TIBET: CUSTODIAN OF KAILASH

In the first article of this series, Tibet: Beyond Geopolitics, it is argued that the Chinese occupation of Tibet was a karmic message to a social and religious system that had grown weak and complacent. This view, while in line with Buddhist philosophy, nevertheless begs one fundamental question: why was this message driven home so harshly on the peaceful nation of Tibet, instead of on the belligerent and corrupt countries of the world? The answer lies in the complex interaction between a lofty, snow-covered Himalayan mountain, the collective karma of Tibet and the spiritual fate of the entire planet. Are we ready?

Jordi Barrett for The East Coast Ledger

June 2008

Photo caption: Mount Kailash, Tibet. Altitude 6,638 m (21,778 ft)

Mount Kailash, located in Tibet and affectionately called Tisé or Gang Rimpoche (”precious jewel of snows”) by the Tibetans, is no ordinary Himalayan peak. Just looking at a photograph of it is enough to make one realize why Kailash is considered sacred by four different religions, and, as far as anyone knows, has never been stepped upon by human feet.

Aside from Buddhism, which associates the peak to Buddhas such as Demchok, Padmasambhava and Milarepa, Kailash is also sacred to Hinduism as the spiritual center of the planet, where Shiva and Parvati sit in eternal meditation. Jainism and the Bön faith (Tibet’s pre-Buddhist faith, considered the fifth official school of Tibetan spirituality) also locate the Earth’s spiritual seat at this peak. That’s some 1,000 million people revering Mount Kailash… as said, no ordinary peak.

Sacred locations are common to all religions, usually in the form of peaks or lakes (inverted peaks). To name but a few: the Mount of Olives of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Mount Uluru of the Aboriginals, Mount Shasta of the Native Americans and Lake Titicaca of the Incas. All these have in common being focal points of the planet’s subtle energies network, more commonly referred to as chakras. As with all living beings, planet Earth has seven chakras, each one representing a rung in the energetic ladder between the material and the spiritual planes. At the bottom rung is the base chakra, spinning with the heavy energies of physical manifestation; at the top is the crown chakra, unfolding with the most subtle energy of all: the consciousness of Pure Awareness.

The geographical locations of the planet’s seven primary chakras, and numerous sub points, have been recognized and revered by humankind since the beginning of time, each one in the way most fitting to the type of energy involved. Thus, the base chakra at Mount Shasta, California, is a majestic peak surrounded by forests and communities where healing practices are widespread, manifestations of the pure Element Earth energy that concentrates there. The second chakra, of Element Water energy, is Lake Titicaca; the third, Element Fire, is Mount Uluru in Australia… and so a pattern emerges, linking geographical features and surrounding cultures to the essence of the subtle energies involved.

So what kind of place would Earth’s crown chakra be like? A peak on the roof of the world, of energies too subtle to sustain life and achingly beautiful in its starkness. Too imposing to even set foot on. Look at the photo of Kailash again, and see it for what it really is: the focal point of planet Earth’s Pure Awareness energy, the most mystical of all sacred places, home of the highest vibrational energy in Creation and the contact point between Heaven and Earth. Living in proximity to such powerful spiritual energy shapes human culture accordingly, thus it is no surprise that Tibet –and in great measure, India and even China— are some of the most spiritually evolved lands on the planet. They are all children of Kailash, with all the rights and responsibilities this entails… including protecting each other, for it is no coincidence that the Tibetan exile was taken in by India, their karmic brother, after China’s fratricidal occupation. While such a strong connection to the source can purify the soul, it can also magnify bad karma to disastrous proportions, both at the individual and the collective level.

The Dues of Collective Karma

While Buddhism focuses on the individual and his or her state of karmic debt, it does not ignore the fact that humans are gregarious creatures that join together to form super-organisms with collective karma, an emergent –and thus unpredictable– phenomenon in which the end result is larger than the sum of its parts. To get an idea of just how unpredictable karmic dynamics can be, a Buddhist teaching puts it this way: “The Buddha fears the causes; mortals explore the causes and fear only the consequences.”

Causes –actions, thoughts, words— make karmic ripples in the fabric of the universe (aka the Tao or Membrane), which interact with other ripples to create new forms which in turn interact with other ripples… and so on, ad infinitum. The process is so complex that even the Buddha cannot predict the exact end result, which is why he “fears” creating ripples in the first place. Humans, on the other hand, are swimming in a veritable ocean of karma, and most of it is of the not-good variety.

Nevertheless, there are examples of good collective karma having positive results, as in the case of the peaceful resistance movement of the Mahatma Gandhi, in which the application of a fundamental good-karma tenet, i.e. non-violence, led to the retreat of the British Empire from the subcontinent without destroying the country in the process, a feat which history proves to be quite uncommon.

Of course, the numbers worked in Gandhi’s favor, not only in terms of relative population but in terms of the cosmic exchange rate between good and bad karma. Because good karma exists in a higher vibrational state, each unit cancels many units of bad karma. The combination of high-vibration karma being collectively applied by millions of individuals in a concerted fashion is extraordinarily powerful, as the British discovered to their low-vibe surprise. No doubt the subtle energies of Kailash played an important backstage role in this historic event.

In the case of Tibet, the numbers are not so favorable. To say that they are outnumbered is an understatement; the occupying country has a population 220 times larger than the occupied one. Considering this fact, it is not the invasion of Tibet that is surprising, but the fact that it didn’t happen sooner. This fact alone is proof that, for many centuries, the collective karma of the Tibetan people was good enough to keep bad karma at bay. Tibet was the buffer zone of Kailash, home to the people whose task was to keep the area spiritually pure and karmically clean, and while this was the case, the land was blessed with the protection of the planet’s crown chakra. When it was no longer the case, the protection was weakened enough for a moment of social and political transition –namely, the rise of a young and inexperienced Dalai Lama—to become an exposed flank which led shortly thereafter to the Chinese invasion.

At this point, let no-one expect a historical analysis of who or whom were to blame for this karmic downgrade. This type of perspective is frankly irrelevant to the complexity of karmic dynamics, for several reasons:

One: Bad collective karma takes a while to build up, meaning that by the time the current Dalai Lama was born, it had been building up for generations at least.

Two: Collective karma, as the name suggests, cannot be ascribed to any one person or group, no matter how rotten or how saintly. Every single soul chips in, and gets its just payback.

Three: The standards for Tibet’s karma are more stringent than those of most other nations… one of the responsibilities of being custodians of Kailash.

And four: There were other factors at work at the cosmic level, namely the need to make the Teachings available to all Humanity in preparation for the new paradigm.

People are born and die, civilizations rise and fall, entire continents surge from the sea and sink back under… and none of these small truths really matter much in the larger scheme of things. What really matters are the Teachings, the big truths about our place in the universe, why we are here and what we need to do to move on. This is the roadmap for our eternal souls, and without them we have been lost for so many lifetimes. So what is a lifetime, or even hundreds of them, compared to eternal freedom of the soul?

Old paradigms die hard, and our current military-industrial war cult paradigm is going to try to hang on to the bitter end. Things will get worse before they get better, the only question is how much. In the best case, Humanity will undergo a collective awakening and avert disaster; in the worst, we will perish by the millions. In the latter case, the Teachings run the risk of being lost, which is why their dissemination was forcibly provoked by the occupation of Tibet. Now, fifty years later, the seeds have been planted all over the world, increasing their chance of survival if and when the shit truly hits the fan. Tibet has gone from being the buffer zone of Earth’s awareness to become its transmission belt to the rest of the planet (the Tibet State of Mind, see previous article), and we’d be wise to heed the implications of this fact.

The previous article ended talking about karmic homework, suggesting that thanks to the work of the Tibetan exile, a good chunk of Tibet’s karmic debt has been paid off. Quite the contrary to China, which has racked up its debt to disaster levels not only with its actions in Tibet but among its own citizens. Just the torture and murder of Buddhist monks, chi-kung practitioners and political dissidents –to name but a few of the really no-joke bad karma actions committed by the regime– is enough to send an entire country so far up karmic shit creek that even a paddle won’t help. Were it not for the strong spiritual community of China –the very one so heavily repressed– the debt would have been enforced years ago.

The astute reader will have by now realized that China is but one in a long list of nations which are neck-deep in collective karma debt, including the USA, which has working hard to catch up on the stretch. Not to mention Russia, Europe… the Middle East… South America, Australia… right, just spin the globe and set your finger down; yep, there too. Because all the collective karmas join together to create our planetary karma, and that touches everything and everyone under the sky.

Fortunately we are not defenseless: good individual karma is the most effective protection against bad collective karma. We must care for our own karmas now, and help others do the same. That’s what all this is really about in the end… that’s what it has been about since the start of time. We sail together, but each mast must hold its own in the storm. Stand firm, and Godspeed.

With deep gratitude to the light of Kuan Yin Buddha. OMPH.