lies in the backseat – his turn, I think gleefully, to be stung by the altitude. We take our mandatory picture at the top of the Taglang Pass, supposedly the second highest motorable pass in the world, against a backdrop of prayer flags whipping in the wind; then begin our meandering descent to Ladakh through the More Plains. There is barely road here, just markings on the flat earth, so our driver aims the car in a certain direction and simply drives. We pass a few bicycle riders, swathed in cloth. Crazy Foreigners. Scattered here and there on this expanse, army trucks look like toys. This 40 km stretch of flat land, tucked away in the folds of these precipitous ranges, seems like a country secreted within a country. And for the first time I feel true awe at the size of India and the ambition of its people.

Leh

The approach to the capital of Ladakh is by the Indus river, here just a shallow stream. Nonetheless, along its banks we see the first signs of our return to civilization — neat homesteads and, here and there, a few monasteries. Eventually, we are spat out onto an oasis, surrounded on all sides by dry mountain slopes, scored by centuries of snow and wind, in the center of which, on a rise, stands Leh.

Bustling and dusty, Leh retains the trader feel it had in the early part of the century. Merchants from all over this ruggedly mountainous region come here to sell their goods to each other and to the tourists. There are countless hotels and restaurants catering to every taste and adventure shops catering to every type of risk taker. Yet, Leh is also a spiritual city. The Muslim call to player wafts over the city from the mosque next to our favorite rooftop restaurant. Robed monks stride purposefully everywhere and the hills are dotted with gompas, stuppas and chortens. Dominating the skyline of Leh is the mini Potala, a replica of the one in Chinese Tibet, a potent symbol of the link between both regions in Mahayana Buddhism. It is a beautiful and serene structure, bone white with red ornamentation. We tried but failed one afternoon to make it up to it in time to see the Monk’s dance.

View of the city of Leh from the Mini Potala

In the time we spend in Leh, I came to love Ladakhi architecture, a prime example of which is our guesthouse, Silver Cloud. The two-story house is white with ornate wooden carvings, fronted by a colorful flower and vegetable garden, the source of our vegetarian dinners and the thermoses of sweet mint tea we keep by our bedside. Our room has ceiling-to-floor windows and a terrace from which we can view the jagged teeth of the Stok mountains. At night we shower with a view of a fingernail moon hanging like a pendant in the dark sky. Mr. Sonam and his family, including his ancient mother, occupy the ground floor rooms of Silver Cloud. As such, certain rules – like the covering of legs down to one’s ankles — apply.

The Monk who sold his Ferrari

Every morning after breakfast, we take a meandering path past the solemn Sampar Gompah complex, a giant prayer wheel which I delight in turning, several inns and the

odd donkey or yak strolling alone by fields of rustling barley. At the well-stocked, if slightly mono-themed, bookstore in town, I pick up The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, a best-selling self-help book by an ex-Harvard lawyer. Despite myself I enjoy it, mainly as high camp – “Be a Buddhist and have great skin!” – and as a kind of primer on the ancient belief system knocking gently on the door of my soul. 

The Dalai Lama (Really)

The Italian ladies we befriended en route to Manali told us their next stop was Dharamsala to see the Dalai Lama. It turned out he was in Leh for his biennial visit. I headed

out with Mr. Sonam’s family early one morning to listen to him speak in a field a few miles from the city center. We went down in two vans, picking up various members of Mr. Sonam’s extended family as we went along, all of them resplendent in traditional Ladakhi costume — thick dark blue robes with red sashes, the women’s hair in long braids. Mr. Sonam had me sit in the foreigner’s section where, through strategically placed speakers, a translator would, dubiously, offer three-sentence summaries of what the Dalai Lama had been saying for 15 minutes. Mr. Sonam told me later that even Ladakhis find the Dalai Lama difficult to follow, as he preaches in Tibetan.

Venerable Bhikkhu Sanghasena

Polo played by soldiers stationed in the military base in Ladakh against a team of Leh citizens

I wish I could transport you physically to the spot where, under a searing Himalayan sun, we sat listening to the Dalai Lama discuss the centrality of compassion and the essence of goodness. Sitting cross-legged on a dais, bending forward from the waist in the position of perpetual listening, was a man who, at 17, had led his people across the Himalayas to exile and who, decades later, refused, even in the face of his own people’s frustration, to succumb to the call to violence. In his presence, many of us, I could tell, began to realize that there was no reason, no reason at all, not to be good. “You do not have to listen to me,” the Dalai Lama says, “but if you do, if you follow the Way, then I can show you another way of seeing. For if you were to remove all the layers of pain and emotion, you would find that every man is a clear mirror.” As the translator droned on I thought of the incredible generosity of the Indian people who, perhaps because of their fondness for the full panoply of the world’s religions, found it in their hearts to give an entire orphaned people a home. I thought of the crowd around me, people whose lives have, for hundreds of years, hewed to a modest principle of living, whose music is the song of prayer, the bellow of ancient horns, the silence of the mountains and the whisper of bending stalks of wheat and I begin to see, weighed down as I am by regret and bitterness, that I am that clear mirror, reflecting a beautiful life.

Yoga at the highest point in the world was the cockamamie idea of the yoga teacher I had started to practice with in Leh. Dutifully but still in my pajamas, I trudged up to

The Snow Leopard

A wooden palace in Manali. Manali is a favorite of honeymooners and day-trekkers.

the Shanti Stupa for the picture-taking event. After a few asanas, our teacher introduced his mentor, the Venerable Bhikku Sanghasena. A tall man wrapped in orange robes stood up, surveyed the crowd and then did something that melted my defenses. He smiled. 

People who have had the privilege to gain an audience with the Dalai Lama often report with astonishment that he laughs often and laughs like a child. Ven. Sanghasena smiles as sweetly and innocently as a newborn. This man, I realized, would be swayed by nothing, neither the promise of material wealth nor that of heavenly delight. He was complete. He spoke and up there, after what seemed like a lifetime of searching, I felt at home in a strange place. “Here in Leh, we have no Disneyland and no malls,” he began. “What we do have to give you, however, is another way to live. We human beings have developed incredible technologies but we are like a powerful plane flying through the sky without a pilot.”

Old houses in Manali

Winter comes to Leh overnight. The day after watch-ing the most energetic and confusing polo game I have ever had the fortune to watch, with entire Ladakhi families strolling across the field as the match progressed, we look up and notice that rather than white hot the sky is pewter and the mountains around us are covered by a mantle of thick snow. We join the rush to book flights out of Leh before the winter storms howl in. At a corner shop, they are selling Mughal-style paintings of a rather tigerish looking Snow Leopard, that highly endangered cat that stalks the mountains of Central Asia in diminishing numbers. I remember that my favorite book is named after that almost mythical creature. The Snow Leopard recounts the author, Matthiessen’s, quest to catch a glimpse of the Snow Leopard which quest turned into a pilgrimage of the spirit. As we fly over a sea of frozen peaks, I realize that I had, unconsciously done something similar. I had embarked on a physical journey through northern India, my intent merely to pass the time, but it had turned into a quest to find a genuine form of spirituality, an experience of a true faith, and I promised myself I would one day come back to India, maybe more than once, so I could finally sit at the foot of a holy man.

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There are countless ashrams in Rishikesh but I liked the Omkarananda Gita Sedan: swami.kumarananda@gmail.com.

To arrange the drive from Manali to Leh contact the Himalayan Extreme Center: www.himalayan-extreme-center.com.

The Silver Cloud is a prime example of Ladakhi architecture.

The best place to stay in Leh, hands down, is the Silver Cloud Guest House: silvercloudstd@rediffmail.com/silvercloudpsd@hotmail.com.

To experience another way of being, book a stay at the Mahabodhi International Buddhist Center in Lei: www.mahabodhi-ladakh.org.