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

by Thomas Shor

  Just before Dorje Dechen Lingpa set out on what proved to be his final journey (his attempt to open the way was unsuccessful and he was to die before returning to Golok), he presided over the coronation of the young boy at the Domang Gompa. He declared the boy a lingpa and bestowed upon him the name Tulshuk Lingpa.

  Tulshuk means crazy.

  I used to go almost every afternoon to Kunsang’s flat in Darjeeling to speak with him about his father. This was during a rainy monsoon. Kunsang lives with his family in the market above a restaurant, a low, one room watering hole which was usually empty but for a few men drinking millet beer huddled around a table in the middle of which stood a single candle. Upstairs, the narrow hall that led to the doors that opened to Kunsang’s flat would be pitch-dark. With water dripping from my umbrella, I’d feel my way down that darkened passage and rap my knuckles on the unseen door at the end.

  The room we met in was his bedroom as well as the family shrine and living room. Images from the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon and portraits of important Nyingma lamas draped with ceremonial scarves hung from nails along the walls. A TV stood in one corner, in front of the family altar, which glowed in the semi-darkness from the light of a single butter lamp. That lamp and the faint light coming through the windows were usually the only light by which we’d meet, for monsoon wreaked havoc with electrical lines. More often than not the electricity would be out in the whole of Darjeeling.

  Kunsang would usually be sitting cross-legged on his bed when I arrived with an unbound Tibetan scripture open before him. He’d be chanting from the book, only briefly looking up as I came in to indicate the bolstered bench opposite where I always sat. When through, he’d get up. Still chanting, he’d light a small fire of paper and wood in a convex pan that might have once been used to make chapattis, or flat breads. He would blow on it with a short pipe to get the embers glowing, then put into it the pine boughs known as sang, which let off billows of fragrant smoke. Opening the window he’d place the burning incense on to his neighbor’s tin roof, which was immediately outside his window and protected from the rain by his own—such is the jumble of roofs in the Darjeeling market. All the while he’d be reciting a mantra while the white smoke merged with the low cloud in which the city had been immersed for days.

  Kunsang, in his room in Darjeeling

  When he was through with his ritual, he’d carefully wrap the book in cloth, tie it with a colored ribbon, stand up on his bed and tuck it into a shelf. Then he’d sit back on his bed with a huge smile, his gnome-like ears protruding from his head, and start laughing even before anything was said.

  ‘So,’ he’d exclaim, ‘and then what happened?’

  Over the course of innumerable afternoons he told me his father’s story from beginning to end, sometimes starting at the end and working forward or backing me through fantastic episodes until I nearly knocked into reality.

  Shortly after my arrival his daughter Yeshe, or more often his son Wangchuk, would arrive. They were in their twenties, spoke English well and took turns acting as my interpreter, thereby learning about their grandfather’s life and the unusual way their father had grown up.

  Tea would be brought by Kunsang’s wife who often sat on the bed opposite and listened quietly to her husband’s tales except when the story became just too funny, and we’d all be laughing with no way to stop.

  Sometimes it was the Tamang Tulku, a boy of eight or nine, who brought us the tea. Tamangs are a Buddhist people from high in the Nepal Himalayas, near the Tibetan border. He was the tulku, or reincarnation, of a lama, though probably not a very high one. Because the Tamang Tulku was born into a family so poor they could not afford to put him in a monastery for special training, Kunsang agreed to take him on. Living with the family, he was a cross between an honored servant, a son and a full-time clerk at the two clothing stalls they owned in a small brick shopping complex whose sign brazenly declared it ‘A Shoppers’ Paradise’. In exchange for taking him in in such a capacity, Kunsang was teaching him to read and write Tibetan, as well as giving him instruction in the dharma. It was only much later that Kunsang told me that the boy wasn’t really a tulku, or reincarnation. I never could tell. After that I called him the Tamang non-Tulku.

  Kunsang is a layperson; he does not shave his head nor does he wear a robe, except on special occasions when he wears the white robe of the tantric practitioners known as the nagpas. Yet he is considered by many to be a rinpoche. Rinpoche, meaning precious one, is the term Tibetans reserve for their high lamas. Kunsang is known as the Dungsay Rinpoche, the title used for the son of a high lama.

  The special and almost mediumistic ability lingpas have to enter a timeless state and bring something back into time—be it a teaching in the form of ter, or treasure, or directions to a hidden valley—is often passed on from father to son. Tulshuk Lingpa’s father Kyechok Lingpa had been the first in the line, and there was some expectation that Kunsang would follow. Having grown up as Tulshuk Lingpa’s son, he certainly has the knowledge and experience and no doubt the education; yet Kunsang would be the first to say that he lacks that rare and special ability, which can only be given by fate and which defines the true lingpa.

  Though not a lingpa, Kunsang’s knowledge of the dharma—or Tibetan Buddhist teachings—is both vast and deep. Because of this, and because of his father, he has had much contact with and has taken initiation from some of the highest lamas of the day. Though devoting his life to a large extent to the dharma, he was also in business for many years. Now that his children and the Tamang Tulku have taken over the daily running of the family clothing stalls, he devotes himself even more fully to the dharma, with much of his day spent sitting cross-legged on his bed with an open pecha, or scripture, before him, white clouds of sang billowing to the heavens outside his window as he performs rituals for himself and his family as well as for others.

  Many people come to him for teachings and to request him to perform rituals on behalf of the ill. He dispenses precious waters and other substances sanctified by ritual. Often when I arrived, there’d be others in the room listening to him discourse on some aspect of the dharma or making offerings so he’d perform a ritual for a dear one. At times, they brought sick people to him; he’d listen to symptoms, consult astrological calendars, dispense Tibetan medicines and herbal teas, and on the basis of the faith they had in him, offer them the strength to heal themselves.

  Once, after the son of an old Tibetan man who was very ill had left with his little vial of blessed water, Kunsang said, ‘What to do? When they come, I must do something. Though sometimes I’m busy, busy—too busy! My father was offered many monasteries. Me too. But I’m not interested. If you have your own monastery, when someone dies you have to go and do puja for the whole day. And not just one day. When people get sick, it’s all the time people saying, “Rinpoche, hurry. Hurry!” And what to say? You have to go.’

  Another time Kunsang said to me, ‘The Tamang people told me, “You are very well educated and you are very good inside. You are a very high lama’s son. So we are offering you our monastery.” But I said “No, no, no.”’

  ‘This type of job—I don’t like. But then they said, “Rinpoche, if you have a big monastery, you’ll be a big lama with many disciples.” That’s what the Tamang people said. But one month has thirty days. With my own monastery, in all those days not one single day would be empty, not one moment free. This kind of job I find very boring.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Eloping over Mountain Passes

  Tibet, while maintaining its place on the map, has the reputation of being a hidden land of spiritual understanding. Though exaggerated in popular imagination, this reputation has been earned by Tibet’s centuries-old vast isolation and the high attainment of its spiritual masters, considered by many to be the world’s most advanced. Where better to look for a tradition of a hidden land than to that land which until recently has to the rest of the world itself been hidden? Arguably the most isolated country
in the world until 1959, by its very isolation Tibet managed to guard precious pearls of ancient wisdom.

  Within Tibetan tradition, we can distinguish between two types of hidden lands. One is known as the kingdom of Shambhala and, like all kingdoms, it has a history, including a known succession of kings and even a literature. Though the Kalachakra Tantra—one of the basic esoteric teachings of Tibetan Buddhism—came to Tibet via India, it is said to have originated in this hidden kingdom. Others, among them the Russian painter and writer Nicholas Roerich and his wife Helena Ivanovna, are said to have had communication with the Hidden Masters of Shambhala. The Masters are believed to be controlling the spiritual evolution of the planet from this kingdom, whose location has never been definitely pinned down. By most accounts it is hidden behind a ring of snow peaks somewhere north of western Tibet. It is believed the kingdom of Shambhala will have a definite role in the future of humanity.

  When chaos, destruction and the forces of darkness threaten to overtake the planet, the king of Shambhala will lead a mighty force to eradicate the foe and found a reign of peace and spiritual enlightenment. Though many of Tulshuk Lingpa’s followers referred to the land he was taking them to as Shambhala (and even Heaven, Paradise or Shangri-La), strictly speaking it was not Shambhala or any of these other places that he was speaking of. In the eighth century Padmasambhava foresaw times of tremendous darkness when greed would rule the planet and the teachings of wisdom and compassion would be in danger of becoming lost, when wars spread and poisons cover the earth, water and sky—times very much like our own. He saw the time when Tibet would be overrun by outsiders, and death and destruction would be their lot. It was with tremendous compassion and foresight for the people of Tibet that he created and then hid deep in the labyrinthine folds of the high Himalayas valleys of refuge, places of peace beyond the reach of the troubles that plague the rest of the earth. In contrast to the Kingdom of Shambhala, these are natural places, uninhabited valleys of tremendous beauty, cracks in the fabric beyond the spider web of the calculating Red Chinese or the industrialists’ military might. They are beyond the range of spewing chimneys and holocausts of every description. It is even said that the time for the opening of these valleys comes when there is nowhere else to run. Some of these valleys have been ‘opened’, though others remain closed, having never been found. Such is Beyul Demoshong, the hidden valley in Sikkim.

  Concepts about these hidden valleys vary, even amongst learned lamas. Some say that a person who is not spiritually advanced—someone without the karma to find or enter one—could climb into the high mountains, stumble upon one of these valleys and not even realize it. One could walk through a landscape that would be transformed into a place of miracle and wonder by a person of spiritual understanding, and notice nothing. William Blake once said, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.’

  Tibetan lamas have been speaking of and attempting to enter Beyul Demoshong, the Hidden Land in Sikkim, since at least the eleventh century. They are quite specific. When they speak of the Hidden Land, they aren’t speaking metaphorically, symbolically or of an exalted state of consciousness.

  When I asked Géshipa, one of Tulshuk Lingpa’s closest disciples in Sikkim, if the Hidden Land might actually not be found ‘out there’ but reside in the human heart, he responded with an incredulous look that spoke volumes about the gap in world views.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘If the Chinese army marched in here and shot me in the heart, they’d be killing the Hidden Land?’

  Let us be clear: the story of Tulshuk Lingpa and his expedition to the Hidden Land is not fiction or metaphor. Tulshuk Lingpa was no Oxford don maintaining his respectability while telling stories of an imagined land. He proclaimed a crack, and then actually set forth to step through it. If you think he must have been mad, then it was clearly no accident that the name Tulshuk Lingpa, Crazy Treasure-Revealer, was bestowed upon him at a tender age along with the prophecy that he would travel far and do great things.

  The second time I went to see Kunsang, the Tamang Tulku answered my knock and invited me in. Then he went down the lane to get Wangchuk from the shop to translate. They came back together. The Tamang Tulku went to the kitchen to make tea, and Wangchuk sat next to me and translated.

  It was obvious that Kunsang had been thinking of what to say.

  ‘Of course you are interested in my father’s journey to the Hidden Land,’ he said. ‘But to gain a deep understanding of that, to understand his nature—why he was the one to lead the way, why he so easily gathered followers—you must know who he was. To know that we have to go right back to the beginning.’

  Kunsang was sitting cross-legged on his bed. A fierce gale blew a thick rain-filled fog against the window behind him. The windowpanes rattled. He took a blanket, placed it over his knees and warmed to his subject.

  ‘My father was born in Tibet,’ he said. ‘It was the year of the Fire Dragon, 1916. If you want photographs or records, of course you won’t find them. The world in which he passed his childhood no longer exists.’

  What he said was true. The distance between the Tibet of that day and the present is unbridgeable, a gap greater in this age of easy transportation than between any two points on the globe. In those days it probably would have taken weeks of arduous travel to go from Golok, his native place, to the closest place with regular communication with the outside world. Now you can probably get from New York to Golok within days but the Golok you would find would have nothing to do with the Golok of Tulshuk Lingpa’s time.

  The Chinese invasion of the 1950s destroyed all that. Even the people are gone. Of those who would have known him, many, being Khampas—renowned for their fierce resistance to the Chinese—wouldn’t have survived the invasion; others survived by fleeing south over the Himalayas where they were scattered throughout India and beyond.

  ‘What can we know of Tibet in the 1920s,’ Kunsang said, ‘but the stories our elders have told us? What I know of my father’s early life, I heard directly from him and from his father Kyechok Lingpa. As his name indicates, my grandfather was also a lingpa—a treasure revealer. He was also based at the Domang Gompa, the monastery in Golok where my father was first tested and recognized by Dorje Dechen Lingpa.’

  The Tamang Tulku brought tea, opened a tin of biscuits and sat cross-legged on the floor, his face eager to hear the story.

  ‘Knowing my father,’ Kunsang continued, ‘I can only imagine that when he was a child it would have been difficult for anyone to set him on a narrow path of learning. He was sometimes found in the temple reciting esoteric mantras from memory when he was supposed to be in class. His teachers, though at first they didn’t understand how this was possible, began to realize what Dorje Dechen Lingpa knew from the beginning: that Tulshuk Lingpa had an extraordinary destiny before him.

  ‘My grandfather Kyechok Lingpa had two wives. His first wife’s name was Kilo; we do not know his second wife’s name. She never made it out of Tibet and it is likely she died at the hands of the Chinese.’

  Lingpas often have two wives. The second wife is called a khandro in Tibetan—or dakini in Sanskrit—which translates to Sky Walker. She is something between a lover and an angel. Khandros are intermediaries between lingpas and the hidden realms they have special commerce with.

  Tulshuk Lingpa was his father’s first wife’s only child. He had a half-sister and three half-brothers, his father’s children by his second wife. One of these brothers was killed while being robbed by highwaymen in the high and lonely wilds of the Tibetan Plateau. Like many men from Kham, Tulshuk Lingpa’s two other brothers were fierce fighters. They fought in the guerrilla army when the Chinese invaded in 1951. They were probably put in a Chinese jail from which they never emerged, a fate all too common amongst the Khampa fighters. In a futile attempt to oust the Chinese when they invaded Tibet, the American CIA started training the fierce Khampas in guerrilla warfare. Tulshuk Lingpa’s half-
sister Tashi Lhamo married a Tibetan man who was trained by the CIA. They escaped to Nepal and received asylum in France. Now they live and have homes in Paris, New York and Kathmandu.

  Sometime in Tulshuk Lingpa’s teens he left home. We know he went to Lhasa. Already, he was recognized as something extraordinary and had sponsors. Since most lamas don’t work for their keep, they need sponsors to keep them. Tulshuk Lingpa had sponsors in Lhasa who were high officers with the Dalai Lama.

  When Tulshuk Lingpa was about eighteen, he went to a monastery in central Tibet that was adjacent to a nunnery. Phuntsok Choeden, then a young girl, was not a nun but she lived in the nearby town, Chongay. She heard that a high lama had come to the monastery to give two or three months of Buddhist teachings. Tulshuk Lingpa was a handsome and charismatic young man with an air of magic about him. She begged her parents to let her go to the monastery to receive the teachings of this exotic lingpa from Golok. Her parents agreed, and she stayed there for about three months, by the end of which she was both in love with Tulshuk Lingpa and fired about the teachings she had received. She approached Tulshuk Lingpa as he was about to leave and told him she wanted to become a nun.

  ‘It’s not necessary for you to become a nun,’ he said with a glint in his eye to the beautiful young woman who was to become Kunsang’s mother. ‘Come with me. Let’s go together!’

  This was not without its controversy, beyond the kind which might connect itself to any young couple deciding to run off together. To understand why, you have to know that Tibetan Buddhism is divided into four branches. The oldest branch, closest to its Bonpo roots, is known as the Nyingma. Tulshuk Lingpa was a Nyingma. Then there are the Kagyus, Sakyas and the Geluks. The Dalai Lama is a Geluk. The young woman in question, Phuntsok Choeden, was a Geluk. Her brothers were high-ranking lamas at the Namgyal Monastery, the Dalai Lama’s own monastery.