The Salvific Worlds of Kailas

McKay’s intervention is a critical reminder of both the fluidity of a significant part of South Asian salvific narratives, as well as their overlapping religio-cultural imaginations. While the latter, i.e. the complex and overlapping nature of religio-cultural meanings associated with several of South Asia’s sacred places, have been noted by other scholars, the cutting edge of McKay’s intervention lies in what he calls an application of ‘historical analysis to the site’ (p. 4). In the upshot, the reader gets a critical engagement with different lines of Hindu and Buddhist salvific narratives with their own points of intersections and divergences. The book, then, is a critical account of the dynamic process since the last century that made mount Kailas what it is in Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist soteriological imaginations: a crucial sacred site, and yet at the same time part of larger sacred complexes that stretch across the trans-Himalayan sphere linking, for instance, the Tibetan site to a broader world of Kailas mountains of the western Himalayas. The emergence of Kailas in the remote Tibetan plateau as an important sacred site is thus traced back to a British colonial official’s endeavour, who came to posit Kailas as ‘the most sacred place in Tibet’ (cited at p. 8), forming the core of a narrative that was taken up by other western explorers, and eventually a Hindu renunciate “who responded to colonial modernity by reformulating Hindu sacred geography through a creative combination of the scientific and the visionary study of its earliest texts” (p. 8).

Lineaments of Salvific Narratives:
The reader will find McKay’s treatment of the subject useful for a number of reasons. In the first place, the book fleshes out the plurality of Kailas narratives within the rubric of different sections, viz. Indic Histories (Section 1), The Kailas Mountains of India (Section 2), Tibetan Histories (Section 3), and finally Modern Histories (Section 4). Moreover, each of these strands are also examined with reference to temporal phases. If, on the one hand, the author foregrounds the complexities in the evolution of a sacred site, he on the other hand proposes a thesis of critical agency of ascetics in this complex process that in effect stoke no less than a conceptual reorientation about the role of renunciates in Indo-Tibetan traditions. Rather than focusing attention on structured monastic cultures and Buddhist institutional frameworks, McKay takes a cue from a recent line of scholarship and suggests a more central role of ascetics in the Indo-Tibetan religions and sociocultural processes including, among other things, in (re-)conceptualisations of sacred cartographies (15 ff., and especially Chapter 1). The study, furthermore, sheds light on a more fundamental issue, viz. the complexities of historical processes whereby mountains have evolved as crucial sacred centres in the Indo-Tibetan religions. This, according to the author, has to be seen as part of an entangled history since “sacred mountains and their association with esoteric ritualists were Pan-Asian concepts from the earliest recorded period, common throughout the lands stretching in a broad arc from western Iran to eastern China (and beyond)” (p. 32). The reader is thus reminded that ‘models, processes and archetypes’ central to the history of Kailas are already discernible in the “pre-Buddhist millennium beginning around 1400 BCE” (p. 32).

Given the wide remits of the book and the complexities of its contents, there is not much that the author could have further added without making the volume cumbersome. Yet, one wonders if some of the omissions or elisions are also not among its weaknesses. The author needs to be congratulated for having marshalled a wide range of sources: e.g., Indic and Tibetan texts in translation, British imperial records, travelogues, accounts of mountaineers and explorers, travel guides and local literatures, and not least oral sources as well as his own experiences gleaned from his fieldwork in 1986 and again, in the Indian Kailas mountains, between 2001 and 2009. However, one is still inclined to think that a critical engagement with more specific forms of sources, such pilgrimage accounts in the Indian vernaculars, could have rendered a more nuanced understanding of this complex history. For one, scholars have underscored especially in recent times how the burgeoning genre of vernacular pilgrimage narratives since the late 19th century opened up a discursive arena for evolving notions of a nation-space. Second, and more particularly in the case of trans-Himalayan pilgrimage networks, such literature also brings to the forefront crucial aspects of cultural frontiers and borderlands. While the author has commendably problematized the different facets of Indic and Tibetan traditions, and not least more recent phenomena such as theosophy in the development of a modern idea of a sacred Kailas, a more focused treatment of some of the vernacular literatures could have further enriched what is already a compelling study. Such drawbacks notwithstanding, this is an important work that will interest scholars and a general learned audience interested in histories of sacred places and pilgrimages in the Indo-Tibetan world.