The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

Cradling his nine-month-old daughter while his wife lifted the pot from the fire and doled out rice and mustard greens onto brass plates, Sonam told me stories of Tantric yogis who had made pilgrimages in quest of the beyul, among them an itinerant lama named Lhatsun Namkha Jikme—“Fearless Sky”—who crossed the Himalayas from Tibet in the Year of the Fire Dog (1646), guided by a dakini, or female spirit, in the form of a white vulture. Leaving his followers behind, Namkha Jikme passed across the face of a cliff and descended into a maze of mist-shrouded ravines beneath Kanchenjunga, searching for the door to the beyul’s innermost realm. As the weeks passed and avalanches rumbled down the glaciers, Namkha Jikme’s disciples assumed that he had perished and began constructing a memorial cairn to honor his passage. Suddenly they heard the shrill blasts of his kangling, or thigh-bone trumpet, echoing from distant cliffs. After another week, the wide-eyed yogi emerged from banks of fog and related his experiences in the heart of the beyul. But he was unable to return there with his disciples, and the hidden realms remain sealed from the outer world not only by towering mountains, dense jungles, and glacier-covered passes, Sonam explained, but by protective veils placed there by Padmasambhava. Only those with the karma to do so can enter the depths of the hidden-lands.2

  According to Sonam, Namkha Jikme had used his Tantric powers to reverse avalanches and rockfalls. I could only wish I had similar resources. Before leaving for Sikkim, I had been climbing in the glacier-scoured mountains of western Norway and had fallen from a precipice with a volley of rocks that shattered limbs, fractured my skull, and delayed my journey east for a full two years. I was still limping from the accident.

  Over the next several weeks, I recorded Sonam’s stories of the hidden-lands. He spoke in a sonorous English he’d learned in part from Hope Cooke, a New York socialite made famous by her marriage to Sikkim’s last reigning maharajah. Sonam had tutored the foreign queen in the local dialect of the Tibetan language during her residence at the hilltop palace in Gangtok, which the American press had glamorized as a real-life Shangri-La. Concerned by growing political unrest in the tiny kingdom, Hope Cooke left with her children before India annexed it in a palace coup in 1975, but before she did, she arranged a scholarship at Brown for her precocious tutor.

  Sonam told me that in the centuries following Namkha Jikme’s arrival in Sikkim, his lineage holders established remote monasteries—including Pemayangtse—where they perfected their meditations, practiced Tantric rites, and staged noble, if quixotic, quests into the heart of the Himalayas in search of the beyul’s elusive coordinates. The outer regions of Sikkim and other hidden-lands provided refuge to Tibetans in times of political and social turmoil, Sonam told me, but their innermost realms have yet to be discovered. Written in an obscure “twilight” language that is decipherable only by accomplished lamas, the manuscripts that describe the beyul are not only narrative maps of hidden worlds, Sonam maintained, but treatises that can alter the way we see our surroundings, transforming waterfalls, cliffs, and other natural features of the landscape into doorways to exalted perception. Over the centuries, many Tibetans have sold all their possessions to go off in search of these fabled lands, but only those with faith and merit actually experience the beyul’s spiritual qualities. They are hidden not only by their extreme remoteness, he said, but by barriers formed by our habitual ways of perceiving our surroundings.

  According to Sonam, as recently as the 1950s, when Chinese Communist forces invaded Tibet, a lama named Kanjur Rinpoche had followed Padmasambhava’s prophecies into the gorges of the Tsangpo River in southeastern Tibet, a region known to Tibetans as Beyul Pemako, Hidden-Land Arrayed like a Lotus. According to Padmasambhava’s revelations, Pemako is the most dangerous as well as the greatest of all the hidden-lands, “a celestial realm on earth.” Fording treacherous rivers and living on wildflowers and powdered bark, the lama eventually passed through a waterfall into an astonishing valley laced with rainbows. The lama’s journals, now kept at a Buddhist monastery in the south of France, are silent about the waterfall’s specific coordinates, but they proclaim the reality of a place that many Tibetans hold to be an earthly paradise.

  As I wandered through the mist-wreathed forests surrounding the monastery, I looked north toward the fluted ice walls of Kanchenjunga and pondered the stories of the hidden waterfall in the gorges of the Tsangpo, 200 miles to the east. I was still convalescing from my mountaineering accident, and with my knee swollen under a poultice offered by a local shaman, my investigation of beyuls was confined to recording Sonam’s stories. They presented an alluring mystery that I felt increasingly drawn to explore.

  A Curriculum of Caves

  TWO YEARS AFTER MY JOURNEY to Sikkim I postponed work toward a master’s degree at Oxford and settled in Kathmandu, Nepal, as director of an American college study abroad program. One afternoon, during monsoon season, I took refuge from a downpour in an antique gallery not far from Nepal’s Royal Palace. While browsing through a labyrinth of masks, leopard-skin chests, and tribal artifacts, my gaze came to rest on a thangka, a Tibetan scroll painting, hanging in a dark corner of the room. The painting depicted a wrathful manifestation of the Tantric sage Padmasambhava. Painted in lapis lazuli and burnished gold, the three-eyed figure wore a tiger skin wrapped around his waist and held a scorpion in one hand and a vajra—a Tantric symbol of the mind’s innermost nature—in the other. Black snakes coiled around his wrists and ankles. Sinuous waterfalls painted from powdered conch shells streamed from jagged peaks.

  WHILE CONTEMPLATING THE THANGKA, I overheard fragments of conversation between the Tibetan shop owner and a maroon-robed monk. The monk was relating the experiences of his teacher, who, while on a meditation retreat in the Tibetan borderlands north of Kathmandu, had dreamed of a beyul hemmed in by vaulting cliffs. After confirming his vision with yak herders who knew the territory, the lama had left his retreat on a quest for the hidden valley that he had seen in his dreams. Trailed by a goat, a dog, and thirty retainers, he cut through thick forest and forded icy streams until he arrived at a flowering meadow nestled beneath the very same white cliffs and glacier-covered peaks that had appeared in his visions. As the lama performed rituals to appease local spirits, rainbows hovered in the surrounding mists.

  I approached the gallery owner after the monk had left and asked him more about the hidden valley. “Beyul are places where everything we need can be found and where meditation and Tantric practices are more effective,” the gallery owner said, pouring us glasses of tea flavored with cardamom and cloves. “Only great lamas can find them. We might be right in the middle of one and still not see it.”

  AFTER WEEKS OF LECTURES and excursions amid Kathmandu’s ancient markets, palaces, and intricately carved temples, the students in my charge disbanded for a month of independent study. On the pretext of exploring locations for future study tours, I packed my rucksack and hired a dilapidated taxi to take me to the eastern edge of the Kathmandu valley, where I began the six-day trek that would bring me to the mountain retreat of the lama who had discovered the remote sanctuary I’d heard about in the antique shop.

  The path climbed steeply through a breach in the valley wall, following a chalk-white river that cascaded through dark forests of hemlock and pine. On the first night I slept on a mud-floored porch in a small village, but as I walked deeper into the mountains I took smaller side trails that led me through increasingly uninhabited terrain.

  On the fourth day, the cobalt-blue flash of a monal pheasant lured me down a steep track that soon dissipated into dense forest. Garlands of moss swayed sensuously from ancient oaks and broad-leafed rhododendrons. Fern-covered cliffs and black-faced monkeys dropped below me into the mist. Enchanted, I pressed on through the lush forest, putting aside concerns about being off route.

  As twilight descended through the canopy of trees, I took off my boots to cross a stream and began looking for a rock outcrop where I could shelter for the night. As the light fad
ed, I caught a scent of burning logs and came across a small clearing and a primitive shelter made from bamboo matting stretched over saplings. A lone Tamang woodcutter, dressed in a matted wool tunic, sat by a fire stirring leaves in a soot-blackened pot.

  Two days later I finally arrived at Neyding, a small collection of retreat cabins that the followers of the lama Chatral Sangye Dorje, the Adamantine Buddha, had hewn from the forest. I was now in the outer reaches of Beyul Yolmo Kangra, Hidden-Land Screened by Snow Mountains, where a maze of cliffs and forested ravines run southward from the main Himalayan range that borders Tibet. As early as the eleventh century, the celebrated Tibetan yogi Milarepa was said to have meditated here to deepen his realization.3

  Chatral Rinpoche—as he was more commonly known—was already in his seventies when he founded this retreat community not far from Milarepa’s cave and instructed his beguiling daughter Saraswati and other disciples to undertake retreats of three years, three months, and three days—a powerful formula in the Tibetan tradition for advancing along the Buddhist path.

  I entered Chatral Rinpoche’s cabin and found him seated cross-legged on the floor on the skin of a long-haired Tibetan goat. At first glance he looked like some Himalayan avatar of Merlin. His long white beard and undyed cotton robes distinguished him as a master of Tibet’s Tantric lineages. A bell and vajra sat on the table, the paired ritual implements symbolizing wisdom and compassion. Thangka paintings hung from rough-hewn wooden rafters.

  Speaking in faltering Tibetan, which I had only recently begun studying in Kathmandu, I told Chatral Rinpoche that I had heard of the hidden sanctuary he had discovered and requested directions to get there. For a long moment, the lama was quiet. Then, in a deep, resonant voice, he told me that beyul are not places for the idly curious, but places for meditation. As the mind opens through spiritual practice, Chatral Rinpoche said, so too do new dimensions of the environment. If I really wanted to know the qualities of a beyul, I wouldn’t find out by spending one or two nights in one, taking pictures and leaving. Nor would I find out simply by asking questions about them or reading about them in a text.

  I tried to steer the conversation toward the specific location of the hidden valley, but Chatral Rinpoche remained adamant. If I was truly serious about understanding beyul, he said, I should come back when I had enough time to stay alone there for at least a month. That way, he said, I wouldn’t have to ask what a beyul is; I would experience it for myself. I agreed that I would come back to Yolmo the following summer.

  My commitment to completing my degree at Oxford delayed me for another year, but I returned to Neyding in July of 1986, following a path along the Malemchi Khola River. As I climbed through torrential monsoon rains, I passed through Buddhist villages marked by sodden prayer flags and long rows of moss-covered rocks carved with mantras. The villages lay mostly deserted, their surrounding fields fallow and overgrown. The inhabitants of Yolmo had traded goods between Nepal and Tibet until 1959, when Chinese Communist soldiers blocked the passes. Forced to abandon their cross-Himalayan trade, many left their small farms and resettled in Kathmandu. Higher up in leech-infested forests, local herders still tended yak-cow hybrids called dzo (dzomo if female), shifting their camps according to the season.

  When I reached Chatral Rinpoche’s encampment it was dark and pouring rain. Saraswati led me to a loosely shingled storage shed piled high with sacks of barley and rice. In the surrounding huts, the Lama’s students engaged in esoteric forms of meditation. I faded off to sleep to the piercing blasts of their kanglings, ritual instruments carved from human thigh bones that are used in Tibetan Buddhist rites for severing attachment to the physical body and outmoded forms of thought.

  In Kathmandu, Saraswati had told me more about Chatral Rinpoche’s earlier life. He had lived for years as a vagabond ascetic, wandering through remote regions of Tibet while perfecting his practice of Tantric yogas, which unveil the body’s inner energy currents and illuminate deeper levels of the psyche. In the 1940s, under the direction of his teacher, he served as tutor to the regent of the current Dalai Lama. When mounting Chinese influence and palace intrigue threatened his life he returned from Lhasa to eastern Tibet, but left soon afterward for Bhutan and India, several years before the mass Tibetan exodus in 1959. He eventually settled at a hermitage outside of Darjeeling and married the daughter of Dulshuk Lingpa, a renowned terton, or revealer of Buddhist treasures. He later built a small monastery in the hills outside Kathmandu, by the cave where Padmasambhava, practicing with his consort Sakyadevi, is said to have attained full enlightenment.

  Chatral Rinpoche is revered as one of the greatest living masters of Dzogchen, the culmination of Buddhist practice in which the mind sees beyond the threshold of thought directly into its essence: “like mind gazing into mind.” Tibetan tradition considers Dzogchen, which translates as the Great Perfection, to be the joyous realization of humankind’s highest potential. An early Dzogchen text entitled Culmination of the Supreme Path refers to this undivided awareness as “the hidden essence of one’s own mind . . . the inner radiance of reality itself.”

  THE DAY FOLLOWING MY ARRIVAL, Chatral Rinpoche spoke to me about hidden-lands. He pointed to a mandala, a circular icon of expanded consciousness, on one of the thangkas hanging from the roof beam, and said that beyul become increasingly subtle as one approaches their innermost realms. In a voice like softly rumbling thunder, he said that beyul have outer, inner, secret, and ultimately secret levels (chi, nang, sang, yangsang) that correspond to advancing stages of spiritual development.4

  Without offering any further explanation, he told me of a cave several hours away where I should stay for the next month. In firm calligraphic strokes, he painted Tibetan syllables on a silk khata, a traditional Tibetan offering scarf, and fixed gold-colored threads at three points along its length. When I reached the cave, he told me, I should fix this banner to a pole as a gesture of sealing the doors to samsara, the world of everyday thought and experience. He handed me a sack of tsampa, freshly ground roasted barley, which is the staple of Tibetan diets, and told me to return from the cave after a month and tell him of my experience. He had already asked a local herdsman named Pema Rigdzin to take me to the cave; he and his twelve-year-old son were waiting for me outside the hut.

  I followed Pema Rigdzin into the forests high above the Malemchi Khola, the roar of the river billowing up in waves from the ravines below. We gradually veered away from the main track up the valley, climbing up steep slopes of bamboo and hemlock and across narrow ledges of fragile shale. When we finally arrived at a shallow cave perched on a steep slope far above Neyding, Pema Rigzin announced that this was the place to which Chatral Rinpoche had told him to take me. We cleared out piles of pungent, matted grass from the cave floor; Pema Rigdzin laughed and said that Chatral Rinpoche had hoped that the bear we were now evicting would not return.

  I WAS DISAPPOINTED AT FIRST that we had not crossed over the high passes leading to the more remote cave that I had first heard about in the shop in Kathmandu, but I surrendered to my circumstances. I busied myself at first cutting firewood in the rain and carrying water from a nearby spring. I built a crude hearth from broken rocks and made a rack above it to dry out the soaked logs. Besides Rinpoche’s tsampa, which I mixed with local dzomo butter and dried cheese, I had brought a month’s supply of mung beans and brown rice, as well as carrots, onions, and spinach, which I had dried weeks earlier on my roof in Kathmandu. To fortify my diet, I’d bought a bag of yartsagunbu (cordyceps sinensis), a high-altitude caterpillar fungus favored by the Chinese olympic team, from a Tibetan trader in Kathmandu. I evened out the surface of the cave floor with rocks and pine boughs and tied the calligraphied banner to a length of bamboo that I planted in the slope above the cave. I settled into a month of solitude.

  I scheduled my day around four three-hour periods of meditation, but before long the persistent dampness caused my watch to stop, and I
adopted a less rigid routine. I woke each morning before dawn and began the first in a sequence of practices designed to free the mind from customary patterns of perception.

  On most days rain fell like a curtain from a still sky, but when the wind blew I had to cover the fire pit with my poncho and press myself against the inner wall of the shallow cave to keep from getting drenched. To avoid traversing out over sloping ledges to my sole water source, I set out two stainless steel pots to collect water dripping from the cave roof. With neither paper on which to write nor books to distract me, meditation became my only refuge. I found inspiration in the verses that the Buddhist sage Milarepa had composed in a cave farther down the valley nearly a thousand years earlier: The nature of Mind is Emptiness and Luminosity

  Inseparably conjoined . . .

  Spontaneously merging with that original state

  I am indifferent to experiences of good and bad.

  With mind free and effortless, I rest in happiness and joy.

  Where subject and object are realized as a single sphere

  Happiness and sorrow mingle as one . . .

  Whatever circumstances I encounter,

  I am free in the blissful realm of self-awakening Wisdom.5

  I thought back to my previous summer, which I had spent writing essays on Shakespeare at Oxford University. From my vantage point in the cave, the hidden wisdom that King Lear attains as an “unaccommodated man” in a hovel on the heath did not seem unrelated to what the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha, awakened to beneath a flowering Figus religiosia. Years earlier, I’d met an Englishman who had played the part of Lear for a theater company that traveled through villages in rural India. One day taking his role to heart, he simply walked off the stage and into the jungle, only emerging five years later. When I met him he’d become the director of Oxfam in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, but was still dreaming of returning to the forest.