Getting to the heart of things Ian Baker’s pilgrimage to Shangri-La BY ALEX IRVINE

Ian Baker has lived in Kathmandu for the better part of the last 20 years, when he wasn’t in Norway, New York, or Peaks Island, where his mother and stepfather live. Part of Baker’s reason for settling in Nepal was his desire to study Tibetan Buddhism, which he has done since the ’70s; also he’s a lifelong outdoor junkie, and there’s no better wilderness than the Himalayas.

Baker has recently left Nepal for good, partially because Kathmandu is "almost unlivable right now" due to sudden political instability and partially out of a general feeling that "my whole period of living there has come to a close." It feels right, he says, that he’s "closing a chapter in my life simultaneously with this book coming out."

"This book" is The Heart of the World, which tells the story of Baker’s years-long quest to solve one of the great mysteries of Himalayan geography. As an adventure tale, The Heart of the World is practically too good to be true. A story about a devoted scholar of Tibetan Buddhism who, over the course of eight expeditions and more than 20 years, makes incremental progress toward his goal of getting to the last unexplored segment of the world’s deepest canyon, and along the way melds this quest with his own spiritual pilgrimage? "Come on," the reader is tempted to say. A landscape of glaciers flowing into subtropical jungles, forests of bamboo and rhododendron, tigers and leopards, bridges made of fallen trees, sheer rock walls towering thousands of feet above raging water — threatened by hydroelectric development? No way. A ritual circumambulation of a holy mountain while blasted on psilocybin mushrooms that just happened to have been growing in the jungle? Please. Local people who divulge the area’s mysteries bit by bit as our hero dodges the oppressive Chinese authorities and earns their trust? Give it a rest. And a last dash to the prize after a drunken local hunter lays out the final leg of the route — with a competing expedition coming from the other direction? Pull the other one.

But that’s the story Ian Baker tells. It begins with his interest in beyul, the sequestered worlds at the heart of Tibetan Buddhist lore. Beyul are gateways to self-realization and spiritual realms, and the greatest of them all is Beyul Pemako — the Hidden Land Shaped like a Lotus — which happens to lie at the bottom of a 17,000-foot-deep gorge surrounded by the Himalayan wilderness. It was Beyul Pemako that gave the world (the Western world, anyway) the idea of Shangri-La, in the novel and film Lost Horizon. The concept is intertwined with the Tibetan idea of Yangsang, what Baker calls an "interdimensional space between mind and landscape." Yangsang, in the Tibetan tradition, is a kind of paradise of union between perceiver and perceived, and it supposedly lay at the heart of Pemako.

If you thought the age of exploration was over, think again. The Heart of the World recalls the memoirs of the great explorers — particularly in the way the landscape provokes Baker into lengthy digressions about Tibetan Buddhism, China’s brutal assimilation of Tibet, and the spirituality of place. Baker has put in time at a number of universities, and the research shows. His knowledge of Tibetan mystical literature is encyclopedic, and along the way we are also introduced to ideas of the sublime and the spirituality of place from John Milton to Henry Miller. These digressions occasionally hamstring the book’s narrative momentum, but the reader gets a sense that Baker might have wanted it that way. He is at great pains to distinguish himself from his exploring predecessors on the grounds that he is not seeking to claim anything — rather he is using the physical quest for the unexplored Five-Mile Gap, and the fabled waterfall it is supposed to hide, as a gloss on his own "search for an understanding of the paradoxical links between landscape and perception and the whole riddle of Yangsang."

But The Heart of the World is hardly an otherworldly religious tract. Tales of poisoning cults, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and more garden-variety corruption and venality abound. Somehow, though, all of this human weakness forms a kind of contrapuntal background to the spiritual quest at the heart of the book. Even the peripheral characters — like the shady police detective Tashi, with his affected trench coat and fedora and his passion for The Godfather — become a sort of gloss on one of the book’s larger themes: the uneasy coexistence of the Tibetan people with their Chinese occupiers and their Western seekers of enlightenment.

Taken as a whole, The Heart of the World is both a cracking adventure story and a revealing look at the dogged extremes of belief. Most people would have given up on the Tsangpo gorge after one or two expeditions plagued by unreliable porters, insufficient food, intractable bureaucracy, horrendous weather, and armies of leeches. Baker returns eight times, on each occasion getting a little closer and moving a little deeper both into Pemako and into his own understanding of his reasons for wanting to go there. The final trip, underwritten by the National Geographic Society (a choice Baker originally viewed with deep ambivalence, although he now says "there was a certain inevitability about the way it all worked"), became the subject of a documentary that still pops up on cable from time to time.