Mount Kailash

Eight chortens stand in a line beside a low run of limestone, and the water comes up out of the ground between them without any drama at all. A few weedy ponds. A stream that runs eight hundred metres into the Bokhar chu, and the Bokhar is one of the three streams that make the Indus. Tibetans read the ground here as an animal: the ridge to the north is a lion, the pale slopes to the west are its tail, a rock beside the spring is its ear, and the wet place where the water surfaces is the mouth. Senge Kabab. Lion’s Mouth. Pilgrims come here because this is where the Indus begins. Surveyors put its true source twenty-seven kilometres further off and fifty-five kilometres from the mountain that gets the credit for both, which is a useful thing to learn early, because almost nothing attached to Mount Kailash is quite where the stories put it.

The mountain itself sits in Ngari, the far western corner of the Tibetan plateau, in the range that runs parallel to the Himalaya proper and north of it. It is not the highest thing for hundreds of miles and it does not need to be. What it has is separation. The surrounding ridges fall away and leave a squared-off block of dark rock rising alone, snow packed into its horizontal beds so that the whole face reads as courses of masonry, the north side sheer enough that the first sun on it comes as a shock of gold at an hour when the valley is still blue and bitterly cold. Below it to the south lie two lakes, Manasarovar and Rakas Tal, one held holy and one held otherwise. English writing has also called the peak Mount Sumeru, welding it to Meru, the cosmic axis at the centre of Hindu and Buddhist world-systems. That is a conflation rather than an identity. Meru is a mountain at the centre of the universe and belongs to cosmology; Kailash is a specific block of rock with a road to it, and the habit of treating the second as the first is one of the ways its reputation grew.

Four of the great rivers of Asia rise within about a hundred and twenty-five kilometres of it: the Indus, the Sutlej, the Karnali that feeds the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra. That fact does most of the mountain’s argument for it, and it has been overstated for as long as it has been known. Swami Pranavananda, who went and looked, put it flatly: statements by authors confirming that the Indus rises at the northern foot of Kailash are absolutely wrong. The traditional sources and the geographical sources are two different sets of places, tens of kilometres apart, and the pilgrims who visit the springs are not making a mistake so much as making a different kind of claim.

In Sanskrit the mountain is Kailāsa and it belongs to Shiva. He sits there with Parvati and the household, and the epics and Puranas send figures up to it the way they send them to any other place a story needs. What is missing is a footing. There is no Kailas in the Vedas at all, and in the epic and Puranic literature the name usually works as a toponym in a mythical register, a mountain in the mind rather than a mountain with a road to it. At least five separate peaks in the Indian Himalaya carry the name. The clear, dateable evidence for renunciates actually reaching this particular Tibetan mountain begins in the eighteenth century, and the idea of Kailash and Manasarovar as Shiva’s home, reachable by ordinary Hindu pilgrims who are not ascetics, takes its modern shape only between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The mountain is old. Its fame is not.

The best story told about it is a story about failing to move it. In the Uttara Kanda of Valmiki’s Ramayana, Ravana comes north in the flying chariot Pushpaka after beating his half-brother the lord of wealth, and the chariot stops dead over a golden fen of reeds. A creature comes down to explain why. Not the white bull of temple sculpture: a squat, shaven-headed, yellow and black dwarf with short arms, monkey-faced, holding a trident. This is Nandi, and he tells Ravana to go, because Shankara is amusing himself on this mountain and it is closed to birds, serpents, Yakshas, gods, Gandharvas and Rakshasas alike. Ravana looks at the monkey face and laughs, a laugh the text compares to thunder. Nandi curses him on the spot: monkeys will come, armed with nails and teeth, falling like an avalanche of rocks, and they will finish him. Then Ravana gets his arms under the mountain and shakes it until Parvati grabs her husband’s neck in fright, and Shiva, as if in sport, presses down with his great toe and pins the demon’s arms under the rock. He screams for a thousand years. When Shiva finally lets him out he does it with a compliment and a name, Ravana, the one who makes the worlds cry out, and a sword called Chandrahasa, handed over with a warning that contempt for the weapon will send it straight back to its owner.

Tibetans do not call it Kailash. They call it Ti-se, and their own record for it starts late too, in the second millennium, with the earliest hints of sanctity attaching to the lake rather than the peak. The mountain becomes Buddhist ground by a series of specific human acts. In the thirteenth century the Drukpa Kagyu renunciate Gotsangpa Gonpo Dorje, who lived from 1189 to 1258 and founded the branch of his school known as the Upper Drukpa, laid the mandala of his tutelary deity Demchok over the landscape and opened the circuit to lay pilgrims who were not tantric adepts. The route he charted is still the route. Whether the Pali Kelasa of the early Buddhist texts has anything to do with this peak is another matter; the geography does not match and the modern identification does not follow from it.

The famous origin story is later and shakier. Milarepa, the yogi, meets a Bön sorcerer called Naro Bönchung, who tells him the mountain is Bön ground; they hold a contest of miracles across the lake and the peak, and Milarepa wins by riding the first sunbeam of dawn to the summit while his rival is still labouring up on a drum. Naro Bönchung is exiled to Bonri, from which he can see Ti-se and never reach it. The episode is absent from every early life of Milarepa, including those written by his own disciples Rechungpa and Gampopa. It surfaces briefly more than a century after his death in a song collection ascribed to the Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorje, and only reaches its full shape in 1488, in the hands of Tsangnyön Heruka, roughly three hundred and fifty years late. Dan Martin’s verdict on the loser is worth quoting: no evidence for the existence of a Naro Bönchung as such is known from the Bön side, and the name itself is hard to account for. Bönchung means little Bönpo. It is an insult, not a name. Bön sources make Milarepa himself the son of a Bönpo clan.

What the story does, and does very efficiently, is evict a god. Before the contest the mountain answers to Walchen Gekhö, the Bön yidam of Zhang Zhung; after it, to Demchok. Bön hymns can still be identified by the way they list the directions counterclockwise, which is the reverse of the Buddhist order, and that reversal is the whole quarrel in miniature: two traditions walking the same rock in opposite directions and each certain the other is going the wrong way round. Jain tradition adds a fourth claim, placing the liberation of Rishabhanatha on a mountain called Ashtapada and pointing, for centuries, at this one, though Jain writing tends to treat Ashtapada as a lost place and the identification has never been settled.

The rest is recent and well documented. A British official, C. A. Sherring, published Western Tibet and the British Borderland in 1906 partly to encourage pilgrim traffic and the revenue it would bring to a poor hill district. Sven Hedin came through in 1907 and wrote the region up inside a fashionable idea of a timeless Tibet. Pranavananda, English-educated and rigorous, spent years measuring it and raised its profile enormously while doing so. Bhagwan Shri Hamsa’s The Holy Mountain of 1934 fed it into Theosophy, and the German Buddhist Lama Anagarika Govinda finished the job, turning a specific Tibetan peak into a universal spiritual centre belonging to nobody in particular.

Its power, then, is not the kind a mountain usually has. It grants nothing by being ascended, because nobody ascends it; the only recorded summit in the whole literature is Milarepa’s, and he did it on a sunbeam. What it offers is the circuit, and the circuit is hard: days on foot from Darchen, thin air, a pass well above five thousand metres, weather that turns without warning, and stretches where the only company is a wolf keeping pace at a distance. Its limits are the same as its attractions. The claim is contested at every level, from which deity holds it to which river truly starts there, and the deeper you dig into any single assertion about the place the younger that assertion turns out to be. The rock is unarguable. Everything hung on it was hung there by somebody, and most of it within the last thousand years.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is Mount Kailash and why is it sacred?

Mount Kailash stands in Ngari, the far western part of the Tibetan plateau, in the Trans-Himalayan range north of the Himalaya proper. It is sacred to Hindus as the abode of Shiva, to Tibetan Buddhists as the mandala of the tantric deity Demchok, to followers of Bön as the seat of the god Walchen Gekhö, and to Jains as the mountain where Rishabhanatha attained liberation. Four of Asia’s great rivers, the Indus, Sutlej, Karnali and Brahmaputra, rise within about a hundred and twenty-five kilometres of it.

Has anyone climbed Mount Kailash?

No ascent of Mount Kailash appears anywhere in its religious or scholarly literature except a legendary one. The Tibetan yogi Milarepa is said to have reached the summit by riding the first sunbeam of dawn during a contest of miracles against the Bön sorcerer Naro Bönchung. Pilgrims walk a circuit around the mountain’s base instead of climbing it, and every tradition that claims Kailash treats the summit as somewhere people do not go.

Is Mount Kailash the same as Mount Meru?

They are frequently identified with each other and they are not the same thing. Mount Meru is the cosmic axis of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, a mountain at the centre of the universe rather than a place on a map. Mount Kailash is a specific peak in western Tibet that has repeatedly been treated as Meru’s earthly counterpart, which is how the two names ended up welded together in popular writing.

What happens in the story of Ravana and Mount Kailash?

In the Uttara Kanda of Valmiki’s Ramayana, the demon king Ravana is stopped over the mountain when his flying chariot halts, and Shiva’s attendant Nandi, described there as a squat monkey-faced dwarf rather than a bull, orders him away. Ravana laughs at Nandi’s face and is cursed that monkeys will destroy him. He then tries to uproot the mountain, and Shiva pins his arms under it with one toe for a thousand years before releasing him, naming him Ravana, and giving him the sword Chandrahasa.

How old is Mount Kailash’s reputation as a holy mountain?

Much younger than it appears. There is no reference to Kailas in the Vedas, and in the epics and Puranas the name generally functions as a mythical toponym rather than a mountain anyone could travel to. Clear evidence of Hindu renunciates reaching this Tibetan peak begins in the eighteenth century, Tibetan sources treat it as a great sacred site only from the second millennium, and its global fame was built by colonial officials, modern swamis and Theosophists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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