In one of the planet’s most sacred regions, Eileen explores a network of caves and monasteries as she gets to know the ancient gods and gurus who inhabit this landscape.
The Tethys Ocean once separated India from Eurasia but disappeared 50 million years ago when the continental plates collided. The former bed of the Tethys is now the treeless Mustangi desert, 3000 meters above sea level. Fossils and ammonites still scatter the land, and my host, Tripple P. Gurung, stops regularly to examine rocks on the path.
I am staying in Gurung’s Red House Hotel, a historic building in the village of Kagbeni, in the Mustang district of northwest Nepal. Mustang borders Tibet, and for millennia, has been more closely connected with this northern neighbor than the green heartland of Nepal. This is my first morning in Mustang and Gurung is taking me to visit the cave settlements of Phudzeling, three kilometers east of Kagbeni.
Archaeologists believe that the thousands of caves, such as Phudzeling, carved into the soft, clay cliffs, formed the first human settlements in the region. Excavations tell us that by 400 BCE, Phudzeling and other caves in the area housed developed communities with living, cooking, and storage ‘rooms’, and burial chambers.
The further we climb out of Kagbeni, the drier and more lunar the land becomes. In domes of earth above, the dark openings of caves start to be seen. Of some, only an outline of the cave remains, while others retain their full form and floors of stone slabs. Opposite Phudzeling, the valley side is a series of rounded sand towers, created by thousands of years of relentless wind and sporadic precipitation. The river below is little more than a ribbon of blue, gentle and graceful in its descent of the valley.
Phudzeling is not only a set of caves, but an area of terraced slopes and ruined buildings on flatter pieces of land below, stretching around half a kilometer up the valley. Sections of circular stone walls – built into great vertical cliffs above the river – remain as tantalizing clues of what lay before. Gurung tells me Phudzeling is believed to have been where the people of Kagbeni lived before the current village, although why and when they moved remains unknown.
I spend my mornings in Kagbeni exploring the local area on foot, before the rise of the famous wind of the Kali-Gandaki Valley – a wind so savage it has been immortalized in Nepali song. One of the world’s deepest gorges, the Kali-Gandaki cuts north to south between the towering Annapurna and Dhauligiri Himalayas, linking the cool Tibetan plateau with the hot Indian plains. My room is on the roof of the hotel, meters from the remaining mud walls of the 16th-century CE palace of Kagbeni.
I climb a zig-zagging path up the steep slope of the opposite side of the valley. The hillside is devoid of trees, home only to yellow-flowered gorse and small-leafed succulents, and peppered with outcrops of dirty bronze stone each holding trimmings of tangerine-colored lichen. The tight cluster of the earthen buildings of Kagbeni sits below, surrounded by a patchwork of green fields.
Mustang lies in Nepal but has remained within the sphere of Tibetan influence until the early 15th century CE, when, a Tibetan lord, Amapal, ventured south into today’s Nepal, establishing the kingdom of Lo in an area north of Kagbeni. A century later, nobles of Lo broke away, creating different fiefdoms further to the south – Kagbeni was one of these. Sitting at the confluence of the Kali-Gandaki and Muktinath valleys, Kagbeni long controlled the movement of salt and grain between Tibet, India, and Kathmandu, growing rich on the tolls paid by traders.
High above, the eagles circle and I can see the old quarter of the village being squeezed between the wide riverbed of the Kali-Gandaki and the narrow Muktinath River, now quiet and humble. Only, a few channels of water meander softly along the Kali-Gandaki’s wide expanse. But I’ve heard these rivers are not always so placid, often breaking their banks in the monsoon months, threatening the walls of the ancient town.
By late morning, the vertical wooden poles on the palace, holding the Tibetan prayer flags, bend with the wind. The flags are in the Tibetan colors of the natural elements – blue at the top, then white, red, green, and yellow – and are tied to these poles with white cloth and crowned by sprigs of juniper. Pigeons duck in and out of the small square holes carved into the soft mortar of the palace walls.
Kagbeni marks the border between the Hindu subcontinent and the land of magic, Buddhism, and lamas (spiritual leaders). The old quarter is made up of windowless houses bound together around hidden courtyards and faded chortens (square monuments of stone usually housing a lama’s remains). Dark passages weave between buildings made of stone and chan – a Tibetan molded clay and cement. The houses are crowned with lines of firewood and prayer flags.
I often take refuge from the afternoon wind in Kag Chode Thupten Samphel Ling, an important monastery of the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism, on the edge of the old town. From the 10th century CE onwards, after centuries of war in Tibet, religious figures increasingly traveled between Tibet and India, along the Kali-Gandaki and through Mustang. Strong bonds were forged between the local people and the Sakyas, with many new monasteries built; paintings in many caves illustrate the rich creativity of this period.
On my first afternoon in the monastery, I meet Ngawang Gyaltsen, a 19-year-old monk. He comes from the remote region of Dolpa, bordering Mustang, and after several years of great hardship arrived in the monastery of Kagbeni. Clad in maroon, he unlocks the wooden door of a clay-red tower, explaining that there are two monasteries – one old and one new. This is the old monastery, he says, which was established in 1429 by Tenpa Gyaltsen, a great lama from Tibet.
The main prayer room is on the second floor, a square room with carved wooden pillars housing dusty statues of the past, present, and future Buddhas, along with those of Milarepa – a legendary sage of the Nepali Himalayas. Gyalsten points to a prayer book of hand-made paper in a glass case, the text in golden ink. This, he says, is older than the monastery. On either side of the door are paintings of four wrathful deities, who, I learn, are the protective deities of the monastery.
I discover the people of Mustang believe in a range of local gods, that protect different spatial and meta-physical areas: the monastery, the home, the village, and areas of the local landscape. The landscape itself is considered sacred, with mountains and rivers gods that existed prior to Buddhism, and who were integrated into the pantheon of Tibetan Buddhist deities as ‘protectors’.
The mani walls (stone walls engraved with prayers) and chortens on the edge of the village provide protection from evil spirits from outside. Gyaltsen takes me through the narrow lanes and courtyards, and shows me a fearsome, clay figure in orange, black and white, brandishing a curved sword and a crown of skulls. This is Kagbeni’s meme, or grandfather, who guards the northern gate of the old town from such spirits. The iwi, or grandmother, sits at the southern entrance. Both, curiously, have their genitals prominently on display.
One blustery morning, I find Gyaltsen and several others around a fire in a steel can outside the red door of the old monastery. This is the day of an important puja (ceremony) for the monastery’s protectors. They add a bagful of green powder, they call sang, to the fire. “The bad deities will smell it and come and eat it,” Tshiring, another monk, tells me. “This food keeps them happy and full, and stops them bringing us back luck,” he says.
Another morning, I strike out on the footpath north from Kagbeni, towards the Kingdom of Lo. Lo has long been known as ‘The Forbidden Kingdom’ – foreigners were only allowed entry in 1992, and even today a licensed guide and the procurement of a 500 USD permit is required. Half an hour north is the village of Tiri, as far as I can go without crossing into this prohibited land.
Above the white-washed houses of Tiri sits its monastery – of the Nyingma sect, the oldest and most mysterious school of Tibetan Buddhism. A solitary lama sits in the corner, in front of a table laden with conch shells, bells, and scriptures. Dirty cloth paintings of angry figures line the walls. Outside juniper burns, the smell floating in with the wind.
I sit on the monastery’s waxed, wooden floor and watch as Jampa Lama, the spiritual leader of Tiri, chants and fingers a string of prayer beads. His eyes roll back as he rocks side to side, all the while hitting the drum that hangs behind. Red, blue, and green fairy lights flash around the monastery.
Later we drink butter tea, the taste of which is at first repulsive but becomes mildly palatable after some perseverance. Jampe slurps noisily. He is dressed in maroon, with a mustard shirt underneath; his prayer beads hanging around his neck.
He is also from Dolpa, the home of Gyaltsen, coming by foot 40 years before when he was asked to perform a puja to end a lengthy drought. He stayed in Tiri for a month chanting mantras (prayers). The rain came and he never left. He tells me Nyingma monasteries are always found in isolated places, outside towns, as peace is needed while learning meditation.
He walks me through the monastery’s orchard, sweet smoke is still coming from the embers of the juniper branches. Opening the gate to the barren hillside, he bids me goodbye, and from this vantage point, I stare north, up the Kali-Gandaki, past the fluttering prayer flags, towards the Forbidden Kingdom of Lo.
On my last day, I meet Pema Doma, whose family has lived in the Red House for generations, and who now resides in a set of rooms below the hotel. She attends to the spiritual needs of the house, worshipping daily the building’s large clay statue of Maitreya Buddha, the future Buddha. Maitreya, Tibetan Buddhists believe, will come to Earth during the next era of the world. In the mornings, afternoons, and evenings, she changes the oil lamps and prostrates before the statue. In her lifetime, a day has not passed without someone in her family praying to Maitreya, she tells me.
But she saves her favorite tales for afternoon chats over glasses of chyaang – a cloudy liquid of local rice beer. Following the takeover of Tibet by China, the border between Tibet and Mustang closed, bringing an end to centuries of commercial and religious exchanges. However, rather than fall into irrelevance, Mustang gave refuge to a notorious army of Tibetan warriors, known as the Khampas, and Pema remembers them in her home.
“They ran away from China to Mustang, and stayed in lots of places in Nepal, including this house,” she tells me. Jutting into Tibet like a peninsular, Mustang had been the center of this resistance, and Kagbeni an important base. Michel Peissel, a French anthropologist who visited Mustang in the 1960s, wrote of the “silhouettes of many Khampas” in the lanes and tunnels of Kagbeni. From here, they launched attacks on the Chinese Army in Tibet.
“My father was here then, and he gave the Khampas the bottom floor for their rations, and we slept upstairs. Many Khampa fighters stayed in caves in the cliffs. One Khampa leader, General Wangdi, often stayed in the two rooms on the roof – I was a child then,” she tells me
Following pressure from the Chinese, and a change in direction of US foreign policy – the CIA funded this resistance throughout the 1960s – the Khampas were finally overpowered by the Nepali Army in 1974. Although, as Doma remembers, the Dalai Lama told them not to fight the Nepalis and they laid down their arms.
The chyaang bottle is now half-empty, and the wind of the Kali-Gandaki is whipping through the lane outside; the daylight is dull. “Life was hard back when I was young,” she goes on. “We didn’t have money to buy rice. But the food was delicious, all ingredients local, the meat, egg, vegetables. We didn’t drink much tea then, but we would drink chyaang like soup – morning and evening. This is the reason we are strong,” she laughs.
We watch as the lane fills with changra goats, on their way back from the mountains to a nearby building with a large courtyard where they will spend the night. “That building was the ammunition store of the Khampas,” Doma tells me, as she pours us another glass of chyaang, and I settle in for more stories.
