Three Years in Tibet

by Ekai Kawaguchi

I did not conceal my astonishment from my host, but related to him all the circumstances that had brought me within the reach of their kind hospitalities, but he only smiled at what I told him.

“Ah! to be sure,” he said, “that’s just like the man; gentle and lovable in outward demeanor, but at heart an arch-sinner, a very devil incarnate, destroyer of the faith.”

It was a sad revelation to me. I had had every reason to be grateful to the man and his wife for their hospitalities and I could have wept to think that hypocrites of so black a dye should be found amongst the followers of Buḍḍha. It was at least a comfort to think that things in Japan were brighter than this.

The next morning I took a walk along the Lake, lost in admiration of the magnificent mountain scenery that surrounded me on all sides, and presently came across some Hinḍūs and Nepālese, apparently Brāhmaṇa devotees, who had plunged into the Lake—it was about ten o’clock—and were engaged in the performance of their religious ceremonies. To the followers of the Hinḍū religion, Lake Mānasarovara is a sacred sheet of water, and they worship Mount Kailāsa, which rises sky-high above the lake, as being a material manifestation of the sacred Body of Mahā-Shiva, one of the deities of the Indian Trinity. When they saw me, they considered me to be a holy Buḍḍhist Lama, and pressed me to accept from them presents consisting of many kinds of dried fruits.

I spent the next night at the same temple, and on the following morning made my way to the range of mountains that stands like a great wall to the north-west of the Lake. A zigzag climb of ten miles or so brought me within view of Lake Lakgal-tso, in Tibetan, or, as it is more commonly called, Rakas-tal. It is in shape something like a long calabash, and in area smaller than Mānasarovara. Another seven and a half miles brought me to a spot whence I could see the whole of its surface, and here I made a further discovery. A mountain, some two and a half miles round at the base, stands like a wall of partition between the two lakes, and where this mountain slopes into a ravine it looks, for all the world, as though there were a channel of communication for the water from one lake to the other. I found, however, that there was actually no such channel, but I discovered that the level of Lake Lakgal is higher than that of Mānasarovara, and I was subsequently told that, on rare occasions, every ten or fifteen years, after phenomenally heavy rains, the waters of the two lakes do actually become connected, and that at such times Lake Lakgal flows into Mānasarovara. Hence arises the Tibetan legend that every fifteen years or so Lakgal, the bridegroom, goes to visit Mānasarovara, the bride. This will account for the statements of the guide-books to Kang Tise and Mount Kailāsa that the relations between the two lakes are those of husband and wife.

Keeping Lake Lakgal in view, I now proceeded easily down hill for some thirteen miles or so, until I arrived at a plain through which I found a large river flowing. The river was over sixty feet wide, and was known as the Mabcha Khanbab, one of the tributary sources of the Gaṅgā. It is this river that, further south, flows through the city of Purang on the borders of India and Tibet, and then, after winding through many a defile and cañon of the Himālayas, eventually joins the main stream of the Gaṅgā flowing from Haldahal. Modern Hinḍūs revere the Haldahal branch as being the main stream of their sacred River, but in ancient times it was mostly this Mabcha Khanbab that was considered to be the principal source.

On the banks of this river we pitched our tent for the night. In the neighborhood I found four or five similar encampments, occupied by traders from Purang. Great numbers of nomads and pilgrims come to this place in July and August of every year, and at these times, a very brisk trade takes place which presents many curious and interesting features.

Tibet is still in the barter stage, and very little money is used in trade. The people from the interior bring butter, marsh-salt, wool, sheep, goats, and yaks’ tails, which they exchange for corn, cotton, sugar and cloth, which are imported from India by Nepālese and Tibetans, living in the region of perennial snow on the Indian frontier. But sometimes, especially in selling wool and butter, they will take money, generally Indian currency, the reckoning of which is a great mystery to them. Ignorant of arithmetic and possessing no abacus to count with, they have to do all their reckoning with the beads of a rosary. In order to add five and two, they count first five and then two beads on the string, and then count the whole number thus produced to make sure that the total is really seven. It is a very tedious process, but they are incapable of anything better. They cannot do calculations without their beads, and they seem to be too dense to grasp the simplest sum in arithmetic. Thus business is always slow: when it comes to larger deals, involving several kinds of goods and varying prices, it is almost distractingly complicated.

For such calculations they arm themselves with all sorts of aids, black pebbles, white pebbles, bamboo sticks, and white shells. Each white pebble represents a unit of one; when they have counted ten of these they take them away, and substitute a black pebble, which means ten. Ten black pebbles are equivalent to one bamboo stick, ten bamboo sticks to one shell, ten shells to the Tibetan silver coin. But there is no multiplication or division; everything is done by the extremely slow process of adding one at a time, so that it will take a Tibetan three days to do what a Japanese could do in half an hour. This is no exaggeration. I stayed on the banks of this river for three whole days and watched the traders doing their business, and I saw the whole painful tediousness of the transaction.