Himalayas

The Himalayas run along the northern edge of the subcontinent, and several traditions use them for the same purpose: to mark where the everyday human world stops.

In Hindu texts the range is Shiva's country. Kailash, a peak in western Tibet, is his seat, and the lake beside it, Manasarovar, is described as formed in the mind of the creator. The Ganges is said to descend from heaven into the mountains, its force broken by falling first onto Shiva's matted hair, which is why the river's emergence from the range is itself a pilgrimage destination. Parvati, Shiva's consort, is the daughter of the mountain.

For Tibetan Buddhism the range is not a boundary but the southern wall of the plateau where the tradition developed, and the passes through it are the routes by which Indian Buddhism reached Tibet and by which Tibetan communities later came south into exile.

Running through all of it is the ascetic's move upward. Renouncers of several traditions go into the high country to practise away from settled society, and the pattern is old, shared and still current. Sondra Hausner's fieldwork with wandering Hindu ascetics found people whose lives are organised around a circuit of Himalayan sites rather than a single hermitage, which complicates the picture of the solitary mountain hermit without replacing it.

Mount Kailash is sacred to four traditions at once, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Bon, and the circuit around its base is walked by pilgrims of all of them, clockwise in three cases and anticlockwise in the fourth. Nobody climbs it, by agreement.

Alex McKay's history of the site makes an argument worth recording carefully, because it is the kind of finding the atlas exists to hold. The identification of this particular peak with the Kailash of the texts, and the shape of the pilgrimage now practised, are considerably more recent and more constructed than the devotional literature suggests, and the modern circuit owes a good deal to renunciate traditions that established themselves in the western Himalaya in the last few centuries and to the accounts of British surveyors and travellers who described what they found in terms their readers expected. This is not a claim that the sanctity is invented. It is a claim that sacred geography has a history, that it can be dated, and that the dating is often much later than the tradition assumes.

The practical questions are modern too. Kailash lies in Tibet, so Indian and Nepali pilgrims reach it across an international border under permit, and access has repeatedly been suspended for political reasons or reopened as a diplomatic gesture. Whether a pilgrimage exists in any given year is currently a matter for two governments.