While the veneration and ritual life of Shaligram Stones outside of Mustang District is its own complicated matter of course, the actual experience of searching for and finding Shaligrams in the Kali-Gandaki River certainly cannot be omitted from any account of their meaning and use.

As I set out this morning, clad in my canvas field pants and a pair of Vibram KSOs (extremely well-suited to walking around in fast-moving, shin-deep, river water), I found myself a little sad that this would be my last day Shaligram hunting on the outskirts of Kagbeni. The Kali-Gandaki river bed is nearly a mile wide in most places around the village, and as the river slowly meanders back and forth across the valley from bank to bank, it reveals a new landscape of stones and silt each morning. The trick to finding Shaligrams, as I have found, is to find one of many small, shallow, side-streams (particularly ones that are clearly in the process of moving off course or have recently petered out in favor of rejoining the main river current) and walk along them slowly up-river with a sharp eye towards any recently exposed areas.

In this way, as one picks their way along through sun-warmed, crystal-clear waters, Shaligrams are slowly revealed to the discerning eye. In Hindu practice, the most important aspect of ritual veneration when it comes to both Shaligram Stones and to other murti (sacred images and statues of Hindu deities used in worship) is the darshan, a Sanskrit word meaning “to see.” But this aspect of “seeing” doesn’t just mean to see the deity physically, as one would when entering a temple (mandir) or shrine, it means to behold the deity as he or she truly is beyond the material obvious to the eye and in return, to be beheld by the deity yourself as well. This practice of seeing and being seen by the deity is thus one of the most common, and most important, parts of ritual practice among observant Hindus and is, also, one of the major driving forces behind pilgrimage throughout South Asia.

Searching for Shaligrams is its own kind of darshan. As I walked with particular care not to disturb too much sediment in the water, I noticed two especially important things about the experience I was undertaking. Firstly, the dark, almost inky, black color of a Shaligram Stone was the first thing that tended to catch the seeker’s eye (since it easily stood out against a plethora of grey and brown), the second was the subtle appearance of ripples or spirals (the tell-tale ridges of the fossil ammonite shell) along its surface that indicated that the stone in question might, in fact, truly be Shaligram. But not every stone that might initially appear this way was really Shaligram. In many cases, the refraction of light through the flowing water often gave the impression of such patterns on otherwise smooth stones and the accumulation of silt underneath the current was also often responsible for the appearance of similar looking patterns in the sand that covered the river bed. More often than not, a burst of excitement and a quick scoop of water to retrieve a sacred stone appearing in the river might end up with nothing more than a handful of sand and a plain rock.

For this reason, actually finding a Shaligram Stone often left me with the sense of something truly born from the river, something only appearing at the very moment that I happened to see it. Carried down through millennia of time (or more like 175 million years if we’re going by the discourse of science) by an ancient and sacred tirtha to be revealed just at that moment and just for me. Something that I was “seeing,” perhaps, that hadn’t been there a moment before. (Tirtha is a Sanskrit term meaning “bridge,” often referring to places where the divine world and the physical world are closer together. In this case, I’m referring to the Kali-Gandaki. Most sacred rivers in South Asia are considered tirtha)

Experiencing the discovery of a Shaligram Stone leaves one with significant food for thought. Not only are Shaligram Stones considered direct manifestations of God-Himself (unmade by the hands of men) but I would argue that it isn’t just their aniconic (non-human) shape or their natural formation that grants them such a reverent status beyond the ubiquitous murti of temples and roadside shrines; it’s the experience of seeking and finding them in the first place that bestows a sense that these objects come from some other place beyond the industry and understanding of human-kind. It is no wonder that so many travel so far just for the chance of being granted the smallest glimpse of something truly beyond. Whether fossil or deity, the Shaligram comes to us from a place none could ever truly fathom.

The play of light and water that makes a smooth, river, stone look like Shaligram.

Here you can see the ripples that often deceive Shaligram seekers.

A Shaligram is Revealed! You can see the round, black, Shaligram near the center of the photo.

And finally, a Sudarshan Shaligram, with clear chakra markings, appears in the river!

I am always surprised at how quickly time flies during fieldwork, and paradoxically, how slowly it passes from day to day. With only a few weeks left for this summer’s current project here in the high Himalayas of Nepal, it’s time to take stock of my fieldnotes to date and make a plan for the days remaining. My guide and I will be leaving Kagbeni on Monday for Jomsom (and by that token, Marpha, an important village in this region which we will also have the chance to visit), leaving me only a few days left here at the main geographical source of the sacred Shaligram Stones.

I will miss Kagbeni. For as fascinating and ethnographically productive as Muktinath is, I find I feel almost more at home here on the wind-swept banks of the Kali-Gandaki River. Perhaps there is just something deeply appealing to me about slogging my way merrily through mud and silt in search of ancient fossils with a group of excited Hindu pilgrims and sadhus, or perhaps it is just reminiscent enough of my rural childhood to keep me perpetually coming back  for more.

But the real endeavor now is to solidify my themes and focus on my most important questions. I can already see four particularly salient categories popping up over and over again: what I am calling The Social Life of Stones, The Semiotics of Stones, Mobility as Power (or, Sacred Landscapes in Conflict with Political Landscapes), and “Modernity” versus “Tradition.” For those of you at all familiar with anthropological work in South Asia, some of this will seem reasonably familiar, especially the last theme. If nothing else, using these headings helps me to organize everything from multiple mythical origin stories, references from competing Vedic texts on the identification of Shaligram Stones, sketches and descriptions of the stones themselves, stories and experiences of pilgrims, and my own observations of ritual practices and uses of sacred space. But what is more, what I see is this project truly shaping up around issues of mobility and movement, which I mentioned earlier, and I think that this approach could potentially produce something truly exceptional in the genre of ethnographic writing (eventually anyway). But of course, as with any fieldwork, something could yet come up that completely changes everything. Such things happen more often than you might think.

In any case, I will be traveling to Tiri village a few kilometers north of here as of yet, revisiting the Shiva mandir in Kagbeni that currently houses several rather enormous sacred stones, and undertaking a few more Shaligram pilgrimages before I go. For just as the stones must travel, so must I.

Kagbeni

Finding Shaligrams is reasonably tricky. In many ways, you need at least a little bit of an idea of what you are looking for before you set out on the silty, rocky, river bed to try your luck. The characteristic inky black color might be hidden under coatings of viscous mud and the patterns of ammonite shell spirals are often worn smooth by millennia of rushing water and aren’t always obvious even from up close. But if searching for a particular kind of stone in a great mountain of stones can be seen as any kind of analogy, I would apply the same idea to walking the narrow streets of Kagbeni village. Sometimes it is hard to know exactly what it is you are looking at, even up close.

Spending time in the village is always a rewarding endeavor. Not only does it give you a sense and feel for how village life is actually carried out, but you also get to play a little Morelli’s Detective while you scour every stupa, mani wall, cross-roads, and threshold for clues as to how people are using and moving through physical and sacred spaces. For example, I note each presence of a Shaligram Stone tucked away inside of Buddhist prayer wheel or set along a wall dividing one part of the village from another. I especially note each time a Shaligram has been placed on the ledge of stupa, often times as an offering to the Dakini of the Himalayas (“Sky Dancers” — powerful female spirits said to inhabit this region). I also carefully log each time I see a goat skull, decorated with spirals and geometric designs, hung over a doorway or a trishula (a marker of Shiva) set in a threshold, or a mani stone, covered in Tibetan mantras, attached to a wall that every traveler must pass. In this region, marking the “spiritual nature” of a space by placing objects and symbols over doorways that represent specific deities, nationalities, and religious traditions is a reasonably common practice, and certainly a helpful one for someone like me.

In this way, each story tells a story, and as confusing as that might sound initially, it comes to make more and more sense as you realize that stories exist in the context of where both you and they are. In other words, stories tell you something about the world in which they come from. Stories are shaped by the landscape, and in turn, shape it; in much the same way as the high winds that perpetually tear through this valley are steered by the mountains and in turn slowly tear the mountains to the ground. So if I may hang on to my analogy a bit longer, then might I say that if each Shaligram Stone that is ever so carefully pulled from all the other river rocks and sand is a story collected from the people of Mustang, then it would do us all a great service to remember that the river was the source of them all.

Kali-Gandaki River Valley, Kagbeni, Mustang, Nepal

I am tremendously cold right now. It’s partially the cloudy, drizzly, weather, which is always something of a treat in the Himalayas, and partially the long hike this morning. My guide and I left early to make our way all the way up to the Vishnu Chulo (Vishnu’s Kitchen), a small shrine/temple a few hundred meters further above Muktinath Temple on the far side of a ridge closer to the Thorong La Pass. Needless to say, it is quite windy and rather cold up there at this point. It was an interesting place though, entirely “natural” in its appearance in that the short, squat, cleaved-stone building housed a shrine that was made up of a large boulder altar with kum kum and tumeric smeared standing stones resting on top of it. Small incense wheels, flowers, and candles were placed variously around the standing stones and hundreds of white prayer cloths were hung from the wooden rafters only a few inches above my head. The overall effect was one of shrouded mystery, carefully picking my way through a dense thicket of Sanskrit cloths to get to the shrine tucked away against the far wall facing the high mountain winds. My guide mentioned to me that this mandir was made in such a fashion, as a “kitchen,” because Vishnu was very hungry; a reference, I think, to a common method of interacting with divine beings and Vedic deities. By that I mean food. Exchanging food with divinities (referred to as Prasadam in Hinduism), along with bathing (called Abisheka Puja), is generally considered one of the most basic responsibilities of any devotee and attributing hunger to divine entities is a reasonably standard method of organizing worship in South Asia.

But what fascinated me even more, actually, was the recurrence of carved or drawn spirals decorating stones and bridges all along our path. Now, the spiral has numerous important symbolic meanings in both Buddhism and Hinduism. Overall, it is a cosmological symbol that refers to the belief in Buddhism and some traditions of Hinduism that the universe moves in a clockwise direction (counter-clockwise if one is a Bon practitioner). This is one reason why pilgrims, nuns, and monks typically circumambulate temples and shrines in a clockwise direction. It may also represent a womb or the movement of a person from birth to death to rebirth (the karmic cycle, which is also represented by the swastika). But, it occurs to me that when you take a moment to look closer, and consider movement itself as a kind of sacred marker…..remind you of anything else?

One of the many spirals we encountered on our way to the Vishnu Chulo

Sudarshan Shaligram

If anyone had ever told my 12-year-old self that one day I would be fossil hunting in the high Himalayas while simultaneously conducting anthropological fieldwork in Nepal, I would probably have laughed myself sick. However, as it turns out, that is exactly what I have spent the last two days doing. More along the participant side of participant-observation, I have found that wandering the mountain sides and river banks looking for Shaligram stones is the perfect morning activity for meeting both Shaligram sellers and Hindu pilgrims, respectively. While I had never expected my childhood fascination with dinosaurs (I think I still have some small fossil collection buried in the basement somewhere) to come to fruition in this way, or at all really, such is the fluidity of anthropology. Also, the next time someone asks me if anthropology is where you dig up dinosaurs, I guess I will need to come up with a better answer than my usual reference to Indiana Jones.

In any case, ultimately, it is the links between these stones and those who scour the country-side in search of them that will form the basis for my research going forward. I say this because it is the mobility of both people and objects in both physical and sacred landscapes that are at the heart of the complex system of identities, boundaries, and meanings that make up Mustang District’s everyday lived world. In short, my fascination with religious co-participation has led me down a path where religious boundaries have become fluid and national and ethnic identities have begun to blend together because of shared sacred spaces all subsumed under the icon of an ancient ammonite fossil found no where else in the world. Time I got myself a pickaxe.

Broken ammonites are not considered Shaligram. A broken stone such as this one is unfortunately, “a blind eye.”

This particular bed of ammonites was revealed in a landslide after the April Gorkha Earthquake.

The fossil bed manages to produce only a single unbroken stone for the day.

Space and Movement. I can already see that these two concepts may well become the foundational framework for this project going forward. Space because religious co-participation in this region is highly contingent of the sharing of sacred places. Movement because it is through various types of motion (circumambulation, pilgrimage, travel of the sacred stones through the river, ritual movement through temple spaces, and returning home with sacred objects) that religious and national identities and boundaries are continuously negotiated. In short, this means that, at its heart, the blending of Hindu, Buddhist, and shamanic traditions in Mustang are largely brought about through the blending of various peoples in shared spaces that hold meanings at multiple levels. For example, the same object (say, a Shaligram Stone) means one thing to one person and another thing to another person, but what they agree on is the meaningful importance of the object, or the place, so in question. In additional to layers of economic exchange and the sharing of ethnic and national identities, this results in a kind of religious synthesis that produces traditions of worship that are both continuously exchanging characteristics and remaining linguistically and ontologically distinct from one another.

As one who is moving through these spaces herself, I had the opportunity yesterday, based on a local tip, to visit on the few mountain Shaligram beds. These black shale beds are used, primarily, by Buddhist stone sellers to mine sacred stones directly from the mountain-side rather than wait for stones to be found by stone hunter/wholesalers further down on the Kali-Gandaki river banks. The downfall here, while the shale beds produce many stones, is that Hindu pilgrims largely do not prefer these stones. Their sharp edges and broken chakras (shells) too often render them as “the blind eye” and are harder to sell because the deity represented within the stone cannot be accessed. This was even more strongly demonstrated when I was given access to the Shaligram Mandir at Muktinath by an elderly Shiva sadhu (holy man) tending the temple grounds. Each stone installed as a deity in this way is whole and without chip or blemish. This is typical of Shaligram Stones used in home worship and these are the stones Hindus come here to find.

Sadly, post-earthquake, there are few pilgrims visiting Muktinath this summer season, so I have not had as many opportunities as I would like to conduct interviews with Hindu pilgrims. My exchanges with local residents and with the sadhus and nuns minding the many temples and gompas scattered everywhere in this area have, however, been incredibly enlightening. For now, perhaps it is best that I get the lay of the land as those who live here know it, because tomorrow who knows how it may change.

The Shaligram Mandir at Muktinath.

The black shale Shaligram bed.

The Shaligram Mandir at Muktinath.

This was the day’s “haul” from the Shaligram bed.

At 4000 meters, the view is not the only thing that’s breath-taking.

It’s a pun I’ve heard a few times now, but it is more truth than humor. The village of Ranipauwa, where I’m slowly settling in for the next few weeks of fieldwork, is truly a fascinating place. Focused largely on the Hindu pilgrims that frequent Muktinath-Chumig Gyatsa temple (only a few hundred meters outside of the village), the main road of the village tends to include mostly guesthouses or dharamsalas (for poorer pilgrims), a few shops selling water and snacks, and some strategically placed permit checkposts lest you attempt to wander the area surreptitiously. As in Pokhara, there are also a few Shaligram sellers and also just as in Pokhara, they are all Buddhist. I suspect my interest in the kinds of religious syncretism and co-participation common to this region will soon be taking an economic turn. The number of stones sold is surprising, and many stone sellers explain that they have a specific supplier. By the sounds of it, as I suspected in Jomsom when I met a few stone hunters on the banks of the Kali-Gandaki, there are professional Shaligram hunters who scour the river beds for stones that they then sell to Buddhist shops all along the pilgrimage circuit. This is particularly interesting because the Skanda Purana specifically forbids the buying and selling of these stones and yet, I can’t help but conclude that the sheer volume of stones being sold must indicate the Hindu pilgrims are buying them. To Western trekkers, they would be little more than a cheap novelty, if they knew what they were at all.

My insistent questions have also revealed a few other interesting points of order. Firstly, that some Buddhist sellers are no longer content to wait for the relatively rare stones of the river beds to materialize and are now actively mining them from the mountain side. Secondly, these mined stones (which are clearly not rounded and many aren’t even black) are being met with some degree of resistance. Those who buy stones are obviously less interested in “mountain stones” than they are “river stones.” However, many sellers have commented that “the mountain has so many stones” and waiting for river stones is sometimes difficult. Lastly, the earthquake has been both a concern and a boon in this region in terms of stones. While very few tourists have made their way to Muktinath this season, the earthquake does not seem to have deterred many pilgrims, which is providing at least something of a windfall for the economy here. And while the earthquake did not cause significant damage to Ranipauwa, there are several areas where landslides and fault breaks have revealed new stone beds in the mountain side. Many people have already begun digging in these areas in search of new stones.

My hope now going forward is to try and get more time with the incoming pilgrims. Meeting the stone sellers is one thing, but I now need to know more about who they are selling to.

These raw “Golden Egg” type Shaligrams have been exposed by a recent landslide related to the earthquake.

Finally, a decent picture of the famous Thorong La Pass to Tibet.

The view taken from just outside Ranipauwa.

On our way up to Muktinath Temple.

“Khana khannu bhaiyo?” means “Have you eaten” and it is a common informal greeting in this region. How do I know? Because at last, my guide and I have arrived safely in Jomsom, Mustang District.

I wish I had words to describe this place to you in a way that could convey the motion your heart makes in your chest when you first behold the high Himalayas. Snow-capped peaks that cover the sky; the Himalayas are an incredible sight to behold. “Grandeur” seems like such a cliche and photos and inspirational quotes inadequate. The mountain flight to get here, however, was not something I highly recommend to those already leery of flying. A moderately bumpy 20 minutes of bounding and turning through mountain passes and valleys in the world’s tiniest commercial airplane finally lands you at 2700 meters but not without a fair degree of white-knuckling (at least, on my part). But in doing so, I have traded Pokhara’s humid 90 degree afternoons for a cool and clear 50 degrees in the day time, a fair westerly wind, and a pace of life far more suited to my explorer’s disposition. That, and my last night in Pokhara was a little rough. I finally figured out why I kept waking up covered in insect bites and, as it turned out, the bed was infested with fleas. I did manage to get a few hours of sleep after draping the mattress in towels and a blanket but at that point, there was little I could do. My arms and legs still look like I got into a fight with a toddler wielding a red magic marker but one of the benefits of altitude is that the bugs really thin out up here and I really couldn’t be happier. My choice to undertake fieldwork in a less…..tropical….setting has already proven the right choice. Cold I can do.

Not unexpectedly, internet is a little spotty, though. Connectivity is pretty limited in terms of times of day and access to Wifi signals, so I have no way to predict how often I will be able to post and update. I purchased a mobile modem in Pokhara much as I did in India a few years ago but if the signal just isn’t up to par, I might try out any one of the few scattered internet cafes I have already seen in the area. But for the moment, my current guesthouse has working Wifi.

Now, my guide and I rest up here for today to continue our acclimation and head for 4000m (to Muktinath) tomorrow afternoon. First by Jeep to Ranipauwa and then maybe we walk it….maybe I find myself a suitably horse.

My current base of operations. Well, for a day anyway.

Jomsom

Jomsom Airport. To wit, “flying low” is a very relative term in the Himalayas.

Jomsom – Surrounded by the peaks.

It says, “Welcome for Climbing.”