by Thomas Shor
‘“Cutting trees at a spring,” Tulshuk Lingpa explained, “puts the earth out of balance and causes disturbances in the spirit world. Your disappearing flesh is the result of the nagas’ anger. It is because of that we now have the demon himself, Nagaraksha, before us.”
The Nagaraksha
‘The sculpture was every bit as horrific as the disease itself. When I saw it,’ Chokshi said, ‘I shuddered. The demon sat on a lotus pedestal resting on a seething mass of serpents. Instead of legs, he had a coiled snake’s tail over which he wore a tiger skin. His skin was blue, and he had snakes draped over his neck and wrapped around his arms. Nine out of his eighteen hands held snakes; the others held knives. A flayed human being was slung over his shoulders. All you could see were the feet and the legs’ empty skin slit down the side. He had three tiers of heads adorned with human skulls, and the heads of snakes poked out everywhere.
‘“Until now,” Tulshuk Lingpa said, “the leprosy has been eradicating you. Now we will eradicate the leprosy!” So saying, the lamas started a ritual—the intensity and length of which the people of Simoling had never experienced. The chanting went on day and night as the lamas called on and mollified the angry spirits. Drums pounded, cymbals crashed, and the clarinet-like gyalings sounded through the night. They constructed a huge kyilkhor, or sand mandala, on a platform that took four people to carry. Tulshuk Lingpa drew the design on the platform and the other lamas constructed it, “painting” it with different-colored sands. Huge caldrons of food boiled on wood fires to feed the lamas and the assembled villagers.
‘The ritual lasted ten days, and when it was through, Tulshuk Lingpa called for all of us villagers to gather. He told us to bring whatever hunting rifles we had, and together we marched down to the river. The lamas brought with them the sand mandala.
‘They placed dried grass on the mandala to set it aflame but before anyone could light it, it burst into flame by itself. The people were amazed and deeply moved, and they were saying, “Our lama is not crazy. This is not a drunken man! He is very powerful, most powerful!”
‘Then the lamas tilted the platform and poured the sand mandala into the mountain torrent, shooting their rifles into the air and whistling shrilly as they did so to send the demons off that had been eating our flesh.
‘“From this day on,” Tulshuk Lingpa told us, “no leprosy will come to this village. There is nothing to fear!”
‘Then the people said to him, “You have sent the demon away. Where have you sent it?”
‘“I have sent it to Afghanistan,” he said. In Afghanistan there is a place called Simoling connected to the life of Padmasambhava.”’
So it was that the flesh-eating spirit was eradicated in Simoling, and the leprosy that had been slowly eating their limbs disappeared. Their wounds healed, and no one else was affected. When I went to Simoling and surrounding villages to do research for this book, I was frankly skeptical that ritual could eradicate leprosy. All the older people remembered the incident. Every one of them attested to its truth.
The people of Simoling were so grateful that they all gathered at the monastery to show Tulshuk Lingpa their respect. The representative of the village’s thirty households got up.
‘We used to have sixty or seventy households,’ he told the lama, ‘but entire families have died of the dreaded disease you just cast out from our land—others fled. Now there are only thirty households left. With you here, we feel confident the demon will never come back. Without you, we are afraid. Therefore we would like to give you our monastery, Samdup Choekorling.’
Producing a paper stating as much, a member of each household pressed his right thumb on a pad of ink and left his print on the deed. Those without a right thumb used their left. One man used the big toe on his right foot. It was all he had.
Tulshuk Lingpa sent a horse and rider to Pangi to bring his family to Simoling. He never once returned to Pangi, despite their repeated entreaties.
Tulshuk Lingpa,
Shrimoling, approximately 1950
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sacrifices, Sponsors and Caves
Shrimoling Monastery
It is difficult to pin down exactly when Tulshuk Lingpa moved his family to Simoling. People in the mountains remember years by the recurring zodiac animal signs (the same twelve signs the Chinese use) but they tend to remember different things. Once I asked an old lama his age and—after thinking long and hard about it, doing calculations on his fingers—he confessed his uncertainty and said he was either eighty or ninety-two. When I asked people in Simoling when Tulshuk Lingpa moved there, I got contradictory answers. My own guess is that it was sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s.
Kunsang remembers when they moved to Simoling, though not the year.
‘I was a young boy,’ he said, ‘perhaps seven or eight, though I’m not really sure. All I know is that I was old enough to feel afraid of moving to this village of lepers.’
Kunsang’s fear was short-lived, based on an image of the past and not on the reality of the present. For by the time he and his mother—and sister Kamala who was two years older—arrived by horseback from Pangi, the leprosy of Simoling was already a thing of the past. Though the evidence of the demoness-goddess’s presence in the village was indelibly imprinted on the bodies of so many, the wounds all healed and the fear the entire valley felt towards Simoling was turned to a tremendous respect for the man who had delivered them from a fate that could have been their own.
Tulshuk Lingpa’s reputation began to spread. People came from far away to be healed by him. When I asked one old man who knew Tulshuk Lingpa in those days what he thought it was that gave Tulshuk Lingpa such healing abilities, he said it was his great compassion. Lamas, too, came for his teachings, and soon the Simoling Monastery—which had been reduced to a population of one, a caretaker—was a thriving community of yogis and tantric practitioners drawn to this charismatic and learned visionary mystic. Those who had fled the village began to return; the thirty households that the village had been reduced to swelled to sixty or seventy.
Though the people of Simoling were followers of Tibetan Buddhism, they also worshipped local gods, one of whom demanded the bloody sacrifice of live goats. He is known as King Gephan. So twice a year—in May–June, and at the end of September—the people of Simoling sacrificed two goats. One of the things that distinguish Buddhism, especially the Mahayana tradition of the Tibetans, from the other religions of the region is the concept of compassion for all sentient beings. They do not perform animal sacrifices.
When Padmasambhava went to Tibet to spread the teachings of the Buddha, he had to overcome the native Bonpo religion’s custom of performing animal sacrifices to appease and curry favor with the gods. Teaching them compassion for all sentient beings, Padmasambhava substituted the sacrifice of live animals for objects made of dough and mud (sometimes even painted red to represent blood), as well as flowers and bowls of clear water. In much the same vein, Tulshuk Lingpa introduced a new ritual to the village, which transformed the age-old practice of blood sacrifice into one that offered vegetable sacrifices, flowers and water. This ritual is performed in Simoling to this day, and as one lama from the monastery told me, ‘We used to sacrifice four goats a year. That was over forty-five years ago. So we’ve saved over 180 goats.’
King Gephan is represented by a long wooden stick that is covered with multicolored pieces of cloth. Once a year, this god is carried through the valley in a colorful procession. It makes stops in the various villages, some of which are Hindu and others Buddhist, and the people offer it live goats. This procession no longer makes a stop in Simoling but I was told that every year as it passes by the village a piece of cloth miraculously flies off the stick and blows towards the monastery as a sign of respect.
While in Simoling, Tulshuk Lingpa introduced the Cham, or Lama Dance. He not only stitched the costumes but sculpted the masks. He also wrote the scripture that described the dances in which the lamas don mask
s and costumes and play out various stories of the spirit worlds and the realms between death and rebirth. He also instituted the khandro dance in which women and even children took part. Four to five hundred people from up and down the valley would come to Simoling to watch these dances.
Mask carved by Tulshuk Lingpa,
Shrimoling Monastery, Lahaul
Namdrol, the lama who smashed the hole in the monastery wall and then sold a copy of the ter Tulshuk Lingpa found there, also learned Tibetan medicine from Tulshuk Lingpa and became famous for his ability to work with the pulses and perform cupping and bloodletting. He was one of Tulshuk Lingpa’s closest and most learned disciples.
Kunsang recalled that during the lama dances, Namdrol always played the wrathful deity. He would sit cross-legged in the center of the courtyard with his purba raised while the others danced around him. Tulshuk Lingpa would be sitting on his throne on the roof of the monastery, looking down. He would give Namdrol a sign, and Namdrol would dance once around the courtyard and sit back down. During the times of the year when there were no dances, Namdrol was known for walking down the road acting his role of the wrathful deity. He’d scare the children, then howl with laughter.
‘Mipham, who was also from Lahaul, was another of my father’s closest disciples,’ Kunsang told me. ‘He was a great practitioner of chod.’
Chod, which literally means ‘cutting’ or ‘chopping’, is practiced in dangerous places, like the charnel grounds at night, places where one is in constant reminder that life is fleeting. The chod practitioner goes to the cremation ground, where the souls of demons and the dead roam. With the help of a drum, bell and horn made from a human thighbone, he calls to these beings and he visualizes his flesh being cut from his bones. He then offers his warm flesh and blood to the demons and for all who need the nourishment his body can provide. It is a profound practice of selflessness, a short road to realization.
Kunsang told me, ‘When Mipham first came to my father he said, “Please guide me and teach me the rituals and understanding that will help me at the time of my death. Please help me, so I can also guide others towards non-attachment at the time of death.”
‘Lamas’ lives are filled with ritual. It is what people expect of them; it is how they make their money. My father was in high demand, especially to do the yangdup puja.’
Yang means prosperity, and dup means accumulation. It is a puja lamas perform on a sponsor’s behalf to help that sponsor accumulate and protect his wealth. To collect yang, prosperity, one has to collect it from different directions, levels and realms using tantric powers. It will even protect the wealth you already have.
Kunsang explained: ‘Say you have a blanket. If you don’t have yang, it will be of no use to you. It will get easily lost, or it will not keep you warm. Like that. So people call the lamas in to perform the yangdup puja. The higher the lama, the better and more powerful he is. My father was in constant demand to perform this puja.’
‘After a while,’ he concluded with a look of disdain on his face, ‘I think this life of puja is very boring. That is why I don’t like this kind of work.
‘Mipham also didn’t like this work. He used to ask Tulshuk Lingpa not to send him around to do pujas in people’s houses for money. He was only interested in performing rituals for the dying and the dead. Whenever someone died, Tulshuk Lingpa would send Mipham to conduct the rituals.’
Winters in Lahaul are not easy. When the snow began to fall in November or December, the Lahaulis would be entirely cut off from the outside world. For upwards of five or six months, deep and blowing snow often rendered travel to neighboring villages impossible, let alone travel over the treacherous Rohtang Pass at over 14,000 feet. Therefore the more affluent people in Lahaul had second houses in the lower altitudes, in the comparatively lush Kullu Valley where they would go before the Rohtang Pass was blocked by snow.
Today, the situation is much the same, though recent prosperity has led to more people having houses in Kullu. There is even helicopter service between Lahaul and Kullu operated by the Indian army once every two weeks throughout the winter months. Earlier winter used to be the time of almost endless local festivals and religious celebrations, which brought villagers together. Most villages in Lahaul now have only a few people staying in them for the winter, rendering life there even more isolated. Electricity has entered the valley and along with it television satellite dishes. Though as isolated from neighboring villages as ever, they are now part of the ‘global village’ that stretches from Bollywood to Hollywood, skipping pretty much everything in between.
Shortly after Tulshuk Lingpa and his family moved to Simoling, he was offered a place to winter in in the Kullu Valley. Until he left to open the way to Beyul Demoshong over a decade later, he and his family would spend winters in the village of Pangao in the Kullu Valley, and summers in Simoling.
Tulshuk Lingpa’s sponsor, or jinda, in Pangao was known as Jinda Wangchuk. He offered Tulshuk Lingpa and his family a place to stay, and the place he offered was on a cliff towering over the Beas River. To be more exact it was the cliff itself, or rather a fissure in it—a cave in which Jinda Wangchuk paid to have walls of stone and wood constructed. He also flattened the floor. So it was that Tulshuk Lingpa spent winters with his family in a cave. It was a wild place, of eagles and snakes, a treacherous ten-minute walk along a razor-thin trail below the village of Pangao.
Tulshuk Lingpa lived in a cave along these cliffs.
The monastery didn’t exist in his time.
Pangao, Kullu Valley
Kunsang told me that when Jinda Wangchuk would come to his father, he’d always have two bottles of liquor in his pockets. He used to say, ‘One for the master, one for me.’
‘Even though I was only a boy,’ Kunsang said, ‘I’d say to Jinda Wangchuk, “One bottle for my father, yeah. One for him but one for you—no. Me, you, half-half.” Then Jinda Wangchuk would say, “Why not?” and share his bottle with me.’
In the course of writing this book, I found myself below the village of Pangao, crossing the cliff face to the cave where Tulshuk Lingpa and his family lived over the course of a decade. Following a monk who beat the grass and bushes before us with a long stick to flush out any cobras, I negotiated the treacherous, razor-thin way. My heart was beating to the rhythm of vertigo, my mind reeling with the consequences of one slip of the foot (a deathly plunge into the raging Beas River flowing like a ribbon of shining mercury far below). I couldn’t help but smile at the sheer divinely inspired madness of the man who would move his young family to such a place.
Pangao Cave, overlooking the Beas River
Kunsang recalled for me how twice a year they would make the three-day journey over the Rohtang Pass from Pangao to Simoling and back again. His mother and father each rode a horse and the kids walked, though they took turns riding when they grew tired. They followed the caravan route. They made the yearly migration from their high summer home to their winter home when the sheep and goat herders were driving animals over the Rohtang Pass to and from their summer grazing grounds on the high slopes of Lahaul. Therefore they often travelled surrounded by huge herds of sheep driven by herders dressed in heavy white woolen robes tied at the waist. Sometimes they would stop with the herders as their dogs circled their flocks and drank tea with them in the crisp and thin mountain air.
During these years, when Tulshuk Lingpa and his family went from Simoling to Pangao and back again, these two places became magnets for many of the great yogi lamas of the day. Some were obscure, others famous, and yet others were to become so. Some came as his disciples, others as his equals.
One of these Tibetan lamas, who was and is one of the great yogi practitioners remaining from the Tibetan tradition, is Chatral Rinpoche. He used to visit Tulshuk Lingpa in Pangao, and spent one winter in a neighboring cave on the same cliff face.
Tarthang Tulku was twenty-five when his native Golok was taken over by the Chinese. He fled to India, where he ended up in La
haul, at Tulshuk Lingpa’s monastery. He travelled with him to Pangao as well, and later lived in a monastery down the valley from Simoling in Keylong. He then went for further studies to Sarnath. After that he moved to America where he started the Tibetan Aid Project, which helps Tibetan refugees as well as the Nyingma Institute and Dharma Publishing, which has published and distributed millions of copies of Tibetan texts.
Herbert Günther, the well-known German scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, also spent time with Tulshuk Lingpa. Kunsang remembers that when Dr Günther came to the Kullu Valley to pursue his studies of Tibetan religion and scriptures he stayed at the house of a big landlord who was a former colonel in the Indian army and a sponsor of Tulshuk Lingpa. He had bungalows in Manali, Kullu and Keylong. This thakur, or landowner, introduced Günther to Tulshuk Lingpa. Günther recognized Tulshuk Lingpa’s great learning and, while probably not becoming a disciple, was his student for quite some time in both Pangao and Simoling.
‘My father was always joking,’ Kunsang told me. ‘He used to say that because Dr Günther didn’t need a translator, he was a tulku, an incarnation. Günther was very good at reading and writing Tibetan, though sometimes my father would help him with his grammar. To me, Dr Günther was very old, though if I think back he must have been only forty-five or fifty. He would write his questions out in Tibetan, and my father would answer them.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Call
Kunsang had brought me through this much of his father’s story when he suddenly said, ‘Up to this point there was nothing unusual about my father.’
The cup of hot tea the Tamang Tulku had just handed me almost slipped from my hand, which so amused Kunsang that it took him some time to stop laughing and to explain: ‘My father was a terton, of course. He had that ability—but so have many others since the time of Padmasambhava.’
