I came to this book through Without Ever Reaching the Summit: A Journey which purports to follow in Matthiessen’s footsteps. My review for it quotes the author saying how little has changed in the 40+ years since the original journey but I realise now how untrue that statement is. An internet search finds a whole host of trekking companies offering guided walks through this region, following the trail of ‘The Snow Leopard’ in many cases. Where Matthiessen and George Schaller camped in often squalid conditions are now found hotels and tea houses catering for travellers. I even found videos on YouTube of mountain bikers travelling the route. It’s not surprising as there are few parts of the world that haven’t changed since the early 1970s. Whether these changes are for the better in every respect is another matter. The Himalayan exploration is interspersed with reflections of the author's tempestuous relationship with his deceased wife D. His wife’s recent death plays on his mind and casts a shadow. The snow leopard is also about his relationship with his wife and how that set him on this path of Zen and spiritual seeking. The spiritual bond that they shared was strong. They even experimented with hallucinogens. They accept Zen Buddhism as their calling. When she is ill and dying with cancer in a New York hospital the author places the Buddha figure he had acquired from a Tibetan refugee in Kathmandu’s Namche bazaar on the windowsill on the top of D’s bed. In her last hour, their Zen master Eido Roshi and the author holds her hands and chants their Buddhists vows. She passes away a little after midnight. The author leaves the hospital after daybreak. Snow is falling. It reminds of his wife’s fondness of the Zen expression about snowflakes. Deborah Love is an accomplished author herself and Mathiessen quoters her beautiful philosophy about this life should be lived-naturally like a flower unfolding. We need to grow ourselves until we understand the intelligence of the flower. Don't worry, the snow leopard saves the village later by convincing the soldiers that the village is haunted by demons. Down in the valley the soldiers came, in search of gold and slaves. They came with fire and fear, and the villagers fled. In the process the duo, then 46 and 40, ended up walking through some of the most scenic but difficult and lesser known parts of Nepal with its unique people and culture. Starting from Pokhara they walked through Dhorpatan to cross Jang La and past the beautiful Phoksundo Lake (also known as Emerald Lake) over Kang La to Shey monastery. There was an urgency of sorts in the inward journey to Dolpo. They had to reach before winter to see the blue sheep in rut, which happens in November.

Published in 1978, this book is the author’s memoir of his journey to the Himalayas to search for the elusive snow leopard. Accompanied by biologist George Schaller, porters, and Sherpas, he crossed mountains to reach the remote region of Dolpo, Nepal on the Tibetan plateau. Along the way he describes his spiritual quest based on the principles of Zen Buddhism in the wake of his wife’s death from cancer. It contains atmospheric nature and travel writing. It is filled with philosophical musings. It is written in the form of a daily diary from September 28 to December 1, 1973. Matthiessen’s detailed descriptions provide the reader with a sense of the stark beauty of the region, the harsh weather conditions, and the manner in which the people live. I particularly enjoyed their visit to the monastery at Crystal Mountain. It is a book where the journey is more important than the destination. Sometimes it's not till I finish a book that I realize how much I am in love with it. That's the case with this lovely travelogue, which smartly does not pretend to be anything that it is not. It's not given any frills or decoration, other than beautiful and inimitable descriptions of nature. It is a humble record of a man's journey through the Himalayas and his concurrent spiritual journey. To ask after the object of the journey is missing the point—and I hope this doesn't sound cheesy, as it does not come across cheesily at all in the book—the journey is the point. The snow leopard in the early 70s was almost a mythical animal. Hardly anyone in the Western world had ever seen it. Schaller had, making him the second western scientist to ever see it in 25 years.

If it is too much of a bother to live life on the plains head for the hills this summer to have a whiff of fresh air and, of course, yes to have a brush with the snow leopard. Deepak Dalal's Snow Leopard Adventure is a fitting closure to the Ladakh Adventure. The Ladakh Adventure was no mean adventure and Tsering, the reincarnated Lama was rescued from kidnappers by the duo Vikram and Aditya. Matthiessen has no illusions about being a mountaineer, which Schaller, six years his junior, is. He speaks candidly about his fears of tumbling down the icy slopes and makes no bones about the fact that he was often scared about losing his life.

Kind of comical, too, right? That some mate, any mate, might find that noise inviting? But we found it pretty transformative, as we did find the whales, and we saw, too, many many other species of animals and birds we dutifully recorded along the way. Matthiessen frequently digresses to remember his wife Deborah Love who had died of cancer prior to the adventure. [4] The book is, therefore, also a meditation upon death, suffering, loss, memory and healing. The memories of Deborah operate with a number of other recursive stylistic traits that play against the linear, outward progress of the journey logged through maps and dates. [5] For Matthiessen, a serious student of Zen Buddhism, the expedition wasn’t strictly scientific. It was also a pilgrimage during which he would seek to break “the burdensome armor of the ego,” perceiving his “true nature.” After it was published, in 1978—first, in part, in The New Yorker, then as a book—“ The Snow Leopard,” his account of the trip, won two National Book Awards, becoming both a naturalist and a spiritual classic. It overflows with crystalline descriptions of animals and mountains: “The golden birds fall from the morning sun like blowing sparks that drop away and are extinguished in the dark,” Matthiessen writes. But it’s also an austere Buddhist memoir in which the snow leopard is as alluring and mysterious as enlightenment itself.Theroux, Paul (2011). The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p.144. ISBN 978-0547549194 . Retrieved 21 June 2014.

For two months of 1973, from late September to late November, Matthiessen joined zoologist George Schaller on a journey from the Nepalese Himalayas to the Tibetan Plateau to study Himalayan blue sheep. Both also harbored a hope of spotting the elusive snow leopard. When I watch blue sheep, I must watch blue sheep, not be thinking about sex, danger, or the present, for this present – even while I think of it – is gone.

Only serious scholars of Buddhism can comment on the authenticity of all that Matthiessen says about the various forms of Buddhism. He gives copious notes on most of what he says with citations at the end of the book that mentions the sources of what he says. What I am coming round to saying is that part of the charm of the book are the vulnerabilities of the author a man who abandoned a fairly young son to go half way round the world to keep another man company while he tries to watch goat-sheep having sex - which they are not keen to do.

P.S. There were two Snow Leopards born in the summer of 2015 at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Several times now I have seen them, but I had waited to see them initially until I was done with this book. I traveled the country to see the Snow Leopard at home! Is that like the Wizard Oz: There’s no place like home? There are a lot of biological facts and observations and insights about the conservation of Nepal. A lot of their exploration that year helped to esta Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterrupted experience in which body, mind, and nature and the same.” (42) In 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Zen Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. As the climb proceeds, Matthiessen charts his inner path as well as his outer one, with a deepening Buddhist understanding of reality, suffering, impermanence, and beauty. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by acclaimed travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer. I listened to this read by Gunnar Johnson in Swedish, the translation having been done by Maj Frisch. Both the translation and the narration are in my view exemplary. I had no trouble listening. The narrator’s calm tone fits the book’s message well. Four stars to Gunnar Johnson. I will keep an eye out for this narrator in the future.

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The great Himalayan mountains and its vast stillness and solitude have for centuries drawn yogis and spiritual seekers. The mountains are always there even while life is evanescent. They stir something eternal in the human consciousness. " The mountain withdraws into its stillness, my body dissolves into the sunlight, tears fall that have nothing to do with "I"". The author can feel it. Like an almost Bodhisattwa he can faintly hear the whisperings of past lives "there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth" To Flower Children, become middle aged in their inevitable daily grind, he gave new hope in this book. Hope as the Tibetans of whom he treats here have in abundance that after endless Kalpas of Rebirth to a Life of Sorrow, complete enlightenment will at last be theirs! At age 46, in 1973, Peter Matthiessen walked, with biologist George Schaller, from Kathmandu to the Crystal Mountain in Tibet and beyond. Matthiessen was a novice at this kind of extreme expedition, as who among us wouldn't be, yet turned in 10- and 12- hour days walking up and down icy, fragile, whip-thin mountain trails. Food was meagre. Boots caused blisters. Winds blew cold. Grief over personal matters was impossible to shake. The Snow Leopard is a famous book that recounts the author’s 1973 journey to the remote mountains of Nepal with field biologist George Schaller, who went to study the Himalayan blue sheep. Matthiessen went along for several reasons, for the high altitude flora and fauna, the most elusive of which is the snow leopard, and for spiritual reasons having to do with a pilgrimage to the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain, as well as a more personal quest to understand reality and suffering, prompted by the recent loss of his wife to cancer. They also believe in reincarnation. Its only in the human life that possibility exists for release from the cycle of birth and death. So, it is to be treasured and every waking moment is to be lived mindfully as if it were the last moment. As per the “Tibetan book of the dead” the last thought of this mortal life determines the quality of the next reincarnation. The teachings are all about how this precious human life is to be managed as this is the only reincarnated form where enlightenment is possible.