by Thomas Shor
As the time drew near for the family to leave for Sikkim, Kunsang became melancholic and, he admitted to me, quite sad to say goodbye to everybody who was staying behind and to everything he had ever known.
‘I had never been away from home before,’ he explained. ‘Sikkim was on the other side of India and Shambhala very much further. I knew we’d never return. I was excited but also afraid.
‘Then people told me, “You have nothing to worry about. 100 per cent! Your father is going to be King of Shambhala, and you’re going to be prince!”
‘Then I was very happy, me, Prince of Shambhala!’
When Kunsang told me this story, he howled with laughter, ‘Me, Prince of Shambhala—Prince of Shambhala!’
Kunsang’s attitude towards his father and his going to the Hidden Land was deeply reverential, that of an absolute believer in both his father’s spiritual accomplishments and in the reality of Beyul. Yet when a point of absurdity about some detail of the story or even of the entire enterprise itself occurred to him, he never shied away from expressing it. His was a knife-edge understanding—expressing the reality of Beyul as an unquestionable truth in one breath and punching holes of absurdity spiced with tremendous humor into it with the next. Behind his irreverence was always a deep feeling for the truth that can be contained by neither facts nor logic and can be found only in contradiction. Such was his father’s legacy.
He proudly said on many occasions, ‘My father, he was the crazzziest lama who ever lived.’ I often had the feeling his father taught him not only dharma but also his own particular brand of craziness and through him, more than through any other source, I had a window into Tulshuk Lingpa’s character.
When Tulshuk Lingpa arrived back in Sikkim, he lived at Tashiding and made it his base. With his followers from Simoling and Kullu following and setting up camp on the hillsides next to the monastery, there was little hiding his true mission. People from Sikkim, Darjeeling and Bhutan heard the news and started moving to Tashiding, swelling the original population of perhaps seventy-five in the monastery and the houses surrounding it to over 400 people. Many of the lamas at Tashiding who are there to this day moved there because they wanted to be there when the prophesied terton came to open Beyul. Others moved there when they heard Tulshuk Lingpa had arrived.
In the course of writing this book, I went with Kunsang and his son Wangchuk to Tashiding. Kunsang hadn’t been to Tashiding in forty-three years. I had been to Tashiding on my own and with Wangchuk the year before. Having seen how reverentially the lamas of Tashiding treated Wangchuk when they heard he was Tulshuk Lingpa’s grandson, I knew it would be a great occasion for them when Kunsang—Tulshuk Lingpa’s spiritual heir—arrived unannounced.
‘Just think,’ I said to Kunsang as we sat resting on a rock on the side of the steep path to the monastery. ‘The Prince of Shambhala is coming, and they don’t even know! How can this be? This just isn’t right.’
I stood up and motioned Kunsang to lead the procession up to the monastery, for Wangchuk to follow, and I took up the rear. Making my hands into a pretend trumpet, I puffed out my cheeks and made the sound of a fanfare by pressing air through my lips.
‘Bumb-be-de bummm, be-de-dummmm! The Prince of Shambhala is arriving! Bumb-be-de-bummmm!’
‘The Prince of Shambhala,’ I announced, making a flourish to Kunsang. ‘The Crown Prince,’ I continued, motioning to Wangchuk. Then I pointed my finger to myself, ‘And their scribe!’
That is how we arrived at Tashiding, like three raving lunatics, hysterical with laughter, ‘Bumb-be-de-bummmm! The Prince of Shambhala, the Crown Prince, and their scribe are arriving!’
Wangchuk & Kunsang, Yoksum, West Sikkim
Word quickly spread of our arrival, and soon all the lamas and many of the older people who were there in the early sixties were gathered around Kunsang who started telling stories. Then we all got up and went to the drakar, the stone door to Shambhala. Ever watchful and hopeful that the terton will arrive to open the way, perhaps they thought Kunsang was their man and this was the time. But Kunsang, with whatever powers he inherited from his ancestors and with whatever wisdom he gleaned from his life experience growing up in the extraordinary way he did, is always quick to say he is not a terton.
Instead of opening the door, he and the lamas of Tashiding examined the stone noting how the door used to be of a lighter color, which was interpreted as indicative of the darkness of our times. They searched for Tibetan letters imbedded in the stone, an Om Ah Hung—the opening syllables of the mantra of Padmasambhava—which used to be above the door. They discovered that the letters had migrated across the stone face. Pointing them out to each other, they were each more hopeful than the next in locating these migrating letters in the magic rock, door to another realm. I don’t read Tibetan, though I can recognize Tibetan letters. I recognized no letters in the cracks they pointed out in the rock face. Perhaps my powers of imagination weren’t great enough.
Then, to see who might open the way, the ancient robed lamas of Tashiding took turns playing a sort of spiritual pin the tail on the donkey. Each lama would take five paces away from the stone face, turn and stare straight at the ‘key’ to the door—the fist-sized hole in the rock within which was a loose stone. Holding his right arm out before him with index finger extended and taking his bearings, he then covered his eyes with his left hand and took stumbling steps towards the wall until his finger touched the rock. Tradition has it that if your blind finger finds its way into the hole, the door will open. When my turn came to see if I might be the one to open the door and let all these venerable lamas—who had been waiting so long—through, I came up wide of the mark. Opening my eyes, I felt inside the keyhole but the stone inside wouldn’t move. One of the old lamas told me, with an edge of anger in his voice, how a Bengali tourist had heard of the secret of the keyhole and its miraculously loose stone imbedded in a stone wall. When no one was watching he took out his penknife and tried to pry the stone out, in the process jamming it forever.
Followers of religious leaders are notorious for lowering their teachers’ understanding to the level of their own while exalting their teacher’s attainments beyond all measure. Therefore we needn’t judge the terton’s level by that of his followers. Lamas earnestly stumbling blind with their index fingers stretched before them and stubbing them against a stone wall don’t necessarily reflect the terton’s understanding of just what a crack in the world might be and the methods he’d employ to open it.
Where did Tulshuk Lingpa draw the line between fact and fancy, or between metaphor and literal truth? Just what did he have to fulfill before he could attempt an opening? We know he had to do certain things before an opening could be made. He had business, for instance, in two of the major caves in Sikkim visited by Padmasambhava.
One of them was the northern cave, known as Lhari Nyingpuk, which translates to the Heart Cave on the Gods’ Hill. Tulshuk Lingpa left Tashiding at one point to go there with five of his close disciples including Géshipa, Namdrol and Mipham. When Kunsang, Wangchuk and I were in Yoksum, Géshipa described what happened.
They got to the cave—a few days’ march from Tashiding—and Tulshuk Lingpa performed a puja after which he picked up a stick, scratched a circle in the floor of the cave and told his disciples to dig. They didn’t have any tools but used stones and their bare hands. As the hole grew, Tulshuk Lingpa was staring into it. Then he suddenly told them to stop. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Fill it back in.’ When they had, he told them he had seen ter in the ground but it wasn’t the time to take it out. ‘I saw a stone dorje,’ he told them. None of them had. ‘It is one of a pair,’ he continued. ‘The other one is in Demoshong. I only had to confirm it. It is not for me to take this one out.’
We know there are four gates to Demoshong, one in each of the cardinal directions. There are also four caves, which are allied to the four gates. Tulshuk Lingpa also went to another of the caves—the western cave—called Nub Dechen Phug, which
translates to the Western Cave of Great Bliss.
Again he went with five or six of his closest disciples, among them Géshipa, Namdrol and Mipham. This time his disciples were ready for anything, and they brought tools just in case. Tulshuk Lingpa did a puja, indicated a place outside the cave in the ground just before the entrance and told his disciples to dig there. Proud of themselves for the foresight of bringing digging implements, they started digging. At three or four feet down their shovels and picks all glanced off a huge flat rock covered in a strange brown material.
‘Turn the rock over,’ Tulshuk Lingpa commanded, ‘and I will take out a tremendous ter.’
‘But Master,’ Namdrol protested, ‘it is too big to turn over. We don’t have the tools. We’ll hurt our backs.’
Tulshuk Lingpa became furious. When a terton is taking out ter, you should never contradict him. He is stepping through a crack in the logic that holds the world together; therefore you should not hold him to your own paltry standard of what is and is not possible.
Tulshuk Lingpa reached into the belt beneath his robes and pulled out his purba, the magic purba he had taken out of the cave in Tibet with Dorje Dechen Lingpa. He held it before him, point up. Then spinning it in his hand, he jumped into the hole with a flourish, stood on the flat rock and touched it with the tip. Though he had only touched the tip of the purba to the rock, the rock cracked and a piece broke off. Tulshuk Lingpa reached into the crack and took out a small piece of tightly rolled yellowed paper.
Jumping out of the hole, he told the others to fill it in and he walked away.
Back at Tashiding, he unfolded the meaning in the few scratches written on the tightly rolled paper. He dictated it to one of his disciples who wrote it down. Usually he would have had Namdrol be his scribe but he was still angry at Namdrol for having introduced doubt at the decisive moment. The resulting book, of only three pages, was only a minor ter: a prayer to make the deities happy on the way to Demoshong. The ter he could have taken out, if they could have miraculously turned the large stone, would have been a guide to all the ter in Demoshong. Some of his disciples tried to convince Tulshuk Lingpa to go back to the cave with the right tools to turn the rock so he could get the ter he had gone there for but he said the time for that was past.
Most of Tulshuk Lingpa’s disciples from Himachal Pradesh were from Simoling. By most accounts, over half the village went to Sikkim, selling enough of their possessions to make the journey and giving away the rest. There were also two families from a village down the valley called Koksar, which is just north of the Rohtang Pass, including the khandro, her sister Yeshe and their mother. People in that village tried to dissuade those who wanted to go, saying Tulshuk Lingpa was crazy and would lead them to ruin. The two families who were followers of Tulshuk Lingpa made their preparations for leaving in secret and left in the middle of the night without telling anyone. They walked over the Rohtang Pass to Manali, where they got a bus to the Plains.
As the waves of people from Himachal Pradesh arrived in Tashiding, the atmosphere became electric. Word spread throughout Sikkim and the Darjeeling Hills that the long-prophesied lama had arrived, and everybody had to make a decision. People’s faith was so great that many were divesting themselves of their material goods—land and homes included—without ever meeting Tulshuk Lingpa, just on the word that he was the one. Fields were lying fallow. Many more were staying at home but had provisions ready so when they heard the time had come, they could leave everything and head directly for Mount Kanchenjunga and pass through the gate while it was still open. I spoke with people who had gone north into the high mountains to hide tsampa, corn and other provisions in caves so when they heard the way was open, they could go as quickly as possible without having to first buy food and then carry it into the high mountains. It looked as if half the Kingdom of Sikkim would have left for the Hidden Land once Tulshuk Lingpa had made the opening.
Tulshuk Lingpa’s followers who gathered at Tashiding were from all over the Tibetan world—Lahaul, Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal and the Darjeeling Hills. They spoke a polyglot of languages. With each group from their own distinct region, speaking their own language, they tended to form groups and live together in encampments slightly set apart. Everybody was suspicious of the Lahaulis, since they were the ones who came with Tulshuk Lingpa and were his oldest and closest disciples, some having known him for over twenty years. Often they would speak with Tulshuk Lingpa in a language the others couldn’t understand. The others always feared that when the time came, Tulshuk Lingpa would take with him only his older disciples and sponsors—the ones from Lahaul whom, one old woman from Bhutan told me (with more than a hint of jealousy even after all these years), he treated like his own children. While it is true and quite natural that his closest disciples tended to be Lahaulis, there was no reason to think he would have left the others behind. Yet such is human nature, even for those attempting to leave this world for a world beyond war and ethnic troubles.
Kunsang told me that when people came to see his father they would often bring offerings of food. After everyone left, Tulshuk Lingpa would instruct them to throw the food out. They were afraid of being poisoned. Chang, homemade beer, was especially suspect.
I too in my travels around Sikkim was often warned to be careful of being poisoned. At first, I thought people were warning me because hygienic conditions can sometimes be less than optimal. But the poisoning I was being warned against and about which Kunsang was speaking was not accidental but deliberate—and deadly.
The first time I heard of this was while walking in North Sikkim, relying on the kindness of strangers to put me up for the night. One night I told my host my intentions of walking to a small town I will call X (so not to bring insult to an entire town), and he gave me a stern warning.
‘If you go to X,’ he told me, ‘bring your own water and food. Don’t accept anything there, not even a cold drink or tea.’
I asked him why.
‘Food poisoning,’ he said.
‘Bad hygiene in X?’
‘They poison people there.’
‘On purpose?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Black magic. Human sacrifice. There are people there who worship a dark goddess who demands human sacrifice. They believe by killing you they will gain the wealth you would have accumulated over the course of your life. They also believe they will acquire your luck. Look, you are a Westerner. Just by the fact that you can travel so far means you are both extremely lucky and wealthy, at least by local standards. Therefore you would be a perfect target. So be careful!’
The next day I walked down the Teesta River Valley, through little villages in a vast mountain landscape. The other side of the river, where deep forests rose to spectacular heights, was Dzongu. It was a reserve for the indigenous Lepcha people restricted to foreigners. I enjoyed my walk immensely, passing through the tiny mountain villages, stopping now and again on a flat stone overlooking the deep to have a snack and take off my shoes and relax. My host’s warnings had made me change my plans. Instead of spending the night in X, I’d get a jeep from there back to Gangtok.
A few kilometers before X, I met a man who invited me to his house for tea. He was a farmer, mainly of cardamom, but also had a nursery and pigs and was quite wealthy. His house was large, rambling and quite new. We sat in his living room, and he asked me where I was headed. I told him to X and then on to Gangtok. ‘When you are in X,’ he said gravely, ‘don’t take any food. Poison.’
I acted as if I didn’t know anything about it: ‘They have bad hygiene there?’
‘No,’ he said in a hushed tone, ‘they will poison you. Black magic. Human sacrifice. They believe by killing someone they will gain wealth. Don’t take even tea there.’
‘What poison do they use?’
‘It is called kapat,’ he said.
He told me the symptoms of poisoning by kapat. ‘First your throat will begin to hurt and it will go dry. Your eyes will grow pale; your lips will become paper
y and dry. Your fingernails will become yellow; your teeth will turn blue and form cracks; your joints will ache. Then you will feel dizziness and your heart will feel pain. It will kill you from within five minutes to six months, depending on the dosage.’
‘Where do they get it?’
‘In the market. But if anyone sees someone buying it, they will go through the village yelling out “So-and-so bought kapat!” So no one will eat at his house.’
‘Do you think it really works? Do people gain wealth through this human sacrifice?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have seen it. People do grow rich, for a while. Then things turn bad for them, and they become very poor. They become like beggars. They become outcasts of society because people know what they’ve done.’
As he was telling me this, his wife brought me tea. I suddenly felt myself in an episode of The Twilight Zone. I could just hear the viewing audience all yelling out, ‘Don’t drink the tea! How do you think a simple farmer lives in such a rich house?’
‘How would I know if someone was trying to poison me?’ I asked. ‘For instance, how do I know what’s in this tea?’ I asked it jokingly, though with a tinge of concern.
‘You can look at me and tell I wouldn’t hurt you, can’t you?’
