To a Mountain in Tibet [Colin Thubron] on *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Colin Thubron is the intrepid, resourceful and immensely talented. There is a telling moment in one of Colin Thubron’s early films. He is travelling with a BBC crew along the Silk Road in China when he. Colin Thubron joins these pilgrims, after an arduous trek from Nepal, through the high passes of Tibet, to the magical lakes beneath the slopes.
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It felt it more like a litany of rambli I was looking forward to this book as I love things relating to the Tibetan culture. The sights, smells and sounds of this arduous walk into a remote, mountainous retreat capture his senses. Kailas has never been climbed: Like Telegraph Books on Facebook.
To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron: review
He doesn’t make it out to be some magical, otherworldly place. His mother has passed away, following his father and his sister, who died in a skiing accident in It has been a while since I have read any Colin Thubron non-fiction, which I generally find to be 4 star quality, and very enjoyable.
Nothing is total, nothing permanent—not even he. He then undertakes the kora, the traditional Buddhist and Hindu circumambulation of the mountain, an exercise that will wipe one’s soul free of sin.
In the other nine volumes, the inner journey hovers between the lines as our man bushwhacks through the lost heart of Asia, bounces along the silk road in the back of a superannuated Moskvich and gnaws gristle behind the Great Wall. He tells a monk that his understanding of Buddhism is that, at death, everything is shed.
Mountaij an antidote, he tries to unravel the complex beginnings of the mystique and expose the reality of internal Tibetan violence centuries before and the hateful Chinese invasion. Mount Kailas is close to the Tibetan borders with Nepal and India, and lies very close to the sources of all of the four major rivers of the Indian subcontinent: May 03, Laura rated it it was amazing. They have already passed through a painless, premature death. Some, with the deep-lungs of mountain folk, can hike the 32 mile circuit in a day.
To a Mountain in Tibet
Some very touching scenes and memories in the book. In Chinese myth, the mountain is called Mount Meru. He feels a sense of accomplishment, but he attains no spiritual revelation, no peace. It is a very tough pilgrimage: His pilgrimage may be secular, but it is still spiritual. He muses about his family, from which he is the only remaining member. Instead, it is an elegy for everything that makes us human. Through the direct speech of interlocutory monks, he is able to explore the shifting pantheon of regional deities — Hindu, Buddhist and shadowy, shamanic figures who waft through the hinterland.
They will leave nothing material behind them rhubron be divided, claimed or loved.
Mar 14, Eveline Chao rated it did not like it. Hoewel Naar een Berg in Tibet als zijn meest persoonlijke boek wordt geprezen, ben ik er pas nu toe gekomen het te lezen.
To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron
Steering at first by the Karnali river, the group soon swings north-west towards the Nala Kankar Himal that shelves into Tibet, walking under walnut and apricot trees, through silent Thakuri villages and paddy fields, where traders once bartered thubbron and wool for lowland grains. Thubron has a great talent for describing not just what he sees, but the impact of what he sees.
Thubron makes the ascent, along with hundreds of pilgrims heading to a zone of “charged sanctity” to find peace with their own dead. In brilliant detail, he recounts his rigorous yet spiritual expedition through this remot “To a Mountain in Tibet” was one of the most fascinating and mounttain travelogues I mountaon ever read; a worthy competitor to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “A Time of Gifts.
For centuries, Hindus, Buddhists and their predecessors, the Bon, have worshipped this mountain, which lies remarkably close to the sources of all four major rivers of the subcontinent: It feels very intimidating and reminiscent Simply a stunning book.
But he views the beliefs he lovingly describes as an outsider; he sees them as myths that — thubrom beautiful and suggestive — were evolved by a primitive civilization.
This book is both a deeply personal journey and a captivating travelogue of a remote, harsh and inaccessible place that most of us will never see. Kailas — over and over, stations on the pilgrimage around the mountain are meant to reinforce the pilgrim’s awareness of his or her impermanence — and also creates a tension that drives the book, since Thubron, as a skeptical Westerner, cannot hope for the cosmic salvation experienced by the real pilgrims traveling alongside him.