The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  6 Adapted from Lobsang Lhalungpa, translator, Mahamudra: The Quintessence of Mind and Meditation by Tagpo Tashi Namgyal (Boston: Shambala Publications 1986), p. 333

  7 On the slopes of the Gawalung-La, Terton Taksham Nuden Dorje revealed the terma cycle of Yidam Gongdu and its enumeration of Pemako’s twelve outer territories, forty inner ravines, and sixteen secret territories.

  8 As described in Padmasambhava’s Luminous Web: Seven Profound Teachings which Open the Gate of the Hidden-land: In the center of Pemako there are five nectar-bestowing plants. Whoever consumes “the excellent plant of miracles” will remain free of all disease and attain miraculous powers. One’s body will become youthful and capable of flying through the sky. Without abandoning the physical body, one can attain celestial realms. . . . Whoever eats the “plant of increasing bliss” experiences the inexhaustible union of joy and emptiness. . . . Whoever partakes of “the plant of purification” dissolves all karmic obscurations and the eighty forms of habitual thought. They will recall countless previous lives. Whoever eats “the plant which severs disturbing emotions,” will never think of food or drink . . . and samadhi will arise spontaneously. These are the supreme plants of the realized adepts (siddhas). Whoever eats them will release all blockages of the inner energy channels and directly perceive the realms of the Buddhas.

  Lest one imagine that collecting these botanical wonders is an easy task, the text clearly identifies the obstacles: This excellent plant . . . will appear instantly to fortunate persons of strong devotion. Those less fortunate whose thought is defiled and those who break their spiritual commitments, for these beings it is invisible!

  Nonetheless, the text offers specific instructions for harvesting the mind-altering flora: You should approach it slowly like a cat stalking. When you first cut into it, the watery sap should be dropped on the ground. Then comes a milky liquid like a drop of melted butter. This you should consume.

  Although research suggests that the Soma preparations of the ancient Aryans included Nelumbo nucifera, India’s sacred lotus, as well as the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria, which induces sensations of flight, little mention is made in Tibetan literature of the pharmacopoeia of enlightenment. A well-documented article by Scott Hajicek-Dobberstein in volume 48 (1995) of the American Journal of Ethnopharmacology reports the use of the distinctive scarlet and white-flecked Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric mushroom, by several Siberian tribes, as well as Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, and other early Tantric Buddhist siddha-alchemists. A section of the eleven-volume Nyingtik Yabtsi—a collection of esoteric practices allegedly dating back to the eighth century—clearly describes a vision-inducing preparation made from the tropane alkaloids of Himalayan datura, an eerie plant with spiked leaves and soft white trumpet-shaped flowers that blossom only in darkness.

  The exalted accounts of Pemako’s magical plants ascribed to Padmasambhava recall the tangatse berries ingested by the “lamas” of Shangri-La in Hilton’s novel, part of the key to their extreme longevity, along with yogic breathing practices and listening to Mozart played on the piano by bewitching, if hundred-year-old, Chinese nymphs.

  9 Official records from 1995 reveal that tigers killed 140 head of cattle and 27 horses. In subsequent years the rate of predation declined. In 1998 only 60 head of cattle and 4 horses were killed. On September 28, 2001, Beijing’s state media reported that Chinese scientists planned to spend five million yuan to develop pig farms “in order to feed a rare group of Bengal tigers that have preyed on Tibetan yak herds.” The official Xinhua news agency reported that: “at least 20 Bengal tigers live in Tibet at altitudes of more than 4,000 meters on the southern slopes of the Himalayas where they feed on domesticated yak herds in remote Medog county and other areas of southeastern Tibet. . . . The county will ban hunting and encourage local herders to drive the tigers into higher mountains, where the government will provide food from the pig farms, Wang Wei of the State Forestry Bureau told the agency.”

  10 When the predations of the Mishmi tribes in Mipi proved unrelenting, Jedrung Rinpoche returned to Chimdro with many of his followers and established a temple called Tashi Choeling, Auspicious Place of the Dharma. Jedrung Rinpoche had not stayed long there, nor had he been able to resettle at his monastery in Riwoche in Kham. Conflicts had developed between Jedrung and his main attendant, Garra Lama, who had collaborated with the Chinese. The scheming attendant escaped reprisal but the central Tibetan authorities had arrested Jedrung in his stead. He was placed under house arrest at Talung monastery north of Lhasa and died ten years later. In 1919, Jedrung Rinpoche’s reincarnation was discovered in Riwoche and, through rigorous tests, another tulku, or incarnation, was found in the Tibetan district of Zayul. Both of the young tulkus were installed at the monastery in Riwoche. At the age of twenty, the incarnation from Zayul, Jedrung Trakpa Gyalsten, married a local woman and settled in Chimdro to head the temple of Tashi Choeling. Peko (short for Pemako) Jedrung, as he came to be known, began sponsoring the construction of shelters along the pilgrims’ trail to Kundu, paying local Monpas in mithun cattle for their work. In 1911-12—during his period of confinement—his previous incarnation, the first Jedrung Rinpoche, had composed a guidebook to Pemako’s long-sought sanctuary. Written on sixteen sheaves of birch bark, The Bright Torch Guide to the Secret Land of Pemako prophesized some forty years before the event, that in the Dragon Year (1951), foreign armies would invade Tibet and wars, famine, and epidemics would follow. Those who did not leave within five years of the Horse Year (1958) would be “chained by the lassoes of the devils.” In 1959, when Communist forces overran Tibet, Peko Jedrung fled from Chimdro with his family and nineteen others in the hope of establishing better relations with the Chulikata Mishmis in Mipi. They brought goods to trade, and guns and swords in case negotiations broke down. But obstructions came now not only from the Lopas but from the commander of an Indian border patrol who forced Peko Jedrung and his retinue to settle at a refugee camp in Tezu in Arunachal Pradesh.

  11 We weren’t the first Westerners to arrive in Chimdro. Bailey and Morshead had come in 1913 on their way from Mipi, and in 1935, an explorer named Ronald Kaulback had ventured through Shingke en route from Burma to the upper Salween River. “Shingke is a meeting-place for Khampas, Pobas, Zayulis, and Mishmis and Abors from the unadministered border territories of Assam,” Kaulback wrote. “There Tibetans and Lopa (savages) face each other on the verge of their lands with veiled hostility. The Tibetans call all the jungle tribes Lopa who live in the no-man’s land between south-eastern Tibet and India. The Abors and the Mishmis are the largest tribes, and of these the Abors are still the most blood-thirsty. Tibetans rarely venture through Abor country, which lies to the south and south-west of Poyu. But occasionally, if sufficient numbers can be found, a party of traders or pilgrims will make the journey. Sometimes they get through to India, sometimes they don’t.” John Hanbury-Tracy, Black River of Tibet (London: Frederick Mullen, Ltd., 1938), p. 156.

  12 Jean Delumeau, History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1995), p. 16.

  13 Ibid., p. 18. Like early Christian accounts of Eden, Buddhist scriptures described the Buddhist Pure Lands as literal heavens and simultaneously as emanations of states of consciousness. Later Mahayana Buddhist scriptures professed an infinite number of Buddhas, as well as an infinite number of Buddha Fields (Buddha-Ksetras): “transcendent universes, created by the merits or the thoughts of the Buddhas” and as “innumerable as grains of sand or pores on the skin.” Once the doors of perception are cleansed, the sutras state, the Pure Lands “rise from one’s own mind and have infinite form.” Edward Conze, Buddhism: Its Essence and Development (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), p. 154.

  14 Delumeau, History of Paradise, p. 17. The first Buddhist Pure Lands were described in the fourth cen
tury c.e. in the Abhidharmakosa, a systematic analysis of mind and universe that includes accounts of transitional realms where Buddhas abide before taking earthly incarnations. These richly conjured heavens were elaborated upon in later Buddhist texts and appeared in murals on monastery walls as idealized realms where adepts could aspire to be reborn on their journey toward total liberation. Free of strife and graced with “rows of palms, strings of bells, lotus lakes with jewels, gold, beryl, crystal, red pearls, diamonds and coral,” the Buddhist Pure Lands promised postmortem heavens for the faithful, while their earthly manifestations in remote, often inaccessible regions of the Himalayas and beyond offered perennial goals for devout pilgrims. Although not Nirvana, the immortal inhabitants of these earthly paradises enjoyed unending grace, and ultimate deliverance was ensured for all who gained access.

  15 Quoted in Delumeau, History of Paradise, p. 48.

  16 Ibid., p. 52. The original wording may be found in John Noble Wilford’s “The Topography of Myth and Dogma” on page 47 of his book The Mapmakers (New York: Vintage, 2001): “Many great lordes have essayed many times to go by those rivers [Ganges, Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates] to Paradise, but they might not spede in theyr way, for some dyed for werynesse . . . some waxt blynde and some defe for noise of the waters, so no man may passe there but through speciall grace of God.”

  17 In the orthodox Christian view, Adam and Eve’s partaking of the forbidden fruit symbolizes man’s rejection of God’s will and the subsequent loss of the primal unity with the divine represented by Eden. Christian Gnostics, who flourished in the first and second centuries of the Christian era, on the other hand, depicted the story of Paradise as an allegory for deeper truths about human nature. Like the the Tibetan treasure-texts, the Gnostic scriptures were lost for more than 1,600 years until archaeologists discovered a trove of more than fifty papyrus texts in an earthen jar on a cliff in the Egyptian desert near Nag Hammadi in December 1945, and two years later, the famed Dead Sea Scrolls in desert caves in Israel. Many of the revealed gospels are attributed to Jesus and his disciples, just as the Tibetan termas are ascribed to Padmasambhava.

  Unlike their orthodox Christian counterparts, the rediscovered Gnostic texts portray the serpent in the story of Paradise as a teacher of divine wisdom, revealing to Adam and Eve the duplicity of a god who would cast them out of Eden for fear of their eating of the Tree of Life. “What kind of god is this?” wrote the Christian author of the Testimony of Truth. In this esoteric reading of Genesis, the forbidden knowledge is less the fruit than the serpent that offers it, the molting snake whose shedding skin suggests mysteries of renewal and transformation. In another Gnostic text, Eve represents perfect primal intelligence and manifests as the serpent to lead humanity to spiritual illumination. Urging the fruit upon the first couple, the snake states: “When you eat of it, your eyes shall open and you shall come to be like gods, recognizing evil and good.” Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 67.

  Other Gnostics read the story of Adam and Eve as an allegory of the soul’s (Adam) discovery of the authentic spiritual self (Eve). A second-century poem called “Thunder: Perfect Mind” presents her—like Dorje Pagmo—as the energy pervading all existence, human and divine.

  I am the first and the last.

  I am the honored one and the scorned one.

  I am the whore and the holy one.

  I am the wife and the virgin.

  I am the bride and the bridegroom, and it is my husband who begot me.

  I am knowledge and ignorance . . .

  I am foolish and I am wise . . .

  I am the one whom they call Life [Eve] and you have called Death . . .

  18 Quoted in Michael Tobias, After Eden: History, Ecology and Conscience (San Diego: Avant Books, 1985), p. 60.

  19 Quoted in Delumeau, History of Paradise, p. 110.

  20 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1953), p. 152.

  21 Research by the mycologist Terence McKenna (see especially Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge) suggests that the principal ingredient of soma—the ritual intoxicant of the Vedas—was not Amanita, but the more psychoactive and benign psilocybin-containing Stropharia cubensis. McKenna also makes a case for Peganum harmala, Syrian rue, which occurs widely along the ancient caravan and trade routes of Asia. (A flowering specimen of Peganum nigellatrum kunge was collected by one G.M.B or F.M.B [F. M. Bailey?] in the Tsangpo valley on August 21, 1924 at an altitude of 11,500 feet.) Rich in the beta-carboline harmaline, a less toxic and more psychoactive alkaloid than its near relative harmine, which occurs in the South American ayahuasca plant (Banisteriopsis caapi), Syrian rue was first identified with soma in 1794. See Haoma and Harmaline by David Flattery and Martin Schwartz (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989). McKenna speculates that the plant may have been used in synergistic combination with psilocybin-containing mushrooms and possibly influenced the iconography of early Tibetan art. See Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993 Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University Press, 1997). German scientists who first isolated harmaline named it telepathine because of its ability to induce telepathy and clairvoyance. In The Plant Book (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), D. J. Mabberley writes that Peganum harmala was used as a “truth drug” by the Nazis and as an intoxicant in central Asia. Images seen during visions, Mabberly claims, were reflected in Persian art styles and gave rise to the concept of “flying carpets” (cf. flying broomsticks in Europe, perhaps due to Black Henbane, Hyoscyamus niger L.). Its oil was used as a dye (Turkish red) for carpets and the brimless felt hats known as tarbooshes.

  22 Waddell, Lhasa and Its Mysteries, p. 439.

  23 John Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1970), p. 105.

  24 According to a Chinese publication entitled “Economic Macrofungi of Tibet” Psilocybe coprophila, P. cubenis, and P. merdaria can all be found in Tibet.

  25 These recipes include other other exotic ingredients such as madder root, acacia catechu, human bone marrow, black hens’ eggs, chang, fish brains, owls’ eyes, parrots’ tails, porcupine blood, jaw bones of tigers, white lotus flowers, peacocks’ hearts, red and white sandalwood resin, hyssop, Tibetan tuberose, juniper seeds, barberry, turmeric, eyes of Tibetan antelopes, white goats’ milk, gold and turquoise powder, arura (myrobalan arjuna), and piper longum.

  26 As lama Shepe Dorje had proclaimed on his journey through Pemako in 1729: “Identifying with Dorje Pagmo’s throat center, or Sambhogakaya chakra, is to abide in the playful union of the cognizance and emptiness of mind itself. At the Nirmanakaya chakra at the navel one abides in the consciousness that gives rise to appearances. Entering the Dharmakaya chakra at the heart which is empty yet cognizant and which cannot be grasped, is to abide in the primordial purity of enlightened mind.”

  27 Adapted from Mother of Knowledge: The Enlightenment of Yeshe Tsogyal (Namkhai Nyingpo, translated by Tarthang Tulku. Edit. Jane Wilhelm, Dharma Publishing, Berkeley, 1983).

  28 Lama Chonam and Sangye Khandro, The Life and Liberation of Princess Mandarava: Indian Consort of Padmasambhava (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1998), pg. 144.

  29 Some neyigs—in conformity with other visions—locate Rinchenpung within Dorje Pagmo’s heart.

  30 Medok once was the seat of a Nyingma monastery called Tambo Gompa. Bhakha Tulku spent three months there during his pilgrimage through Pemako in 1956. The local Monpas had urged him to remain and offered his family rice fields and mithun cattle. With a premonition of what would soon befall Tibet, Bhakha Tulku pressed to stay in Pemako, telling his mother, “If we leave this place we will never meet again.” At his tutor’s insistence, th
ey left Pemako over the Doshung-La pass. Bhakha Tulku’s father met them on the far side of the pass with horses and mules for the onward journey to Lhasa. After Bhakha Tulku entered Mindroling, his mother and father returned to Powo. Fighting with the Chinese broke out in 1958. His father headed the local Powo resistance and commanded a militia of seven hundred men. In 1959, as the Communist forces invaded Lhasa, Bhakha Tulku fled over the Himalayas to Bhutan with his tutor. His mother, father, and other family members had all died during the predations of the Chinese Liberation Army. 31 At the heart of the curriculum was Dudjom Lingpa’s treasure-text—Lamp for Dispelling the Darkness of Ignorance—that he had unearthed from the Cave of the Great Moon in eastern Tibet. In hermeneutical prose, the terma directs its readers through “the five outer, inner, and secret chakras” and guides them “into valleys shaped like dancing dakinis.” The terma states that in the innermost valley, “a river streams from the right eye of Chenrezig [the Lord of Compassion].” To reach these depths that the terma likens to Sukhavati—the Buddha field of Perfect Bliss—the scrolls stipulate that the terton should take the company of a consort born in the year of the bird, horse, mouse, or ox and proceed in “the non-dual state . . . in which emptiness and appearance are one vast expanse.” To fulfill the prophecy, a lama from Nangchen named Terton Nangé Orgyen Dorje Dranak offered his daughter to Dudjom Rinpoche, but the synchronicity required to open the door to Yangsang broke when Dudjom Rinpoche’s attendant fell in love with the hapless girl.