The Snow Leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

He was still grieving, but, by his own spiritual standards, grieving too much. Buddhism teaches the renouncement of craving and neediness, and that the transition between life and death is just a single shift in the myriad states of universal energy.

spiritual porters

Is the goal of enlightenment to see and love this world exactly as it is, or to see through it, to something beyond?

Thoreau had made his epic climb of Mount Ktaadn and made a statement about the absolute authority of the physical.

Perhaps Thoreau, often included amongst the US Transcendentalists, would be more accurately described as a ‘transcendental materialist’.

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.

In the fifth century B.C., near the town of Gaya, south and east of Varanasi, Sakyamuni attained enlightenment in the deep experience that his own “true nature”,

Bhutan, which lies at the southern edge of Tibet, means “End of Bhot”.)

One day this boy and others will destroy that forest, and their sheep fields will erode in rain, and the thin soil will wash away into the torrents, clogging the river channels farther down so that monsoon floods will spread across the land.

With its rapidly increasing population, primitive agriculture, and steep terrain, Nepal has the most serious erosion problem of any country in the world, and the problem worsens as more forests disappear in the scouring of the land for food and fuel; in eastern Nepal, and especially the Kathmandu Valley, firewood for cooking (not to speak of heat) is already precious,

The country folk cook their own food by burning cakes of livestock dung, depriving the soil of the precious manure that would nou...

he will not ski or play rough sports for fear he might do them damage.

I should warn you, the last friend I had who went walking with George in Asia came back—or more properly, turned back—when his boots were full of blood.

Machhapuchare remains pristine, not because it is impregnable—it was climbed to within fifty feet of the summit in 1957—but because to set foot on the peak is forbidden;

All the great rivers of southern Asia fall from the highest country in the world, from the Indus that empties into the Arabian Sea east to the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, the Mekong and the Yangtze,

fierce Tibetan nomads known as Kham-pa, who still actively resist the Chinese occupation and retreat to Dolpo and Mustang after their raids.

Even in Marco Polo’s time, the Kham-pa were renowned bandits, and from all reports5 are fond of their old habits.

Mahayana lies at the foundation of the Tantric Buddhism of the Himalaya, Tibet, and Central Asia, as well as that extraordinary sect that developed in China, travelled eastward to Korea and Japan, and is now established in the United States.

The traditional founder of Ch’an Buddhism (in Japan, Zen) was Bodhidharma, a great teacher in the apostolic line of Sakyamuni, who carried the teaching from India to China in A.D., 527. Perhaps influenced by the simplicity of the Chinese philosophy called Tao (the Way),

ignore the sectarian disputes, ponderous scriptures, proliferating icons, and priestly trappings of organized religions and return to the intense med...

In Zen thought, even attachment to the Buddha’s “golden words” may get in the way of ultimate perception; hence the Zen expression “Kill the Buddha!”

The Universe itself is the scripture of Zen, for which religion is no more and no less than the apprehension of the infinite in every moment.

sumi painting of Japan—a strong expression of Zen culture,

George Gurdjieff introduced me to “the Work”, in which (as in so many disciplines) great emphasis is placed on “self-remembering”—paying attention to the present moment instead of wandering the ephemeral worlds of past and future.

but for the next ten years, I used them regularly—mostly LSD but also mescalin and psilocybin. The journeys were all scaring, often beautiful, often grotesque, and here and there a blissful passage was attained that in my ignorance I took for religious experience:

The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization—absolute and unconditional—of its own particular law.

Not that D and I considered ourselves “seekers”: we were embarrassed by such terms, and shied from people who employed them.

And she accepted the one danger of the mystical search: there is no way back without doing oneself harm. Many paths appear, but once the way is taken, it must be followed to the end.

At no time did the “I” dissolve into the miracle.

Buddhist missionaries reached the Aleutians and travelled as far south as California by the fourteenth century

Tibetan oracle-priests and Siberian shamans practice dream-travel, telepathy, mystical heat, speed-running, death prediction, and metempsychosis, all of which are known to New World shamans: the Algonkian medicine man who travels as a bird to the spirit world, the jaguar-shamans of the Amazon would be impressed but not surprised by the powers attributed to yogis and naljorpas.

The energy or essence or breath of being that is called prana by Hindu yogins and chi by the Chinese is known as orenda to the Cree.20 Such concepts as karma and circular time are taken for granted by almost all native American traditions; time as space and death as becoming are implicit in the earth view of the Hopi, who avoid all linear constructions, knowing as well as any Buddhist that Everything is Right Here Now. As in the great religions of the East, the native American makes small distinction between religious activity and the acts of every day: the religious ceremony is life itself.

Last March GS’s preliminary expedition to eastern Nepal produced inconclusive data on the blue sheep;

Bardo Thodol (the Tibetan “Book of the Dead”)

The physicist seeks to understand reality, while the mystic is trained to experience it directly.

because one musk pod (a large gland in the male’s belly skin) brings up to five hundred dollars in Kathmandu,

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.

These dreams do not seem to evaporate—can I be dead? It is as if I had entered what Tibetans call the Bardo—literally, between-two-existences—a dreamlike hallucination that precedes reincarnation, not necessarily in human form;

In case I should need them, instructions for passage through the Bardo are contained in the Tibetan “Book of the Dead” which I carry with me—a guide for the living, actually, since it teaches that a man’s last thoughts will determine the quality of his reincarnation.

Therefore, every moment of life is to be lived calmly, mindfully, as if it were the last, to insure that the most is made of precious human state—the only one in which enlightenment is possible. And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.

is called Mila Repa because as a great yogin and master of “mystical heat” he wore only a simple white cloth, or repa, even in deepest winter: his “songs” or hortatory verses, as transcribed by his disciples, are still beloved in Tibet. Like Sakyamuni, he is said to have attained nirvana in a single lifetime, and his teaching as he prepared for death might have been uttered by the Buddha:

Meditation has nothing to do with contemplation of eternal questions, or of one’s own folly, or even of one’s navel, although a clearer view on all of these enigmas may result. It has nothing to do with thought of any kind—with anything at all, in fact, but intuiting the true nature of existence, which is why it has appeared, in one form or another, in almost every culture known to man. The entranced Bushman staring into fire, the Eskimo using a sharp rock to draw an ever-deepening circle into the flat surface of a stone achieves the same obliteration of the ego (and the same power) as the dervish or the Pueblo sacred dancer.

Like the round bottomed Bodhidharma doll, returning to its centre, meditation represents the foundation of the universe to which all returns,

Gradually I have learned to walk more lightly, legs loose, almost gliding, and this helps a lot in times of vertigo.

When one pays attention to the present, there is great pleasure in awareness of small things; I think of the comfort I took yesterday in the thin bouillon and stale biscuits that shy Dawa brought to my leaking tent.

I wonder why, in this oppressive place, I feel so full of well-being, striding on through the rain, and grateful in some unnameable way—to what?

GS, disgusted, says he is continually astonished by the poor adaptation of Himalayan peoples to their environment.

all these mythical embodiments of Buddhahood called Bodhisattvas, the one known to Phu-Tsering as “Chen-resigs” (literally, sPyan ras gzigs), who is the Divine Protector of Tibet and is invoked by OM MANI PADME HUM.

Pronounced in Tibet Aum—Ma-ni—Pay-may—Hung, this mantra may be translated: Om! The Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus! Hum! The deep, resonant Om is all sound and silence throughout time, the roar of eternity and also the great stillness of pure being; when intoned with the prescribed vibrations, it invokes the All that is otherwise inexpressible.

The mani is the “admantine diamond” of the Void—the primordial, pure, and indestructible essence of existence beyond all matter or even anti-matter, all phenomena, all change, and all becoming, Padme—in the Lotus—is the world of phenomena, samsara, unfolding with spiritual progress to reveal beneath the leaves of delusion the mani-jewel of nirvana, that lies not apart from daily life but at its heart. Hum has no literal meaning, and it is variously interpreted (as is all of this great mantra, about which whole volumes have been written). Perhaps it is simply a rhythmic exhortation, completing the mantra and inspiring the chanter, a declaration of being,