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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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The
Accidental Pilgrim There was a moment, between the impossible behind us and the impossible ahead, when I disappeared along with the rest of the churning universe of my mind, and the pilgrimage mountain and life merged and stretched ahead, still and inevitable. I did not know how it had happened, or even what had happened, only that I had started the eight-mile climb of Sri Pada, Sri Lanka's holy mountain, as a tourist and now, in the black stillness of the jungle night, I felt a pilgrim. Rational logic, imported on an Airbus from London, and doubts melted into calm purposefulness while aching muscles and jarred joints eased - the lights that crowned Sri Pada still spiralled half way to the poya moon, with false trails snaking left and right, but it did not matter. Everything was in place, inevitable, right. Sri Pada means Sacred Footprint, the rock indentation that Buddhists say was left by Buddha on the top of the 2,224 metre (7,360ft) peak. Muslims call it Adam's Peak and say the footprint came from Adam's first step into our world after being cast out of paradise. Hindus believe it was made by Lord Shiva. Some call the peak Samanalankande -- the mountain where butterflies go to die. But, whatever the reason, whatever the beliefs, pilgrims have been on the peak for more than a thousand years, their suffering making karmic merit in this world and the next … and their merit as people making them suffer sometimes to the point of death. A few days before our time on the peak we had met The Venerable S. Dhammakiththi Thero, the high priest of Aukana, the site of Sri Lanka's most famous Buddha image. The 40ft standing Buddha was carved from the living rock some 1,500 years ago: today, Dhammakiththi - pronounced 'Dharmakeetee' - and his close lay associates, are revitalising the community with a new Buddhist purpose, a new school and a new hope for the future. He had a charismatic presence, at once an unworldly monk and a dynamic leader, and unusually he waited for the dawn sun and our film to agree before going through the morning ritual of offering flowers and prayers to the Buddha. That was the start of a friendship with him and his community that led us to Sri Pada on the next poya - full moon holiday - in the company of 20 or so people from his Aukana Rajamaha Viharaya temple complex, some of the teachers from the associated school and others from the local community. For them, the only route was the long traditional climb from Ratnapura. The quick route, a mere six hour climb from another direction, was better than nothing for those who could not manage the proper route and for tourists who needed experiences rather than wanting to make merit. But it was not even a consideration for our Buddhist group. For us, too, it was not a consideration - though for different reasons. We had eaten no more than snacks for two days as we went from one experience to another - the February festival in Colombo, the Bo-Path Ella waterfall near Ratnapura - and, with more determination than physical fitness, we were just taking it all in our mental stride as part of a group that had no doubts. Our two vans - one that collected us from Colombo and the other direct from Aukana with Dhammakiththi and the temple party - arrived at Sri Rajasinharanaya temple at Palabakhala, near Ratnapura, at the start of the pilgrimage route. Dhammakiththi, the supreme networker, had arranged with the monks for his party to be given a cool room, access to facilities and tea with jaggery. Refreshed, we grouped off to the Buddha shrine and then to a ritual where a temple official named us to the gods and asked them to protect us on the mountain, a coin wrapped in cloth and soaked in coconut oil bound round our right wrists - coin up for men, coin down for women - to mark us out from the less devout and wary. June, my wife, took our group photos; a stray German (the only other westerner we saw on the route) wandered into the group and was caught forever with us. Dhammakiththi said goodbye: he was staying behind. A few years ago, before the peace between the Singalese and the Tamils, his dynamic community leadership made him a target for a Tiger bomber and he was left with damaged knees, an injured eye and a police bodyguard carrying a submachinegun. Our party set off around 5pm with the day cooling: a nurse and an architect with their nine-year-old and two-year-old daughters, the young temple ladies as bright and demure as a Sunday school outing, a teacher with his wife and young son, a woman with a walking stick and two girls to help her, men in their 20s to 40s, and June and myself. No one took much: just water, food and warm clothes to protect against the cold of the night on the mountain. We were the only ones wearing anything on our feet - and then only footwear we would use for a stroll in our Cambridgeshire village on a summer's afternoon. Our bags had extra water, a few clothes and, of course, our weighty cameras, lenses and film … we had no idea how much we were going to suffer for our dubious art. At one time, pilgrims climbed the raw mountain but today the route has some concessions to the frailties of the human form. It has electric lights at intervals, tea shops where people can rest and get a variety of drinks on the trail, and the start warms up with 2,200 concrete steps which end about half way up the first of two smaller mountains that the routes crosses before it gets to Sri Pada itself. It is a pretty walk at that stage, through tea fields with brightly dressed girls plucking the young leaves, and past the first of the teas shops that line the route. A young man, bent almost double by a huge sack of supplies for one of the higher rest stops, steadily overtook us. One of the kindly group looked back to see how we were faring: no problem. The first intimation of the true difficulties of the climb came when western notions of what constitues a path petered out with the concrete steps and the climb, over just the first mountain, began in earnest from boulder step to boulder step, across huge rock surfaces chiselled with shallow footholds, through streams and over rivers, by precipitous drops into the engulfing jungle. Young men passed us, leaping ahead with the traditional chants, but our group straggled and struggled on, coalescing at times so we could all sit together on the rocks or at the tea shops perched by the trail. Some knew how far we had to go: we had an ignorance that protected us until the hours and the effort stripped away the optimism and made us wonder just what we were doing. By the highest point crossing the second mountain, the effort was eating into our reserves, sapping our strength and our water and reducing our horizon to the next boulder, the next jarring step down some black crevice in the trail. And the group - the very opposite of the competitive western trekkers in Thailand's northern hills - was closing up, everyone helping everyone else: a careful eye on the children, now flagging; on the bravely struggling woman with the walking stick; on older members of the party; and on us, out of pace and place, with one of the younger men gently insisting on carrying my bag, so I could carry June's, and two others carefully offering supporting arms for June at particularly difficult places. Finally, we reached the beginning of Sri Pada: we were on the mountain itself and the poya moon - so spiritually significant to the pilgrims - was rising clear and free of cloud, lighting up the trail like daylight and casting shadows as black as despair where not even the occasional pilgrim lights penetrated. But by then, with 7,000 feet to climb, the world for us had closed in to the next 2ft upwards heave, our clothes so wet with perspiration that it felt like we had emerged from a river. Around us were the jungle sounds, the occasional voice of the others. Ideas of staying clean had vanished and now we slumped gratefully on to rocks or ledges or roots without heed for water or insects or snakes … A few minutes later when it was time to go, one of the enthusiastic men would cry out: ''Madam! Go!'' And we would all grind on as far as we could: the nurse carrying her two-year-old, the woman with the stick fighting one step forward at a time, our weary western muscles quivering and our knees threatening to give way. At one stop Wasala, a serenely kind friend, told us: "We're late." But we could not fight through the exhaustion to care - though we might if we had known that the solicitous Dhammakiththi had got the monks at the top to cook a meal for our party, a rare treat when most pilgrims must rely only on themselves. At one point we all stopped to buy needles and cottons to thread into a white wall of cotton. We did it, took the snaps, but were past trying to get through the language maze to the meaning of the ritual. And by then time was falling apart. Someone said we had been climbing for eight hours but it felt like … I no longer knew. Nor did June. My mouth was so dry it felt glued solid. But we just kept going until everyone stopped at a derelict tea shop and food was passed around - everyone sharing the ubiquitous rice and curry; and from a flask, a couple of mouthfuls of the most delicious tea in the universe … 10 minutes rest. The woman with the stick, suffering herself, massaged June's leg muscles before rubbing Tiger Balm, of something like it, into her own legs. Earlier, it seemed hours maybe days ago, demure eyebrows had raised when the woman and June had joined in an impromptu dance with a party of 17-year-old lads who were making easy work of the descent. Our usual fierce independence was fracturing and softening round the edges as we felt the benign force of the community: everyone had to be looked after, everyone had to make it to the top - stopping was not an option and neither was leaving anyone behind. "Listen," said Wasala in the remote hours of the night. "It is not far now - you can hear the monks." Just faintly, edging inside the jungle noises, was the chant. Sri Pada, the Sacred Footprint. It was near. The agony was over. All the other false finishes, the night mirages of mistaking a high-above resting places for the monastery, were forgotten. This was it. And then we rounded a bend and looked up … and saw the pilgrim lights, high above, some curving away to the left and others to right going almost vertical, an impossible spiral into the night sky. The blow felt physical. "We'll never make it," I breathed to June. "Never," she agreed as we just stared at it. In the numbness of fatigue, the realisation grew that there was no other course but to go on. No going down. No stopping. No chance of making it to the top. "Do we take the left route or the right?" I asked. No one answered. Perhaps no one understood my question. Maybe some of them were as shocked as us. But then I understood … there was just one trail: the lights curving out of sight on the left hopelessly high above us were on the lower part and they dropped with the mountain trail, vanishing from sight, until, finally, they lurched upwards in a punishing climb to the summit. It was at that moment that everything changed. There was just the mountain, just life, and going on - the doubts just disappeared, not replaced by confidence or even hope, just not there; the inevitability of going on, never going back, simply existed in my stilled mind without emphasis or affirmation. We started climbing again, weary step after weary step, rarely looking up to see how far but conscious of the monks' chant growing louder. The group was sticking together: a helping hand here, several helping hands there … the cameras and water bag were back on my shoulder, biting into muscles, competing with the dull ache in my knees. And then, over the left curve of lights, down, down, down until the ground whipped up in a final ascent to the peak - what seemed like a million steps with a handrail, electrified in places where the lights touched it, to help arms haul flagging bodies to the top. We were too tired to be amazed when we reached the top. It was about 6am, and we had taken twice the six or seven hours that fit young men can achieve: climbing for 13 hours, awake for 24 hours, and sunrise was scheduled for half an hour later. We took off our shoes and, with the others, walked on the icy floor round the top of the peak until we followed our group of pilgrims into the shrine of the Sacred Footprint. The people before us gave the customary small gifts of money, knelt before the footprint with hands together, and bowed three times to touch it with their supplicant hands and foreheads. I bent, in the way of respectfully approaching a Buddha image and went to pass on but the attendant forcefully took my arm, showing me the right way … I knelt, hands together, and went forward three times to touch the footprint with my forehead and hands. June followed, carrying out the ritual without prompting, and we walked down the steps and on to the main concourse where Singalese and tourists from around the world vied for position to see the sunrise. Our guidebook - the Lonely Planet Sri Lanka - quotes a 19th century writer describing the peak and its pilgrims: "…others struggle upwards unaided, until, fainting by the way, they are carried … to the summit and forced into an attitude of worship at the shrine to secure the full benefits of their pilgrimage before death should supervene…" The sun eased over the horizon as the poya moon hung in the north-western sky, all our party now safely at the footprint, and we tried to tell them that we wanted to leave before them for the descent to catch the dawn light for our photographs. But, as we slipped away, the others were preparing to come too. If you believe in chance, then we chanced upon one of the truly captivating aspects of Sri Pada - the peak's dawn shadow, cast on the clouds between two lower mountains, looked like a ghost peak in greys and pinks. Revived by the experience at the top and the beauty of the ghost mountain, we began the numbing descent with the same serious intent of the climb. Near the bottom, I looked back and up at Sri Pada. The cloud was gathering round the peak, round the Sacred Footprint, and the sun was lighting it up like a halo. The tourist snapped it for the collection. But the accidental pilgrim marvelled at the sight and the night that made the confusion of life as clear as day. First published in VISA issue 56 (June 2004) |