The Snow Leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

All other creatures look down toward the earth, but man was given a face so that he might turn his eyes toward the stars and his gaze upon the sky. OVID Metamorphoses

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save these remnants of his past.”

In what became known as the Four Noble Truths, Sakyamuni perceived that man’s existence is inseparable from sorrow; that the cause of suffering is craving; that peace is attained by extinguishing craving; that this liberation may be brought about by following the Eight-fold Path: right attention to one’s understanding, intentions, speech, and actions; right livelihood, effort, mindfulness; right concentration, by which is meant the unification of the self through sitting yoga.

The Sherpas are alert for ways in which to be of use, yet are never insistent, far less servile; since they are paid to perform a service, why not do it as well as possible? “Here, sir! I will wash the mud!” “I carry that, sir!” As GS says, “When the going gets rough, they take care of you first.” Yet their dignity is unassailable, for the service is rendered for its own sake—it is the task, not the employer, that is served. As Buddhists, they know that the doing matters more than the attainment or reward, that to serve in this selfless way is to be free.

“Perhaps you can teach me how to write about people; I don’t know how to go about it.” This sort of open and lonely remark redeems his sternness and an occasional lack of proportion brought about by sheer intensity.

The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization—absolute and unconditional—of its own particular law. . . . To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being . . . he has failed to realize his life’s meaning.

The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this interior way “Tao,” and likens it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one’s destination reached, one’s mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things.

the many cultural similarities between the pre-Aryan Dravidians and the Maya, and accounts seeming to indicate that Buddhist missionaries reached the Aleutians and traveled as far south as California by the fourteenth century

And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.

Before heaven and earth There was something nebulous silent isolated unchanging and alone eternal the Mother of All Things I do not know its name I call it Tao

In the wet snow, the narrow path traversing the steep slopes is hard to trace, and treacherous. Phu-Tsering and Dawa have mountain boots inherited from past expeditions, but most of the Tamangs go barefoot so that the sneakers provided for them may be sold another day in Kathmandu.

I wait, facing the north; instinct tells me to stand absolutely still. Cloud mist, snow, and utter silence, utter solitude: extinction. Then, in the great hush, the clouds draw apart, revealing the vast Dhaulagiri snowfields. I breathe, mists swirl, and all has vanished—nothing! I make a small, involuntary bow.

Tibetans say that obstacles in a hard journey, such as hailstones, wind, and unrelenting rains, are the work of demons, anxious to test the sincerity of the pilgrims and eliminate the fainthearted among them.

In Tantric practice, the student may displace the ego by filling his whole being with the real or imagined object of his concentration; in Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear, pure stillness of a seashell or a flower petal.

When one pays attention to the present, there is great pleasure in awareness of small things;

GS says, “Do you realize we haven’t heard even a distant motor since September?” And this is true. No airplane crosses such old mountains. We have strayed into another century.

And of course it is this clinging, the tightness of panic, that gets people killed: “to clutch,” in ancient Egyptian, “to clutch the mountain,” in Assyrian, were euphemisms that signified “to die.”

koan (a Zen paradox, not to be solved by intellect, that may bring about a sudden dissolution of logical thought and clear the way for direct seeing into the heart of existence):

“All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings, in destruction; meetings, in separation; births, in death. . . .” Confronted by the uncouth specter of old age, disease, and death, we are thrown back upon the present, on this moment, here, right now, for that is all there is. And surely this is the paradise of children, that they are at rest in the present, like frogs or rabbits.

The shelves are marked with the swastika, that archaic symbol of creation that occurs everywhere around the world except south of the Sahara and in Australia. It was taken to North America by the ancestors of the American aborigines; in the Teutonic cultures, it was the emblem of Thor; it appeared at Troy and in ancient India, where it was adopted by Hindus, then Buddhists. The reversed swastika is also here, in sign of the B’on religion, still prevalent in old corners of these mountains; since it reverses time, it is thought to be destructive to the universe, and is often associated with black magic.

Through Jang-bu, we question everyone about Kang La and Shey Gompa, as the crowd gives off that heartening smell of uncultivated peoples the world over, an earthy but not sour smell of sweat and fire smoke and the oil of human leather. Goats, a few sheep, come and go. Both men and women roll sheep wool on hand spindles, saying that blizzards have closed Kang La for the winter. On the roofs, culled buckwheat stacked for winter fodder has a bronze shine in the dying sun, and against a sunset wall, out of the wind, an old woman with clean hair turns her old prayer wheel, humming, humming.

I am glad that the cliff corner hid my ignominious advance on hands and knees. Squeezing by, GS remarks, “This is the first really interesting stretch of trail we’ve had so far.” How easy it would be to push him over.

At these altitudes, in the Himalayan autumn, the difference between sun and shade is striking: the stream by my tent is clogged by ice, whereas lizards lie sunning on the rock slope above camp where I climb up to get warm and write these notes.

After supper I watch the fire for a time, until smoke from the sparking juniper closes my eyes. Bidding goodnight, I bend through the low doorway and go out under the stars and pick my way around the frozen walls to my cold tent, there to remain for twelve hours or more until first light. I read until near asphyxiated by my small wick candle in its flask of kerosene, then lie still for a long time in the very heart of the earth silence, exhilarated and excited as a child.

There is also a custom called “air burial,” in which the body of the deceased is set out on a wild crag such as this one, to be rended and devoured by the wild beasts; when only the bones are left, these are broken and ground down to powder, then mixed into lumps of dough, to be set out again for passing birds. Thus all is returned into the elements, death into life.

The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. To be anywhere else is “to paint eyeballs on chaos.”

“Of course I enjoy this life! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!”