Lake Manasarovar

Few places are shared by so many religions at once. In Hindu tradition the lake was formed in the mind of Brahma so that his sons would have somewhere to bathe, which is what its name records, and it is associated with Shiva and Parvati, whose home is the mountain above it; the swans that summer there carry their own symbolism of discernment. Buddhist cosmology identifies it with Anavatapta, the lake at the centre of the world from which four great rivers flow to the four directions, and one strand of the tradition places Maya's dream of the white elephant, and so the conception of the Buddha, at its shore. For Jains the mountain is Ashtapada, where the first tirthankara Rishabhanatha attained liberation. For Bon the mountain is the nine-storey swastika mountain and the whole region the heart of the ancient land of Zhangzhung, and Per Kvaerne's work on the living Bon tradition shows how far its sacred geography here is its own rather than borrowed.

The physical facts underwrite the cosmology to an unusual degree. The Indus, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra and the Karnali, a headwater of the Ganges, all rise within a short distance of the lake and run to four different quarters, which is close enough to the four rivers of the texts that the correspondence has been noticed by every tradition in turn.

Beside it lies Rakshastal, a salt lake with no outlet, held in several of these traditions as its dark counterpart.

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.