Sikkim's hidden gem: Walking the Rinchenpong forest trail under the shadow of Kangchenjunga

“Om gatey gatey, paragatey, parasamgatey bodhi svaha”. The Bodhisattva vow mantra is a favourite of mine, not just because of its spiritual import but also because of just how relentlessly propulsive it is. I chant it under my breath whenever I’m hiking in the mountains. It helps regulate my breath, keeps my pace even, and anchors me in the present, mindful of the stunning landscapes I’m passing through.

Last month, I was chanting it again as I hiked the forest ridge from Kaluk to Rinchenpong in west Sikkim, always in sight of the Kangchenjunga massif basking in the winter sun on the northern horizon.

Sikkim is a perennial holiday favourite, especially amongst Bengali tourists, who flock to the state no matter what the weather. Although the well-beaten track of Gangtok-Nathu La-Lachen-Lachung-Gurudongmar Lake remains the prime option for most tourists, there are quieter, more peaceful joys to be found in the middle hills of Sikkim, like the Rinchenpong ridge.

It is one of the oldest cultural areas of the erstwhile Buddhist kingdom, and Rinchenpong’s forested ridges are a melting pot of Himalayan tribal cultures, home to the Lepcha, Rai, Gurung, Bhotia and Limbu people. Tourists mostly come here (and to the neighbouring village of Kaluk where the resorts are) for one thing only—unobstructed views of the Kangchenjunga massif. This is still a fairly recent trend, and most tourists stop at Kaluk for a day or two before heading to the next ridge further north to the more established hill station of Pelling.

THE MIDDLE GROUND

While you’re closer to Kangchenjunga at Pelling, the view of the massif is more boxed in. The Kaluk-Rinchenpong ridge offers a perfect middle ground between the more expansive but distant view from Darjeeling, and the closer but narrower view from Pelling. It’s well worth your while to stay in Kaluk for a few days, and that is what I did in December for four days of wonderful day walks to acquaint myself better with the rich culture and natural beauty of the region.

One of those walks was a leisurely hike that led from Kaluk village up a forested ridge to the medieval Reesum monastery. It was a cold, sunny day when we started out with the Kangchenjunga range standing out in all its glory. From left to right shone the peaks of Kokthang, Rathong, the twin peaks of Kabru South and Kabru North.

To the right of that rose the Kangchenjunga massif, with its triangular south face and the south, central and main peaks further back. To its right, and closer, the jagged peaks of Simvo, Pandim and Narsingh. The Singalila ridge, which marks the border with Nepal, stood tall to the west, its high meadows still ringed by clouds.

A steep track led directly up into a birch forest, the path rising above the local school, past upper village houses and cardamom plantations. The rising sun hit us just as we crested the ridge, and stepped into the front porch of the home of a Rai family. We wished them Happy New Year (it was the Rai new year), and they gave us avocadoes.

The trail hit the upper forests soon after, and the punishing gradient became gentler as we made our way past spooky animist shacks and through thickets of giant fern. The forest floor was littered with dry husks of dead fungi, clinging to fallen branches and toppled tree trunks in a profusion of shapes and sizes.

A half hour’s leisurely walk through the forest brought us into a glen in the middle of which was the haunting ruin of a stupa wall, covered in moss and creepers. The mound was surrounded by ancient mani stones, inscribed with carvings of the Buddha, Om Mani Padme Hum (the mantra of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshwara) in Tibetan script, and mandalas. Our guide Binodh Gurung, a local trek leader and biker, told us that this was the old gateway marking the beginning of the Reesum monastery, which lay further up the hill. “Reesum,” he said, “means three ridges. It is the point where three ridges met.”

The monastery, belonging to the Nyingma order of Tibetan Buddhism, is one of the oldest surviving structures in the area, dating back over 300 years. Till the early years of the 20th century, it used to be the site of tantric sadhana, and many Buddhist yogis, both men and women, would come to the forest from across Sikkim for long periods of intense meditation, under the tutelage of the locally renowned Reesum Rinpoche. A thickly overgrown trail leads down from the ruined gates of Reesum to a sacred pond, which the Rinpoche had dug to provide water to this otherwise arid ridge.

We continued up the main trail, and in 10 minutes broke through the tree cover to the pinnacle of the ridge. Atop it sat a most beautiful, old monastery made entirely of wood. Reesum gompa is a time machine to an era when Himalayan monasteries and temples were built entirely of wood and stone, before anyone had heard of cement. The monastery’s whitewashed packed earth walls support a two-tiered pagoda roof, with steps going up one side to an upper shrine. The main ground floor temple doors were fronted with a wooden latticed partition, three quaint wooden prayer wheels set under them.

Streamers of prayer flags flowed from the upper floors down to the wide courtyard in front of the monastery. Behind the gompa was a cordoned off area, hung high with black cloth and a sign saying, “No entry, meditation centre”. Gurung said that recently the monastery has been taken over by the larger Rinchenpong monastery further down the hill and served, once again, as a sadhana retreat.

LIVES IN A BUDDHIST KINGDOM

Although Reesum must have been built no earlier than the late 17th century, it distinctly reminded me of the 12th century Alchi monastery, at the other end of the Himalaya in Ladakh. Not only does Reesum resemble Alchi’s temples in its construction style, but even the faded murals are of a decidedly non-dogmatic Tibetan style, closer to the Kashmiri and Bihar-Bengal antecedents of monastic mural painting. This being a Nyingma monastery, the chief deity of veneration is Guru Rimpoche or Padmasambhava, regarded by the order as a second Buddha, and probably more important than the first.

The sun was shining on this very tranquil scene, even as some workers laboured at one end of the hill to remodel ancient, faded earthen chaityas, clothing them in a much more modern, gaudy Tibetan style. I paid my respects to a weathered old stupa said to contain the remains of the old Reesum Rimpoche.

And the view! A clear day like this is what everyone who comes to Reesum prays for. Beyond the walls of the old monastery and above the forest rose the ancient ramparts of Kangchenjunga, the “abode of the five treasures” of Mahayana spirituality. A breeze was in the air, and the sweet, monotone music of the coppersmith bird.

The forest trail continued down from Reesum’s peak through a gorgeous pine, birch and larch forest towards the Rinchenpong monastery. The pines here are true giants, standing at least a hundred feet tall, clad in coats of moss. Within this forest, Gurung said, were other spots for meditation. While the yogis spent months here in their esoteric rituals, villagers would come up this path with food for the meditators.

Another of our guides, Ongchen Lepcha, in his 20s, said his brother, an ordained monk, spent years learning and meditating at Reesum. “He’s now at a monastery in Ladakh,” said Lepcha, “and then he will go to Mahabodhi for a few years.” He stopped at a clearing in the forest, pointing to a faraway village on a distant ridge and said, “Look, that’s Tinkitam, Bhaichung Bhutia’s village.”

It’s fascinating to get a glimpse into the life of a modern Mahayana Buddhist society, not just as an example of the continued vitality of the religion on the margins of mainstream India, but also because it puts paid to the historical lie that Buddhism ever “disappeared” from South Asia. In Sikkim or in the Kathmandu Valley, one can experience the Mahayana as an unbroken living tradition from its Bihari and Bengali antecedents to its modern Newar and Tibetan descendants.

The main Rinchenpong monastery, set in a pretty clearing surrounded by lines of tall poles of fluttering white prayer flags, is also old, established in 1730. It is a slightly more modern looking—and certainly more brightly painted—version of the Reesum gompa. The monastery was locked due to a winter recess, so I didn’t get to see its famed main deity, a tantric depiction of the blue-skinned Vajradhara, the “Adi Buddha” of Vajrayana, in a yuganaddha (Tibetan yab-yum) embrace with his feminine pragya, the goddess Pragyaparamita.

TRAVELLERS’ TALES

Rinchenpong’s rich history extends beyond Buddhism to Sikkim’s complicated history with the British Raj. Though the colonialists helped the kingdom repulse an invasion by Nepal in the mid-19th century, the British themselves tried their hand at conquest in 1860, sending a detachment of soldiers to Rinchenpong. The local community repulsed that attack by poisoning a lake that was the soldiers’ main source of drinking water. Called Bikh Pokhari (poison lake), it is a short walk to the west from the monastery.

Although the British failed in their conquest, Sikkim did eventually become a protectorate of the Empire, thus opening up the kingdom to western artists, scientists, travellers and later mountaineers. In the early years of the 20th century, Rinchenpong became a major staging post, and as a result, home to a beautiful colonial era daak bungalow, a little way above the lake. Surrounded by a grove of tall pines, the bungalow remains well maintained and picturesque.

The Russian painter and mystic Nicholas Roerich stopped here in 1924 during a long, rambling trip through Sikkim, soon after he came to India. Enthralled by the kingdom, and especially Kangchenjunga, he would paint the range again and again through his life, from a rough watercolour in 1928, to luminous ones in the 1940s. In his book Altai Himalaya: A Travel Diary (1929), Roerich describes a view of Kangchenjunga and rhododendrons: “Above this synthetic picture, it is strange, unexpectedly startling, to behold new ramparts mounting the clouds. Above the nebulous waves, above the twilight, glimmer the sparkling snows. Erect, infinitely beautiful, stand these dazzling, impassable peaks. Two distinct worlds, intersected by a mist!”

The mountaineer Frank Smythe stayed here in 1930, on his way to mount one of the first attempts at scaling Kangchenjunga. Writing about the expedition in his book The Kangchenjunga Adventure (1930), Smythe recounts meeting tourists on a world tour at the bungalow. Sleeping on the bungalow’s verandah that night, Smythe woke up to an amazing sight.

“As I raised myself in my sleeping bag, I saw between a gap in the nearer mists the crest of a great cloud high up in the sky aglow with the first pale light of day. But was it a cloud? It was too steadfast, too immovable…Even as I watched, the dawn came up fiercely, ruddily, a titanic conflagration sweeping the upper regions of the sky. The nearer mists dissolved; other peaks became visible, their summits gleaming like the white tents of a besieging army reflecting the glare from some burning city.”

Standing in that same verandah 96 years later, there was no such view for me, thanks to the surrounding grove. It was nearly noon now, and there was a quiet hush in the air. It felt curiously timeless to be standing there. Walking the Rinchenpong ridge, I felt, was like walking a pilgrims’ trail in the footsteps of countless others over hundreds of years—to become an entry in an unending tide of history, moving steadily forward yet being perfectly still, at the same time. “Om gatey gatey, paragatey, parasamgatey bodhi svaha”.