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.