Grief and Faith in Tibet

Trekking among the temples and monasteries of Nepal and southwestern Tibet, Colin Thubron hears variations of the same message whenever he consults a Buddhist priest: “The soul has no memory. The dead do not feel their past.” It’s not much consolation for an agnostic Englishman, aging and childless and now, after the death of his mother, the last surviving member of his family. But consolation — emotional if not intellectual or even spiritual — is what Thubron is after as he sets off on a grueling pilgrimage to the most sacred of the world’s mountains, an insurmountable eerie white cone that rises out of a barren plain in Tibet, shielded from easy access by the natural fortress of the Himalayas and the imported vigilance of the Chinese Army. Mount Kailas, the mystic Mount Meru of the Hindu scriptures, is venerated not only by Hindus but by Buddhists, Jains and practitioners of Bon, Tibet’s primeval faith. Together they constitute a fifth of mankind. Yet Thubron, approaching its inscrutable fastness, feels ever more solitary.

“You cannot walk out your grief,” he tells himself. “Or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are.” This is the reason he has resolved to go “walking to a place beyond your own history, to the sound of the river flowing the other way.” To embark on a journey is, he reminds himself, “my profession, after all.” And what a profession. Since the publication of his first book, “Mirror to Damascus,” in 1967, Thubron has been praised for the grace and erudition of his writing: in accounts of travels to the Near East, Russia and, in recent years, Central Asia and the ancient, now-vanishing route of the Silk Road, once the main link between China and the West. Also an accomplished novelist, he has come to be known for his ability to summon just the right phrases to fix a place or person in the mind’s eye. In “To a Mountain in Tibet,” however, what seems almost as striking is Thubron’s understanding of the power of silence.


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Webster University Thailand