by John Avedon
Surrounding destitute beings who are without a protector
Are a thousand benevolent eyes
Acting to guard all suffering creatures.
To the One with Lotus in Hand I pay homage.
A great compassionate treasure is the Lord of Migrators in the Land of Snows
With compassionate activities that fully encompass all directions,
Whose kind, skillful methods are like those of a mother for her only son,
This compassionate care is a vast excellent gathering.
I am well pleased.
The prophetic answers to the questions follow, given in the order in which they were asked.
The long horns emit a resounding boom. The canvas stool is brought forward by attendants, and Dorje Drakden sits, still gyrating from side to side, before the Dalai Lama’s throne. As the maroon curtain parts again, he glances toward the doorway. The medium of the Gadong Oracle enters, supported by attendants. He is starting to undergo trance. The spirit possessing him, known as Shinjachen or Wooden Bird, sometimes called Black Vulture Hat, is also a minister, like Dorje Drakden, of one of the main protective deities of Tibet, Pehar Gyalpo, the ultimate source of the oracular pronouncement. Unlike the Nechung mediums, however, those of the Gadong monastery are not monks. The mediumship is passed in a lay lineage from father to son. The present medium is a man in his mid-thirties employed as a secretary in the Dalai Lama’s private office. He has served as kuden for little more than a year and is still finding it difficult, the process of clearing the psychic channels or tsa by which the Protector will enter him, extremely painful. In addition, Shinjachen is a more abrasive, manifestly wrathful spirit. Because of these factors, the two spirits have been summoned together, so that, using special methods, Dorje Drakden can assist in breaking in the new medium.
As the Gadong kuden enters the hall, his breathing sounds dense and heavy. Unlike the Nechung kuden’s proficient acceptance of the deepening levels of trance, his chest heaves thickly, erratically. He is dressed in full-length gold robes, and his long black hair contrasts with the cropped head of the monk kuden, though just like the latter, as he sits on a second canvas seat five feet inside the door, his breathing abruptly accelerates and grows rougher. Shinjachen appears to take possession all at once. With each inhalation the medium starts to scream in sharp pain; his eyes bulge, his body shudders wildly. Attendants strain to place his helmet on and rush him forward to offer the mendel tensum to the Dalai Lama. In a few chaotic instants, the offering is made, after which the Dalai Lama struggles to place a green blessing scarf between the kuden’s helmet and neck. But the trance is too violent; the choking and convulsions have increased dangerously. The Dalai Lama delivers a curt command; the kuden’s helmet is immediately loosened and in the next moment he collapses, the trance suddenly dispelled. Unconscious and totally rigid, the Gadong medium is lifted into the air. Dorje Drakden leaps off his seat and, grabbing handfuls of yellow barley grain from a monk, showers them across the medium’s prone form. And then, as the lifeless frame of the Gadong kuden reaches the door, Dorje Drakden himself vanishes; the monk’s body stretches out stiffly and is caught before it crashes to the floor by his attendants, who carry it out. The session is finished.
There is silence. In the recovery room, the two mediums lie on adjacent low beds wrapped in golden brocade blankets and orange silk covers. The Gadong kuden continues to shudder and breathe spasmodically. The Nechung kuden lies perfectly still, his face placid. The aides have loosened his costume and are massaging his body. In time, he briefly opens his eyes: he is at peace. He closes his eyes and rests. Now the Gadong kuden, his trance less deep and lengthy, has fully emerged, and sits up in bed, his head in his hands, leaning forward, breathing evenly.
After changing their costumes, the two kudens and their staffs walk to the front door of the cathedral, enter and prostrate three times before the Dalai Lama. Dressed in plain maroon robes, the Nechung kuden seems to have been only slightly jarred—his hands do not quite match up in prayer as he prostrates—yet, as always, he has no memory of the event. The Gadong kuden, dressed in a handsome green khaki chuba and red sash, looks like a perfectly normal Tibetan layman. He follows the Nechung medium up to the Dalai Lama, where all receive protection cords and scarves and then return to seat themselves, looking freshly decorated, in two rows, a kuden at the head of each. The Dalai Lama continues to look down in silence. Tea is served, and the gathering of twenty drink from their bowls, each man staring at the floor by his feet. Draining his cup, the Dalai Lama leaves his throne, ties on his brown oxfords in the anteroom and, as the Indian guards snap their rifles to attention, exits the building to return to his residence. Outside, the precincts of the Central Cathedral are as empty as they were forty minutes before. A blanched gray light is filling the sky. The night has passed; it is Saturday. Within the cathedral the bright yellow barley seeds thrown by Dorje Drakden are collected, one by one, from the floor, to be kept and treasured as blessings of the Protector.
FOR 1,300 YEARS TIBET’S CHIEF ORACLE has been consulted by the nation’s leaders on virtually every key decision of state. Although on sacred occasions the oracle would appear before up to 80,000 people in Lhasa, the inner workings of his monastery, the nature of the possession and, in particular, the experiences of those most closely involved have been kept strictly secret. As part of Tibet’s entry to the world, however, the Dalai Lama agreed to have some details of Nechung Monastery and the story of its most important resident, the kuden, revealed.
On January 5, 1930, Lobsang Jigme, twelfth medium of Tibet’s State Oracle was born to a family of middle-class shopkeepers in Lhasa. His father died when he was still young, leading his mother to give her only child to the monkhood. The family had cousins in both the Je College of Sera Monastery, Tibet’s second-largest cloister, and the small but eminent monastery, called Namgyal Dratsang, belonging to the Dalai Lama and housed in the Potala. To decide which to approach, his mother sought a mo or divination from a renowned lama, named Demo Rinpoché. On the basis of his prognostication, Demo Rinpoché stated that the child should be sent to neither monastery. Rather, the lama related, he had “very important work” to do at Nechung Monastery and, hence, should go there. He added that the boy must be treated carefully and always kept “clean”—meaning that things should be done with decorum in his presence. On receiving this advice, Lobsang Jigme’s mother thought that perhaps her son was an incarnate lama who had, as yet, to be recognized. His sensitive, introspective nature seemed a further indication of his special nature. Securing a place at Nechung monastery, she sent him from home at the age of seven, and the young boy took up life as a getsul, or novice monk.
Nechung Dorje Dray angling—The Immutable Island of Melodious Sound—as Nechung Monastery was formally called, lay four miles west of Lhasa, in a large grove of juniper and fruit trees just below Drepung Monastery. Since the seventeenth century, its 115 monks had been supported by the Tibetan government who held them responsible for keeping intact a daily link with Tibet’s main spirit Protector, Pehar Gyalpo. Believed to inhabit the spirit world invisible to humans, Pehar Gyalpo and his principal emissary to Tibet, Dorje Drakden, were contacted through eight hours of ritual conducted in four sessions a day, beginning at six in the morning and ending at ten-thirty at night. To learn the invocations, Lobsang Jigme was required to memorize five hundred pages of tantric liturgy—far less than the hundreds of books memorized by some scholars training for the Doctor of Divinity degree, but, due to the premium put on its correct incantation in ritual, a demanding task. In conjunction with recitation, he was instructed in the monastery’s unique style of chanting, the playing of religious instruments, the fashioning of elaborately sculptured offerings and cham or religious dance. Most complex were the intricate visualizations which each monk had to generate during prayers. It was by virtue of their own powers of meditation as well as the visualized offerings of blood, meat and alcohol that the Protector, it was believed, wa
s actually summoned, imagination being the link to a higher, more refined level of reality. Lobsang Jigme soon learned that advanced practitioners whose psychic channels had been opened by years of meditation, would see Dorje Drakden, garbed in the robes of a stately monk, during daily prayers. The rest, however, received their only glimpses of the Renowned Immutable One during the five official trances held each month.
Though private trances often occurred at the request of the Dalai Lama, on the second day of each lunar month, without fail, Drepung’s abbots would arrive soon after sunrise for their monthly audience with the Protector. While the medium underwent trance before the two-story-high statute of Hayagriva, a ferocious, multi-armed, multi-headed tutelary deity, poised at the rear of the monastery’s hall, the monks would seek advice on a wide range of issues affecting Drepung’s vast estates. During the next week, four government departments—Cabinet, Office of the Lord Chamberlain, and two offices of the Treasury—would submit formal requests to the monastery for their own sessions with the Protector. Meticulous records of each prophecy delivered at these meetings were kept by Nechung Monastery’s secretary, who recorded predictions on nine two-foot-long black, red-rimmed boards, oiled and dusted with limestone powder. Using an inkless bamboo pen, he wrote in the shorthand necessary to keep up with the oracle’s often rapid speech. At the conclusion of each trance, Lobsang Jigme watched as the tablets were taken to the temple’s eastern wing, where they were copied for the records of the department in attendance, as well as for his Monastery’s own archives. The latter were kept in large, wood-framed books, wrapped in brocade and stored in tall, brilliantly decorated yellow cupboards. Beside them lay scrolls of golden silk upon which Nechung Monastery’s regulations had been personally composed by the Fifth Dalai Lama. Elsewhere heavy steel swords were displayed, tied in knots and given as a blessing by Dorje Drakden. The monastery’s true spiritual riches, though, consisted of a number of sacred vessels through which the Protector, without the use of a medium, was believed to communicate directly. These hallowed objects had been preserved since the dawn of Buddhism in Tibet.
From his fellow monks Lobsang Jigme soon heard tales of the oracle’s miraculous abilities. Throughout Tibet’s history, he was told, the Choekyong had intervened to protect those following the path of religion from harm. In recent years, he had manifested the week-long vision in the sacred lake of Lhamoi Lhatso that had revealed the birthplace of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. When the young ruler had reached his majority and was about to assume temporal power, the Protector had exposed an assassination attempt on his life by directly challenging its mastermind, the Regent, during a trance. At the end of his reign, the oracle had bid the Dalai Lama farewell by facing him as he walked away at the conclusion of a public trance held in the Norbulingka—an act performed only at final parting, which, though puzzling at the time, became clear four months later when Tibet’s ruler died unexpectedly. All these accounts showed Lobsang Jigme how intimate the connection was between his monastery and the government of Tibet. None, however, illustrated the establishment’s vital role as clearly as the ceremonies undertaken during Tibetan New Year’s, the first of which brought the entire world of spirit protectors into direct contact with the affairs of men.
As a state institution, Nechung Monastery stood at the apex of a nationwide system comprised of thousands of mediums and their respective spirits. The network, through which the human and spirit worlds were connected, was reenfranchised annually, in the so-called Lhatrel or God Tax. Once a year Tibet’s 120 district governors collected offerings from the mediums in their region on behalf of their spirits. Forwarded to Nechung Monastery, they were given, on the third day of the New Year, in a colossal tsog or offering ritual, to Pehar Gyalpo. After the rite, Nechung’s monks moved to the center of Lhasa for the oracle’s appearance in Tibet’s most spectacular celebration, the three-week-long Monlam Chenmo or Great Prayer Festival. At this time, over 20,000 monks, joined by thousands of pilgrims from all across the country, crowded into the capital. The Nechung medium was required to undergo trance on at least ten separate occasions. In the most dramatic event, following days of parades, athletic meets and religious convocations, he marched in a regal procession south of the city to a field below the Potala, where, wielding his bow, sword and trident before a bonfire, he ritually dispersed the negative spirits of the old year.
As Lobsang Jigme grew older, his principal teacher gradually related to him the account of how Tibet’s spiritual hierarchy had come to be, imparting through it the deeper significance of his role as a Nechung monk.
Thirteen centuries before, Tibet had been an uncivilized land, its people and indigenous spirits alike, savage and unruly. When Shantirakshita, the first Buddhist missionary to cross the Himalayas, had attempted to preach the Dharma in Lhasa, he was, despite eleven years of royal patronage, finally driven off by Tibet’s native deities, whose wrathful nature was not inclined to the pacific tenets of the new faith. In his wake the great Indian saint and tantric master Padmasambhava was invited to Tibet. Glutting the populace with miracles, he vanquished the recalcitrant spirits and pledged them to henceforth protect Buddhism. As each spirit was subdued he placed him in a hierarchy according to his powers until all were accounted for save the five most arrogant. These he defeated in a series of supernatural battles, whereafter one came before him to offer fealty for all, in the form of an eight-year-old novice monk wearing a golden hat and holding a crystal rosary. Taking his dorje or ritual thunderbolt, Padmasambhava branded the child on the crown of the head, anointed the tip of his tongue with nectar and named him and his brother spirits Pehar Gyalpo—the Five Ferocious Kings. He then made Pehar Gyalpo head of the entire hierarchy of protective spirits. With all opposition to the Dharma overcome, Padmasambhava helped build Samye, Tibet’s first monastery, and placed in the sacred vessels through which Pehar Gyalpo could be contacted, the den or material bases of the spirits. As the kings were too mighty to concern themselves directly with this world, however, two of their ministers took on the task: Dorje Drakden, minister of the Western King of Speech, Sung Gyi Gyalpo, and Shinjachen, minister of the Southern King of Superior Qualities, Yonden Gyalpo. Two more potent spirits were appointed to assist them: Tsangpa, appearing through the medium of Lamo Monastery, north of Lhasa, and the seven Tsemars or Blazing Brothers of Samye Monastery itself. As Lobsang Jigme learned, all of these spirits were exempted from the God Tax because of their preeminence. At the same time, their mediums were frequently used to check the secret prophecies given by the Nechung Oracle, thereby ascertaining whether or not the original transmission had been correctly received. Beneath them, in turn, came thirty generals whose task was to marshal the remainder of the lesser spirits.
Once Padmasambhava had completed his work, Tibet’s hierarchy of guardian spirits took its place in a universal order, symbolically described as the Wheel of Protection. In it, Bodhisattyas and Buddhas were believed to manifest, not just peaceful, but also wrathful forms for the specific purpose of guiding unruly beings who could not be influenced other than by force. The Wheel operated throughout the cosmos, much like an angelic host, each group responsible for promoting the path of virtue in its local zone.
With the aid of the protective spirits, the task of spreading religion in Tibet moved apace. The founding of Lobsang Jigme’s own monastery had marked an important stage in its development. In the last decades of the twelfth century Dorje Drakden himself had prompted a renowned lama to build the small shrine of Nechung, dedicated to Pehar Gyalpo, in the open country west of Lhasa. As a result, the protector’s main base had been extended from Samye to the vicinity of Tibet’s capital. Two hundred years later, in 1414, Dorje Drakden helped to create Drepung, where the Dalai Lamas eventually ascended as abbots. When the Fifth Dalai Lama gained temporal power in 1642, he instituted Pehar Gyalpo as Protector of the new central government. To house his medium he built Nechung Monastery around the original shrine. Thereafter, a number of the sacred vessels were m
oved from Samye and the monastery was instituted as the official home of the state oracle of Tibet.
Lobsang Jigme’s indoctrination as a Nechung monk would have progressed normally if it were not for the sudden onslaught of a strange illness around the time of his tenth birthday. In the middle of the night, he would quickly rise, don his robes and proceed, sleepwalking, out of his room. During the next year he began to show signs of irrationality during the day as well. One moment he would be conversing with the other young monks; the next, he would look into space and speak in a disjointed manner. When the fit passed, he claimed no recollection of it. But at the same time his ravings seemed to impart a logic of their own. Often he described animals—eagles, elephants and monkeys in particular. On one occasion, he told of a huge throne being built by five people. In the future, he concluded, he would sit on that throne.
