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

by Thomas Shor

  ‘Even if I die on the way and the bears eat my flesh,’ he said with emotion, his old eyes sparkling, ‘I would gladly offer it to them. Better to die on the way to Beyul than to shrink back in fear.’

  His eyes—at once open, childlike, and ancient—peered out of his deeply wrinkled yet innocent face and fixed Kunsang in their gaze. ‘You are Tulshuk Lingpa’s only son,’ he said softly.

  Then fixing upon me the same gaze he said, ‘Now your life too is linked to Tulshuk Lingpa’s.’

  He looked deeply into each of our eyes in turn.

  ‘Let us go together to Beyul,’ he suddenly said, his voice quivering with excitement. ‘I’ve been doing the astrological calculations, and next October will be a very auspicious month for opening the Eastern Gate. This could be the last chance within our present incarnations. It is written in one of Padmasambhava’s ancient books of prophecy that once the Nathula Pass is open again for trade with Tibet, it will be next to impossible to get to Beyul. I’ve just been reading it.’ Géshipa pointed in a vague sort of way to a jumble of Tibetan scriptures on a high shelf over his bed wrapped in cloth that were so encrusted in cobwebs and dust that it was clear they hadn’t been touched in years.

  ‘But your heart,’ I said, ‘your doctor said your heart will stop if you go to high altitudes.’

  Géshipa brushed away my concern. ‘Tulshuk Lingpa was attempting to open the Western Gate of Beyul Demoshong,’ he said, his voice at once eager, confident and confidential. ‘Even he said the Western Gate was the most difficult to open. The Eastern Gate is the one with least obstructions; it is the easiest.

  ‘Some years back, two Bhutanese lamas came to see me. They had a scripture I’d never seen before about Beyul Demoshong, and they wanted to discuss it. They weren’t very learned. They were asking me questions and writing down notes. They spent two days with me, discussing the various routes and gates. Early on the third day, they arrived with their bags and told me they were going to make an attempt on the Eastern Gate. That was the last I ever saw of them.

  ‘It was some time later that I got a visit from some other Bhutanese. It was these two lamas’ families looking for their missing relatives. Since I knew the route they had gone and I couldn’t ask their relatives to risk their lives—the way to Beyul must be kept secret—I told them I would go looking for them. So I did. I went to Mangan, Dzongu and Tolung. Then I climbed into the high mountains through thick forests until I got above the trees. There was a lake there and it was very salty, and blue as the sky. There I met a nomad. I spoke to him of Beyul, and he knew the stories. He knew about the Eastern Gate and remembered talking to the missing Bhutanese about it. He had watched the Bhutanese climb a particular valley but they never came down, which was strange to him since the only way out of that high valley was to retrace their steps. But he was a nomad; he had his yaks to attend to, and he never went up to investigate.

  ‘The nomad and I went together up the valley. Following the instructions from the ancient books, we came to a cliff. There was a ladder made of trees lashed together leaning against it. The ladder led to a cave. We climbed the ladder, and inside the cave we found the Bhutanese lamas’ clothes, their bags and even their shoes. All the things you don’t need in Beyul. I know they had the scriptures with them but they were gone. They had made a fire, and with the blackened end of a stick they had written the name “Tulshuk Lingpa” on the back wall of the cave.

  ‘The nomad returned to his animals and I stayed in the cave. Because I had studied the scriptures, I knew exactly where I was. The gate was just above the cave. The next day I climbed farther and got to the gate but I became afraid. It’s easy to have no doubts when you are down here. But when you are up in the snow it isn’t so easy. I wasn’t ready.

  ‘I’ve wanted to go to Beyul my whole life. It is my last chance in this lifetime. But because I am old I cannot make it alone.

  ‘But if you come,’ he said, looking at Kunsang, ‘you can take out ter.’

  Turning to me he said, ‘If you don’t have any doubts, you too can come.’

  ‘I am Tulshuk Lingpa’s son, not Tulshuk Lingpa,’ Kunsang protested. ‘I cannot take out ter.’

  ‘But your father taught you,’ Géshipa said. ‘Together we know all the pujas. The deities who guard the way get easily angry. That’s why we’ll have to do lots of pujas, to make them happy. Together with you, surely the way will open! In October, the time will be right. After that, it won’t be possible. Time is running out.’

  Kunsang winked at me. ‘This is not to be taken lightly,’ he said in a confident tone. ‘Géshipa is a great master of prognostication. When he says the time is auspicious, the time is auspicious. My father always had Géshipa divine the dates for things. He always said once we were in the Hidden Land Géshipa would be the main prognosticator. But still,’ he said under his breath, ‘I don’t think so. Very difficult. He’s nearing ninety. With a heart his doctor says will stop beating at high altitudes, it does seem rather crazy!’

  It did seem an incredible form of suicide—not out of desperation but out of hope.

  Kunsang turned back to Géshipa, ‘In October the time is right—you go!’ and he burst out laughing.

  Géshipa realized we would not be joining him.

  ‘I am too old now to go on my own,’ Géshipa said undeterred. ‘I have two boxes of scriptures I must take to Beyul.’ He indicated two wooden crates he uses as low tables. ‘Since I am not a terton, I’ll need them in Beyul. I’ll have to get someone to help me. I’ve been thinking about it. I might be able to find someone with sufficient faith, here in the village. But as we near the gate and the way gets rough, most people’s faith would waver. As you near the border of Beyul, you have a chance of dying. But if I didn’t tell him, if he didn’t know where we were going there’d be no obstacles …’

  Of all the people I met who were with Tulshuk Lingpa above Tseram, Yeshe left the greatest impression on me. It was Yeshe who paid the greatest price. The openness she possessed at the age of nineteen that allowed her to see in the mirror, that deeply intuitive sense by which she could discern images in the burnished brass, had been tempered by time into a deep and open sadness. Her love for the man who was to open the way to Beyul had obviously succeeded in opening her heart.

  I met Yeshe in her tiny house in Koksar, her home village in Lahaul just down the valley from Simoling. Hers was the last old-style house in the village. It consisted of two rooms with walls of mud and stone over three feet thick. Her neighbors were all tearing down their houses and constructing larger, two-storey concrete houses, a mark of modernity, prosperity and status—none of which she possessed. She was dressed in a traditional Lahauli dress of deep burgundy with red lacework and large looping earrings. Her warm and engaging smile made me feel at home as I sat on a cushion on the floor and watched her heat water for tea on the wood-fired stove. At sixty-two years old, there was still something of the young woman in her face. A beauty shone through, an innocent quality tempered by suffering. Her aged mother lay wrapped in blankets next to the stove for warmth, sleeping most of the time I was there during my many visits.

  I asked Yeshe what happened above Tseram and about the death of Tulshuk Lingpa.

  ‘The night before the avalanche,’ she told me in her soft voice, ‘I was alone with Tulshuk Lingpa, and he told me something he told nobody else. This was after Namdrol doubted his route—after Tulshuk Lingpa and Wangyal had almost been killed by the glacier, and I had looked in the mirror and seen the white pipe coming out of the sky. This was after the doves had circled him, and the multicolored cloud had descended. The others had asked him what all these signs meant but he had kept his silence. Now, when we were alone, he told me that these were all signs that he was going to die.

  ‘You would think I would have felt upset at hearing this but he was entirely calm, as if looking down at himself from a tremendous distance. I also felt calm, even knowing he was going to die.

  ‘“I will take rebirth,
” he told me. “But it will be at the end of this age, when everybody is dying in battles and destruction is upon this earth. It will be at the time of the death of mankind.”

  ‘It was the next morning that we set out for Beyul.’

  ‘Weren’t you afraid to follow him up that steep snowy slope,’ I asked, ‘especially after he predicted his own death? It wasn’t difficult to guess how his death would come, especially after Namdrol pointed out the dangers of the route.’

  ‘I didn’t even think of it,’ she replied. ‘I was not afraid. He said, “We are going,” and we went.’

  Yeshe replenished our tea. Then she sat quietly, looking into her cup. It was painful for her to recall what happened next.

  ‘I don’t remember the avalanche,’ she said. ‘I remember going up the slope towards the pass. I remember the cloud coming down over us. And I remember everything turning white. When everything turned black, my light went out and I lost consciousness. What happened after that I only know from what others have told me. I know now that there was an avalanche, and that I was buried. When the Lachung Lama dug me out, I had lost so much blood from the cut on my head that the snow was red all around me. It looked like an animal had been slaughtered. That is how he described it. Though I started breathing again when he uncovered my face from the snow, he thought I would die at any moment. The cut on my head went right to my skull. The scar still causes me pain to this day.’

  She leaned over and parted her hair to show me the scar, which ran from above her right temple right to the crown of her head. It was thick and misshapen from not having been properly stitched.

  ‘After the Lachung Lama dug me and Lama Tashi out and found Tulshuk Lingpa’s body, he went for help. When they returned, they tell me I was drifting in and out of consciousness, though I don’t remember this at all. They wrapped me in Tulshuk Lingpa’s sheepskin coat. Since he was dead, it wouldn’t be doing him any good. Then they took off their own coats and wrapped both Lama Tashi and me as well as they could. Since we were both so badly injured, they couldn’t move us till the next day. They didn’t expect to find me alive when they returned. But I was. Unfortunately they didn’t cover my feet well enough and I got frostbite on all my toes. They took turns carrying Lama Tashi, me and the body of Tulshuk Lingpa down the mountain. It took two days for us to reach Tseram.

  ‘It was while I was being carried on someone’s back that I looked over and saw a lama carrying Tulshuk Lingpa on his back. I saw his glazed eyes and realized what had happened and that Tulshuk Lingpa was dead. My entire world was shattered, and I started crying. That is the first thing I remember. I started crying, and I don’t think I stopped for six months. They carried me down to Tseram, the tears flowing from my eyes. I stayed there through the cremation. Then they carried me on their backs back over the pass to Sikkim and to Yoksum. There the others just left. They left me with my mother and husband. They just left us alone. My toes were black by then and the flesh was beginning to rot. So they brought me to the Gezing hospital but the doctor said it was too serious a case for them to handle, so we went to Darjeeling. I spent six months there in the hospital. They amputated all my toes. I had lost so much blood that it took me all that time to recover.

  ‘I cried for six months in that hospital. I was so sick. I just remembered how they carried me down the mountain. The doctor was so nice. He used to wipe my tears.

  ‘Slowly, I learned how to walk.’

  Yeshe opened the stove to throw in another piece of wood, and I took the opportunity to look at her feet. She was wearing tiny children’s sneakers.

  ‘My husband returned to Lahaul before I did,’ she continued. ‘When I got there and he realized I could no longer work in the fields, he divorced me. Only my mother was there to help me. We had to sell everything we had. We had a little bit of gold jewelry, and we sold that. We had no other money.’

  ‘Didn’t the people in the village help you?’

  ‘Not really. Only two families from Koksar went to Sikkim. When we left, we sneaked out of the village. We left after midnight and walked over the Rohtang Pass. The others in our village didn’t believe in Tulshuk Lingpa. When we returned, nobody said bad things about our going—not in front of us. Only behind our backs.’

  ‘You were Tulshuk Lingpa’s khandro, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Didn’t the monastery help you?’

  ‘No. After some time I got married again to another of Tulshuk Lingpa’s disciples but before long he died. I’ve been alone ever since. Now it’s just my mother and I.’

  She was silent for some time, staring into her teacup.

  ‘Some say Tulshuk Lingpa was crazy,’ she said, looking up from her teacup and looking deeply and hauntingly into my eyes. ‘But it’s just that he didn’t follow the rules. He didn’t believe that one man was big and another small. He would talk with anyone, rich or poor. To him everyone was equal, and he helped them all. He was full of compassion. You could feel it. Chatral Rinpoche thought Tulshuk Lingpa was the only man who could open Beyul. The Dalai Lama couldn’t do it because he was the head, like a king. Dudjom Rinpoche couldn’t take you because he was the head of rich people. Since he was a rich person himself, he couldn’t go. Chatral Rinpoche said Tulshuk Lingpa was the one.

  ‘In the end, we couldn’t go to Beyul. Everybody has his own karma. If you have the karma, you can go to Beyul. Definitely. We couldn’t go because there were too many people and everybody didn’t have full belief. If everybody had that faith, we definitely would have made it. But because some had doubts, others began to doubt. We didn’t have the karma, so we couldn’t go. Sometimes I think about it. I dream about him often, that he is doing the rituals and blessing me.’

  There was in Yeshe’s voice both sadness and that unmistakable tone of a woman who has kept alive in the secret cavern of her heart a love that defies both time and death.

  ‘Do you often think about those times?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. But it was so long ago. What’s the good of thinking about it?’

  She wiped a tear from her eye, thinking of all the pain she’s endured since that fateful day on the mountain. That tear was followed by another and yet another, and she started to weep.

  ‘Sometimes I think I should have just died in that avalanche with Tulshuk Lingpa. I’ve wondered why I’ve been living ever since.’

  ‘I’m sorry that my coming here and asking these questions brings up so much pain,’ I said.

  Yeshe got up. She wanted to make us more tea. She didn’t have a cow but her neighbor did. She lifted a corner of the rug she was sitting on and took out a few coins.

  ‘I’ve got to go get milk,’ she said.

  Yeshe.

  When I went to Simoling to investigate this story, I was greeted and instructed there by Lama Tashi. He was a large and powerfully built man who, at the age of eighty-one, exuded authority in everything he said and a strength of mind that matched his almost superhuman size. A close disciple of Tulshuk Lingpa and a learned lama in his own right, Lama Tashi was the umzay, or head of rituals, at the Simoling Monastery during Tulshuk Lingpa’s time. He holds the position to this day. I had met others who were close to Tulshuk Lingpa—others who had studied the ancient writings concerning Beyul. But they only scratched the surface of their experience when they spoke of such matters and were sworn to secrecy concerning the depths. None spoke with the weight, command and certainty of Lama Tashi. Tulshuk Lingpa had chosen him to break the path through the deep snow on that fateful day, and I understood why. His faith was as solid as an ancient tree, his learning well-founded. It was over forty years since that fateful day when he gashed open his head, broke his arm and three ribs in the white tide of snow. But his large-boned frame was still wrapped in a musculature like that of an athlete’s. His high cheekbones and prominent eyebrows made me feel as if I were in the presence of an American Indian elder.

  Over the course of the two extended visits I made to the monastery in Simoling,
Lama Tashi and I spent hours sitting in the monastery courtyard wrapped in jackets to keep out the frosty summer wind that swept off the surrounding peaks. Whenever we got too cold we’d move to the monastery kitchen and drink large cups of salted and buttered Tibetan tea. He not only answered my questions carefully but thought deeply about our discussions and raised issues and topics he thought would be important for my research. He spoke with the reasoned authority of a learned professor, one for whom the reality of Beyul was an unshakable truth.

  Lama Tashi, the umzay of Shrimoling Gompa

  Writing this book put me in the presence of many who had given up everything to go to Beyul: those for whom the tragic ending of the expedition caused not the slightest diminishment of their faith, for whom Beyul remains a reality greater than the world we inhabit. It was by being in their presence, more than any reading I did on the subject or discussions I had with people whose knowledge was from books, that I came to understand what it means to be on a quest for Beyul. Among all those I sought out in both the eastern and the western Himalayas, it was in Lama Tashi’s presence that Beyul was the most palpable, an unmistakable and unshakable reality.

  Never did I feel closer to that crack than in his presence.

  ‘On that last day on the mountain,’ he told me, ‘the four of us had no doubt that we could make it. I think that is why Tulshuk Lingpa especially chose us to go with him. Not everyone had that belief, and that made conditions difficult. For twenty days we were practically at the gate, within sight of the pass to Beyul. Every day it would be sunny towards the pass when we left the cave but every day obstacles arose, storms of clouds, snow and wind.

  ‘Something wasn’t right.

  ‘If we were to make it, I began to think to myself, why such hindrances? Though I’ve not spoken of this, I can tell you that by day sixteen a tremendous conflict arose within me. Nobody understood better than I that one’s faith in one’s teacher must be total and that one must not contradict him, especially when he is preparing to open the way. My faith, both in him and in the reality of Beyul, was and is unshakable. I had been with Tulshuk Lingpa since he first arrived in Simoling and rid our village of the leprosy. This was long before he spoke of Beyul. He had made me the umzay, and left me in charge of his monastery when he left for Sikkim—a post I hold to this day since he never returned. He summoned me to Sikkim only when he felt the time was ripe for the opening. Yet after so many attempts and after each attempt failed when the weather turned bad and beat us back off the mountain and into our cave, the conviction began to arise in me that we should turn back, that we should return to Tseram or calamity would strike. Our rations were running out. Not everyone had the faith I had, which I knew was causing the disfavor of the guardian spirits and causing the obstacles to arise.