The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  3 . Research begun in 1994 by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in collaboration with earth scientists at the Chengdu Institute of Geology and Mineral Resources confirm that the Tsangpo’s average gradient between Gyala and Medok is nearly 160 feet per mile.

  4 . Frank Kingdon Ward, Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1926), p. 205.

  5 Following Kingdon Ward’s epic quest for the Falls of the Brahmaputra, two other plant collectors—George Ludlow and Colonel Henry Elliot—traveled several days below Gyala in May of 1946, collecting seeds of more than forty species of rhododendrons. Since then, with the emerging threat of a Chinese invasion, no foreign expeditions were admitted into the Tsangpo gorge region until 1991 when a joint Chinese-Japanese team made the first attempt to climb Namcha Barwa—until that time the world’s highest unclimbed peak. As Kingdon Ward had written before his death: “Our knowledge of Tibetan geography would be greatly increased by an ascent of Namcha Barwa, and of Gyala Pelri, those twin peaks which stand on either side of the Tsangpo at the gateway to the gorges.”

  6 . Khamtrul Jamyang Dondrup Rinpoche, The Lama’s Heart Advice Which Dispels all Obstacles: A Concise Guidebook to the Hidden Land of Pemako. Unpublished manuscript, translated by Brian Gregor, 2002.

  7 . Even Padmasambhava, who first spoke of Pemako as an Elysian haven, narrowly escaped this fate. Toward the end of his sojourn in Tibet, self-serving ministers threatened by his growing influence counseled the king to have him drowned in the Tsangpo: This sorcerer and master of various illusions, a savage from the barbaric borderlands . . . adept in evil spells, has deceived Your Majesty’s mind . . . He should be thrown in the Tsangpo river before the very eyes of . . . the king, ministers, queens, and everyone else in the country.

  8 . In the cult of the sublime, “the beautiful elements in nature are the enduring expression of God’s loving benevolence, while the vast and disordered in nature express his infinity, power, and wrath, and so evoke a paradoxical union of delight and terror, pleasure and awe.” Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century philosopher in his greatly influential Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, bases the sense of beauty on the passion of love and associates it with pleasure, while “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible . . . is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” M. M. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), p. 102.

  9 . Kingdon Ward, The Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges, p. 130.

  10 The suture between the colliding continents is further identified by serpentinites, soft green rocks quarried by the local populace to fashion cooking pots.

  11 Sometime between 1365 and 1372 the terton Sangye Lingpa revealed a treasure-text from behind the falls called Shinje Tsedak (Yamantaka, Lord of Life), in which the dark blue god holds out his hand in the mudra of assurance and in the other holds a blazing jewel. Khamtrul Rinpoche explained that the deity behind the waterfall refers not to actual death but to the momentary transcience of all phenomena, the nature of which is both suffering and liberation. Geographical sites such as the Falls of Shinje Chogyal, Khamtrul said, support what Tibetans call danang, or sacred vision, in which perceptions of the environment are transformed and exalted. During his own journey through the gorges Khamtrul had written: “In this supreme of sacred lands, those who exert themselves in spiritual vision will be uplifted by the Buddhas of the ten directions. . . . Whoever travels through this land on pilgrimage . . . will be utterly victorious over the darkness of anger, ignorance, and attachment.”

  12 In the fourteenth century the terton Sangye Lingpa extracted hidden scrolls from the slopes of Namcha Barwa as did Duddul Dorje nearly three centuries later. These texts had opened routes into Pemako and the sanctuary said to lie at its heart. Following the directives of the scrolls, the eighteenth-century lama Choeje Lingpa had searched for Pemako’s sequestered paradise but died in the jungles before finding it. His lineage of revealed treasures—The Immortal Heart Drop—prospered in the Great Bend region of the Tsangpo gorge, furthered by his reincarnation, Choling Garwang Chimé Dorje. Born into a local Monpa family in 1763, Chimé Dorje ventured deeply into the Tsangpo’s innermost gorges in search of the mysterious portal to the lost sanctuary. He was joined in his efforts by two contemporary lamas; Rigdzin Dorje Thokme (1746-97), Limitless Vajra, and Gampopa Orgyen Drodul Lingpa (b. 1757), both of whom enjoyed the patronage of Powo’s hereditary king, the Kanam Gyalpo. The three lamas became known collectively as Beyul Rigdzin Namsum, the Three Emanational Awareness Holders Who Opened the Hidden-Land (of Pemako). Protected from invading forces by its extreme topography and ascribed with powerful spiritual energies, Pemako’s renown spread throughout the Land of Snows. Choeje Lingpa’s revealed terma Wishfulfilling Light Rays: Opening the Door to the Hidden Land described it as follows: The sacred land of Dechen Pemako—

  The Lotus of Great Bliss!

  Glaciers cover the surrounding mountains,

  Below them are walls of rock . . .

  Lower down lie forests.

  Fruits and medicinal herbs fill the valleys.

  The mountains and trees appear like dakas and dakinis dancing.

  Vast jungles are like demonesses with their manes swept back,

  And rocky spires rise like piercing weapons.

  The rivers roar due to the high passes and precipices that seal the boundaries.

  There is no danger of invasion from outer forces.

  Those who dwell here enjoy the fruits of this blissful realm.

  The sounds of the elements resound like mantras of . . . peaceful and wrathful deities.

  The birds that live here have beautiful colors of white, yellow, green, red, and blue; their songs are the happy sounds of Dharma.

  The waters have eight qualities.

  And there are hundreds of edible plants . . . and varieties of fruits and crops,

  Incense-bearing trees, and powerful medicinal herbs.

  Samaya!

  13 The neyigs refer to Dorje Pagmo Ludrolma, “Vajra-varahi in her form of subduing serpents.” Lying on her back, her left arm wields a snake and extends into the region of Powo. Her right arm shapes the valley of lower Kongpo and holds a scorpion whose generative organ is held to be located at Gyala. Pemako’s most important monastery rises from Dorje Pagmo’s navel chakra in the lower Tsangpo valley. Farther south, concealed in vast and luxurient jungles, lies her secret center, the area associated with Yangsang Né, Pemako’s still undiscovered paradise. As a support for meditating on the mind’s innermost reality, Dorje Pagmo’s sow head ornament and glistening third eye represent the transmutation of ignorance into luminous awareness. Her right hand holds a curved blade that severs all dualistic conceptions of self and other. Her tiara of skulls, bone ornaments, and wild disheveled hair convey freedom from all fears and attachments, while life-enhancing nectar overflows from her human skull bowl. Tibetan texts maintain that Dorje Pagmo’s wisdom mind of emptiness and bliss pervades all beings, although they are largely ignorant of it.

  14 George Patterson, Patterson of Tibet. (San Diego, CA: ProMotion Publishing, 1998), p. 58.

  15 Although each of Dorje Pagmo’s chakras corresponds to specific topographical features or areas within Pemako, the neyigs differ in their designation, discrepencies based on the differing visionary experiences of individual tertons. While most texts refer to the mountain Gyala Pelri as Dorje Pagmo’s crown chakra, the identification of the throat and heart centers varies considerably. More elusive still is the geographical referent for Yangsang Né that some texts say lies in her heart chakra and others in the secret lotus center of her genit
alia. Some of the discrepancy is attributable to Tantric practice by which the heart chakra only opens once the lower centers have been activated, their energies blazing upward to illuminate the heart, throat, and crown. Generally, Dorje Pagmo’s five principle chakras refer to areas in Pemako encompassing several pilgrimage sites. For example, in the Powo history the five chakras are listed as follows: Crown chakra—Gyala Pelri; throat chakra—Gompo Né to Drakpodrukpuk; heart chakra—Polungpa; navel chakra—Rinchenpung; secret chakra—Ksipa Yudzong. Shepe Dorje, on the other hand, locates the heart center at Rinchenpung and the navel chakra farther south at Drakar Tashi Dzong.

  16 The neyigs refer to Pemako as the greatest of all charnel grounds. In this context the charnel ground signifies the world in its most elemental form and the transcendence of fear through Tantric rites. In one practice, yogins and yoginis visualize themselves being ritually dismembered in a charnel ground by a dark emanation of Dorje Pagmo. More elemental still was Padmasambhava’s initiation in the charnel ground of Sitavana (Cool Grove) when he was swallowed by a dakini and traveled through her chakras to her secret lotus, the ultimate charnel ground of all. This sense of being devoured and transformed recurs throughout Tantric literature. See Khamtrul Rinpoche’s experience of a visionary journey to a paradisical realm as recorded by Edwin Bernbaum in The Way to Shambala.

  17 Notable discoveries and introductions from the Tsangpo gorges included: Rhododendron cinnabarinum spp. xanthocodon Concatenans Group (“Orange Bill”), R. lanatoides, R. venator, R. montroseanum, R. parmulatum, R. leucaspis, Primula florindae, P. cawdoriana, Cotoneaster conspicuous, and Berberis calleantha. These and other species of rhododendrons were planted throughout the British Isles in the first decades of the twentieth century when new introductions and the works of writers such as William Robinson inspired a revolution in gardening tastes. As Ken Cox wrote in a recent (2001) reprint of Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges: “The scale of introductions during this period [1910-50] were [sic] unprecedented both in the number of species and the volume of seed. . . . A number of wealthy landowners such as J. C. Williams, Lionel de Rothschild, Lord Aberconway and others sponsored plant hunting expeditions . . . landscaping their expanding woodland gardens in a ‘natural’ style, with ponds, streams, ravines and meandering paths, into which they planted the exciting new Magnolias, Rhododendrons, Azaleas, Camellias, and Meconopsis.” As Cox further observed: “They founded the Rhododendrons Society where they competed amongst each other for ribbons. There was a neverending stream of spectacular new species of rhododendrons coming in and they planted them in the thousands.” Several species of rhododendrons are indigenous to Europe, six from Western Europe, and several more from the Turkish-Russian frontier. Now that Ledum are considered part of the genus Rhododendron, an additional two European species can be considered. The “wild” Rhododendron ponticum has flourished in the United Kingdom for at least 300 to 400 years and may have existed there from before the last Ice Age. The deciduous azaleas from the eastern parts of the United States were introduced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by William Bartram and other pioneer explorers. One or two Asiatic species were introduced in the eighteenth century, includuding Arboreum. The tropical varieties were introduced from the 1750s onward from Borneo and other parts of southeast Asia. From 1848 to 1853 Joseph Hooker introduced many species from Sikkim. All of the species of rhododendrons brought back by Kingdon Ward still flourish in British gardens.

  18 A year earlier, in 1728, Shepe Dorje had acted as mediator between the recently installed 7 th Dalai Lama and a minister who had ascended to power after bringing to an end a period of civil war and brutal Manchu oppression. The opening of hidden-lands, like the construction of stupas and performance of Tantric rites, was believed by Tibetans to repel negativity, including the armies still gathered on Tibet’s frontiers. Although Tibet had been repeatedly invaded by Mongol armies, the first decades of the eighteenth century were a period of great political instability and power struggles between the Dzungkar Mongols and China’s Qing Dynasty that had asserted hegemony over Tibet. The 6 th Dalai Lama was murdered in 1706 and, before his successor could be enthroned, armed Gelugpa monks supported by Mongolian mercenaries terrorized any Tibetan factions that opposed the temporal authority of the Dalai Lama and his regents. An edict put forward by a scheming Tibetan minister and supported by the Qing emperor led to severe persecution of the Nyingmapa sect, which followed the teachings of Padmasambhava. An independent Jesuit priest resident in Lhasa at that time referred to the Gelugpas as “deceitful wolves. . . . From the first of December 1717 until the end of October 1720 they ill treated and murdered the monks of [the Nyingma order] and all who had dealings with them. Many of their monasteries were sacked and destroyed, the richest and most honoured Lamas were killed, while others fled deprived of everything and sought refuge in caverns.”

  In 1726, when Lelung Shepe Dorje was twenty-eight years old, he met with Miwang Sonam Topgyal, a Tibetan minister known also as Polaney, who over the following two years was instrumental in ending Tibet’s civil war and mitigating the persecution of the Nyingmapas. Polaney had received teachings from Jetsun Migyur Palgyi Dronma (1699-1769), the daughter of Terdak Lingpa, who was one of the foremost Nyingma masters of that time. He also received empowerments and transmissions from Shepe Dorje who, while nominally Gelugpa, had deep affinity for the more free-roving style of the Nyingmapas. Despite the renewed stability following Polaney’s rise to power, Tibet was still threatened by Dzungkar Mongol troops that had withdrawn to the borderlands. During this time of political and social turmoil the hidden-lands of Padmasambhava promised both refuge and spiritual redemption.

  Shepe Dorje’s account of his journey, “Delightful True Stories of the Supreme Land of Pemako,” reveals the spiritual as well as political forces that underlay the opening of hidden-lands. A contemporary of the treasure-revealer Choeje Lingpa who recognized him as a master of his lineage, Shepe Dorje was sponsored in part by Miwang Sonam Topgyal who later became Tibet’s de facto ruler. Before departing from Lhasa, Shepe Dorje performed fire rituals and other rites to remove obstacles to his impending pilgrimage. He advanced the political prospects of his primary sponsor by making feast offerings to the Miwang’s principal protector deity. He was instructed in visions to “meditate on supreme emptiness and generate great bliss through the union of skillful means and primordial wisdom.” By thus building the foundations of meditative absorption, he was told, “the auspicious circumstances will coalesce to open the hidden places of Pemako.”

  On the second day of the second month of the Female Earth Bird Year (1729) Shepe Dorje began his journey with two spirit mediums—one male and one female—whose trances would later indicate the route they should follow toward their destination, the Secret Forest of the Dakinis in Pemako’s innermost center. A protector deity named Mentsun Chenmo spoke through the male spirit medium: “Kyi! I was sent by Padmasambhava to assist the knowledge holders in opening the sacred places of Pemako. I will not deviate from protecting your task. When you and your retinue return safely to your place of origin make offerings to appease me.” Nearing the entrance to the Tsangpo gorge, Shepe Dorje performed a ceremony to Dorje Lakpa, the protector of Pemako’s western gate, whose “palace” lay amid the ice of Namcha Barwa. Unlike most Buddhist rites, they offered the blood of a black goat and other substances that had been indicated in Shepe Dorje’s visions. As the lama wrote: It is important here to honor the eight classes of spirits with blood and meat, and each morning to make ritual offerings of fragrant incense and other pleasing substances to the protector deities so as to pass without hindrance. . . . Write the wishfulfilling prayer of 13 secrets on a red flag and erect it on high ground while reciting mantras. Perform sacred dances and . . . play instruments unceasingly. Visualize Padmasambhava on the crown of your head and his attendants at your sides. Invoke the fearsome mamos to guide you on the path. If danger approache
s, generate the pride of the ferocious mantra protector Lokitriyi and perform the rites of expelling and combustion. Otherwise, visualize . . . that Avalokiteshvara [the bodhisattva of supreme compassion] sends forth light rays to eliminate all obstacles. Recite the three sacred syllables and the deity’s heart mantra. Imagine that the diseases and magical disturbances caused by the elements and local spirits all are pacified.

  Before departing from Gyala, Shepe Dorje performed Tantric feast offerings to accumulate merit and appease the deities. He followed the directives of the prophecy and enlisted a young girl born in the monkey year to walk ahead of his group bearing the trident of a wrathful protector spirit. Besides a male and a female kudanpa, or spirit medium, his party included three yogis, a siddha named Sangye Lhundrup, a “woman of good lineage” named Pema Roltso and her attendent, as well as a cook named Dorje Lhunpo, Indestructible Spontaneity. Shepe Dorje wrote that a local guardian spirit entered into one of the mediums and declared: “I have used both peaceful and wrathful methods to impart the blessings and siddhis [of this sacred land] . . . To enter through Pemako’s western gate recite the wishfulfilling verses of this hidden-land and enter while dancing and singing.”

  They set out into the gorge playing flutes, drums, and kangling, accompanied initially by an entourage of monks, patrons, and local villagers. “When we passed the gate,” Shepe Dorje wrote, “I began to dance and spontaneously sang the following verse: ‘Rainbows paint the high blue sky. There lies the spontaneously formed palace of Padmasambhava and his dakini consorts. Please grant common and supreme accomplishments to those fortunate enough to have gathered here . . .’ ” Shepe Dorje then turned into the dense forest and began climbing toward the first pass. “Our continuous dancing, singing, fervent prayers, and sounds of ritual instruments increased our meditative awareness,” he wrote. “Our vision expanded without limit and we effortlessly made the difficult ascent.”