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

by Thomas Shor

  A very similar event occurred at the decisive moment for Dorje Dechen Lingpa when he came to Sikkim to open Beyul Demoshong in the 1920s. They were nearing this same gate, climbing a snowy slope towards a ridge—probably the very same ridge that Tulshuk Lingpa and his disciples would climb over forty years later—when he suddenly turned to his disciples and said, ‘Bring me a white dzo.’ A dzo is a cross between a yak and a cow.

  ‘But Master,’ they replied, ‘we are high in the snow peaks, far away from any settlement. Where are we to find a dzo, let alone a white one? It is impossible.’

  This raised the ire of Dorje Dechen Lingpa. ‘Don’t you understand? Nothing is impossible,’ he boomed. ‘What we need is a white dzo. Make one, then, out of butter!’

  ‘But Master,’ they complained, ‘we have no butter. We used the last of it in the tea.’

  This was described to me as the ‘bad omen’ that marked the end of Dorje Dechen Lingpa’s attempt to open Beyul Demoshong. They headed back down the mountain that day and returned to Tibet.

  Now, forty years later, Namdrol voiced a doubt about Tulshuk Lingpa’s judgment and the very sky itself responded. Suddenly they were engulfed in thick cloud. Freezing winds lashed at them with biting snow. Having spent three weeks above Tseram living in the cave, they would have been unrecognizable to those below. Their faces were thickened like leather by the elements and the skin was almost black. The snow stuck to their faces and turned to ice. Wrapping themselves in their long sheep’s wool coats and shawls, they returned to the cave.

  That afternoon, Namdrol set out without anyone knowing to try his route and see if it were possible. He didn’t make it very far. He slipped on the ice, gashed his forearm and returned to the cave with his arm bleeding.

  The next morning the weather was good. Tulshuk Lingpa performed the trata melong, the mirror divination. He announced that the divination bode well. He told some to stay in the cave, while he went with the others to make a reconnaissance of the route they had been trying each day in order to see how the weather was developing. On the way he pulled one of his disciples aside. His name was Wangyal Bodh, a powerfully built man from Simoling in his mid-twenties. Now a retired civil engineer in his late sixties, Wangyal himself told me what happened next.

  Wangyal Bodh.

  ‘Tulshuk Lingpa pulled me aside. “Today we’ll let them go by themselves,” he said. “You and I will try another route, alone—just the two of us. Too many people make difficult progress. It is good that you have a warm coat—and excellent, you have a climbing axe.”

  ‘He sent the others ahead. “We’ll go left, up that way,” he said to me confidently, indicating a little side valley that angled up to the sky. “That is what I saw in the mirror.”

  ‘I followed Tulshuk Lingpa up the valley,’ Wangyal said, his voice betraying the excitement he must have felt at the time. The way was steep, icy and dangerous. Water was gushing down innumerable rivulets from a glacier that loomed above them, the ice hard and green.

  It was a raw and dangerous place of loose scree and precariously perched boulders balancing over the deep. The glacier was confined to the ravine where the snows of innumerable winters collected and compacted. It had turned an eerie blue. Above the glacier ice gave way to snow- and ice-covered rock rising to a windswept peak with a plume of snow blowing from its summit. The sky at that altitude was so deeply blue it was almost black. Wangyal’s heart was pounding—from more than just the altitude. He had the sense that with only the two of them, the way would open.

  With a tremendous crack, followed by a resounding roar, a piece of the glacier the size of a house broke off. Scattering boulders and crushing others in its path, it was sliding down the valley directly at them. Wangyal grabbed on to Tulshuk Lingpa to save him but realized there was no way out of the glacier’s path. Terrified, he knew this was the end. Though he had first grabbed on to Tulshuk Lingpa to save him, when the lama yelled at him to let go, Wangyal realized he was now hanging on to him out of raw fear. Wangyal released Tulshuk Lingpa from his iron grip.

  Tulshuk Lingpa reached under his sheepskin coat and, with the flourish of a knight presenting his sword to a foe, whipped out his purba and held it before him at arm’s length as the glacier crashed towards them with a deafening roar.

  Holding the purba steady, one arm outstretched and his other arm extended with the index and small fingers pointing towards the onrushing wall of ice, his voice resonated such a profoundly deep note that the rumble of the oncoming glacier reverberated back on itself. His voice was elemental, pre-human. ‘Ha-ha-haaa …’ and the glacier broke into two pieces and thundered by them left and right, leaving them unscathed.

  Tulshuk Lingpa tucked the purba back into his robe with a calm that was astounding. Wangyal trembled with fright, awed by what he had just experienced, shaken to the core.

  Wangyal told me this story from when he was young while we sat drinking tea in his substantial home in Simoling. A more sedate, open and honest man cannot be imagined. I had just been travelling some days with him, visiting people and places connected with Tulshuk Lingpa. I had found him sober, level-headed and very exact in what he said. Exaggeration was not in his character. The way he told the story, I felt it was true. Even though it was embarrassing to do so, I had to ask. I tried to be diplomatic.

  ‘People make up stories and exaggerate,’ I said, ‘especially when it comes to things religious. Did this really happen how you tell it? The glacier split in two and passed you by?’

  ‘Absolutely. I am as amazed today as I was then,’ he said, staring me openly in the eye. ‘I also probably would not believe it if I hadn’t experienced it myself. But it happened exactly as I say.’

  Both the man’s honesty and his integrity told me it was true.

  ‘The human mind is susceptible to all sorts of things,’ Wangyal continued, ‘especially doubt. I realized that until this point I had still harbored doubts; now that I had experienced Tulshuk Lingpa’s powers, doubt was no longer possible. Beyul Demoshong was now a certainty.’

  When the crashing glacier’s echoes faded down the valley, Tulshuk Lingpa turned to Wangyal and asked whether he wanted to continue. Wangyal said, ‘Yes,’ without hesitation. Tulshuk Lingpa was happy. ‘Finally,’ he said, ‘a disciple with enough faith.’

  Tulshuk Lingpa took a confident step forward and continued climbing the steep valley. Wangyal followed in a state of awe. Though his mind was calm and confident, his body quaked with animal fear.

  Ahead of them was the glacier. Beyond the glacier, where earlier had been a steep slope of snow and ice topped by stone, the ground now appeared bare. Impossible as it might sound, above the bare ground was vegetation and it got greener as it went higher towards what now appeared to be a pass. Even more incredible than that was how the way was marked by rainbows—the most incredible rainbows Wangyal had ever seen, rainbows whose light and arcs were in the patterns of flowers. They looked strangely close—as if he could reach out his hand and touch them. The air was so thin that the rainbows could only be seen where they lay upon the mountains, as if the mountains at these altitudes had the density of air. The air seemed too imbued with the Celestial to contain them.

  ‘When we reached the edge of the glacier,’ Wangyal said, ‘it was smooth as only melting ice can be and flowing everywhere with water. Tulshuk Lingpa confidently climbed on to it, next to where the piece had broken off. He reached down his hand and lifted me up.’

  Wangyal broke his narrative to take a sip of tea and look out the window of his living room at the surrounding mountains. Though it was June, the peaks were still covered in snow.

  He told me that when he was a young man here in Lahaul he used to cross the Rohtang Pass in winter. It was dangerous but sometimes they had to do it. Just walking to the next village often meant negotiating snow so deep that houses would be buried in it. Trails were often swept away by avalanches. Since he used to go for treks in the high mountains and walk among the glaciers, he underst
ood as well as Namdrol how treacherous glaciers could be. They were especially a threat in springtime when the ice melts on the surface and the resulting water opens deep crevasses. When the changing spring weather brings fresh snow, the fissures get covered. Under any other circumstance, he would have had more sense than to venture up that glacier. Now he did not hesitate. His awareness was as taut and sharp as the glacier was steep.

  He followed Tulshuk Lingpa a few hundred yards up the glacier. The rainbows ahead of them seemed so close he could now practically scoop them up in his hands. The wind swept down the cold surface from the heights and the sky beyond. Suddenly the breeze turned warm and fragrant. The thin crystalline mountain air was bringing with it the scent of the most glorious herbs and flowers. He breathed deeply the fragrant air, and the smell of saffron filled his lungs. Tulshuk Lingpa was walking just ahead of him. His sight, however, was set on the rising greenery beyond the glacier from whence issued this beautiful smell.

  Suddenly the ground gave way beneath his master’s feet and Tulshuk Lingpa was sliding headlong into a crevasse wide enough to swallow him. Wangyal lunged forward and grabbed on to his ankle. He tried to dig the tip of his boots into the edge of the crevasse to prevent them both from sliding into the dark chasm of ice. Could this be the crack to which they had been travelling so long?

  ‘The ice axe,’ Tulshuk Lingpa yelled.

  In his panic Wangyal had forgotten that he had one on his belt. He swung it hard and dug its tip deep into the ice, stopping their deathly slide. There he was, lying on his belly with his face hard against the ice, watching his hand slowly slip down the ice axe’s handle. His other hand was stretched behind his back holding on to Tulshuk Lingpa’s ankle. For the second time that day death seemed unavoidable. How could he ever get his guru out of that crevasse? He turned his head to look at him, and to his amazement Tulshuk Lingpa was standing up! Yes, he was hanging on to Tulshuk Lingpa’s ankle but he was standing.

  ‘Hey,’ Tulshuk Lingpa said in a jocular voice, ‘what are you doing with your face on the ice. Get up!’

  Wangyal got up, amazed at his guru’s strength. He wanted to bow down and touch his feet but if he did so he’d probably slide right into the crack from which they had just saved themselves.

  Though immediately ahead of them it was even more treacherous, Wangyal was ready to follow his master. They were almost there. Just ten steps more, Wangyal told himself, just ten steps and we will be in Beyul. It seemed that close. He heard a sound from above and it took him a moment to realize he was listening to a gyaling, the clarinet-like instrument the lamas use. At first he thought he was hallucinating from the altitude. But he heard it and so did Tulshuk Lingpa. ‘It is the gatekeepers of Beyul,’ Tulshuk Lingpa said. ‘The dharmapala and the dakinis are coming to greet us.’

  Wangyal started forward but Tulshuk Lingpa put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘We can’t go, not just the two of us,’ Tulshuk Lingpa said. ‘The two of us can’t disappear. How can we go without the others? There is room for over 2000 in Beyul—this I know. We must turn back.’

  ‘Never did I feel disappointment so acutely in my life,’ Wangyal confided. ‘We were so close. We were standing in the snow but above us, beyond the glacier, there was no snow. It was so beautiful on the other side, green, and we were almost there. I kept thinking I was hallucinating. I even put my fingers in my ears to see if the sound of the gyalings came from inside my own head. The sound was real. The rainbows were real. And so was Beyul.’

  They carefully picked their way down the glacier and descended the valley. By the time they reached the cave dark clouds had once again descended on the mountain.

  The others were eager to know what had happened. Tulshuk Lingpa didn’t utter a word. He sat a short way off on a large stone, and the others surrounded Wangyal. ‘What happened up there?’ they asked him. ‘Your eyes are glowing. What did you see?’

  He related all he had seen and how close they were.

  ‘I know why we couldn’t see it earlier,’ he told them. ‘There were too many doubts in all of our minds. That’s why we have been unable to see the Hidden Valley, even though it’s right there.’ He pointed up the snowy slope. ‘This time we really saw it, for real. Twice we almost lost our lives. It is really there. I saw it with my own eyes.’

  The people thought, ‘We’ve travelled so far, from Himachal Pradesh and Bhutan and Tibet. We’ve come to Sikkim and now to Kanchenjunga, and still have doubts. We have too many doubts; that’s why we haven’t seen it.’

  Tulshuk Lingpa had advised them all along, even before they left Lahaul, that if they had the slightest atom of doubt in their minds they would never see the Hidden Valley.

  The others were really excited now. ‘We also want to see what you saw,’ they said to Wangyal. ‘Even if we cannot enter, we want to go to the point where we can see what you saw.’

  Wangyal told them that if he hadn’t been nervous, if he hadn’t been shivering with fear because of nearly dying twice, he would have been able to reach out and touch the rainbows.

  That afternoon, Tulshuk Lingpa performed the trata melong.

  Yeshe looked into the mirror.

  She saw a long pipe coming out of the sky. It was as wide as your outstretched arms, glowing with a golden yellow light like the sun but was also very white. It was coming straight out of the sky.

  Though they asked Tulshuk Lingpa what it meant, he grew silent and again sat a short way off on a stone. The moment he sat, four white doves—what they were doing up there amongst the glaciers is anybody’s guess—flew low over Tulshuk Lingpa. They circled him three times before cooing as if in salute and flying off into a low-hanging cloud. The cloud came lower and engulfed them. Though it was the middle of the afternoon, a red light glowed through the thick fog they were suddenly immersed in. It seemed like sunset. Then the color changed, and there were flashes of pulsating colored light. Those in the cave came out and were staring into the changing, colored light of a fog so dense they couldn’t even see Tulshuk Lingpa. Then the wind blew. The cloud moved up the valley, and they were bathed again in sunshine.

  These two events, the circling doves and the multicolored cloud, were corroborated by everyone I spoke with who was there. When telling me the story, each independently recalled these events with such vividness after four decades that it was as if these events had been etched in their memories.

  The next morning Tulshuk Lingpa again did the trata melong and had Yeshe gaze into the mirror.

  This time she saw Beyul, a beautiful place of natural wonder. Ancient trees surrounded a field through which water flowed. Waterfalls cascaded through the thick jungle that covered the surrounding mountains, and the field was filled with huge white mushrooms.

  The sky was clear over the slope leading to the pass.

  Tulshuk Lingpa smiled.

  ‘Today is the day,’ he said. ‘Today is not like the other days. Today we must be especially careful.’

  He chose among his disciples twelve he wanted to take. They wore heavy jackets and scarves wrapped round their heads. Tulshuk Lingpa brought the pechas needed to open the gate and those he’d need once they entered. Wrapped in cloth, he strapped the pechas to his back.

  When they were leaving the cave one of those being left behind said to Wangyal, who was amongst the twelve, ‘Why don’t you stay behind and let someone else go. You’ve already seen it.’

  ‘That, I thought, was extremely unjust,’ Wangyal told me. ‘I told the fellow, “That wouldn’t be fair. It was only because of all of you that we turned back!”’

  Tulshuk Lingpa led the twelve towards the snow slope that rose to the pass.

  At the base of the final slope, they stopped on a large flat rock for a final meal of tea and tsampa, after which their food was finished. After this, they would have no food until they entered Beyul.

  Tulshuk Lingpa chose three to go with him further: Yeshe and Lama Tashi—both from Lahaul—and the Lachung Lama, not the one by that
name still living in Sikkim but a Tibetan lama by that name. ‘If we make it,’ Tulshuk Lingpa told those he left behind, ‘we’ll signal.’

  The four started pushing their way up through the waist-deep, newly fallen snow towards the pass. Lama Tashi was the umzay, the head of rituals, at the Simoling Monastery. In his late thirties, he was a mature man solidly built with years of experience of high mountain snow. He went first to break the trail. Tulshuk Lingpa came second, holding a page from a pecha and chanting aloud certain sacred syllables. Behind him was Yeshe, and taking up the rear was the Lachung Lama.

  From a distance, they looked like four little dots slowly moving up the vast white slope.

  When they suddenly dissolved into white and disappeared, it took a moment for those on the flat rock to realize that their comrades had been engulfed in a cloud that was pouring down over the pass.

  On the slope, the cloud’s arrival—like a white and permeable wall—hit them with a sudden vertigo as the steep white plane of snow they were climbing suddenly merged with the air. Everything lost distinction, became uniform and started to spin.

  As the snow slope gave way beneath them, the air itself became solid as they were plunged into a darkness that roared.

  Each of them found themselves alone—the air sucked from their lungs and a crushing force hitting their bodies. In place of the green valley each expected to suddenly find themselves in, each, alone, found themselves plunged into a world of darkness and profound silence, unable to move—all except for the Lachung Lama who, when the avalanche ended, found himself with only his legs buried in the snow but otherwise unharmed.

  He extricated himself and finding himself alone on the slope he started digging frantically, looking for the others. As he neared Yeshe the snow was red and as he cleared her face of snow so she could breathe, he saw blood spurting from a huge gash across the top of her head. When he laid her on the surface of the snow, she was barely breathing and she was unconscious.