the Heaven of Buddhists and Hindus, answering to the
Olympus of Homer. This sacred spot is at present
visited by some hundreds of pilgrims annually, but,
with improved communications, these hundreds should
become thousands in the near future, and the ultimate
effect of this increase in the number of pilgrims should
be very great.
This part of Western Tibet and the British Borderland
is a country most sacred to Hindus and
Buddhists, and appealing as it does with its awful
solemnity and weird grandeur of landscape to all that
is romantic in the human soul, it is clothed the while
to the eye of faith with a garment of mystery • which
makes it the fit abode of the great gods of Hinduism
and Buddhism. In India, the great Buddha has left
associations which cling to numerous spots: at Gy a
he obtained Nirvana; at Benares he preached his
doctrine of sorrow and showed the path leading to its
cessation; at Taxila in a previous birth he accomplished
the perfection of charity, when he gave his
own head and distributed his flesh and blood to a tigress
and her seven cubs; but it is to Mount Kailas
that the Tibetan points as the’ home of his gods
and the axis of the universe. To the Hindu, death at
Benares (“ Holy Kashi ” ) is the supreme desire of
the pious mind, and hundreds, aye, thousands, go there
to await their end in this sanctum sanctorum with
a cheerfulness which sees beyond the grave. ‘ Prag
(Allahabad), where the Ganges and Jumna meet the
third invisible stream of Sarasvati, and Hardwar,
which marks the spot whence the sacred stream of
Ganges leaves the Himalayas, attract their millions of
earnest pilgrims ; but it is to Kedarnath and Badrinath
in the everlasting snows that they point as the home
of their gods, where Shiva lived, and Krishna dallied
with the cow-herd maids, and to Mount Kailas, the
heaven of Shiva and the goal of all happiness.
Waddell, in his “ Buddhism of Tibet” (p. 81),writing
of the belief of the Tibetans regarding their heaven,
says : “ And in the very centre
is the ‘ King of Mountains,’
Mount Meru (Kailas),
towering erect, ‘like the
handle of a mill - stone,’
while halfway up its side is
the great wishing-tree, the
prototype of our ‘ Christmas-
tree,’ and the object of contention
between the gods and
the Titans. Meru has square
sides of gold and jewels. Its
eastern face is crystal, the
south is sapphire, the west
is ruby, and the north is
gold, and it is clothed with
fragrant flowers and shrubs.”
JAGAT SING, POLITICAL PESHKAR
Here also are the Holy Lakes
of Mansarowar and Rakas, so eloquently described in
the “ Ramayana ” in the passage given below (see pp.
36, 37). f
The British territory, which adjoins this part of
Tibet, is the Kumaon. borderland, which is to the
Hindu “ what Palestine is to the Christian, the place
where those whom the Hindu esteems most spent
portions of their lives, the home of the great gods, the
‘ great way to final liberation.’ This is a living belief,
and thousands every year prove their faith by visiting
the shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath. To many the