Dharma Refuge

Inner Pilgrimage to Kailash

In Tibet, Mount Kailash is a place that everybody wants to visit. It is the most sacred pilgrimage site and is the beating heart of the Tibetan people. Mount Kailash is revered not only by Buddhists, but by shamans, Hindus and Jains, and its shape is an amazing, almost otherworldly phenomenon. It is unbelievably sacred, so much so that people do not climb it.

When you go on pilgrimage, it can be very transformative because you leave everything behind: your comfort, your attachment, your family, your relatives, your identity. Sometimes we can get stuck with those familiars and our role, so that we don't really know who we are and what we long for. On pilgrimage, we purify our habits and mental propensities that prevent us from becoming truly liberated. We see our mental and karmic patterns and we naturally shed them. We let go of hatred, fear, greed, and of a lot of judgment and concepts. This powerful purification happens on the pilgrimage.You feel you are dying to your old self–you're dying to your old habits, your old propensities. You feel that you are renewed again and again.

But Mount Kailash is more than a mountain–it is a place that resides in each of us all the time. It is a place we sometimes call the dharmakaya, the Buddha mind, or rigpa, the pristine nature of mind. That pure awareness is the true Mount Kailash. And therefore it's not like we have to go on the pilgrimage physically–there's an inner pilgrimage. This is an invitation to be on that inner pilgrimage to the sacred mountain that has lived within you all along.

(Mount Kailash photo by Ondřej Žváček, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2525216)

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