CHAPTER 1

Above the Tree Line

India is like the human mind — it has so many layers! If you learn how to meditate on your own mind, you might discover its ever-deeper and deeper layers, though you will never know how deep a level you have actually reached. So it is with India. It is an ocean of different peoples, customs, religions, philosophies, rituals, smells, and tastes. There is so much of India that a newcomer could easily end up drifting upon its surface — as if sitting on a raft, pushed by the waters of the Ganga, and witnessing only a fast-forward garland of colors, poverty, temples, and affordable luxury hotels.

India to me was not simply a country I wished to see — it was a quest. I became aware of that quest when I was a teenager, but I came to India for the first time when I was fifty. In all the years in between I was preparing — consciously and unconsciously — as though silently guided by a trusted master who had initiated me into a sacred mantra — India. What I desired was not necessarily to see the beauty of the temples, the grandeur of the palaces and mosques. I wanted to learn about the ancient times, the knowledge hidden in the Vedas, the thinking of the Yogi, the perception of the human mind and body in the philosophy of the Yoga Sutras and the Upanishads, and about the sacredness of the Himalaya.

Why all this? I may never know. Some believed it was my interfaith upbringing that inspired my interest in Hinduism — a religion that at its core is most open and most tolerant, though history has demonstrated the opposite as well. To others it was obvious that, having read about yoga philosophy and about Indian mythology, I wanted to see their origins for myself. Many of my closer friends thought I was attracted to the idea of India because of a particular memorable dream I had as a child, and there were even those who told me that by going to India, I might have wanted to return home, to a place from a previous life. I myself have never really cared much about this question. I was living with this quest of mine as a child lives with the love for its mother. But if I had to ask myself seriously why I wanted to see India, I would probably offer an explanation different from that of the people around me.

I believe that I met India high up in the mountains of the country where I was born — Bulgaria. The highest summit on the Balkan Peninsula, Musala, is in the Rila Mountains. It is just under ten thousand feet or three thousand meters. The mountain chains in that country have very different characters. Pirin is full of deep, cold lakes and rivers and has sharp and rocky peaks similar to those in the Alps. The Balkan Mountains are a range that is a continuation of the Alpine chain. It is somewhat lower, but it extends from the border between Bulgaria and Serbia in the west, all the way east, down to the Danubian delta at the Black Sea; the legendary Rhodope mountains, home of Orpheus, form the border between Bulgaria and Greece and enchant the traveler with their mystical river gorges and caves. And then there is Rila, a mountain where one gets above the tree line quickly but that nevertheless is very green, with soft and gentle shapes. Before I was born, there had been a spiritual teacher in Bulgaria, known in the West as Beinsa Douno or the Master. The Master and his disciples spent summertime in the Rila Mountain. In the beginning, each year they used to set their summer camp in a different place, until eventually they settled in an area called the Seven Lakes. They used to spend a month or two together. At sunrise, to the sound of songs composed and often played on a violin by Beinsa Douno himself, they performed movement exercises called paneurhythmy (in good or perfect rhythm with nature). Every day, after the paneurhythmy, the Master gave a discourse on a particular ethical or philosophical topic. The disciples would listen and ask questions. Then they all cooked and ate together, cleaned the trails, rested near the lakes, and prayed. As a symbol of gratitude to the mountain and to nature, the Master and some of his disciples built a small fountain that captured the water running down from a high peak into two beautiful cupped, stone-carved hands. In 1944, as World War II was coming to an end, the communists came to power in Bulgaria. They prohibited the summer camp. Over the next half a century, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the regime was trying to suffocate Beinsa Douno's movement in an effort to establish an atheistic nation. The members of the community were persecuted, and the reading of books with the lectures of the Master, written down in shorthand and transcribed by the disciples, was strictly forbidden. Beinsa Douno had died a decade before I was born, and I never saw the summer camp of his days. However, I studied his teachings with one of his very first disciples. I read his lectures, and I trekked in the mountains where he camped. It was in the mountains where I learned most about my master. It was in the mountains where I learned most about myself. It was in the mountains where the concept of the Himalaya was created in my mind and where my wish to go to India and learn about its ancient wisdom was born.

My first trip to India was a trip to the Himalayas. I went to trek there for a month. On the day before the trek began, my second day in India, I went from Delhi to the Taj. I had to take a bus from Connaught Place at five o'clock in the morning. I was staying close to the hotel from which the bus was leaving, and I did not have to take a tuck-tuck or a rickshaw. I walked.

In Delhi, early in the morning, the monkeys used to wake up and start running down the trees in large groups, dozens at a time, trying to escape the inescapable noise of the workday traffic. This was in the days when I first saw Delhi. Since then, things have changed. Legend has it that the monkeys started invading government offices, entering through the open windows, and that they caused terrible damage by playing with or eating the stacks of papers. Since monkeys may not be exterminated in India for religious reasons, an alternative solution was found. Allegedly, the monkeys of Delhi were lured to leave the metropolis and go to more rural areas by another species of Indian monkeys that were not so fond of the big city. Today, there aren't that many monkeys in Delhi.

At the same time of early morning, people who live in the open, outside any homes or buildings, and maybe outside society itself, start moving too. Some of them sleep in parks along rivers — either in groups or as loners. Others spend the nights on top of the small barrows they use to sell fruit and vegetables during the long, hot days. Six, seven, sometimes more naked bodies are pressed next to each other, on a surface no bigger than twenty square feet. It makes one silent.

The bus followed the old Agra road. The express motorway was not yet built. If I hadn't taken that bus so early in the day, I would never have seen those endless human chains, people who seemed to live off nature, together with the street dogs and some bony cows. Other tourists were taking pictures through the windows of the bus, but I could not. It felt as if I would be taking pictures of Christ on the cross.

Some of the people I saw along the Agra Road did seem to get up in the morning and go to work. They washed in the rivers or in the sewer drains beside the roads. Then they took public buses, whose appearance no one seems to be interested in improving. Those who were a little better off might own rickshaws or scooters. They gave others a ride. Often four or five people, including children and pregnant women, would sit on top of each other on a scooter, taking a terrible risk but having no choice.

The Taj, by contrast, looked like a place from a fairy tale. It was as if heaven made it, not human hands. When you approach it, you might think that there could not have been a more beautiful symbol of love. The empress's wish that the world remember the love between her and her husband was fulfilled, but what a change there was — from the landscape of the slums along the Agra Road, which leads to the Taj Mahal, to the image of the Taj itself!

Change in fact seemed to be a basic feature in Indian aesthetics, as well as a basic concept in the life of Indians. I thought of this on the first afternoon after I landed in Delhi. A few hours after I settled in the hotel, I found myself sitting cross-legged in a small carpet shop where I was offered masala tea and called ma'am. A man on the street had invited me to the carpet shop of his "uncle." Going to that shop, on the second floor of a very dodgy building, may not have been very smart of me, but in hindsight the experience was fascinating. The colors and the patterns of the carpets the shopkeeper showed me changed every time I looked at a carpet from a different angle. Later I noticed the same about the colors and patterns of the Taj and the colors and patterns of the saris women were wearing. Did the same apply to Indian society, culture, or religion, or to their philosophy?

I did my first Himalayan trek with a small group of six plus two Americans and two local guides, a cook, and eight horsemen. This particular trek was organized for the first time a year before I went on it, and it was given up two years after because for many people, it lasted too long. I was one of the few very fortunate trekkers who had the chance to do it.

The trekkers' group met in a hotel at Connaught Place in Delhi. The two American guides were a husband and wife in their late fifties. They had lived in India for over twenty-five years and seemed to be quite familiar with Indian customs and culture. We were supposed to cross the Great Himalayan range from east to west. First we took the train from Delhi to Chandigarh, and then we drove up to the Kullu Valley. In Manali we met the rest of the team, the local guides and the horsemen. On the way up to the higher mountains we visited Nagar, the village where the Russian artist and international peace activist, Nikolai Roerich, had lived, and then we continued to Keylong in Lahaul and Spiti, heading further to the base camp of the Shingho-la pass, and over the pass, to the Zanskar range. After having spent about three weeks in the Indian part of the Tibetan plateau, we got down again to the town of Kargil at the Pakistani border and ended our trek at Leh in Ladakh.

Most of the time we were trekking at an altitude of fourteen to sixteen thousand feet, with our highest point being the Shingho-la pass at 16,750 feet. We saw very few people during the trek, for most villages we went through consisted of just a few houses. Some of those we met must never have seen people who looked like us. I remember an old woman pulling up the side flap of our dining tent one evening and staring at us in obvious amazement. She did not speak any of the dialects our local guides knew, and they could not figure out why she was staring at us. However, we also met a woman who knew more about people like us than we expected. She invited us to her home. She lived in a village of about twelve huts, very high in the mountains. Her hut consisted of two floors with one room each. Her family inhabited the upper floor, furnished with a stove, two sleeping rugs — one for her husband and herself and one for her child — and some pots and pans. All around the walls there were sacks with rice, which served as a kind of insulation too. On the ground floor lived a cow and two goats. Animals and people kept each other warm this way. The woman spoke to us in English. She had gone to high school in Manali but later had to move to this village because it was the place where her parents found her a husband. When I asked if there was anything she would like me to send her when I got back home, she asked for an Urdu-English dictionary. I had to send it with the guides next summer though, because there was no postal service to that village. The little boy the woman held by the hand while we were in her home was the only child in the village. I did not see him smile. He looked as serious as the harsh winds and the rugged rocks.

We visited Buddhist monasteries where lamas had been working on clay mandalas for years, all done in silent meditation. We saw shamanic Hindu rituals performed by local priests and commoners. Once, we came to a village where a young man had died. The family had asked the priests from two temples to bring two particular gods to their home for the sake of their dead son's soul. Legend had it that these two gods had been at odds with each other for a while. The villagers believed that if the gods were reconciled, young people in the village wouldn't die. We saw the procession of the gods, who rested in disguise on top of shoulder carriages. Each of them was borne by about a dozen men, followed by women with loose long hair, dancing in trance. At a corner the gods met. They stopped. They got upset with each other. The shoulder carriages started shaking. The men could barely keep balance. Two school girls in uniform ran down the street to watch. The saw me, and they saw that I had a camera.

"Can you take a picture, can you take a picture?" they yelled over each other.

"Of the gods?" I asked.

"No, of us," they said, giggling. "You don't want to upset the gods. They can punish you."

I needed time to absorb all this on my own. Reflecting on everything immediately was impossible. During the trek I was not able to discuss what we saw even with the rest of the people in the group. I was focused only on preserving that world — a world that was both fascinating and disturbing. I wanted to store it in my mind and in my heart, as deep as possible. Forever. It was as if humanity had laid out its very essence on a mountain plain and I was there to witness this. But there was also something more to my first experience in the Himalaya, something beyond my perception of humanity.

I have always loved nature. I liked trekking at high altitude, above the tree line, where all you see is mountains, summits, and the sky — perhaps some water and a few birds too. But what I was seeing here, very high up in the Himalaya, in Indian Tibet, when we were a little under seventeen thousand feet, was something very different. The landscape was rugged. There was no more green — no grass, no moss. The endless ups and downs of those mountains looked like a desert of rocks. We could have been on the moon for all I knew. I had no previous conception of mountains like that, or of rocks like that. But I felt some amazing warmth, a powerful embrace. I realized that I was not looking simply at a landscape. I was dealing with a living being — an enormous being — the planet. In theory, I may have always accepted the view that all celestial bodies are beings. But that had been in theory. In the mountains of Tibet I perceived that being with my senses, not only with my mind. However, it was not exactly as if I was one being that perceived another. I seemed to be it, and it seemed to be me. There was no real distinction — we were both the same breath, the same love, even the same sensation. I felt something that we might, for lack of a better word, call happiness. And I felt safe — safe because I was part of this being, because there was some communication between the individual me and the me that was one with this enormous being, our planet.

I was not astonished or surprised. This felt completely natural. It was even strange that I had not lived with this feeling all my life. It seemed so silly that I had thought of me as something separate, someone who could like or dislike nature. As if I could like or dislike my heart or my breath! Years later, in a state of meditation, I felt the same oneness with God. But it was the Himalaya that made me understand oneness first, in concrete, tangible terms.