Questions of faith on a trek in Nepal
Two nights into the pilgrimage, I had an overtly spiritual dream – the football at Diego Maradona’s feet burst into flames. Recollection of the scene gave me a much-needed boost halfway through a trek around sacred Buddhist sites in the Kathmandu valley.
The sprawling Nepalese capital is notorious for its smog but on the trails above we caught clear views of the Himalayas to the north. The first time was the most exciting, a narrow chunk barely discernible by a few jagged lines among puffy clouds of the exact same whiteness. Big yellow or black butterflies, monkeys and long-tailed birds were among the delights in the forest, as well as pink orchid-like flowers. The invigorating scent of pine sap rose from trees felled to clear landslides after torrential rain – and devastating floods – a few weeks before. I squeezed a few drops of the silver in my fingers and breathed in.
Hiking in this setting was mostly a joy, apart from a bit of painless blood sucking by leeches. (They found their way into my shoes and made shallow red marks in my feet the size and neatness of paper punch holes. I only discovered this when I took off my blood-smeared socks that evening, an odd sensation of fait accompli, like coming home to a burglary.)
Pilgrim – the root of the word, peregrinus, is Latin for foreigner, without any connotation of a spiritual journey. I came to Nepal with my wife Clunie at the start of a three-month trip, the rest of which will be spent in India. Neither of us has been anywhere in Asia before – we’ve only been out of western Europe a handful of times between us. The years have been going by – 60 of them, all told – and we’ve finally managed to carve out the extended break. That was not easy (though I expect no sympathy). We have definitely not retired.
The pilgrimage aspect did not come out of nowhere, though. Mindfulness and meditation are central to Clunie’s work and though she follows a more secular practice, she fully acknowledges their Buddhist roots. My own interest overlaps hers, and has been deepened by it, so I took little persuasion to do the four-day guided walk.
But, as open as I tried to be, I struggled at times with the experience of being invited to watch, or even join, to some small extent, other people’s religious rituals. We talk about adherents observing a particular faith, a paradoxically detached term for something so involved. Often I was an observer, watching with interest, but at other moments I wanted to look away, and not just from the decapitated goats strewn around old Kathmandu on the Hindu feast of Maha Ashtami, which is part of the Dashain festival.
At one point, the day before Maradona appeared in all his subversive and miraculous glory, I felt an intense irritability with the devotees – their robes, butter lamps, prayer beads and incense: the whole shebang. Once I whacked my head on a low entrance to the sound of chanting. Another time, short of sleep to start with, I found it hard to stay awake on a monastery tour that went into detail about the lineage of various enlightened beings who had frequented the area. To me, the big statues erected for their worship looked daunting, impersonal.
It had been a different story on our first evening in Kathmandu, when we walked the short distance from our hotel to the Boudha Stupa. I knew barely anything about this magnificent structure except that it was a major sacred site that pilgrims walked around. The few photos I’d seen had hardly registered. That ignorance turned out to be a blessing. With its huge white dome, four pairs of painted eyes, golden spire and four sets of multicoloured prayer flags fluttering down like guy ropes too exuberant to touch the ground, the visual impact was stunning. To my narrow frame of reference it evoked everything between a basilica such as St Peter’s in Rome, an early warning radar station, a maypole, even, more crassly, SpongeBob.
The maypole echo might make sense on some level but it could not be less apt in terms of cultural or spiritual vitality. One is a symbol of a mostly lost or commodified folklore, in the UK anyway; the other exerts a magnetic, dynamic yet calming pull like no other building I’ve seen. Sound-proofed from the six lanes of traffic only yards away on Boudha Road by a high circular shield of old buildings – restaurants, craft shops, clothes shops, galleries – the Boudha Stupa, also known as Boudanath and Khasti Chaitya, is believed to hold the sacred relics of Kassapa Buddha, and draws a constant stream of people, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Many are pilgrims in the usual sense, from far and wide – many circumambulators wear the robes of Buddhist monks and nuns – but everyone is made to feel welcome.
A hum of solo prayers and gentle chatter on the move fills the air. It would be almost impossible to visit this place without joining the flow. The circular, communal but free movement – everyone walks the clockwise koras at their own pace, with small children spinning the prayer wheels in the same way they might drag a stick against railings – feels grounding and affirmative.
The Boudha Stupa is a haven, a spectacle, an experience, a rite. (At night, from a distance it looks enlightened itself, lit from within – an illusion conjured by spotlights.) It also does something profound in the way it both unifies people and displaces notions of linear time. The years might go by but they also come around, like days, seasons. We go round in circles in so many respects, repetitions that are similar, never identical. As the late John Burnside wrote, real time “flows in all directions… it happens, it accumulates in reverse and… it returns transformed and dynamic.”
Maybe that’s why Buddhists focus so much on the cycle of the breath, our most basic unit of consciousness.
Near the sacred site of Namo Buddha, with landslide damage in the background.
What Burnside noted of time seems closely linked to how memory operates. In Nepal certain scenes came back from thousands of miles away, decades before.
My maternal grandmother moved from London to Rome in her late seventies, on her own, and became a Catholic (my mother had converted years before, at the age of 15, of her own accord). Many people questioned why she would take such a leap but she relished her new life there and it became home for all but her last few weeks. She died aged 94 in my childhood bed back in London (I was no longer a child and had long since moved out).
Once, on a visit to her flat in the heart of the city, near the Pantheon, I went with her to an open air papal mass outside St Peter’s, on her invitation. It was about 10 years after I had “lapsed” (also aged 15). I love that word for a no-longer practising Catholic, with its hint of both collapse and something merely careless, reversible. It’s not like apostasis – literally a standing outside, with its finality of rejection.
The place was packed, as you’d expect. Curiosity rather than faith had taken me there but maybe some part of me was trying to unlapse. Stuck in the middle of a row of elderly – as they seemed to me then – women, suddenly I couldn’t take it any more: the droning prayers, what I saw as the performative keenness and, above all, the fanatical adulation of the Pope, visible in the distance in his white robes, part rock star, part human deity. Leaving was not so easy – the women jostled me and gave murderous looks. To her credit, when we were reunited at her flat my grandmother took the frank explanation in her stride.
The apparatus or props, if that is not too cynical a word, of Tibetan Buddhism are surprisingly similar to those of Catholicism – prayer beads quite like the rosary I got for my first Holy Communion; bells to be rung at the right moments; the burning of substances to purify the air. The juniper that smoulders away at sacred sites emits a drier, less sweet smell than the swirls of incense that I used to love watching as they chink-chinked out of the priest’s thurible (I’ve only just looked up that word now) when he swung it back and forth. In Nepal I could not help thinking it was more like smoke from a superior bonfire.
The Buddha Stupa in Kathmandu.
How would my parents have reacted to the Boudha Stupa? Growing up, I was led to feel Catholic more than Christian, an identity foisted and formed in opposition to various others. I like to imagine their curiosity would have won out over their tribalism but it’s possible they would have recited a few Hail Marys as they completed perhaps just the one kora.
When the guides led us up the tricky path to Guru Rinpoche’s cave high above the giant Buddha statue that looms over Pharping, I was too wary to walk through the narrow opening. What if a rockfall trapped us inside? Or the Earth shrugged? Then I found some courage and squeezed in sideways behind one guide. By torchlight we took about 20 steps to the far wall, where we made out a tiny shrine of white scarves and burnt butter lamps. No one else was there but a footprint was visible in the stone. It felt impressive but no more miraculous than each breath, each step.