The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  Initially my mind mingled happily with the rain shimmering on green leaves and the display of clouds and mists that formed and dissipated in the surrounding ravines. But as the days progressed my mind rushed toward feeble distractions. I found myself reading fragments of Nepal’s national newspaper, The Rising Nepal, that enclosed the bundles of egg noodles I had brought from Kathmandu. I burned them in the fire to remove the temptation, the words transforming in flames and air. I took short scrambles up the surrounding slopes, but the treacherous terrain and the leeches seemingly on every leaf urged me back to my narrow ledge. On the rare occasions when the sun emerged through banks of mist, bees swarmed on my unwashed body. A crow regularly alighted on the branch of a dead tree below the cave, eyeing me with sideways glances that seemed to mirror my own uncertainties.

  In Sanskrit the word Tantra refers to the connective principle underlying all existence. Its Tibetan translation, gyud, means thread, string, or that which joins together, and its practices encompass all that overcomes the sense of separation stemming from belief in an autonomous self. Rather than renouncing the ephemeral thoughts and emotions that bolster self-identity, Tantra, or Vajrayana, seeks to transform them into potent catalysts for entering deeper, less restricted strata of consciousness, and unveiling the enlightened mind of wisdom and compassion said to be inherent within all beings.

  By urging me to spend a month in solitude in a beyul, Chatral Rinpoche had inspired a loftier goal. Padmasambhava’s revealed scrolls speak as much about the mind as they do about hidden-lands. “In its true state the mind is naked, immaculate, transparent, empty, timeless, uncreated, unimpeded; not realizable as a separate entity, but as the unity of all things, yet not composed of them; undifferentiated, radiant, indivisible . . . to know whether this is true or not, look inside your own mind.” A later seventeenth-century Buddhist master had written: “Do you not weary of the mind’s endless convolutions? Cut to the source and rest in the essence, the undivided union of emptiness and spontaneous presence.” But the mind’s habits do not yield easily. I immersed myself in ancient practices of mantra and visualization. At times waves of doubt and perceived futility opened into edgeless rapture. At other times, thoughts rose up like an impenetrable wall.

  As day followed day, I tallied mantras on a string of 108 sandalwood beads, but my mind was often clouded by frustrations that neither conjured deities nor half-remembered Buddhist poetry could dispel. While reciting a lengthy invocation over a brass mandala plate piled with rice, I reached a moment of total exasperation and hurled it off the ledge. It spiraled downward through layers of air and disappeared into the glittering, impenetrable forest.

  I gazed blankly down the cliff.

  The Buddha proclaimed sunyata, or Emptiness, to be the underlying nature of all phenomena, a web of causal relationships that the philosopher-poet Octavio Paz referred to as a “fathomless abyss above which metaphysical thought flaps its wings.” In the Buddhist Tantras, this “truth that does not itself exist” and the concurrent freedom from self-identity is celebrated as the birth of a radiant, compassionate awareness, often symbolized by luminous multiarmed deities.

  My prescribed month in the cave had come to a close, but as my meditation deepened I resolved to stay on for another week. My food supplies had dwindled, and I lived on little more than lemon water and sautéed yartsagunbu. The monsoon had ended and the small stream where I had once washed my clothes had turned to a trickle. I sat naked in the sun as the cave walls behind me slowly began to dry. Vivid dreams filled my nights and I awoke on one occasion to the sight of strange lights circling down the pathless slopes on the far side of the ravine. I imagined that Chatral Rinpoche might have sent men with torches to check on me, but the luminous spheres began to circle upward in erratic patterns before dissipating into night.

  With the leeches now gone, I crawled through the steep and shimmering forests searching fruitlessly for edible mushrooms and for communion with terrain that Tibetan Buddhist texts eulogize as a “tray of gems.” The distinction between beyul and so-called ordinary geography absorbed me like a Zen koan. Were the texts describing hidden-lands really evidence of some heightened perception, I wondered, or merely poetic attempts to invest nature with qualities that belonged more properly to the mind? Were they challenges to discover what lies ultimately within ourselves? As I moved through tangles of green-leafed bamboo, my thoughts served only to estrange me from the environment. The crow continued to eye me suspiciously from its perch below the cave.

  I finally left my stone aerie, thin from my meager diet, gliding with a light pack through forests of drifting lichen. The weeks in the cave had been richly rewarding, but now I looked forward to seeing the beyul texts that Chatral Rinpoche said he would share with me on my return. Without his oral commentary, their metaphors and symbols—written in sandhabhasa, the Tantric “twilight language” in which truths are revealed only indirectly—would be largely unintelligible; I’d be like someone new to English trying to decipher Finnegans Wake.

  I reached Neyding at nightfall. The prayer flags that circled the clearing hung motionless in the evening air. A long-haired retreatant in a sheepskin jacket was chopping wood at the edge of the compound. He paused to tell me that Chatral Rinpoche and his daughter had left a week earlier for Kathmandu.

  I RETURNED TO MY DIRECTORSHIP of the American college program in Kathmandu. The city’s rich artistic traditions and often byzantine customs offered a wealth of revelations, but my primary interest remained the enigma of the beyul.

  That following spring, in 1987, I arranged an audience with the Dalai Lama for myself and nine American college students who had come to Nepal to study Tibetan language and culture. We traveled by train through northern India and finally arrived in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile on a cloud-wrapped ridge at the base of 18,000-foot mountains. I had arranged to meet with His Holiness privately following our group session.

  With disarming warmth the Dalai Lama drew me toward a plush beige couch in his reception room, which was dominated by a gilded statue of Avalokiteshvara, the multiarmed Buddhist divinity representing universal compassion. The supreme leader of the Tibetan people waited patiently as I read through a list of questions, mostly concerning the nature of beyul and né—hidden-lands and sacred sites—and their place in Buddhist practice. After a bemused reminder that meditation is not dependent on place, His Holiness conceded that spiritually advanced beings leave imprints on the physical environment. “The fact that many holy beings stay and practice in a certain place changes the atmosphere of that place,” His Holiness said. He cited the example of Bodhgaya, the site where the Buddha attained enlightenment more than 2,500 years ago. “When other beings with less experience or spiritual development practice at such a place they can obtain certain special kinds of experience.” The Dalai Lama also spoke at length about subtle beings such as dakas and dakinis6 who, according to the Tantric teachings, congregate at such sanctified places, bestowing powers on those who meditate there. He then told a story of his previous incarnation, the 13th Dalai Lama, who had traveled to the sacred mountain Wu Tai Shan on the frontiers of Tibet, where he had crossed an invisible threshold and visited a temple that no others could see. Through the power of meditation, His Holiness said, great practitioners are able to enter hidden realms which, though part of this world, are beyond the range of common perception. “It’s a bit like quantum physics,” he reflected, “which recognizes parallel dimensions and multiple universes.”

  As our conversation progressed, I told His Holiness about the month that I had stayed in Beyul Yolmo Kangra. I told him that I had requested leave from my work to return there the following summer and fall. As we spoke about meditation, I confessed my frustration with the lengthy invocations and supplications of Tibetan ritual texts. What practice could I do, I asked, that would most powerfully reveal the hidden dimensions of mind and landscape? His Holiness laughed and said,
“Buddhism is not about faith in a transcendent deity or higher being, but about thoroughly investigating the nature of our minds and emotions . . . and discovering the way things truly exist.” In Dzogchen, he said, nothing needs to be abandoned or rejected. The mind’s innermost essence—and its interconnectedness with all things—can be discovered in every moment, in the flow of every experience. He told me then of a Dzogchen practice that should be undertaken in total seclusion, remote from human habitation. “If others see you,” he said laughingly, “they will think that you’ve gone mad.” He demonstrated how one must act out an innumerable range of existences from heavens to hells. Bringing his hand to his chin and closing the thumb and palm rapidly together, he said: “At times you’ll have to run through the woods howling like a wolf!” He took me by the hand and led me into a back room, where he took a small gold-plated Buddha from a shelf. After holding it at the top of his head and reciting an inaudible prayer, he placed it in my hands. When I walked out onto the lawn a female security guard brandishing an AK-47 smiled angelically as bougainvillea flooded from the roof like purple light.

  THREE MONTHS LATER I trekked to Yolmo during a break in the summer rains. When I arrived in Neyding, I found Chatral Rinpoche sitting on the grass outside his hermitage feeding a consecrated elixir to a flock of crows. I told him of the teachings that I had received from the Dalai Lama and that I hoped to practice them in Yolmo over the next several months. Releasing one of the birds into the sky, Chatral Rinpoche said that specific né in Yolmo are conducive to particular kinds of practice. Places with waterfalls inspire reflection on impermanence. Places with steep cliffs where the rocks are dark and jagged are good for meditating on wrathful deities. Places with rolling hills and flowering meadows support meditation on peaceful deities. For the practices I had received, Chatral Rinpoche said, all elements should be present and the best place was a valley called Pemthang, the Sandy Plains, at the headwaters of the Malemchi Khola. According to Chatral Rinpoche, Padmasambhava himself had meditated in this remote sanctuary.

  Padmasambhava is commonly referred to in Tibet as the second Buddha, and his miracle-filled life and multiple manifestations serve as parables of the Tantric path. In the eighth century, the Tibetan emperor invited him to help establish Tibet’s first Buddhist monastery. Legends relate how Padmasambhava converted the Tibetan people to Buddhism by subduing their most belligerent local deities, and performing magical feats, such as driving wooden daggers through solid rock and flying on the rays of the sun.

  During an evening meal of buckwheat bread and wild mushrooms, Chatral Rinpoche clarified that the beyul that Padmasambhava established in Tibet are not literal arcadias, but paradises for Buddhist practice, with multiple dimensions corresponding to increasingly subtle levels of perception. Beyond Yolmo’s visible terrain of mountains, streams, and forests, he said, lies an inner level, corresponding to the flow of intangible energies in the physical body. Deeper still, the subtle elements animating the environment merge with the elements present within the practitioner—the secret level. Finally, at the beyul’s innermost level—yangsang—lies a paradisiacal, or unitary dimension revealed through an auspicious conjunction of person, place, and time. Like other lamas I had spoken with, Chatral Rinpoche contended that Yangsang is not merely a metaphor for the enlightened state, but an ever-present, if hidden, reality.

  THE VALLEY OF PEMTHANG to which Chatral Rinpoche had directed me lies cradled between towering walls of rock and ice at the headwaters of the Malemchi Khola. To reach it I climbed through forests of rhododendron and oak with Pema Rigdzin, my guide once again. The directions in the Yolmo neyigs, the traditional accounts of the hidden-lands’ sacred places, were vague and surreal. “Follow the dragon’s tongue to the horse’s saddle,” reads one passage, until you see before you a mountain “like the billowing skirts of a queen.” The stocky herder led us up a sinuous stream bed and across shifting landslides toward a high, mist-shrouded pass beyond the reach of the heat-seeking leeches that had plagued our steps. Scree and stones scattered beneath our feet into the dense fog curling up from the ravines below.

  We crossed the pass and veered north, skirting the rock wall of Dawajati, the Moon Bird. According to local legend, Padmasambhava stood on the summit of this lofty peak to subdue Yolmo’s malevolent spirits and transform them into guardians of the Buddhist path. Near the base of the peak we passed a small lake nestled between mossy spires. Rigdzin told me that local shamans traveled here on the August full moon to draw power from the clear black water. As we moved farther toward what had seemed an impenetrable line of cliffs, a narrow break appeared, and I saw a steep, snow-choked gully leading northward into the mists below. This was the door to Pemthang, Rigdzin said. At that moment the mists parted, revealing walls of blue-gray rock and shimmering ice. Below the clouds lay a green valley laced with streams.

  As we descended, the snow and scree gave way to slopes of fragrant bushes of Rhododendron anthropogen. Rigdzin collected their tiny pearl-colored flowers to bring back to Chatral Rinpoche. We crossed a series of milky glacier-fed streams where I collected water. Unsure of its purity, I added five drops of iodine solution to my water bottle, and as I shook the mixture, Rigdzin asked me what it was I had added. Jokingly, I told him it was blood of a dremo, a Himalayan brown bear, and that like the small flowers that he had collected on the slopes above, it was good medicine. On the valley floor we entered a forest of rhododendrons and boulders wreathed in thick layers of moss. Tendrils of saxifrage swept our faces as we forged our way through. Where the braided streams winding across the valley floor converged into a single torrent, a tree had fallen across the river. A few meters below us the river swept into a seething cataract and dropped into a deep gorge. With his heavily laden bamboo basket Rigdzin walked barefoot across the narrow wet trunk, and I followed him in my sodden leather boots.

  A narrow track through a stand of birch and fir led to a gigantic boulder that we had seen from far above. Built into a cave on its southern end was a tsamkhang, a hermit’s shelter with a crude wooden door. Gray cliffs soared above into a rainy sky. To the north the high, snow-covered range of the Ganja Himal spread out, as the neyig had indicated, “like the silken robes of a queen.”

  Rigdzin stayed one night to help cut firewood and stack it on a drying rack that we made above the hearth. As I paid him for his services the next morning he asked if he could have a bit of the bear’s blood for the journey back.

  PEMTHANG LIES in the heart of Yolmo. During monsoon, the surrounding walls of rock are laced with waterfalls. Two streams falling from glaciers to the north join at the headwall and, at the valley’s center, wind through marshes teeming with primulas and tall-stemmed turquoise-blue poppies. The snow-covered peaks at the head of the valley lay draped in cloud.7

  Like the hidden-lands themselves, the Dzogchen rites that I had come here to practice are divided into outer, inner, secret, and yangsang, or ultimately secret, levels. By acting out conjured existences from heavens to hells, the practitioner recognizes how intention shapes reality and connects to an open, heart-centered consciousness in which all experience, emotions, thoughts, and sensations are perceived as the mind’s natural state of self-manifesting wisdom, an energetic field empty of inherent existence. As Padmasambhava stated in an ancient text called Liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness: Samsara and Nirvana have no other difference than that between the moment of being unaware and aware. . . . Since we are not deluded by perception but by fixation, Liberation naturally occurs when we recognize that fixated thoughts are only mind grasping at its own empty reflections.8

  During my months in Pemthang, I followed the trajectory of unbound thoughts and ran through wet forests and rolled in dark streams, seeking the source from which I was never apart. My mind drifted through shadows and vivid absences as leaves glittered in the saturated air and rainwater carved channels down the cave walls. I sometimes heard what I thought were voices a
nd woke from dreams into further reveries. Much of the time, however, I spent simply tending the fire, rigging up tarps to keep the rain from dripping from the granite walls, warding off predatory frogs, and thinking of Chatral Rinpoche’s daughter.

  By mid October I ran out of food and I began the journey back to Neyding. I left at first light under a liquid sky. Wet ferns brushed against my legs as I made my way to the river. The stream had widened with recent rains, and I cut birch saplings to use as poles to cross the slippery log above the waterfall. On the other side the entire landscape had rearranged itself since my journey in. Landslides had cut new ravines into the steep slopes, silvery streams fell through vertical jungle, clouds streamed against white cliffs, and the heady scent of sinpati and balushukpa filled the air. I found the narrow break between the cliffs and crossed the pass in heavy rain, the slopes below carpeted in small blue and yellow flowers. Far below the pass, yak and dzo grazed like apparitions in the mist while a lone herder standing beneath a cairn strung with sodden prayer-flags buried his head beneath the plastic covering of his pack basket and offered no reply to my greeting. Lower still, the cries of unseen shepherdesses called home their herds. For perhaps an hour we kept up a dialogue of resonant cries—empty sounds echoing in the mist. I descended lower through stands of wavering bamboo and labyrinths of rhododendrons, the ground soft like wet velvet beneath the interwoven limbs of the trees. I reached Pema Rigdzin’s hut and saw that he had piled fresh dzomo butter outside in wooden buckets. I stopped in for tea and tsampa. Lower still, I forded rushing streams, their banks carpeted in thick moss, and finally arrived in twilight at the split-rail fence encompassing Neyding.