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Chapter 02
Three Field Trip Reports
rich in animal products, style of heavy dress and strong emotional bearing finely suit them to life at high elevation as well. The ancient Jains, a lowland, tropical vegetarian people, would not have been as well acclimatized to the Mount Kailash environment as the indigenous peoples. This is not to say that individual Jain munis were not capable of great physical feats, they most certainly were, but as a group, the Jains were not physiologically well suited to living and working at Mount Kailash. Temple building requires engineers, logisticians, cooks, artisans, and servants, most or all of which would have had to have been brought from the Subcontinent. They would not only have had to acclimatize but reach full productive strength, an unlikely prospect given the nature of the Tibetan environment. Many materials for the construction of a great Jain temple would have had to be transported up from the Indian Subcontinent, a logistical prospect. Although I am not qualified to offer a textual analysis of Jain textual accounts of the Shri Ashtapad temple, I shall raise a few critical questions for consideration. The sheer size and opulence reputed to have characterized Shri Ashtapad do not seem in keeping with the physical constraints of the Mount Kailash area, an austere montane environment. Even a much more modest structure of traditional Jain architectural design seems incongruous with the physical setting of Mount Kailash. With its extreme cold and quite heavy snowfall, a temple with open plan architectural features designed for the tropical world would not be in keeping with local conditions. However, this is what is described in the texts. By contrast, the Dokhang of Zhang Zhung were bunker-like affairs, set deeply into the ground with few windows or doors. The lack of physical evidence for a Jain temple is compounded by the absence of a native Tibetan tradition for its foundation. Archaeological sites around Mount Kailash are known to a small handful of native elders at the holy mountain. These sites all belong to the Zhang Zhung cultural horizon and contain nothing palpably Jain or Indie in cultural orientation. Moreover, while Jains (known as gcer-bu) are noted in the philosophical treatises of the Bon Po (and Tibetan Buddhists), they are not mentioned historical narratives. In other words, there are not tales of the Jains and ancient residents of Mount Kailash and Zhang Zhung meeting and interacting. This does not mean that such encounters did not occur, but that they are not central to the Bon historical dialogue. Mount Kailash was a Zhang Zhung stronghold, supposedly, even its first capital. Any visitation by ancient Jains would have had to be approved by the warlike inhabitants of the region. Even if the two groups became friends, it does not seem likely that the Zhang Zhung inhabitants would have countenanced the construction of an alien temple amid one of their most important political sites. There has also been some speculation that Shri Ashtapad was founded before the rise of the Zhang Zhung cultural horizon circa 1000 BCE. Prior to this period, as in Kashmir or Swat, the inhabitants of western Tibet appear to have lived a Neolithic or New Stone Age existence, rearing livestock, farming in certain places and hunting. There appears to have been little scope for the establishment of Bronze Age temple complexes prior to 1000 BCE in Upper Tibet, but I hasten to add that this remains to be proven. Still, this begs the question: whatever its
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A reconnaissance mission to locate the Ashtapad Temple
