All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (11 page)

And yet despite the ambiguity of India, or perhaps merely its complexity for someone like myself, it was by far the most absorbing place I had ever been. Religion, as I had learned it in childhood, seemed to divide the world into two halves: one sacred, one profane. In India that division was gone. Here everything was sacred, everything was set apart for the worship or service of God. People saw Him everywhere – in elephants, in river stones, in the whorls upon a human hand. Were they ridiculous? Should we be against religion because, as Richard Dawkins suggests, ‘it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world’?

Or was it that we were searching for a new understanding of the world to combat our chronic levels of depression, disease and disconnection? Was it we who were so cut off from the idea of the earth as ‘sacred’ that we were close to destroying it altogether? Was it we who were so bound up in epistemology that we were confining ourselves, before the journey had even begun, to languishing in unsatisfactory scepticism?

In all likelihood, I would never know if the female
sadhu
had really mastered the
siddhas
. But this experience, far more than in some limited quest for proof, had brought me in contact with a person who had spent fifty years in the most rigorous search for transcendence. For the first time I had met someone who, it seemed clear, had earned a knowledge of the spaces which lay beyond the veil. Whatever the outcome of this strange pilgrimage I seemed to be on, I was glad of the journey that had led me to that.

In what I sought next, this experience might also serve me well. An ecologist friend of mine had remembered something highly intriguing from his time spent in Ladakh. While working near Zanskar, he’d come to know the village ‘oracle’: a trance healer who had some local renown as a healer and diviner. When not in trance she was a normal member of the community, a wife and mother, he told me. But once a week she donned the ceremonial robes of a
lhama
and left her body completely. When she was in such a state, the villagers would come to her with their problems, both physical and psychological, and, for the most part, she treated them with complete success.

‘There aren’t many oracles left now,’ he said. ‘It was ten years ago when I saw this. But if you’re interested in spirit worlds I strongly suggest you go up there. I only saw her in trance once, but it was the most extraordinary experience of my life.’

Oracles in the Land of the Snows

In north-west India, bordering the vale of Kashmir and the trans-Kunlun territory of East Turkistan and Tibet, lies Ladakh, Land of the High Passes, one of the most isolated cultures on earth. More even than Nepal and Tibet, both of which are now easily accessible, Ladakh retains the allure of a forgotten kingdom, a place of vast mountainscapes, amongst which Buddhist monks meditate towards enlightenment in their ancient monasteries.

Beyond the chance to see oracles, there were other reasons to reach Ladakh. It would be a chance to explore a unique desert eco-system. Cut off from the monsoon, Ladakh usually receives less than fifty millimetres of rain per year. Its vistas are a combination of weather-beaten cliffs and alpine desert, blown into uncanny shapes by the dust-laden wind, and immense open plateaux upon which little grows. In this surreal setting, a distinctive culture of some 150,000 people survives. The town of Dras in Kargil district has the dubious distinction of being the second coldest inhabited town in the world.

Given the immensity and loneliness of the Ladakhi landscapes, it seems little wonder that Buddhism, reaching Leh via Kashmir in the second century ad, should have found such fertile soil here. Most of the Buddha’s teachings stem from his insights concerning
sunyata
or the essential emptiness of all phenomena. For the Buddha, the world, as human beings imagine it to exist, is an illusion. Nothing exists in isolation or possesses a separate ‘self ’. Instead, he taught his disciples to view the material world as a complex web of interdependence and connectivity. Things – a flower, or an individual human self – only exist in relation to each other.

For the Ladakhis, eking out a difficult existence amidst the vagaries of a harsh natural world, this teaching of connectivity must have been profoundly life-affirming. Before that time, most of Ladakh practised a pantheistic animism in which aspects of their environment were worshipped as the abode of cosmic deities. This natural world was seen as a fearful place, full of spirits, demons and ‘hungry ghosts’. With the coming of Buddhism, a systematic philosophical system linked the Ladakhis to the world around them. It also espoused inner silence as the ground upon which to plant the seeds of nirvana. Silence, as any visitor to Ladakh can attest, is something Ladakhis know well.

As is often the case in the transmigration of beliefs, it didn’t take long before the Buddhist teachings began to merge with what had been there before. Elements of Hinduism, sympathetic magic and shamanism blended with the incoming Buddhism, resulting in a form of practice which is some distance from what the Buddha taught. This Vajrayana school (common to most of the Himalayan regions) is a highly esoteric religion, often involving great secrecy. It also contains a great number of magical formulas, the exorcism and destruction of demons, divination, auguries, and – if I could still find them – oracles.

Prior to my experiences in Ladakh, I knew next to nothing of oracles. The classical world, I remembered from school, had believed in oracles, most famously in Delphi. The priestess of the oracle at Delphi was known as the ‘Pythia’ and it was said that Apollo spoke through her. Generally an older woman of blameless life chosen from among the peasants of the area, the oracle sat on a tripod seat over an opening in the earth. Some theories suggest that the fissure over which she sat may have released a type of natural gas with the power to induce trances. Under the influence, the oracle spoke in riddles which were then interpreted by the priests of the temple. Seekers from all over the classical world came to see the oracle, and she was consulted before all major political undertakings.

From Delhi my plane flew north-west towards the Zoji La Pass. Before the coming of air travel, this was the lowest western land approach to Ladakh, at 14,000 feet. Even by plane, the experience is astounding. For some time one creeps above serrated peaks, peering into deserted snow bowls, before suddenly dropping into the Leh valley. Kushok Bakula Rimpoche airport, the highest commercial landing strip in the world, turns out to be a kind of military encampment, ringed by barbed wire and hills of brown shale. Officially part of the Indian sector of divided Kashmir, Ladakh retains one of the strongest military presences in India and, from the first, this is powerfully evident. Tourists, in fact, have only been allowed into Ladakh since 1974.

Stepping out in the piercing clarity of Leh, one is struck immediately by the air, so thin and pure, one’s lungs marvel first at the sheer sweetness of this nectar, and only then begin to feel its scarcity. At 3,050 metres, visitors to Leh invariably feel some symptoms of altitude sickness, and especially those who arrive by air. By early evening I was wishing I’d made a more conservative approach, as a throbbing headache set up shop for the night.

Nevertheless, Leh in summer is an enchanting sight. Soon after leaving the somewhat forbidding environs of the airport, one arrives in the town itself, a jumble of traditional mud buildings, ringed by apricot and apple trees, rich vegetable patches, willow and poplars. More even than the natural environment, fed by trickling glacier-melt for the short summer months, it’s the Ladakhi people who enliven their surroundings. Weather-worn like almost no other people on earth, they bear the distinctive pink complexion of high altitude dwellers, as well as the most evocative smiles I’ve ever encountered.

For the first few days I lay low, reading in the garden of my guesthouse, while the elderly patriarch of the family hoed onions in the clear light. Initially I had trouble sleeping, and the slightest exertion left me panting. But soon – thanks to a diet rich in blood-thinning garlic and litres of water – my body began to acclimatise and I was able to begin my explorations of Leh. Another guest in the Oriental Guesthouse fared less well. Beset by fever, vomiting and diarrhoea, she showed all the signs of chronic altitude sickness. The local doctor came to visit, recommending her glucose and apricots, which, due to their high iron content, help the body to produce red blood cells more easily. The patriarch, a spry seventy-eight but with the mischievous grin of a teenager, seemed unfazed by the American girl’s travails. ‘All will pass,’ he whispered to me, as the American sucked on her oxygen tank. ‘According to Lord Buddha everything passes . . . although perhaps more slowly for Americans.’

From the guesthouse, a rutted track led down towards the town. I walked slowly, my senses alive to the Himalayan light, the chattering of finches, the wild flowers lit up on the verge. Behind a low stone wall, a newly born
dozo
calf, the hardy half-cow, half-yak breed which serves the Ladakhis as farm animals, lay soaking up the sunlight. Still wet with afterbirth, it struggled to its feet, then slipped, then struggled up again. Steam rose from its back.

I stopped for a minute, overwhelmed by the wonder of it all, the smells of wood smoke and newly turned earth. Not even a murmur of wind served to break this endless silence. That old, obscure longing felt in cities seemed entirely absent here. There was nowhere I was trying to get to, nowhere I needed to be. My heart was overflowing with the simple delight of the moment.

Towards the town, however, all was less serene. A small hump-backed bridge had collapsed due to the storm-fed river, and a group of military engineers were erecting a temporary replacement. It was dangerous work, with the icy cold water bolting over the rocks below, gurgling and sucking downstream. One intrepid Sikh, tied on with ropes, was lowering himself an inch above the white water to hammer in some bolts. He stopped from time to time to realign his turban.

‘Big problem is there,’ shouted a young soldier to me above the noise of the rapids. He beamed as if this were all a huge adventure. ‘Too much rain is coming. Bridge has been smashed to pieces!’

As I would learn over the weeks to come, this was just one incident in a worsening series. In recent years, global warming has changed the weather patterns considerably here, to the point that rainfall had exceeded the total yearly average merely in the two weeks prior to my arrival. For a self-reliant culture, whose entire social structure has carefully evolved around agricultural practices designed to make the most of an exceptionally short growing season, such changes are potentially catastrophic. Their crops – barley, millet, apricots – do not fare well in too much rain. Nor do their houses, made of mud and brick. Or their animals, their roads, even the clothes they wear. Ladakhi culture is a marvel of invention and evolution – but how can a culture attuned to its landscape over millennia be expected to adapt within a few short seasons?

‘We’re very frightened about the future,’ one dusty farmer later told me in a small workers’ café. ‘This year we have seen a month of rain! Never, even in the memory of my grandfather, has this happened. People in the Markha valley have lost everything.’

The town itself – aside from the occasional rumbling truck, and the ubiquitous backpackers’ cafés – has changed scarcely, perhaps, for millennia. It was once a major trading post, and merchants from Persia moved through the Karakoram mountains to the great Silk Road at Yarkand here, carrying their precious cargoes of gold, silk and opium.

Along the thoroughfare, sun-beaten Ladakhi women sat before their piles of produce – luminous green beans, rosy-cheeked apricots, stunted carrots – with which they eke out a meagre wage to buy the goods they cannot grow themselves. Some of them had travelled many miles to bring their wares to market. With them were donkeys hopping with fleas, a lumbering yak, monks en route for their monasteries in the deep interior. Noticing one of them, a contemplative young boy of no more than ten or eleven, I wondered whether this bustle was exciting for him, a welcome respite from his duties, or if – to the contrary – he longed for the silence of the inner passes.

Finding a small café with tables shielded from the sun, I ordered some rolls with thick apricot jam, and ate my breakfast. They even had coffee – a fortunate by-product of tourism in these parts – and I sipped it contentedly, noting Kashmiri merchants en route for the mosque, an old woman spreading apricots out to dry on the flat of her roof, two backpackers arriving on heavily laden Enfield motorcycles.

An Indian man approached me: ‘You want meditation classes?’ he asked. ‘I teach yoga system of Patanjali, Tibetan yoga, Astanga yoga, kundalini yoga and bhakti yoga. All types are possible, depending on budget.’

‘That’s very comprehensive,’ I said. ‘Why so many types?’

He leaned closer. ‘Honestly, sir, foreign people are liking
too
many choices. It is how they are. But actually, all systems the same!’ He roared with delight. ‘Our little secret, yes.’

Over the next week I begin to frequent the library of the Ladakhi Ecological Development Group, set up in the 1970s by veteran activist Helena Norberg Hodge. Here, as well as coordinating various efforts to preserve Ladakh from the marauding shock of the new, a well-stocked library houses books in many languages and dialects. None of the librarians knew much of a continuing oracle tradition, however, despite their keen interest in my project. ‘I have heard that this is a practice of the villages closer to Tibet,’ one of them told me. ‘But we do not have such things here – not for a long time. I would not know where to begin. If you had been here fifty years ago, perhaps . . .’