Mount Kailash -the sacred mountain

[rcscwc]

Mount Kailash -the sacred mountain

Or Kailash Parvat as it is called by Indians, is a compelling, dome-shaped peak, rising above a fantastically beautiful 13,000 ft plateau of rainbow-coloured rocks. It is holiest of all holy peaks revered by millions of Hindus, Jain and Buddhists as the abode of Lord Shiva. The peak towers to nearly 22,000 ft. Steepness of slopes does not allow much snow to accumulate.

Kailash in Sanskrit language mean CRYSTAL, and it is surprisingly much harder and denser than the other mountains of the Himalayas. In stead of the typical jagged and sharp peaks, it is has a peculiar dome shape. Hindus consider it as abode of Lord Shiva. Jains believe that the First teacher and founder of their Dharma attained His Nirvana here, thousands of years ago.

Every Hindu and Jain aspires to a pilgrimage to this mountain, but the trek is very difficult, testing and arduous, except for a short period 1959-84.

Geographical details:
Elevation 6,638 m (21,778 ft)
Location China (Tibet)
Range Trans-Himalayas
Prominence 1,319 m
Coordinates 31°04′00″N, 81°18′45″E

Every year thousands of pilgrims make the trek, which has a tradition of thousands of years. A dip in the nearby icy cold waters of Mansrovar lake surface elevation 4556 m or 15,000 ft], an offering of worship to Lord Shiva are parts of this pilgrimage. After that follows the 52 km circumanbulation of the Mouton. Ideally it should be completed one day, but few can do it because of uneven terrain, altitude sickness [route rising upto 17,000 ft] and harsh conditions faced in the process. Normal time is about 3 days. Even if the Chinese build a road, few pilgrim will do it by vehicles, preferring to walk. The holy Parvat is part of a national park, so the road is not likely to be built.

The Kailash has never been climbed, and is unlikely to be climbed. It is considered so holy that the Chinese government does not permit climbing.

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

 

[LDNCatholic]

Beautiful photographs, however you’ll have to forgive me, as I must ask. What was the purpose of this thread?

 

[Cluny]

The following by a woman who made a similar pilgrimage, and what she found.

In 1956 1 did field work with headhunters in the Philippines. My interest was in primitive religion -particularly in what is termed an “unacculturated” area — where there had been few missionaries. When I arrived in Ifugao (that’s the name of the tribe), I didn’t believe in black magic; when I left, I did. An Ifugao priest (a munbaki) named Talupa became my best friend and informant. In time I learned that he was famous for his skill in the black art. He took me to the baki, which is a ceremony of ritualistic magic that occurred almost every night during the harvest season. A dozen or so priests gathered in a hut and the night was spent invoking deities and ancestors, drinking rice wine and making sacrifices to the two small images known as bulol. They were washed in chicken blood, which had been caught in a dish and used to divine the future before it was used on the images. They studied the blood for the size and number of bubbles in it, the time it took to coagulate; also, the color and configuration of the chicken’s organs gave them information. Each night I dutifully took notes. But this was just the beginning. I won’t elaborate on Ifugao magic; suffice it to say that by the time I left, I had seen such a variety and quantity of supernatural occurrences that any scientific explanation was virtually impossible. If I had been predisposed to believe anything when I arrived. it was that magic had a wholly natural explanation. Also, let me say that I don’t frighten very easily. But the fact is that I left Ifugao because I saw that their rituals not only worked, but they had worked on me at least twice.

I say all this so that what I say about Hindu practices and places of worship will not seem incredible, the product of a “heated brain.”

Eleven years after the Ifugao episode, I made a pilgrimage to the Cave of Amarnath, deep in the Himalayas. Hindu tradition has it the most sacred place of Siva worship, the place where he manifests himself to his devotees and grants boons. It is a long and difficult journey over the Mahaguna, a 14,000 foot pass, and across a glacier; so there was plenty of time to worship him mentally on the way, especially since the boy who led the pack pony didn’t speak any English, and I didn’t speak any Hindi. This time I was predisposed to believe that the god whom I had worshipped and meditated on for years would graciously manifest himself to me.

The Siva image in the cave is itself a curiosity: an ice image formed by dripping water. It waxes and wanes with the moon. When it is full moon, the natural image reaches the ceiling of the cave — about 15 feet — and by the dark of the moon almost nothing of it remains. And so it waxes and wanes each month. To my knowledge, no one has explained this phenomenon. I approached the cave at an auspicious time, when the image had waxed full. I was soon to worship my god with green coconut, incense, red and white pieces of cloth, nuts, raisins and sugar — all the ritually prescribed items. I entered the cave with tears of devotion. What happened then is hard to describe. The place was vibrant — just like an Ifugao hut with baki in full swing. Stunned to find it a place of inexplicable wrongness, I left retching before the priest could finish making my offering to the great ice image.

The facade of Hinduism had cracked when I entered the Siva Cave, but it was still some time before I broke free. During the interim, I searched for something to support the collapsing edifice, but I found nothing. In retrospect, it seems to me that we often know something is really bad, long before we can really believe it. This applies to Hindu “spiritual practices” quite as much as it does to the so-called “holy places.”

 

[SedesDomi]

Stunned to find it a place of inexplicable wrongness, I left retching before the priest could finish making my offering to the great ice image.

The facade of Hinduism had cracked when I entered the Siva Cave, but it was still some time before I broke free. During the interim, I searched for something to support the collapsing edifice, but I found nothing. In retrospect, it seems to me that we often know something is really bad, long before we can really believe it. This applies to Hindu “spiritual practices” quite as much as it does to the so-called “holy places.”

Obviously, Siva-devotion is not her path.

One has to ask, though, whether everyone who visits this cave experiences similar negative reactions. If not, why?

Further into the story, she continues:

When a student is initiated by the guru, he is given a Sanskrit mantra (a personal magic formula), and specific religious practices. These are entirely esoteric and exist in the oral tradition. You won’t find them in print and you are very unlikely to learn about them from an initiate, because of the strong negative sanctions which are enforced to protect this secrecy. In effect the guru invites his disciple to prove the philosophy by his own experience. The point is, these practices do in fact work. The student may get powers or “siddhis.” These are things like reading minds, power to heal or destroy, to produce objects, to tell the future and so on — the whole gamut of deadly psychic parlor tricks. But far worse than this, he invariably falls into a state of prelest, where he takes delusion for reality. He has “spiritual experiences” of unbounded sweetness and peace. He has visions of deities and of light. (One might recall that Lucifer himself can appear as an angel of light). By “delusion” I don’t mean that he doesn’t really experience these things; I mean rather that they are not from God. There is, of course, the philosophical construct that supports every experience, so the practices and the philosophy sustain each other and the system becomes very tight.

Actually, Hinduism is not so much an intellectual pursuit as a system of practices, and these are quite literally — black magic. That is, if you do x, you get y: a simple contract.

Hindu scriptures talk openly about the “siddhis”. The siddhis are simply by-products of spiritual practice. However, the Hindu scriptures are clear that siddhis are not merely neutral phenomena. Someone might develop a siddhi of, for instance, foretelling the future, and the danger comes if the person begins to think that he or she has reached the ultimate stage of enlightenment, and begins to use that siddhi for selfish purposes (“black magic”).

Swami Sivananda talks about the dangers of siddhis, even though siddhis are a natural product of spiritual practice (and that spiritual practice might be Hindu, Christian, Jewish, etc.):

The Yogi practises deep meditation. He advances in Raja Yoga. After some practice, this Raja Yoga gives him some wonderful Siddhis. The Yogi tries to use the Siddhis for some simple and harmless purpose. He finds that he can get rid of simple ailments with his Yogic powers. He is able to keep ferocious animals under his control so that they won’t harm him. He is also able to influence some human beings and make them serve him. From one experiment to the other, he proceeds with the use of his psychic powers. When he discovers that his psychic powers are enormous, then he stops his Sadhana [spiritual practice], he gives up his Tapasya [discipline and renunciation] and goes headlong down the abyss of delusion. He is ready to cut even the throat of the Yoga itself; he is ready to destroy the very Sadhana that gave him the psychic powers. But, in time God’s Grace descends into him and cuts off the evil promptings within him which make use of his psychic powers. The Yogi realises his serious mistake and thenceforward never runs after the Siddhi. He attains to the Supreme Peace.

The danger that siddhis manifest makes it important that any one who practices yoga intensely, do so under the guidance of a real, authentic spiritual teacher, and with the motives of compassion and wisdom. The possibility of the mis-use of siddhis doesn’t make the siddhis themselves “evil”, no more so than the possibility of the mis-use of atomic energy make atoms themselves “evil”.

This is one of the reasons many Hindus speak of Jesus as a Maha-Yogi, a Great Yogi: Jesus was able to renounce the temptations to use the siddhis that developed as a result of His sadhana and tapasya, when he rebuked Satan (who offered Him siddhic powers) in the wilderness. Of course, Christians will have a slightly different interpretation of this event, but for Hindus it’s easily understandable from a Hindu framework as well.