Nobody climbs Kailash, but tens of thousands walk around it, and the walk itself carries the religious weight the summit is denied.
The kora
The circuit path, roughly 52 kilometres over high passes, is usually walked in two or three days by outside pilgrims and sometimes attempted in a single long day by devout Tibetan Buddhists, for whom completing it in one day is considered especially meritorious. Hindu tradition holds that thirteen circuits equal the merit of a lifetime of meditation, and Buddhist tradition sets the number for guaranteed enlightenment at one hundred and eight. Bon pilgrims circle the mountain counterclockwise, against the clockwise direction used by Hindus and Buddhists, reflecting an older tradition that predates both.
Four traditions, four mountains
Hindus identify the peak as the abode of Shiva and Parvati; Tibetan Buddhists identify it with Mount Meru, the axis of the Buddhist cosmos, and with the tantric deity Demchok; Jains know it as Ashtapada, where the first Tirthankara, Rishabhanatha, is said to have attained liberation; the Bon tradition calls it Yungdrung Gutseg, the nine story swastika mountain, and holds it sacred independently of the other three.
Getting there at all
The mountain sits in Chinese-administered Tibet, and access for foreign pilgrims runs through a permit system that has been tightened or suspended at various points, making the kora a walk that has to be politically as well as physically possible before it can be religiously so.