The Snow Leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

The earth twitches, and the mountains shimmer, as if all molecules had been set free: the blue sky rings. Perhaps what I hear is the “music of the spheres,” what Hindus call the breathing of the Creator and astrophysicists the “sighing” of the sun.

At this altitude the white is thick and silent, only a soft murmur of snow-shrouded streams. The moon rests on the white crescent. All is still, I walk in sun-filled dream, as wind blows sparkling snow from the rock faces.

I do realize this, and am happy, too, watching him tramp off down the mountain; the sense of having one’s life needs at hand, of traveling light, brings with it intense energy and exhilaration. Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.

(“I could not simplify myself”—the explanation of the suicide Nezhdanov.)

This is closer to my own idea of freedom, the possibility and prospect of “free life,” traveling light, without clinging or despising, in calm acceptance of everything that comes; free because without defenses, free not in an adolescent way, with no restraints, but in the sense of the Tibetan Buddhist’s “crazy wisdom,” of Camus’s “leap into the absurd” that occurs within a life of limitations.

The absurdity of a life that may well end before one understands it does not relieve one of the duty (to that self which is inseparable from others) to live it through as bravely and as generously as possible.

“At least ninety-five percent of the yeti material is nonsense,” GS said, “but I’m convinced, on the basis of the Shipton photographs and some other evidence, that an animal unknown to science occurs here.”

A theory that the yeti is a relict species of early man, driven long ago into dense forests by the surge of Homo sapiens that presumably eliminated more primitive hominids, is not helped by its strange, bestial foot, which would seem to place it closer to a subhominid such as Gigantopithecus or even to the apes; yet the hundreds of photographs and casts of sasquatch tracks show a very large, crude humanoid footprint with the big toe close to all the rest, not separate as in all other known primates—a footprint such as might have been made by a large Australopithecine species of early man.

How could I say that I wished to penetrate the secrets of the mountains in search of something still unknown that, like the yeti, might well be missed for the very fact of searching?

I understand much better now Einstein’s remark that the only real time is that of the observer, who carries with him his own time and space.

I long to let go, drift free of things, to accumulate less, depend on less, to move more simply. Therefore I felt out of sorts after having bought that blanket—another thing, another burden to the spirit.

and then I cling to the cliff edge as to life itself. 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.”17

Childhood is full of mystery and promise, and perhaps the life fear comes when all the mysteries are laid open, when what we thought we wanted is attained. It is just at the moment of seeming fulfillment that we sense irrevocable betrayal, like a great wave rising silently behind us, and know most poignantly what Milarepa meant: “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. .

And surely this is the paradise of children, that they are at rest in the present, like frogs or rabbits.

I lie sleepless, shouting hopelessly, as the exalted dog in the house above, crazed by the pale tents in the moonlight, barks unceasingly from midnight until dawn, without the smallest loss of tone or volume.

I wonder if anywhere on earth there is a river more beautiful than the upper Suli Gad in early fall.

In a cold wind at the Murwa stream, we take off boots and pants and wade the current, which is strong and swift, over slick rocks. I hurry in the icy water, for my numb feet find no footing; suddenly I am plunging like a horse, on the brink of a frigid bath, or worse. Moving diagonally upstream, I make it safely after some bad moments and dry myself on a sunny rock, out of the wind.

Truly it is a lake without impurities, like the dust-free mirror of Buddhist symbolism which, “although it offers an endless procession of pictures, is uniform and colorless, unchanging, yet not apart from the pictures it reveals.”

By firelight, we talk about the snow leopard. Not only is it rare, so says GS, but it is wary and elusive to a magical degree, and so well camouflaged in the places it chooses to lie that one can stare straight at it from yards away and fail to see it. Even those who know the mountains rarely take it by surprise: most sightings have been made by hunters lying still near a wild herd when a snow leopard happened to be stalking.

They are jolly and colorful, but there is aggressiveness in their good nature, and we cannot trust them.

The turn in my mood occurred this morning, when the brave Dawa, attempting to catch Jang-bu’s pack, hurled across a stream, dropped it ineptly into the water. Wonderfully, Jang-bu laughed aloud, as did Dawa and Phu-Tsering, although it meant wet clothes and a wet sleeping bag for the head Sherpa. That happy-go-lucky spirit, that acceptance which is not fatalism but a deep trust in life, made me ashamed.

On a hard journey, with no respite from each other, such consideration (extended also to the Sherpas) is far more valuable than mere “good manners,” which sometimes hide a mean spirit beneath, and may evaporate when things get rough.

“Do not be heavy,” Soen Roshi says. “Be light, light, light—full of light!”

As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full, and he who can draw it away from before his eyes, as one draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds.

I am still excited by the wolves seen so close yesterday, and to see them again, to watch them hunt blue sheep in such fashion, flying down across the cliffs within sight of our tents at Shey Gompa—what happiness!

The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no “meaning,” they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.

And good news, too, would be intrusive, spoiling this chance to live moment by moment in the present by stirring up the past, the future, and encouraging delusions of continuity and permanence just when I am trying to let go, to blow away, like that white down feather on the mountain.

Indicating his twisted legs without a trace of self-pity or bitterness, as if they belonged to all of us, he casts his arms wide to the sky and the snow mountains, the high sun and dancing sheep, and cries, “Of course I am happy here! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!”

Perhaps this dread of transience explains our greed for the few gobbets of raw experience in modern life, why violence is libidinous, why lust devours us, why soldiers choose not to forget their days of horror: we cling to such extreme moments, in which we seem to die, yet are reborn. In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we are life, our being fills us; in ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity. But in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe.

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.”20 When I watch blue sheep, I must watch blue sheep, not be thinking about sex, danger, or the present, for this present—even while I think of it—is gone.

is satisfied that the bharal is neither sheep nor goat but a creature perhaps very close to the ancestral goatlike animal of about twenty million years ago from which Ovis and Capra evolved.

While we feed, more villagers come in, until the firelight is a circle of lively faces, young and old. I wonder if I have ever seen so many faces that I like in a single circle, and I go off happily to bed, my belly glowing.

I have the universe all to myself. The universe has me all to itself.

“No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.”

To proceed as though you know nothing, not even your age, nor sex, nor how you look. To proceed as though you were made of gossamer . . . a mist that passes through and is passed through and retains its form. A mist that loses its form and still is. A mist that finally dissolves, particles scattered in the sun.1

Thinking of a friend’s note, received before leaving home, I smile: “I can hardly imagine all the strange and wonderful sights that you will see.”

At daybreak, as I leave our camp, Karma gives me a spruce stave that he cut yesterday as a surprise present: his joy in his own generosity is so infectious that I laugh aloud.

God offers man the choice between repose and truth: he cannot have both.

The path I followed breathlessly has faded among stones; in spiritual ambition, I have neglected my children and done myself harm, and there is no way back. Nor has anything changed; I am still beset by the same old lusts and ego and emotions, the endless nagging details and irritations—that aching gap between what I know and what I am.

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

From the beginning, this leopard-eyed saint has outworked and outwalked us all; not once have I seen him downhearted or tired, nor has he responded with sullenness or rudeness to my own evil temper of these recent days.

how can he forgive me, when he hadn’t bothered with resentment in the first place?

It is not so much that this man and I are friends. Rather, there is a thread between us, like the black thread of a live nerve; there is something unfinished, and he knows it, too. Without ever attempting to speak about it, we perceive life in the same way, or rather, I perceive it in the way that Tukten lives it.