Despite the cold, Mark was looking very pleased with himself. 'Whats got into you? Why you so happy? What did you get up to last night?
'Later, later,' he said. 'Look at the mist over there!'
The clouds were billowing up the valley when we set off but soon the sun started to break through the mist. For a few minutes, there seemed to be some kind of duel - the clouds would be beaten back by the warmth, but would then rally and reach up the valley again. It looked like Dragons breath, billowing in and out.
As we walked up the hill through the mist, I started to think about Padmasambhava again and his journey up this valley, twelve hundred years previously. What hardships must he have faced? The shamanistic people who had already sent one Buddhist teacher packing, the ice, the cold, the lack of maps... it made our journey seem simple.
Buddhists have one painting that they claim was drawn under instruction from the Buddha, Shakyamuni, Siddharta Gautama, called the Wheel of Life. It is a complex diagram, with many different layers of meaning, but at the centre, are three creatures, chasing each others tails. A Cock, a snake and a Pig.
These are what are called the three poisons. Hunger or Lust, Hate or Anger, and Ignorance. To reach nirvana, these three poisons, or delusions, must be removed from the mind.
The Cloud Dragon was hungry, like the Cock in the Wheel of Life. So hungry it wanted to smother all the land beneath it, take the heat, warmth, the life and suck it all up into blinding white never ending suffocating death. It could never be satisfied.
But eventually the sun was victorious. The clouds were beaten back. The cloud Dragon was killed. Padmasambhava had defeated the Cock, never ending hunger and want.
Soon after the Cloud Dragon was defeated, the wind picked up. The ground underfoot is actually quite poor, a bit like dunes just before a sandy beach. The wind whipped up the dust, and orange clouds of sharp, biting and stinging sand enveloped us all, almost as if we were in a desert storm.
This felt like the breath of a Dust Dragon. An angry, vengeful, hateful beast, wanting to destroy and kill all those that faced it. The snake of the three poisons.
The Buddhist remedy to anger is to practice loving kindness, patience and forgiveness. We turned our backs to the Dragons breath, covered our faces in handkerchiefs, and then carried on. Maybe a little slower, but patiently, step after step, into the storm. Like anger, the storm eventually blew itself out, and we were once again into the blue sky. Padmasambhava had patiently withstood anger, understood its causes, loved the Dragon despite its anger, and eventually forgiven it.
The path continued up. We were well over 4500m now, well above the tree line and the only vegetation were clumps of grass and moss on the rocks. A lot of the path was along a dry glacier, the rubble and junk it deposited before retreating back to the mountains.
We told stories to each other on the way - Mark was inspired by a stone circle we passed through, Indra remembered a story from his childhood about Sparrows and Princes. The air was definitely getting thinner though - we had so stop every so often to take deep breaths and to fight off dizzy spells.
Our destination, Labuche, was reached about 1pm. Mark decided to relax at the lodge, whilst I went exploring. On the map, I had spotted a small lake and was desperate to spend a bit of time there for myself. 'Do you think I can get there this afternoon Indra?'
'Yeah, sure. Do you want Mundre to come with you? No, ok then. Just go slowly, and give yourself plenty of time to come back'.
As I was leaving I saw Mundre with a bucket bashing at the frozen surface of a lake. 'Mark wants a shower', he said grinning. 'A cold shower, a VERY cold shower'. We both started laughing.
The glacier valley was mostly flat, rocky, but flat. At a lower height it would have been really easy, but at 5000m, it was quite challenging. Next was the ascent up the hill to the hidden lakes - another 200m in height. It was hard, but like anything, bistari, bistari, slowly, slowly, one step at a time, and you will eventually get there, and I did.
The lake was almost completely iced over. A high and almost vertically steep bowl of mountains were surrounding it. A frozen waterfall, ice white, cascaded down one of the walls. It was all in shadows, I am not sure if the sun ever shone on it. It was still, deathly still, cold, deathly cold.
I could feel the breath of the last dragon here. Cold, deathly cold. Spreading its fingers. In the Wheel of Life, this was the Pig, Ignorance.
This has a specific meaning for Buddhists. Its is the ignorance of the true nature of reality, or ignorance of the emptiness of inherent existence. The true meaning of this is beyond words, it cannot really be described, but must be experienced or realised.
As far as my limited understanding goes, it is experiencing the world as one totality, experiencing the world as an indivisible sum of its parts. It might be called experiencing a oneness of spirit with everything. Whatever its exact description it is supposed to be incredibly blissful.
This was not an ignorance that I was going to be able to defeat sitting on top of a mountain with the cold coming in. Padmasambhava might have, but he was a Buddha. I headed back to the lodge.
Mark appeared a bit later, grinning from ear to ear. 'How was your shower?' I asked.
'Cold! But I've got clean balls now. You can't do anything with dirty balls!' If only it was so easy to clean and banish Dragons, Beasts and Poisons.
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