Colin Thubron

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Colin Thubron joins us from a BBC London studio. It's good to be speaking with you again, Colin.

Colin Thubron: Thank you.

Ramona Koval: Colin, Mt Kailash, it's called 'the heart of the world'; it's actually very near to the source of four great Indian rivers. What does Mt Kailash mean to people, this one-fifth of humanity?

Colin Thubron: Well, it's all Hindus and all Buddhists regard it as the centre of the universe. They think that it is the source of creation, basically, where everything has its kind of blueprint: whether it's a rock, or human being, or an animal, it all started its creation in this isolated mountain just north of the Himalayas.

Ramona Koval: So, tell me about, when you look down at a map, what was your journey? Where did it start and where did it take you? Just on the map, just tell us the places that you went through.

Colin Thubron: Well, if you imagine the Himalayas and Nepal, the far northwest of Nepal is an area of the Himalayas which then gets into Tibet, into western Tibet. So what I did was to walk along the highest source of the Ganges, which is called the Karnali River, which goes northwards over the Nepal border and into Tibet and has its source just near Mt Kailash. So this is, in a way, the heart of Asia.

Ramona Koval: Can we begin by hearing from the book, but perhaps you could just introduce this part that you're going to read. Where are you?

Colin Thubron: Ah, I'm in Nepal still, travelling north through this valley—there are no roads here, it's just a track—going towards the Nepalese border. I'm with a Sherpa and we're simply walking up this very beautiful and remote valley. And this is a passage which talks somewhat about my motive for the journey, which I still find very hard to explain, but here, I attempt to.

[Reads from On a path below us, a woman is striding fast above the river... to ... meanwhile the sun is setting with a perverse radiance behind us.]

Ramona Koval: And that was a part of To a Mountain in Tibet, read by the author Colin Thubron. And you're on ABC Radio National on The Book Show, with me, Ramona Koval.

Yes, 'To ask of a journey, why?' You say, 'It's the wrong question, although there seems no other.' And so I'm loath to ask why [laughs], but let's talk about why the others go on this journey. What do people expect to find at this mountain, the others who believe?

Colin Thubron: The others are going for quite a variety of motives. There are some, who you might call the very sophisticated Buddhists, who go in a spirit of meditation. There are others, the great majority, who are Tibetan Buddhists and quite simple, earthy people. They're going to accrue merit, which in the Buddhist-Hindu tradition means that your karma is lightened, that you are hurried on to a better transmigration. And there's then a lot of people, I think, who are going for something quite specific. They're going for the birth of another yak, or to get a better price for their butter, and all sorts of things they may be asking the Buddhas or gods along the way. The Hindus are coming from India; they don't live in Tibet, they're coming mainly from the lowlands of India. And they worship Shiva, who they believe sits on the mountain in eternal meditation.

And they're all going to accrue merit, particularly the Hindus; to lighten the burden, if you like, of sin in their lives. And that's common to all of them, I think—Buddhists and Hindus. It's a lightening of sin. And there's a feeling when they reach the highest pass around the mountain—they never climb the mountain, it's never been climbed, it's too sacred—but there's a high pass around the mountain, at 18,600 feet, and there they believe they attain a sort of redemption from the goddess of compassion, whose pass this is.

Ramona Koval: So you decided to do this journey, even though it doesn't appeal to your own sense of belief, and you observe them in their rituals. You do what you do in lots of places; you travel very light and you travel with a small group of people. Who are they, the ones you travel with?

Colin Thubron: I flew on a little plane to a place called Simikot, which is remote area of northwest Nepal which used to be overrun by Maoist guerrillas. But there I found a Sherpa and a horseman, somebody to carry our tents, and a cook. And this is about the minimum that you can travel with in the Himalaya here—like sort of British Raj. So I had these three attendants, something I'm not used to at all.

Ramona Koval: No, when we've spoken before, you talk about taking a little knapsack, basically. And in your knapsack, I think, something like one change of clothes and some basic medical things in case you hurt yourself, and of course something to write on. And you said before that you don't take a camera. Is that still the case?

Colin Thubron: Yes, no, that's still the case. I did take a little camera on this journey for the first time. Not to make illustrations for some book that I imagined in the future, but simply to record landscape. It became very cold, the last day or two, and my fingers were numb, and it was much simpler simply to click a camera rather than to try to make notes.

So that was all the gear I had of my own, but the Sherpas, who are tremendously tough, were carrying tents and the horse had a tent on his back.

Ramona Koval: And you often either made your own camp, but sometimes when you went through little villages—or little hamlets I suppose they were—there would be a family that would take you in. But what's the arrangement there? Do you pay them?

Colin Thubron: Well, the arrangement was usually made through the Sherpa and I wanted... because they're desperately poor, these people, one very much wanted to pay them. There's a tradition of hospitality in which they wouldn't normally accept payment, but because I was foreign and because there were four of us, they did. And so you came into these houses, which looked beautiful from the outside—they were timber and stone, built against the mountains—and when you entered them you realised the people were desperately poor; sometimes quite big families and almost no food at all, just they owned a little strip of barley or rice if they were lucky.

Ramona Koval: Yes, you say, 'Everything we have looks excessive. Our travelling kit is more than everything the family owns.' And that's the travellers' dilemma in these places, isn't it? And it's something that you've always had to deal with.

Colin Thubron: Yes. It's always been a sort of agony, in a way, that here you are travelling, in this case I had three... they seemed like servants, with me, and these tents and our baggage and cooking stuff and so on. And you enter a house where there's just bare floors and a stove and children who are quite badly undernourished and a people who feel that they have very little hope. Their hope is in education; they've realised that; but you know, as a man said to me, 'I'm 35. It's too late for me, I'll never be educated, or my wife.' And so they're living on the poverty line. One of the worst things is that there are beautiful forests up this valley and of course they're cutting the trees down in order to sell the timber to a treeless Tibet, to the north, in order to live. So I felt all the time this disparity, not just in my material condition, but also in knowledge, you know? You have some idea of what their lives are like, because you're travelling amongst them, but they have no idea of what our lives are like here, or very little.

Ramona Koval: Did they know you were writing about them?

Colin Thubron: No. No, I usually feel if I tell people I'm writing about them they start to behave in unnatural ways; they become very reticent, or rather theatrical, or something. I always prefer that people don't know.

Ramona Koval: You talk about this journey—and we'll talk about... we'll continue the journey with you. But there's another layer that you write about, which is remembering your family, remembering what it was to be a boy, with a sister, and parents. And sometimes something happens, and suddenly you're thrown back to your memories. For example, when you have a look at a map, and—I don't know if I'm pronouncing this properly—is it Nainital?

Colin Thubron: Yes, Nainital.

Ramona Koval: Tell us about... when you saw this name, on this map, you seem surprised to see it so close to your pathway to this mountain.

Colin Thubron: Yes, I was surprised. All my life I'd thought of Nainital as somewhere that existed almost only in my boyish imagination, because this was the place that my father, in the 1920s and 1930s, had gone big game hunting. He was in the British army in India, and in those days you sort of went big game hunting without worrying that any of these beasts that were being shot were going to be almost extinct within your lifetime.

And I looked on the map and I saw Nainital. Heavens, it was only about 100 miles away as the crow flies and where I was walking, there was a little lake there. And all my childhood I had been almost haunted, rather excitedly, by these great leopard heads which had been hung on my parents' walls. They were the leopards my father had shot and there were little shields under, giving the date and the name of the place he'd shot them. And there was Nainital on his prize leopard, which would stare out of the wall of my parents' dining room. It said, sort of, 'Nainital 1928', or something like that on it. And there were bear rugs, and there was a wolf's head in the lavatory, and there was a huge bison head, which I don't know what that was doing, in a way; it was far too big for our smallish house; and all these animals my father had shot in the 20s and 30s in a sort of sportsman spirit, really, that was perfectly common for that period. So it was strange to suddenly see it on the map and realise I was such a short way from where he had been, a man much younger than I was then.

Ramona Koval: You say that, like him, you're 'happy in these solitudes, sleeping in the pure air above the great river.' In a funny way, you're kind of following in his footsteps, in a sense.

Colin Thubron: A little. He was capable of solitude in a way that I am. I could always relate to that in him. He liked the loneliness, or at least the solitude of that hunting; just walking in the forest, in the beauty of the forest. As an older man, he simply liked walking in English woods and observing wildlife rather than shooting it.

Ramona Koval: You talk about travelling with these people and seeing people overtake you sometimes, or come back the other way. They've been to their pilgrimage. And you talk about the sort of mystique of this Tibetan mountain that you're going to. It's grown out of childhood and adolescent reading. What was the mystique of Tibet for you when you were younger?

Colin Thubron: I think I had the mystique that almost all my generation did, that was probably a product above all of that novel by James Hilton called Lost Horizon, which was published in 19...

Ramona Koval: Which was then a film, a film was made out of it.

Colin Thubron: Yes, it was a film. I've forgotten who was in it. But his book was published in 1933 and it imagined that there was this government of seers, of prophets, and pure sort of holy people, who would eventually be the salvation of the world. So there's an idea I think I'd inherited about Tibet of it being a land of great purity and a land ruled by a religious elite. And all these things, these legends that surrounded it, particularly early in the twentieth century: there were legends of monks who could fly and levitate, and lamas who could break rocks with their voices, and the lung-pa, the wind-men, who drifted over the landscape with their feet barely touching it. All these things, they suggested that Tibet was a sort of laboratory, almost, for experiment, for extraterrestrial experiment. And people seemed to believe anything about Tibet. And I'd inherited something of that, I think. An idea that this land, in its extraordinary isolation, was a place of purity and promise, where all the poor things in human nature would in some way be redeemed or never existed. I mean, the west I think poured its fantasies into Tibet and perhaps still does.

Ramona Koval: Well, the truth about Tibet you also write, about the history of warriorship and the history of feudalism, controlled by monks.

Colin Thubron: Yes, that's so interesting that in fact if you look at the history of Tibet, it's pretty warlike. In the seventh-eighth centuries they brought the great Chinese Tang dynasty to its heels. They sacked Xian, which is that great city where the Terracotta warriors are. Their armies reached the borders of Burma, and the Tibetan army was the finest—their armour was the finest in the world. I think they could muster 200,000 men without a problem.

And later, even in the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries we find these great monasteries weren't just places of worship and meditation, but they were armed camps where the monks would fight one another, different sects would be at war with one another. And even into the twentieth century, we find that the Dalai Lamas, if they weren't murdered in childhood, were sometimes complicit in violence. The idea of the Dalai Lama being a peaceable figure has really come in only with the splendid present Dalai Lama and in the twentieth century. So actually again the peaceableness of Tibet is something of a myth.

Ramona Koval: I'm speaking with Colin Thubron here on The Book Show on ABC Radio National. Ramona Koval here. And we're talking about his new book, To a Mountain in Tibet.

Colin, so, would it be true to say that this is a culture that is, well, if not obsessed with death, stares death in the face?

Colin Thubron: I think we've always thought that in the west. I don't know... I'm not sort of intimate enough with Tibetan culture really to know, except it is a very demon-ridden culture; there is a lot fear in it. And there are certain things which we in the west have garnered from Tibet, if you like, which do make it seem as if death and the way to treat death is especially important. Probably the only Tibetan text anybody's ever read in the west is The Book of the Dead, which has this extraordinary, almost scientific, attitude to what happens to the soul after death and how it can be guided through various trails and ordeals to reach a better incarnation, guided by the living, by a lama whispering to the dead to now do this, now do that. It's an extraordinary book and has this strange... the language is so specific, as well as being mystical, that it fascinated people like Jung, for instance, as well as a counterculture of William Burroughs and so on. And so it's... that has been the great Tibetan text for us.

And I think people have also been fascinated by the way Tibetans dispose of their dead. The fact that, well, the ground is so hard, it's very hard to bury anyway, and they think that to place people in the soil is horrible, that we place our dead in the cold earth. They cut up the dead corpse and pound the bones. It's done by a special—'sky-masters', they call him, a sky-master of burial, and he then feeds these morsels to vultures which assemble for the purpose. So the dead are completely consumed by vultures. And they believe that vultures are sacred; they say that you never see a dead one, that when they die they simply fly up towards the sun until the wind takes them apart. And so they, with the dead, simply disappear and that's their favourite way of disposing of corpses. And all this gives a kind of haunting feeling to us in the west about death and how you treat it, really. In particular, I met one or two lamas and people who spoke about the corpse as something that was not quite dead. The feeling was that after you die, that you're not quite dead, you're still able to receive guidance from those close to you—probably ideally from a lama—guidance into your next life, your next incarnation.

Ramona Koval: So as you're walking along this path, literally, climbing and going down into valleys and looking at splendid vistas, you're thinking about your dead—your parents, your sister who died at 21—and you say that you're overborne by individual death, while others are focussed on reincarnation and this idea that death isn't the end of things. And for anyone who's lost anybody close, it's a nice thing to think about, isn't it? That somehow you'll see them again, or that they are with you in some way.

Colin Thubron: Yes, that's what we want from the Christian tradition, of course, we want individual memory to survive, because I suppose it's memory that really makes us individual, truly individual, is what we know of our past. And we want memory and character, personality, and even physical appearance to continue. And that's what we've been told in Christianity will happen, and that's what we long for, even if we are, like me, agnostic. So it's a little ironic, in a way, that here I was, an agnostic, with my family still in my mind, but walking in a culture that doesn't really believe in that sort of continuance. You know, the belief is that only karma survives; the burden of good or evil in the world. It's in a way a very grand and more sort of relaxed tradition than the Christian one, but it doesn't allow for any individual survival at all. As a Buddhist monk told me, 'We don't believe in a God, we don't believe in a soul.' Buddhism, he described to me, Tibetan Buddhism, is not even a philosophy, he said, it's a discipline, it's a science, it's a science of meditation, of realisation that the world is illusory, basically. And none of that brings much comfort to somebody mourning the dead, but it does give a kind of spacious feel, I suppose you could say, to a journey like mine, in which the individual ideally—at least this happened in regard to myself, if not to my loved ones—that the individual is less important than we suppose.

Ramona Koval: Colin Thubron, you are constantly meeting people here who have all kinds of different stories, but many of them are stories of leaving families, like women marrying and going to the husband's family and not seeing their family again because they're so far away; monks going far away to live in monasteries and making new families. There are people who have to loosen the ties, their family ties of loved ones, long before the loved ones die.

Colin Thubron: Yes, that's certainly so with the monks. Many are given to the monastery as children by their families for whatever reason. And they lose family ties very quickly; their families, they would say to me, becomes the monastery; their brothers are the fellow monks there; their parents are the senior monks. And their family becomes quite shadowy to them, particularly those—and I met quite a few—whose parents were left behind in Tibet and they had come out, had fled or been carried out perhaps by relatives, out into Nepal, and then sometimes on to India.

As for marriage, the principle usually was that somebody would marry outside their village, outside their immediate environs, and always the woman would come to the man's house. So the woman would leave the family she'd been brought up in and come to maybe many valleys away, a long way away. She'd come to a new village, a new mother-in-law, crucially, who could be a very powerful influence. And speaking to one or two of these women, they said they were desperately lonely the first few years of their lives, and then probably with childbirth and perhaps with a better relationship with their husband, since the whole thing had been arranged, not chosen by them, probably with that they begin to... their old family begins to fade in their minds a bit and they become used to another life.

But you're right. I mean, all around me were people who had been cut off from their homeland, their families, cut off from something. And in this very harsh terrain, in many ways—it is very beautiful but very harsh—people are separated by steep mountain valleys and by village custom.

Ramona Koval: Yes, you visit monasteries—you have done this quite a bit, actually, since you started writing—and you actually say that in this particular monastery, the monks were mad about Manchester United football team, weren't they?

Colin Thubron: [Laughs] Yes. Well, you know, we think of monks as being very peaceable and—particularly Buddhist monks—perhaps sitting around, meditating and so on. And when I was in Kathmandu, I wanted to prepare for this journey by befriending Tibetan monks and trying to understand something of their feelings and their faith. And one monk in particular sort of told me, 'You know, you imagine we're all pacifistic as monks. No we're not! You should see the monks watching television in the evening,' he said. 'They're throwing things at the screen and shouting at the umpire. They're all great followers of Manchester United and they were furious with the European Cup umpire who was giving out the wrong penalty tickets to the Manchester United fans and so on.' And I said, 'I thought the monks were praying in the evening, or contemplating.' He said, 'Well, maybe it is a kind of meditation. They concentrate on the ball and the rest of the world goes away.'

[Laughter]

Ramona Koval: And you also say it's hard to know how wise or indolent the monks are.

Colin Thubron: Yes, it is. It's so easy to see these men in these beautiful magenta robes and their shaven heads and their peaceable expressions, to imagine that they are all kind of Buddha figures. But monks, for one thing, have always been at the forefront of political protest. In China, as we know—I mean, in Lhasa in Tibet, Chinese Tibet, as we know—it's the monks that have so often been the spearhead of revolt and demonstration. They're very active. Others, particularly in these little monasteries around Kailash, all these monasteries were demolished in the cultural revolution in 1966-7 and they've been rebuilt; they're very poor, there are very few monks there, and a lot of them seem to be sort of asleep most of the time. It's a very, very isolated world.

Ramona Koval: You're funny because you... sometimes you don't welcome the idea of other British trekkers. And you hear that there are some behind you. What does it do to your self-concept to see others who might be able to code you? Is that what you mean about you're not welcoming them? Because you're having this... you've got this bubble on your head and you're going to have your own personal experience and then you've got all these fellow Britishers there.

Colin Thubron: Yeah, I think so. You get quite possessive of your little world there—you know, the landscape, the people—it's a bit grotesque but you feel they all sort of in some way relate to you and you're having this special experience of them. You're trying to lose your own culture, basically, you're trying to understand theirs. The last thing you want is to see another Brit trekker behind you.

But I had to join a group of six British trekkers to go over the border, because the Chinese won't allow solitary travellers—or wouldn't at this time and this place allow a solitary traveller over the Nepalese border into Tibet. They feel they can control groups better. So I had to join these trekkers, who turned out to be great, of course, they were fine. But I was thinking they're going to be very hearty, they're going to be talking about England and a lot of things I don't want to be listening to. And I suppose the fear is they're going to return you to your own culture; that you want to travel in this sort of clear state of listening and trying to be invisible, which of course you can't be, but once you start travelling with people of your own culture you're looking out from this sort of bubble of Englishness, finding everything very odd out there and maybe even laughing at it. And if you're alone, you're the funny one, and you have much quicker to come to an understanding of where you are.

Ramona Koval: You're the funny one except for the Russian evangelist from Dusseldorf.

Colin Thubron: Yeah, well, that was a strange one. This was Sagada, where the Buddhist holy month, at the bottom of Mt Kailash, there was this enormous ceremony. About a thousand pilgrims assembled to raise a great pole, ceremonial pole, for the Buddha's birthday. And, dammit, on a plateau behind came this figure, clothed completely in white, holding an enormous cross up and marching down the mountain. Nobody took much notice of him, actually, but I couldn't think what on earth this was. I found him eventually and he turned out to be a Russian, a German Russian. People who were born in Kazakhstan had come... then these people had come west with perestroika, with the breakup of the Soviet Union, and he was a sort of crazed evangelist: part new age; part that sort of feeling that the Russians will save the world, which is a very Slavophile agenda that somewhere in the Russian soul there's a kind of mysticism that will save the world.

So here he was. He'd come over all these complicated borders in a truck with this colossal cross, inscribed with kind of strange diagrams and esoteric figures. He began talking to me about the great sphinx and the lay lions [?] between Mt Kailash and the pyramids and so on. And as far as I could see, he was a little crazy. And the Buddhists took no notice of him at all. They couldn't understand anything he said; he only spoke Russian. And it was just a little mad to find a figure like this at a profoundly holy ceremony, Buddhist ceremony, beneath their holiest mountain.

Ramona Koval: At one point you say, 'the journey does not nurture reflection as I once hoped.' Did you find what you thought you were looking for?

Colin Thubron: Um, I think by that I meant that it... I found it very hard to think well on the move. I don't know what I was going to think, just to allow myself to meditate. But you're thinking, oddly enough, all the time of where you're placing your feet, you know? It's rocky, it's stony, and it's not very easy just to sort of stroll. I would think I suppose, have an opportunity to think, the moment I stopped and sat on a rock and looked at this extraordinary and beautiful landscape.

I think that I wasn't going with any specific goal in mind. I wasn't expecting to find illumination and it would be lovely to make, in this book, a narrative of some kind of redemption, or catharsis, or enlightenment; it didn't really happen, and I didn't expect it to. It was a journey taken more in a meditative spirit, simply to create a breathing space, I think, between the death of my mother and the knowledge that I had no family left, a sort of breathing space between that and whatever future I envisaged. So it was an instinctive thing to do, really, I did it without any great rational agenda that this was going to produce illumination for me. It was also, I suppose, a testing of my own Christian tradition, even though I had lost faith in it, against the Buddhist-Hindu one, which conceives of life and death in such a different way.

Ramona Koval: Well, it's a lovely book. Thank you so much for writing it and thank you so much for speaking to us today, Colin.

Colin Thubron: Thank you very much. Very nice speaking to you.

Ramona Koval: And Colin Thubron's book is called, To a Mountain in Tibet and it's published by Chatto and Windus.

Publications

Title: To A Mountain In Tibet

Author: Colin Thubron

Publisher: Chatto and Windus