Pilgrims to the region walk. The circuit of Mount Kailash, called parikrama in Sanskrit and kora in Tibetan, is made clockwise by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains and counter-clockwise by Bonpos, and many pilgrims add a longer circuit of the lake itself and bathe in or sprinkle themselves with its water. Nobody climbs the mountain; there is no record of an ascent, and the traditions treat the summit as not to be trodden.
Alex McKay's history of the region argues that the unified sacred geography now taken for granted was assembled more recently than it looks. Renunciate traditions, Tibetan and Indian pilgrim accounts, and nineteenth century British survey and travel writing each contributed to a picture in which the four faiths converge on one mountain and one lake, and McKay traces how much of the modern Hindu pilgrimage in particular took its present shape in the colonial period.
The route is now a matter of diplomacy. The lake lies in Tibet, administered by China since 1950, and Indian pilgrims travel on the government-organised Kailash Manasarovar Yatra through Himalayan passes, a permit-controlled journey that has been suspended in some years for political and public health reasons. Numbers are small by Indian pilgrimage standards, in the low thousands a season, which is a function of altitude and access rather than of demand.