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

by Thomas Shor

  Khandro Chimi Wangmo posing with a stuffed snow leopard that had recently broken into her cowshed, seriously injured a cow, was half killed by the cow’s kick, and then finished off with a bullet.

  When I asked Rigzin Dokhampa, the researcher at the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology outside Gangtok, about the role of the khandro he told me the following story.

  There was a terton in Tibet. One day he went with his khandro to a rugged mountain area in order to find ter. Tertons are like that. You cannot find the logic. They wake up one morning, and they know today is the day. Maybe they have a dream; maybe they receive a vision. But they know today is the day they’ll find a text hidden by Padmasambhava a thousand years back in a particular rock face of a twisted mountain they’ve never seen. They’ll tell their disciples; they’ll warn them, ‘Whatever I say, don’t contradict me. Say OK, OK. I may ask for the impossible. But do not doubt. Whatever I do, do not doubt it.’ To find ter isn’t as easy as knowing where it is, going there and taking it out of a cleft in the rock, as if it were a manuscript that was hidden there. To take out ter is to reach into another dimension and bring a piece back.

  So this terton went with his khandro beyond any trail, into the tangled mountains where neither of them had been before. They climbed narrow cliffs and razor-like fissures until they reached a place where the huge stone mountain they had ascended ended abruptly in a sheer cliff of a size and magnitude that was hardly imaginable. Far below, a river cascaded over a series of raw waterfalls. On the other side rose a cliff every bit as sheer as their own but higher, dwarfing them and blocking the sun. A cold wind blew up the chasm.

  The terton stood on the edge of the abyss. He held out his hand and pointed across to a fold in the rock on the cliff face opposite. ‘The ter is there,’ he said.

  The question, of course, was how to get there. It was as impossible to descend to the river as it would be to climb the other side.

  Even tertons can experience doubt.

  The khandro sensed the seed of doubt in the terton’s mind even before it surfaced. She ran up behind him, yelling out ‘Get the ter!’ and pushed him off the cliff.

  There was a huge vulture flying below them. The terton landed on it. It brought him to the other side, and he took out the ter.

  Tulshuk Lingpa used to perform a special form of divination, called the trata melong, in which he stuck a convex brass mirror into a bowl of rice, performed a ritual, then invited people to look into the mirror to see if in the dull shine of the burnished brass they saw any images, which he would then interpret. The ability to see in the mirror is known as tamik, which literally means picture eye. Those with tamik have the ability to see images that predict the future, unravel mysteries of the past, and communicate messages from the spirits. Though it was not unknown for older people to have this mysterious ability, it was usually children who could see, especially girls. In them, it seems, the intuitive channels were still open and the active imagination stronger.

  Rigzin Dokhampa recalled how Tulshuk Lingpa used to perform the trata melong ritual at Tashiding. ‘Not only girls can see in the mirror,’ he said. ‘I was a child when Tulshuk Lingpa was in Tashiding, maybe fifteen, sixteen. He used to go to one of the temples at the Tashiding Monastery with the local children to perform this ritual. I would be there, my brother would be there—and maybe thirty other children, both young monks and lay children also. He did this many times. It was something we children could participate in, and we’d all be very excited. He would do the ritual, push the mirror into the plate of rice and have each of the kids look into the mirror one after the other. Then he’d ask us what we saw. Some could see; others couldn’t. It was a special ability.

  ‘One time when my turn came, I looked into the mirror and after some moments the mirror disappeared and in its place there was a beautiful large mountain with many streams of water flowing down it. I saw huge stupas on the mountain and long prayer flags. On top of the mountain snow was falling. On the right side, there was a wide trail rising with the slope of the mountain, which was washed away in places. I told Tulshuk Lingpa what I saw, and he said the stupa and prayer flags were good signs. But the parts of the trail washed away—that he said was not so good. Other children saw yaks, sheep, mountains—like that.’

  Of everyone who ever looked into Tulshuk Lingpa’s melong, or mirror, Khandro Chimi Wangmo’s younger sister, Yeshe, was by far the most gifted. Though Yeshe could neither read nor write, she had tamik. She was often employed by Tulshuk Lingpa to look into the mirror, even before they went to Sikkim. Though a teenager and married at the age of sixteen, she was also destined to become Tulshuk Lingpa’s khandro, and her fate was closely wrapped up with his.

  Yeshe

  One morning when Tulshuk Lingpa was living in Pangao, a rich Indian merchant braved the treacherous slope to his cave to plead for his help. He was in a panic particular to a rich man who has just lost everything.

  ‘Help me, please!’ he implored. ‘My safe was just stolen with everything in it—everything I have—and the police can’t find a single clue.

  Please, Master, perform a mo so I can find it.’ Mo is a form of divination lamas routinely perform using their mala, or rosary, or else a pair of dice.

  ‘No,’ Tulshuk Lingpa said, ‘I won’t perform the mo; for this we must perform the trata melong. We must use the mirror, and for that we need Yeshe.’ Yeshe was in Manali at the time, about two hours up the valley. Somebody got her, and in the afternoon Tulshuk Lingpa propped the brass mirror in a plate of rice, performed his ritual, and instructed Yeshe to look very carefully into the mirror and to notice every detail.

  What she saw was that the thieves couldn’t move the safe very far. So they put it down, got some help—around eight people—and then they could carry it. They brought it to a stream.

  Tulshuk Lingpa then said to her, ‘You must look very carefully to see which stream it is. We have to go there.’

  The image changed, and the sun was setting. The thieves started to panic, asking themselves what to do with the safe. So they covered it with stones and with branches.

  From her description, the merchant knew which stream it was. It was just below his house. They went to the spot, and everything was exactly as she saw it.

  I first heard this story from Kunsang. Frankly, I didn’t believe it. Later others independently recalled the story with an uncanny accuracy in detail.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Discovery

  When the Chinese invaded Tibet and started ransacking their way through Kham, smashing monasteries and throwing monks in jail, there was a secret convocation there of high lamas and tertons. Foreseeing the ripening of the end times which would culminate in their having nowhere to turn for sanctuary, their thoughts naturally turned to their south, and to the hidden beyul in Sikkim.

  The Tibetan name for the Kingdom of Sikkim—which stretched in fertile valleys south of the Tibetan Plateau—was Demojong, which means the Valley of Rice. The beyul hidden within Sikkim was known as the Great Valley of Rice, or Demoshong. This Great Valley of Rice hidden within the outer kingdom was—despite obvious logical inconsistencies—supposed to be three times the size of the outer kingdom. This would be rather like a shoebox hidden inside a matchbox—and remaining undiscovered for over a thousand years.

  The last one to make the attempt to open the Hidden Land was Dorje Dechen Lingpa sometime in the 1920s. Though many lamas in Sikkim know the story of his attempt to open the Hidden Land, it was difficult to find details since no one was alive who remembered it. For that I needed a historian, so I went to the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology outside Gangtok and had extensive discussions with their senior researcher, Rigzin Dokhampa, who was a great practitioner of the Tibetan Buddhist dharma as well as a scholar. He was also a disciple of

  Tulshuk Lingpa, which I found out the first time I met him. I was in the Institute’s museum and had a question about one of the sculptures. The security guard guided me into Rigzin’s off
ice. Rigzin offered me a seat and I asked my question. Before leaving, I asked him if by chance he had ever heard of Tulshuk Lingpa and his journey to Beyul. ‘Of course,’ he exclaimed. ‘I am from Tashiding, and both my brother and I were his disciples. We learned thangka painting from him.’

  Rigzin Dokhampa (1943-2005), senior researcher, Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, Sikkim

  Rigzin told me that Dorje Dechen Lingpa was an incarnation of Lhatsun Chenpo, whom you could call the patron saint of Sikkim. When Dorje Dechen Lingpa received indications and instructions in ter about the opening of Demoshong, the beyul in Sikkim, he wrote to Chogyal Tashi Namgyal—the king of Sikkim—saying that he was the incarnation of Lhatsun Chenpo and that Padmasambhava had given the prediction that he would find the Hidden Land. He wanted the king to grant him permission to come to see him in Gangtok. The king consulted with Taring Rinpoche, a high lama who was giving oral teachings at the time at Pensong Gompa. Taring Rinpoche was himself reputed to be the incarnation of Lhatsun Chenpo and happened to be the king’s brother. He told the king that since he was the incarnation of Lhatsun Chenpo, the writer of the letter must be a fraud, and therefore Dorje Dechen Lingpa was not invited to the kingdom.

  Dorje Dechen Lingpa was not so easily put off. He was, after all, heading for a kingdom both larger and greater than the Chogyal’s Valley of Rice. So with about twenty monks from the Domang Gompa, he set off on foot, crossing the Tibetan Plateau and the high, snow-swept passes of the Himalayan range and went down to the Kingdom of Sikkim in order to open the way to the Hidden Land.

  Their first stop in Sikkim was the Doling Gompa, a small Nyingma monastery set in a forest not far from the town of Ravangla, across the wide valley from Tashiding. They stayed there for a few weeks and Dorje Dechen Lingpa took out quite a bit of ter—statues and scriptures. He went briefly to the Tashiding Gompa, whose name translates to Auspicious Center and is considered to be at the heart center of Sikkim. It was prophesied that the lama who would open Beyul Demoshong would come to Tashiding. Since he didn’t have permission to be in the kingdom, he kept his visit there low-key and didn’t stay long.

  They went to Rinchenpong Gompa in West Sikkim, not far from the Nepal border, and from there to Risum Gompa. Since they were going high into the snow mountains, they had many horses and mules with them as pack animals. Risum lies deep in the mountains, the last place before the snow, and quite near the Western Gate to Demoshong. Like the Biblical Heavenly Kingdom, there are four gates to the Hidden Land.

  At this crucial juncture there occurred, as Rigzin Dokhampa described it, a very bad omen. Dorje Dechen Lingpa and his twenty followers were staying at the home of the headman of Risum, Penchu Tekadar, who was the owner of the gompa and had built it. One night there were terrific thunderstorms with heavy hail and lightning. Dorje Dechen Lingpa’s followers were used to sleeping in tents. That night he told them to sleep in the monastery itself, which they all did except for one. The lama in question was a practitioner of chod, a practice that is performed in dangerous places such as cremation grounds and graveyards with fresh graves. He insisted—against his master’s wishes—on staying outside that night to practice.

  That night there was a terrific storm that pelted the ground and covered it with huge pellets of hail and illuminated the sky with violent flashes of lightning. In the morning they found that not only did the lightning shatter rocks and splinter trees, it also killed the lama practicing chod and over half of their mules and horses. This was a bad omen indeed, and Dorje Dechen Lingpa was ready to give in to the omen and give up his quest to open Beyul Demoshong. But the wife of the headman stepped in, offering him as many horses and mules, food and other provisions he needed to continue his journey. He accepted her offer and ascended the snowy slopes.

  Bad omens are rarely followed by favorable ones, and indeed there were further bad omens (which will be described later), and in the end he had to give up. He returned to Tibet and died before reaching his home monastery at Domang. Before he died, he announced that when he returned he would take not one but three incarnations. According to Rigzin, that is exactly what happened.

  ‘One of the incarnations,’ he told me, ‘is Jigdal Namgyal, our last king’s youngest brother. He lives in Gangtok below the higher secondary school. Another—I don’t remember his name—was born from the wife of Penchu Tekadar, the headman of Risum, the one who offered Dorje Dechen Lingpa the mules and provisions so he could continue. The third was also born in Sikkim. He is known as the Yangthang Rinpoche. In his seventies, he lives mostly in Yoksum.

  ‘Both the son of Tekadar and the Yangthang Rinpoche went to the Domang Gompa in Tibet to be trained. At that time they were quite young, in their mid-twenties. Both of them showed such great intelligence that they became famous. In our monastic system of learning we memorize scriptures in the morning. An extremely intelligent person can memorize twenty or perhaps twenty-five pages in a morning. When I was a student, I could memorize fifteen. Yangthang Rinpoche and Penchu Tekadar’s son memorized one volume each every morning: more than 100 pages. So the people became very excited.

  ‘During this time, Tibet’s troubles with the Chinese began. When it became increasingly dangerous in Kham, they escaped to the capital Lhasa where news kept reaching them of the increasingly dire conditions in Kham, of the resistance and the wholesale slaughter. Tekadar’s son said to Yangthang Rinpoche, “We are lamas and have escaped from the troubles. That is not right. We must share in the suffering and help as we can.” Penchu Tekadar’s son returned to Kham, where he was killed. Yangthang Rinpoche remained in Lhasa, which was soon occupied by the Chinese. He was later put in a Chinese prison for twenty years.’

  Ever since Dorje Dechen Lingpa failed to open Beyul Demoshong in the 1920s, the lamas and tertons of Kham wondered who would be the next one to attempt the opening. Though they considered Dorje Dechen Lingpa the right lama to open the way (the ter, after all, was revealed to him), they faulted the times, saying the time wasn’t right for the opening of the beyul. The 1920s were relatively peaceful in Tibet, and the need for a place of refuge wasn’t so great. But with the Chinese invasion of 1951 and the subsequent brutality, what would be more important than a place of refuge? Therefore the high lamas and tertons of Kham gathered secretly in order to perform the divination necessary to help them discover the next one to open Beyul Demoshong. Special pujas were performed, and visions were received: visions of Khandro Yeshe Tsogyal who told them the five attributes by which the one to open Beyul Demoshong could be known. They wrote a pecha with the description, rather like a literary ‘Wanted’ poster, and hundreds of hand-lettered copies of this pecha were made. They were distributed to lamas throughout Kham.

  Many Tibetans, especially from Kham, started fleeing south to India. It wasn’t yet time for the all-out exodus with the Dalai Lama in 1959 but things were getting rough, especially for the lamas who found themselves targets of Mao’s anti-religious zealots. Many were braving the high passes for an uncertain life in India. To survive, newly arrived Tibetan refugees took to begging or worked as day laborers and road workers. Though Tibet and India shared a border, the mountains separating them were the highest in the world and life in the two countries couldn’t have been more different. How difficult it must have been for a people who measured wealth by the size of their herds on the high empty plateau to suddenly find themselves cast among the Indian masses, scraping for survival.

  Zurmang Gelong was one of the lamas who were at the convocation in Kham. He fled over the high passes to India with only a copy of the pecha and the clothes on his back. It was written in the pecha that the lama who would open Beyul Demoshong would originally be from Kham but would be found living in an area known as Töd, or ‘upper Tibet’, comprising a large area of the western Himalayas: Lahaul, Spiti, Kinnaur, Zanskar and Ladakh. Having experienced the Chinese invasion first hand, Zurmang knew above all else that it was necessary to find the lama to open Beyul.

  He travelled to the western
Himalayas with the wish and prayer of finding the lama who would open that place of shelter for all Tibetans. But along the way, the quest for survival came to dominate his existence and he found himself, like the hero of mythology, forgetting his quest from the sheer exhaustion of working on a road crew cracking rocks for the construction of the new road up the Kullu Valley. He lived below the road along the banks of the Beas River in a camp of makeshift lean-tos of sticks and river stone occupied by about a hundred of his colleagues, a mix of displaced Indian families, rootless wanderers and Tibetan refugees like himself.

  Above their camp were huge cliffs, and he started hearing about a lama who lived in a cave up there. At first he heard he was a crazy and drunken lama. He was too tired after a day of cracking stones with a heavy hammer to climb the cliffs for such a lama. Besides, Zurmang was from Kham. No local lama could compare with a Khampa lama, he thought to himself, so he didn’t pay much attention to the news. But he kept hearing of this lama who lived in a cave, so he finally asked, ‘Who is this lama?’ When he heard that he was from Kham, he became interested. He grabbed the pecha and climbed to Tulshuk Lingpa’s cave.

  Since Kunsang was there when this Khampa lama wearing a road laborer’s clothes and a pecha under his arm arrived at the cave, we have a first-hand account of what happened.

  ‘He was dirty,’ Kunsang told me, ‘and his clothes were covered in rock dust. The moment he opened his mouth, my father picked up on his distinctive Khampa dialect. So their conversation began commonly enough, my father started asking him the normal questions: Where are you from? What monastery did you study at—that sort of thing.