L I F E S T Y L E
Kawaguchi
in Nepal
By Scott Berry
This
month’s Hindsight is about an unusual historical character,
the Japanese Buddhist monk named Ekai Kawaguchi. The author tells
us that Kawaguchi visited Nepal in 1899, 1903 and 1905, and that
while most British and American travelers saw Nepal from an elite
point of view, his experiences were more varied. Kawaguchi’s
time in Tibet is perhaps best known to modern readers, but his sojourns
in Nepal are equally fascinating, as this account tells us.
In
1899 an unusual young man who was about to embark on a remarkable
and harrowing jour ney through Tibet, visited the Boudhanath stupa.
He was a celibate, vegetarian Zen monk who never ate after noon,
and who travelled mostly on his own in search of the Tibetan translations
of the lost Sanskrit Mahayana and Vajrayana scriptures. The first
Japanese to come to Nepal, he stayed for several weeks at the home
of the Chiniya Lama where today a plaque in three languages commemorates
his visit. This was the first of four trips he would make to Nepal,
and unlike other foreign travellers over the previous century Kawaguchi
became intimately acquainted not with the life of the elite or the
tiny foreign community, but with the everyday life of the ordinary
people, not only at Boudhanath but in the Thak Khola Valley, Upper
Mustang and Dolpo.
Kawaguchi was only in Nepal at all because he wanted to go to Tibet.
He had just spent a year in Darjeeling learning Tibetan and was
too well known there to try the nearby passes. He therefore decided
to go underground and try his luck in Nepal.
From Calcutta, where he donned the maroon robes of a Tibetan monk,
Kawaguchi took a train to Sagauli, not far from the Nepal border.
While in Calcutta, he had also become acquainted with a Nepali gentleman,
a close friend of the abbot of Boudhanath, the second Chiniya Lama,
who wrote Kawaguchi a letter of introduction to his friend.
In Sagauli, Kawaguchi saw three Tibetan-looking monks and decided
to try out his disguise. Not yet fully confident of his Tibetan,
he introduced himself as a Chinese monk from Lhasa. And here his
trip almost ended, for he found himself addressed in Chinese, and
could not understand a word. But he could write, and claiming to
be able to speak “only in the common Foshee tongue”,
he bowled the monks over with his knowledge of the written language.
The reason that he had been asked to prove himself in Chinese is
that here on the plains of northern India, he had quite remarkably
stumbled upon the Chiniya Lama, the one man in Nepal to whom he
had an introduction. The two hit it off, Kawaguchi was invited to
stay at the lama’s house, and they made the trip to Kathmandu
together. Two nights later at Bichagori, a place mentioned in all
the old travellers’ tales but now bypassed by the road, he
heard the roar of a tiger and rather than being frightened, he paused
to write a poem about it.
His stay in Boudha coincided with the annual Tibetan migration,
when pilgrims and traders from Tibet passed through on their way
to the pilgrimage sites of India, as they do to this day. Kawaguchi
was looking for a way to sneak himself past the border. Even in
those days you had to be in possession of a pass to be able to go
in and out of Tibet, so since Kawaguchi had none, he sought information
from the poorest of the pilgrims who had neither pass nor money
to bribe the guards. The information he got was that the least guarded
entry into Tibet was via upper Mustang.
So off he went in March, 1899 on a white horse, a gift from the
Chiniya Lama, and accompanied by three servants, two men and a woman,
the most elaborate entourage of his entire trip. On the way to Pokhara
he found the caste system so rigidly enforced that he was forced
to sleep outside, but like visitors today, he was charmed by Pokhara
itself: “In all my travels in the Himalayas, I saw no scenery
so enchanting.”
Kawaguchi was one of the most absent-minded travellers of all time,
and somewhere near Ghorapani he was so lost in thought, that he
rode right into a branch, was thrown from his horse and “…
narrowly escaped from rolling a thousand fathoms down a craggy precipice,
to reach the bottom a mangled carcass.” But this was the least
of his problems, for the old woman among his servants (presumably
a Tibetan speaker), “made a revelation to me, and it was not
of a very reassuring kind; for according to her, I was doomed to
be killed,” by the other two servants once they had reached
the plains of Western Tibet.

The four of them proceeded up the old Jomsom Trek to Tukche in the
Thak Khola Valley. The Chiniya Lama had given him a letter of introduction
to the local headman, or Subba, Harkaman Sherchan, and he was invited
to stay in the chapel of the house that was the center of the salt
trade, where salt from the Tibetan plains was traded for grain from
the lowlands, a perfect place to pick up rumors. In this barren
windswept river valley surrounded by snowy mountains, he must have
felt he was getting somewhere. Here he also divested himself of
his murderous servants. One night they got drunk, and “each
accused the other of the somewhat cheerless intention of making
short work of me …. I could not have had a better opportunity,
and I there and then dismissed them both, after having paid them
off rather liberally.”
While staying at Harkaman Sherchan’s, he learned that the
way he had hoped to use to enter Tibet had been recently reinforced,
but he also met the man who was to be his companion for the next
year, a learned Mongolian Lama named Serab Gyaltsen “who had
yielded to feminine temptation” in Lhasa and was now “
… compelled to pass his life in obscure seclusion.”
Though strict to the point of prudishness in his own life, Kawaguchi
loved jovial company. He and Serab Gyaltsen became fast friends,
and the Mongolian invited him to stay with him in Tsarong where
they would exchange lessons in Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism and
share the task of doctoring the village. In the end he stayed in
Tsarong for a year, debating so vigorously with his friend, that
they sometimes came to blows. He also successfully cured many villagers
of their ailments by forbidding alcohol and tobacco, which he claims
they used to excess. In his free time, he got himself into shape
for the arduous journey ahead by running up and down the mountainsides
with a load of rocks on his back, an exercise which he passed off
as a religious penance.
Kawaguchi did not altogether approve of the way of life in Mustang,
claiming that when there was no agricultural work to be done, the
inhabitants thought of “nothing but eating, drinking and sleeping,
their minds being otherwise filled with thoughts pertaining to sensual
love.” And the standards of cleanliness left him appalled.
“I have no courage to dwell here on their many … doings,
which are altogether beyond imagination for those who have not seen
them done, and are too loathsome, even unto sickening, to recall
to mind …”
And so when Serab Gyaltsen, completely misjudging his celibate friend,
proposed that he marry one of the headman’s pretty daughters,
he beat a hasty retreat all the way back to Marpha. “Had I
yielded then, Tsarong would have today one more dirt-covered and
grease-shining priest among it’s apathetic population, and
that is all.”
In Marpha his secret was almost revealed, and he took off quickly
through Dolpo, crossing into Tibet by a route no one is entirely
sure of even now.
Kawaguchi’s adventures in Tibet belong to a different story,
but two years later, when he had secretly left Tibet just before
his identity was revealed, he learned that a number of his Tibetan
friends had been arrested, and hoping that the rulers of Nepal might
be of assistance in getting them released, he sneaked back into
Nepal and made such a nuisance of himself at a royal hunting party
that Chandra Shamsher, the Rana Prime Minister, was finally forced
to notice him, and eventually gave him a passport to Kathmandu.
Along the way he was disappointed this time to find no tiger at
Bichagori.
The same as once before the moonlight sleeps
On Bichagori fair; but whence is heard
Upon the stream the savage tiger’s roar?
In Kathmandu, Kawaguchi again stayed with his old friend, the Chiniya
Lama at Boudhanath. There were plenty of Tibetans passing through,
and the rumors he heard of the sufferings of his friends caused
him a great deal of concern.
He also had several interviews with Chandra Shamsher, probably at
the Thapathali Durbar since Singha Durbar was still under construction.
The picture Kawaguchi gives of Chandra Shamsher and the king, Prithvi
Bir Bikram Shah, together is revealing. The king seemed cowed and
never said a word, so that it was some time before Kawaguchi even
realised who he was.
The interviews did not always go smoothly, but eventually the monk
convinced the Prime Minister that he was not a spy, and that his
only concerns were to collect Buddhist scriptures and to try and
help his friends in Tibet. Once Chandra Shamsher was convinced,
he accepted Kawaguchi’s petitions to the Tibetan government
(They did get to Lhasa, though it would be twelve years till Kawaguchi
learned this). He also promised to collect some Sanskrit scriptures
for the monk, and promised him more on a planned return trip in
exchange for a set of Japanese scriptures. While they were being
collected, Kawaguchi retreated to Nagarjun where he meditated for
two months.
Kawaguchi was a tough, brave and persistent traveller, but no one
has ever accused him of being a competent geographer. When riding
back to Boudhanath from Thapathali one day, he caught sight of Mt
Gauri Shankar which dominates the mountains to the east of the Valley
and called it “the highest peak in the world … the famous
Gaurishankara, or Chomo Lhari, often called Mt Everest,” naming
three quite separate mountains, one of which is in Bhutan.
Having delivered his petitions, Kawaguchi felt free to return to
Japan after an absence of five years. It was not a particularly
happy homecoming. He found himself an outsider whose exploits were
sometimes doubted and derided, and it was with relief that he returned
to India in October, 1904 after only a year and a half in his own
country.
After a few days in Calcutta, he returned to Nepal with his Japanese
scriptures. The promised scriptures had, of course, been forgotten,
but a member of the Rana family was soon delegated to look for them.
While the search for his manuscripts went on, Kawaguchi stayed at
Boudhanath and studied Sanskrit, much as Tibetan monks had done
in an earlier age.
He also wrote a 58 page “Memorial” in English to Chandra
Shamsher on how to develop Nepal along Japanese lines. This curious
document was discovered in a Rana palace in Patan by Kamalmani Dixit
as it was about to be thrown away. Dixit, who had studied about
Kawaguchi’s journeys at Kathmandu’s Durbar School in
the 1940s was fascinated by this original document. He has kept
it in pristine condition at the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, and
published a Nepali translation in 1992.
When all his manuscripts had been collected, Kawaguchi left Kathmandu
for the last time in December, 1905. The only time he returned to
Nepal was a brief visit to Lumbini in 1911. Leading a group of Japanese
Buddhists, the man who had crossed numerous borders in disguise
forgot about visas, and got the whole group arrested.
Though mainly remembered for his adventures in Tibet, Kawaguchi
spent well over a year in Nepal, and his descriptions of Boudhanath,
Thak Khola and Upper Mustang as well as of Chandra Shamsher’s
court, give us a unique view of Nepal a century ago.
More about Kawaguchi’s adventures can be found in A Stranger
in Tibet by Scott Berry (London: HarperCollins, 1990; recently reissued
by Vajra Publications, Kathmandu, as A Stranger in Nepal and Tibet),
Three Years in Tibet by Ekai Kawaguchi (Kathmandu, Bibliotheca Himalayica,
1995), and Ekai Kawaguchi: The Trespassing Insider by Abhi Subedi
(Kathmandu: Mandala Book Point, 1999).
Scott Berry is associated with the Center for Nepal and Asian Studies
(CNAS), Tribhuvan University. His most recent book, written with
former Kumari Rashmila Shakya, is From Goddess to Mortal: The True
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