The Kailash Mansarovar Parikrama

Kailash is the clearest case in the atlas of a single physical object being four different things at once, with no version willing to be a variant of any other.

Hindu

Shiva's abode, named as such in the Puranas, with Parvati, and the still point of the Hindu cosmos. The circuit is walked clockwise, and the merit of completing it is very large; completing it in full-body prostrations, measuring the road with one's own body, is larger still and takes weeks.

Tibetan Buddhist

Tise, the seat of Demchok, Chakrasamvara, and his consort. The mountain was won for Buddhism, in the Tibetan telling, by Milarepa, who out-flew the Bon priest Naro Bonchung to the summit on the first ray of the rising sun after a long contest of magical powers. Walked clockwise.

Jain

Ashtapada, the mountain on which Rishabhanatha, the first tirthankara, attained liberation. Walked clockwise.

Bon

The nine-storey swastika mountain, the axis of Zhangzhung, the pre-Buddhist kingdom of western Tibet, and Bon tells the Milarepa story with Naro Bonchung treated very differently. Walked counter-clockwise.

That last detail is the thing to hold onto. The doctrinal disagreement is not abstract; it is visible on the path, as two streams of people passing each other going opposite ways around the same rock, each certain the other is doing it wrong.

What it costs to go

The parikrama is about 52 km and crosses the Drolma La at roughly 5,630 m, normally over three days. Access is controlled twice over:

• Indian pilgrims on the government route travel under a Ministry of External Affairs yatra with an application ballot, a compulsory medical, and a fixed quota, most applicants are not selected.
• Chinese permits are separate and have been withheld for entire seasons, including through the pandemic and following border incidents. The road crosses a contested frontier and closes for reasons that have nothing to do with weather.

People die on it most years, of altitude and of cardiac events, at a rate that would end most commercial trekking routes.

Not climbed

No ascent of Kailash is recorded and permission has never been given. Attempts have been discussed and abandoned; the Chinese authorities have declined the applications that have been made. It is one of the few significant unclimbed peaks in the world, and the reason is not technical.

This is why the commercial placement question on this route is recorded as unresolved rather than answered. The trip is sold, and it is in practice a commercial high-altitude expedition run by licensed operators on both sides of the border. It is also a penance, performed under quota, on a militarised frontier, at a place four religions hold in ways that cannot all be true. Forcing that to a yes or a no would misrepresent it.

The hardest part of the Kailash circuit is the Drolma La at around 5,630 metres, and the ground immediately before it is the part that carries the meaning. Shiwa Tsal is a wide stony flat treated as a charnel ground, where pilgrims leave something of themselves: a lock of hair, a tooth, a drop of blood, an item of clothing. The crossing is understood as a death and the descent on the far side as a rebirth, so the pass is not simply the physical crux of the walk but the point the walk is about. The ground is littered accordingly, which visitors sometimes mistake for rubbish.

Direction is doctrine here. Hindus, Buddhists and Jains walk clockwise; Bonpos walk counter clockwise, so the two streams pass each other on the same path, and the difference between the traditions is visible on the ground rather than argued in a text.

The most demanding form is the prostration circuit, in which the pilgrim measures the fifty two kilometres with the length of their own body, marking the ground at the fingertips, standing, stepping to the mark and going down again. It takes weeks.

The mountain has never been climbed and there is no record of a permitted attempt. Reinhold Messner is generally reported to have been offered or to have discussed permission and to have declined on the ground that the peak should be left alone, and a later expedition proposal was abandoned after protest. Whatever the details, the practical position is that the summit is not visited.

Access is administered rather than open. Indian pilgrims travel on a government organised route requiring a lottery, a medical examination and a fixed itinerary, and the arrangement has been suspended during periods of border tension.