The Mountain Road
Monday April 3, 2006
I found the following story in my files this morning, and thought that I should post it to the site. It was written several years ago, but the incident I was writing about goes back to 1990 when I was travelling in the northern part of Pakistan, the place where – amongst the ruins of Taxila, the great Buddhist monastery, and in the museums of Lahore and Peshawar – I first started to develop a strong fascination with the traditions of Buddhism.
On the day I left Gilgit I was browsing in a second hand book-shop looking for something to read on the eighteen hour bus journey back to Rawalpindi. It was a fat, green book, rather the worse for wear, with fungal spots sprawling across its pages. On the spine was a single word, written in pen: ‘Buddhism’. I picked up the book and flipped through. The style of the prose was sparse and humourless. Nevertheless, as Buddhism was something that had attracted me for some time, I looked for the price, which had been carefully marked on the inside cover of the book. Far too expensive for a book in that condition, but the salesman was not open to my attempts at bargaining. I paid full price, lifted my backpack onto my shoulders and left the shop.
Glancing at my watch, I saw that I was already late for the bus. Book tucked under my arm, I hurried through the bazaar to where the Rawalpindi Express, as it was called, was belching fumes in readiness for its departure. Before climbing on board, I stopped at a street stall where an old woman was selling cherries. Realising that I had no food for the journey, I asked if I could taste one. She handed me a single cherry which I put into my mouth: plump, sweet, but not over-ripe. I bought myself a pound in weight. I put the change into my pocket and the bus driver blew upon the horn. Finding a seat by the window, I sat down and was soon packed in with excitable gaggles of schoolkids, assorted livestock, mounds of baggage. It was late afternoon. The first pangs of anxiety began to gnaw at me. I anticipated eighteen hours of sheer terror.
Some weeks before, I had come up the same stretch of road with the sawtooth Karokorums overhead and the Indus boiling furiously down below in the gorge, the road winding round the inhospitable shoulders of those mountains some point in-between. I knew what was in store for me. The journey up the Karokorum Highway had been one of the most alarming journeys I had suffered in Pakistan, and that in a country not short on treacherous roads and questionable driving techniques. To call the road that wound up through the Karokorum range a Highway was a misnomer. It was certainly high, but it was hardly very wide, little more than a country lane in parts, barely broad enough for two buses or trucks to squeeze past each other. The melting snows – it was spring and everything was thawing – caused landslides; and whilst the authorities did all they could, the elements gnawed away at their work even before it was finished, resulting in potholes, subsidence and constantly changing conditions. One only had to read the Pakistani press to know how often a truck or a bus or a wagon went hurtling over the edge of the cliff, usually with all lives lost. Even the drivers, for all their experience, were not immune to the terrors of the road. A Pakistani friend confided in me that they liked to smoke hashish as they drove, to calm their frayed nerves.
We pulled out of Gilgit and shuddered off down the road, picking up speed. Before long we were hurtling along, the horn blaring with pride, turning those hairpin bends with undeniable panache, Bollywood’s flavour-of-the-month singing of love and moonlight in the background. Chandni, O meri chandni…
The sun dipped behind the mountains, throwing long shadows. I could hear the river bellowing down in the gorge as it tumbled over the rocks and boulders. I chewed on my cherries and spat the stones out of the window. The drop was so sheer that it was possible to spit the pits clear into the middle of the void where they arced out of sight and fell into the boiling waters. I amused myself with imaginings of the pips being swept downstream where, on the banks of some quiet tributary, they might take root. But the empty space just a few feet away made me feel giddy. What would it take? A single slip of the wheels, just one misjudged bend, a blaring of the horn just a fraction too late as an oncoming vehicle hurtled towards us… I was eighteen. It seemed too young to die.
Caught between giddiness, anxiety and boredom, I returned to my book, flipping through until I came to the part on meditation. My eyes came to rest upon a section headed, ‘Meditation on the Stages of Decomposition of the Corpse.’ It was probably out of nothing other than morbid fascination that I started to read this passage.
The canonical source for the corpse meditation is the Mahasatipatthana Sutta in the Digha Nikaya. The version I was reading drew upon the Vishuddhimagga of Acharya Buddhaghosha, which is a little more systematic in its presentation. I read about the first three stages of decomposition, described as follows:
1. The corpse is bloated, one or two days dead, swollen as a bellows is with wind.
2. The corpse is pecked at by crows, hawks and vultures, or gnawed by dogs and jackals, devoured by the maggots which, Buddhaghosha tells us, ooze from the corpse’s nine orifices like heaps of boiled rice.
3. The corpse is a framework of bones, tied together with sinews, bespattered with blood and hanging with flesh.
This is strong medicine, and Buddhaghosha gives a number of guidelines on how it is to be taken. Firstly, he recommends that the monk should undertake this practice only after informing his superiors of his intention. ‘Why?’ he asks rhetorically. ‘Because if all his [the monk’s] limbs are seized with shuddering at the charnel ground, or if his gorge rises when he is confronted with disagreeable objects such as the visible forms and the sounds of non-human beings, lions, tigers etc., or something else afflicts him, then he whom he told will have his bowl and robe well looked after in the monastery, or he will care for him be sending bhikkhus [monks] or novices to him.’ Indeed, according to Buddhaghosha, the correct way to set out to perform the meditation is not with a kind of anticipatory terror, but rather, ‘happy and joyful as a nobleman on his way to the scene of anointing… or as a pauper on his way to unearth a hidden treasure.’ This joyfulness seemed improbable to me, but I continued to read. The next three stages were as follows:
4. The body is now a framework of bone, stripped of all flesh, blood-bespattered, and held together by the sinews.
5. The skeleton is stripped both of flesh and of blood, but remains held together by the sinews.
6. What remains of the corpse is a scattering of bones in all directions: here a thigh bone, there the pelvis, in another place the skull.
Once the monk has informed his superiors, obtained their consent, and set out joyfully, Buddhaghosha suggests that, on arrival, he should stand or sit upwind of the corpse – the point after all is calm contemplation, not gagging revulsion. But, and here Buddhaghosha offers another caveat, he should not sit or stand directly upwind, because of the danger of finding oneself beset by mischievous spirits . Having found a suitable spot for his contemplation, free from foul odours and the attentions of trouble-making spirits, the monk fixes his awareness on the corpse, reflects that his own body will one day be as the corpse is now and whenever fear arises in him, he consoles himself with the soundly pragmatic thought that ‘no dead body gets up and pursues one.’ I liked the humour of this last point. It leavened the material a little, I thought. The final three stages were as follows.
7. The bones are bleached and resembling shells.
8. The bones are piled up, jumbled together, broken.
9. The bones have crumbled away to dust.
Dust. I could cope with dust. It was the stuff in between that was difficult to deal with. I put the book down in disgust. Didn’t these ancient Buddhists have better things to do with their time? Wasn’t there something rather unhealthy, something less than entirely wholesome, about this fixation with corpses? We hurtled round bend after bend, and I closed my eyes, horrible visions of one hundred different accidents, one hundred different deaths, one hundred different corpses, arising before me. The man sitting to my right tapped me on the arm and I opened my eyes again. He smiled. ‘Pakistani roads are very dangerous!’ he proclaimed, with a kind of perverse nationalistic pride. I smiled back wanly and looked away.
Then, at that moment, something strange happened. It was as if I awoke for a few moments to the sheer naturalness of the inevitability of my own death. As if the fact that I would eventually die – if not now and on this journey, then at some other uncertain juncture in the future – was a simple, straightforward thing. As if my coming death was not a dark, terrible spectre on the horizon, nor as a ghoulish shadow that I should strive to keep at bay as long as humanly possible, but as something woven into the fabric of my life, written deep in the very patterning of my being, a being that could be none other than transient.
I looked out of the window. To my left, just a few inches away was a pit of growing dark where two hundred feet of jagged rock plummeted down into an angry river. The entire world was there in all its transitory beauty: the fading sky, the mountains, the road, the sound of Hindi hits, the blare of the horn. I put one of the tiny fruits into my mouth, tasting as if for the first time the sweetness of the cherries upon my tongue. And I spat the pips, out into the endless void. Immersed in it all – the savour of the cherries and the radiance of the landscape, the song of the river below and of the Bollywood strumpet on the speakers, the horn blaring and goats bleating – I realised to my surprise that I was happy. There could be no certainty that I would reach the end of my journey. I had no claims on a life gifted to me from nowhere. Life owed me nothing, but still gave generously to me, moment by moment. How churlish, how small-minded it seemed to complain that this generosity would, at some time, come to an end! Happy, free from fear, elated even, at last I fell asleep.
When I woke it was already dawn and we were safely down on the plains. I was woken by my next door neighbour shaking me. “Breakfast”, he said in English.
As I squatted by the site of the bus, drinking chai and munching on a hot, greasy paratha (one of the best breakfasts I have ever eaten), I grudgingly conceded that perhaps these Buddhists were on to something after all…
Comments are turned off for this article.
#1 · Tom
31 January 2007
Manual Trackback. This post is cited in Blogisattva, Announcement: 2nd Annual Blogisattva Award Nominees.
http://blogisattva.blogspot.com/2007/01/announcement-2nd-annual-blogisattva.html