A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality Read online

  When they reached the first settlement in Nepal they heard that the lama and his followers were at a monastery farther down. He hadn’t yet opened the secret cave. So they cut some grass for the donkey, filled a sack with cooked potatoes and climbed back over the pass to where the others were waiting in the cave. The next day, she led the others across the pass on the trail she had cut. It took two days for them to reach the lama. For a few months the lama was busy doing special pujas, or rituals, to appease the local spirits. Then he led hundreds of them high into the mountains in order to open what she called the Gate of Heaven.

  With that she got up. To my amazement, night had fallen. A glance at my watch told me almost three hours had passed.

  ‘That’s how it was,’ she said. ‘If I were still young I’d show you the way. But now I can hardly walk. My legs hurt and my feet are swollen.’ She bent down and rubbed her left knee and looked at her bare feet, gnarled with arthritis.

  ‘Just look at my feet,’ she said. ‘See what time has done to them. And to think I was the one to walk in front and stamp down the snow! Now all I can do is pray.’ She spun her prayer wheel, and muttering the mantra of Padmasambhava beneath her breath she left the room.

  The secret cave

  Wall painting, Tashiding Gompa, Sikkim

  CHAPTER TWO

  Into the Rabbit Hole

  ‘I became one of the lucky ones—I reached my unattainable land.’ ~ Carl Gustav Jung

  When I stepped into the Gangtok night I felt elated. Just by being in Dorje Wangmo’s presence, hearing her very real story, feeling the icy, snow-laden winds she described, I felt a longing awaken within me like a distant echo.

  How extraordinary it is to actually meet someone with the courage not only to believe in a land of dreams but to leave everything behind for it.

  ‘Only if you are willing to give up everything and leave forever,’ she had told me, ‘only then can you go to the beyul.’

  Dorje Wangmo left her native Bhutan and never returned. She gladly gave up not only her possessions but was quite willing to say goodbye to everyone she had ever known, so infinitely greater was the place to which she was going.

  I found myself at a high point in the city. Perhaps it was the altitude or maybe the lowness of the clouds that somehow made the sky seem more immediate, not entirely disconnected from where I stood. The firmament of stars seemed almost close enough to touch.

  The moon shot free of the swiftly moving, tumbling clouds. Across a deep and broad valley rose ridges of thickly wooded hills. Ascending in the distance were the snow-clad heights of Mount Kanchenjunga. There, basking in the same silvery moonlight, were the very snowy slopes Dorje Wangmo had spoken of so vividly.

  Maybe I was confounding the palpable detail with which she told her tale—vivid to the tiniest particular—for the reality of that which she sought but I felt the need to delve deeper into the story.

  I went back to see Dorje Wangmo the next morning to ask if she knew of others who had gone with Tulshuk Lingpa on his journey to Beyul. She told me of two people who, in turn, told me of others, and eventually the search for those who set out for Beyul brought me to villages, monasteries and mountain retreats from Darjeeling and Sikkim in the eastern Himalayas to the western Himalayas and to Nepal. I met and spent time with most of the surviving members of the expedition, now mostly quite aged, as well as the lama’s family. These extraordinary people, who gave up everything to follow their dreams, also gave freely of their time to tell me about what was for most of them the most extraordinary events of their lives.

  The most important person with whom I spoke was Kunsang, Tulshuk Lingpa’s only son. He provided the thread that wove together the story of Tulshuk Lingpa and his visionary expedition. Eighteen years old at the time his father departed for Beyul, Kunsang was able to offer a first¬hand account of what others knew only from hearsay. Kunsang heard the stories of Tulshuk Lingpa’s early life directly from him. One might expect—and even forgive—a son to exaggerate his father’s deeds. But the details of his stories, no matter how fantastic, astonished me all the more by checking out when I asked others who were in a position to know. Kunsang’s respect and admiration for his father was matched by his profound knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism. Deep respect did not preclude his seeing the humor and divinely inspired madness at the core of so many of the stories. With Kunsang alone I had almost fifty hours of taped interviews. When I transcribed these interviews, I was struck by the amount of time speech was rendered impossible by laughter.

  Kunsang, Tulshuk Lingpa’s only son

  I used to wonder just where to draw the line when Kunsang told his tales. Often I had the feeling he was leading me down a narrow plank over deepening water, drawing me further than I felt comfortable to a place where logic failed. His stories often started out on firm enough ground but as the incidents built up and became increasingly fantastic, I’d suddenly find myself following with my credulity intact further than I would normally go. I would end up believing things that if told outright would sound just too fantastic to have occurred. Every time I thought Kunsang had gone too far, I’d find a corroborating detail in something someone else said. Or I’d check details of what others told me with him, and find an uncanny concurrence of facts even in the most outlandish stories.

  With Kunsang, one got a taste of what his father was like, making reality of things usually relegated to the realm of fiction and imagination. He wasn’t confounding fact and fiction as much as forging a new synthesis of the two.

  We have been taught from the earliest age to separate fact from fiction. We can read Alice in Wonderland and get transported to a land of marvels. Yet while we are there, we know Wonderland doesn’t really exist. By imagining it, we partake in the hidden realm of wonders the author imagined but we retain our sense of propriety. We don’t redraw the line between fact and fiction; we suspend it, and we are entertained. That is certainly the prudent thing to do. We can assume it is what Lewis Carroll himself did. He could write his books about Wonderland and still maintain his position as a respected Oxford don.

  Imagine what would have happened if Lewis Carroll had proclaimed the reality of Wonderland and launched an expedition? Surely he would have been thought mad as a hatter in the Oxford of his day as he would be today. The line separating fact from fiction is certainly tightly drawn and enduring—as tightly drawn as that which separates sane from insane. Cross one, and you cross the other.

  The first time I met Kunsang, I asked him the meaning of his father’s name.

  Kunsang told me that to understand the name Tulshuk Lingpa we had to go right back to Padmasambhava, the eighth-century visionary and mystic wizard often credited with bringing the dharma, or Buddhist teachings, to Tibet. Padmasambhava established the teachings by travelling through the high central Asian plateau, subduing the local deities belonging to the Bonpo (the indigenous religion of Tibet with strong shamanic elements), and turning them into protectors of the dharma.

  Padmasambhava

  Kunsang explained that Padmasambhava not only understood the past and had mastery of the present but could see into the future as well. He gave only the teachings that were right for the founding of Buddhism in that remote corner of the world in the eighth century. Other teachings that he knew would be better imparted at a later date, even hundreds or thousands of years later, were hidden by him. These hidden teachings are known in Tibetan as ter or terma, which means treasure. Those who find terma are known as tertons, treasure revealers.

  Padmasambhava hid things like tantric scriptures. He hid certain ritual objects that, once found, would give tremendous powers. He hid great spiritual insights. But most important, Kunsang explained, he hid the secret valleys like the one in Sikkim—Beyul Demoshong. These valleys are Padmasambhava’s most precious treasures, and the most difficult to find. Kunsang was both eloquent and enthusiastic about Padmasambhava’s tremendous insights. Knowing the teachings of the Buddha would become endangered in Tibet, Padmas
ambhava also knew what would be needed and when. Some of the most important Tibetan Buddhist scriptures were protected over vast expanses of time in the changeless layers of a terton’s consciousness. Terma remains hidden from the world until time itself ripens, until a particular terton takes incarnation and ‘opens’ it.

  I told Kunsang I could imagine how Padmasambhava hid a text or even a dorje, the two-sided brass implement lamas use in rituals representing the thunderbolt. But when I told him I didn’t understand how an insight could be hidden, especially a spiritual insight, he burst out laughing.

  ‘You only imagine you can understand how Padmasambhava hid his texts! To be sure, he didn’t just take a text and bury it in a cave or stuff it in a crack in a cliff. It wasn’t like that at all.’

  He explained how there are five places where Padmasambhava hid his terma. He hid some in the earth, this is known as sa-ter; he hid some in the mountains. This is ri-ter. Some, chu-ter, he hid in water, and yet others are called nam-ter. These are the treasures Padmasambhava hid in the sky. Others, gong-ter, he hid in the mind itself.

  Hiding terma is one thing; finding it, another. As Padmasambhava hid each of the terma, he appointed a newly subdued ‘protector of the dharma’ to guard it and keep it hidden until that particular teaching, powerful object or insight was needed.

  At the same time that he was hiding a terma in the world outside, he was also planting it inside, in the mind of one of his disciples. Not on the surface of his mind, the part that changes, that holds memories and is lost from one lifetime to another. He planted the knowledge of the terma in the unchanging layer of his disciple’s mind, where the teaching would be protected.

  What happens is this: when the time comes and a particular terma is needed, the right disciple takes an incarnation. He is a bit crazy. He has the ability to enter a mystic state and have revealed to him by a dharma protector or a dakini—a female messenger or guide—the teaching or empowerment given directly by Padmasambhava.

  When a terton is given a scripture it isn’t actually in the form of a book. Or not at first. Sometimes what the terton has revealed to him is only a few scratches on a stone. Other times he reaches his hand inside a stone and pulls out a tightly rolled scrap of yellowed paper. On it will be a few ‘letters’ in an alphabet only a terton can understand. He will then spend hours or even days without sleep, unfolding the meaning contained in those few characters, bringing them down—as Tulshuk Lingpa once said—from the Celestial Language into Tibetan.

  A white-robed terton in a literal

  depiction of the taking out ter.

  Wall painting, Queen of Bhutan’s monastery, Darjeeling

  Tulshuk Lingpa was a terton. Tertons are known for being crazy—and totally unpredictable. They are famous for being idiosyncratic and irrational, and by their very nature inscrutable. Illogical behavior is their forte. They are expected to act in ways that defy the rationality to which the rest of us are bound. After all they reveal hidden treasures, and because of this they are especially revered among Tibetans and—like precious jewels—they are exceedingly rare. You cannot train to become a terton. You are born with the ability—or not. No amount of study can make you a terton. In fact, too much learning might very well take the ability right out of you. As William Blake wrote in his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.’

  Kunsang explained that his father’s name was Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpas are like the elites of tertons. ‘They find special hidden treasures,’ he said, ‘therefore, they are especially crazy!’

  ‘And the name Tulshuk,’ I asked. ‘Does that have significance?’

  To understand that, Kunsang told me, we have to go back to Golok, north of Kham, in eastern Tibet. That is where his father was born. He was born with the name Senge Dorje, which means Lion Thunderbolt.

  From the earliest age, Senge Dorje stood out as a particularly witty, intelligent and mischievous boy. He could learn despite hardly being taught. This made people suspect he was an incarnation, as often happens with boys who show special abilities. At a very early age he was sent to the Domang Gompa, a monastery in his native Golok, to be trained. This must have been in the early- or mid-1920s.

  There was a great lama at that monastery known as the Domang Tulku, or reincarnation. That was his title. He was a lama who had taken reincarnation many times at the Domang Gompa, increasing his spiritual insight with each successive incarnation. His name was Dorje Dechen Lingpa. Being a lingpa, one of those rare elites of treasure revealers, he had the spark and could recognize it in the boy. He saw the boy’s easy capacity for both learning and mischief. He observed that though he skipped most of his lessons, he earned the jealousy of his classmates by learning and being able to recite the ancient texts with only a single cursory reading. He began to suspect the boy had an extraordinary future ahead of him.

  When the boy was at the age of losing his baby teeth, Dorje Dechen Lingpa decided to test him. He took Senge Dorje and half a dozen other young novice monks across the empty plain behind the monastery to where a chain of bare mountains rose abruptly in a series of huge cliffs. Leading them in a single file up the rock face along a treacherous way of loose scree and sheer drops, he brought them to a crack in the cliff that opened to a cave. There he sat in a circle with them in the cave’s twilit interior and took out the implements of a lama’s ritual life: the dorje, or double-sided brass implement that represents the thunderbolt; the damaru, or handheld drum made from children’s skulls; and the dilbu, or ritual bell. Into a small brass bowl he poured a few handfuls of rice from an old leather pouch and placed it in the center of the tight circle in which they sat.

  Tibetan lamas chant sacred syllables at such a deep pitch you can feel the empty air between you vibrate. Imagine how much stronger the vibration would be if you’re in a cave and tons of ancient rocks resound. If you’re seven years old and an apprentice, learning both the reality of the Unseen and how to communicate with it, the lama appears to you like a wizard and the beating of his drum is heard in other worlds; then the ringing of his bell calls forth unseen beings. You sit—fear riding up your spine and spilling over into wonder and awe as the atmosphere in the cave concentrates and takes on form.

  Dorje Dechen Lingpa performed a ritual that day that moved his young novices to a wide-eyed state of supernatural anticipation. When he had achieved his desired atmosphere, in which what is beyond sense reached the edge of the palpable, he took a handful of rice from the bowl. Intoning a single incantation, followed by a resounding silence, he threw the rice into the air.

  In the ensuing silence the children gasped, in both fear and wonder, as the grains of rice turned into purbas, the daggers of Tibetan ritual, and danced before them floating and shimmering in the air.

  The children all pulled back, faces marked by fear—except for one, Senge Dorje, whose face grew steady. He raised his hand and fixing his eyes on the purba closest to him, reached out and with a confidence born out of fearlessness he grasped it and held it fast.

  The other children gasped in wonder and admiration at their comrade who had reached into a vision and brought back a piece; Dorje Dechen Lingpa simply smiled.

  This is the story as Kunsang told it. Of course neither he nor I was there. Yet as with so many other fantastic stories in this remarkable tale, there is an element of truth in the apparent fantasy, a blurring of the line between fact and fiction out of which something tangible arises as if designed to make us question our assumptions. In this case it was the purba itself. For Kunsang told me that his father was to carry that purba in a cloth bag or tucked beneath his belt for the rest of his life.

  When Kunsang was a young boy of eight or ten years, he used to sneak into his father’s room in the middle of the night with some friends when thunderstorms were coming. Every night his father would stick the purba in a bowl of rice beside his bed, and there it would be—in the pitch-dark room—the tip glowi
ng with the coming of the storm, sparking a moment before each bolt of lightning flashed in the sky. His friends would get so scared they’d want to scream and run away. But he’d grab on to them and force them to silence as the purba glowed and sparked next to his sleeping father.

  The day after Tulshuk Lingpa got the purba, Dorje Dechen Lingpa took him on a long walk. ‘I am sorry for taking that purba,’ the boy said as soon as they were alone. He thought he was to be reprimanded.

  Dorje Dechen Lingpa smiled inwardly.

  ‘It’s quite all right,’ the lama said. ‘In fact it is very good. Yesterday was a test, and you alone passed it. While I could manifest the purbas, even I couldn’t have brought one down. The purba you brought down was nam-ter, sky treasure, treasure hidden long ago in the sky. That you got it means you are a terton. Let me see it.’

  Tulshuk Lingpa had the purba tucked under his belt beneath his robes. He handed it respectfully to the lama, who examined it closely and told him to keep it safely for it would bring him much power.

  The purba, taken from a photo of Tulshuk Lingpa in the 1950s

  Dorje Dechen Lingpa handed the purba back to the boy and spoke confidentially to him. ‘I will be leaving soon,’ the older lama said. ‘I am going to Sikkim to try to open the way to Beyul Demoshong, the Hidden Valley where none has been. Thirty are coming with me. But the way is difficult—we must cross the plains of Tibet, braving highwaymen, cross the Himalayan passes south into Sikkim and then climb the slopes of the Mountain of the Five Heavenly Treasures, Mount Kanchenjunga. If I am successful I will never return and we may never see each other again. I want you to know something: There is a remarkable future laid out for you. You won’t stay here but travel to distant lands. People from far away will know your name. If I fail to open the way, then you will be the one.’