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The Himalayas: Wanderers from the West
One man's high-altitude journey for Moses, Milarepa, and the Mountain Temple
BY W. K. JACKSON
The driven are drawn to the mountains.
As the cotton-clad Tibetan saint Milarepa, having stripped himself of all vestiges of his former life, found Enlightenment in a rock-cave in the hills, so a few non-Tibetan, non-Nepali, non-Indian, non-Bhutanese, non-everything-but-Western folks find themselves one day in the foothills of the world’s mightiest peaks. Compulsions differ, but the natures of these forces that induce are the same, awakening the primordial instinct these days so often dormant in the human psyche: the instinct to search.
I myself find a certain solace in the knowledge that behind the looming clouds one of the highest places on the planet touches the sky. On a clear day the dignity of Kanchenjunga, bested in height only by Everest and K2, comforts me, injects me with a certain unexplainable hope that is gratifying beyond words. Surely here, where every soaring summit is draped in wind-horse prayer flags that come alive with each zephyr, where humanity comes together so severely – the native and the tourist, the black and the white, those who sleep soundly in the grand Windamere Hotel and those who opt instead for creepy-crawly company at the Bengali Guest House – surely here, surrounded by steep slopes and glacial turrets and the mixed chants of the Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim faithful, something of that elusive Answer toward which the driven are driven exists, waiting to be found.
A thousand years ago, Milarepa trudged through the hills to locate a rock cavity suitable for his purposes, as directed by his root guru, the wise Marpa the Translator. Milarepa’s past was marred by evil deeds that ranged in wickedness from the destruction of others’ property to mass murder by black magic. Spurred on by the shame of his terrible works, the young man sought out the great guru Marpa, and after many trials at his master’s side, the student’s course became clear: into the hills. Nowadays, while certain ascetics find their path leads them in the same direction – to a place alone in the mountains – most religious devotees can accomplish their purposes well enough in the confines of a monastery: “in retreat” as they say. I like to think that all of us in the foothills, Buddhist or not, in pursuit of religious awakening or otherwise, are “in retreat” in some fashion. Like Marpa’s illustrious student in the eleventh century, all of us here find ourselves contemplating things that are only fleeting thoughts, wisps of ideas, on the plains.
The driven are many, at least more than I originally assumed. They hail from centers of civilization scattered all over the Western world, their backgrounds are diverse, and their stated reasons for coming to the hills vary more than the region’s elevation. One repository of such specimens can be found in Darjeeling’s Manjushree Center of Tibetan Culture, where a small group of Western driven spend four hours a day learning spoken and literary Tibetan in a moldy room under hospital lights that flicker with frequent electricity surges.
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Paul Brownell, age 29. Approximately six feet tall, Paul boasts a head that is regularly bald, but his goatee is thick with black hair, and his face delivers a ready smile. The son of a neurologist and a registered nurse-turned-homemaker, Paul grew up a baptized member of the United Church of Canada (“a liberal Lutheranism,” he laughs) in Calgary, Alberta, the second-youngest of five children to whom he describes his relationship as “very close.” But while his siblings chose careers in sales, with the municipality, or in the footsteps of their parents pursuing medicine, Paul stood out, preferring philosophy at a liberal arts college to the sciences. His desire at the time was to study creative writing, and, upon the suggestion of a professor at the college, he applied for a program in Colorado at Naropa University. His application was promptly rejected without even an explanatory letter.
“I was disillusioned and didn’t know what I was going to do with school,” said Paul, who did what most driven are apt to do: he left.
South America’s British Guyana welcomed him first. Paul volunteered as part of an AIDS awareness program, at the same time striving to improve the literacy among small Amer-Indian communities in the country. The tiny Micronesian island of Vanuatu followed, where Paul continued his humanitarian work among the locals. But a mysterious sickness called an early halt to his efforts in that land, and he was quickly moved to a hospital in Melbourne, Australia, where doctors were baffled by the curious illness that prompted migraines and frequent sweats. Malaria tests came back negative. Returning to Canada despite his condition, Paul suffered eight more months of the anonymous malady before, like a magician’s disappearing assistant, it simply went away.
It was in this condition that Paul, while surfing the internet, stumbled upon Naropa University’s website and found himself engaged by an advertisement there for a new program – one that combined Buddhist philosophy with social work. Despite a general lack of knowledge about Buddhism up to that point, Paul felt drawn to the program, applied (“I really had no idea what I was getting in to,” he says), and this time was accepted.
“I found that this program was not what I wanted at all,” Paul said, but one of Naropa’s other degree options was not to be so disappointing. Soon Paul signed up for the Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy program, and it was exactly what he was looking for.
The two-year degree turned out to be more than academic. A mandatory one-month-long retreat became a conversion story that culminated in a meeting with a western Buddhist teacher and the making of sacred vows “to help liberate all beings.” The philosophy he studied at school had become personal, a religion, but soon after taking his vows “everything began to crumble,” he said. “I was stressed out, I was disillusioned with school and all I wanted to do was practice meditation.” Certainly one of the young man’s most important realizations came to him during this particular struggle: that both meditation and study are essential to spiritual progression.
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