The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  I plucked bloated leeches from my hair and limbs; the fallen slugs wallowed on the ground, intoxicated with blood. As I climbed over the wooden gate, dark birds passed above my head, sweeping the earth with their shadows. I took off my sodden boots and entered Saraswati’s hut. She sat in a sea of white lambs-wool, black hair tumbling across her shoulders and her eyes like sonnets. I warmed myself by her fire until the wood turned to glowing coals and then retired to the storage shed to sleep. Rain fell in blissful waves against the roof.

  The next morning, Saraswati introduced me to a lama named Bhakha Tulku Pema Tenzing, who had arrived in Neyding from his monastery in Powo, a once independent kingdom in southern Tibet. Bhakha Tulku spent his days in a wooden retreat cabin, but he came to Saraswati’s hut for his evening meals. Bhakha Tulku had learned fluent English soon after escaping from Tibet in 1959, and in the evenings by the fire, our muddy shoes and umbrellas laid out on Saraswati’s porch, I listened to his stories of Pemako, the place revered in Tibetan tradition as the greatest of all hidden-lands.

  In a remote corner of southeastern Tibet, one of Asia’s largest rivers, the Tsangpo, descends into a dark and precipitous gorge, circles around the easternmost summit of the Himalayan range, Namcha Barwa, and flows into the jungles of India as the Brahmaputra River. Tibetans refer to this region of soaring glaciers and lush, subtropical rainforests as Beyul Pemako, the Hidden-Land Shaped Like a Lotus. For centuries, Bhakha Tulku told me, the maharajahs of Powo, who ruled the valleys to the north, had laid claim to these territories, which were connected to their kingdom by the Tsangpo’s primary tributary (the Po Tsangpo or Po Yigrong River) and by several high snow-covered passes. Primitive tribes that the Tibetans called Lopas inhabited these remote jungles. They climbed half-naked over the mountains to leave pelts of clouded leopard and medicinal plants on the threshold of Powo’s monasteries and at the Showa palace, the seat of Powo’s kings, in exchange for woven cloth, copper cookware, and iron swords that they carried back over the passes. The wild and remote regions where the Lopa lived were spoken of in Padmasambhava’s prophecies as the outer reaches of the most dangerous and sacred of all hidden-lands.

  IN THE LATER HALF of the fourteenth century, Bhakha Tulku told me, a renowned Tibetan yogi named Sangye Lingpa discovered texts on Tantric alchemy in a cave on Namcha Barwa and found additional scrolls in a rock wall behind a waterfall near the entrance to the Tsangpo gorge. Two hundred years later, when Tibet was invaded by Mongols headed by Gushri Khan, a scholar and meditation master named Rainbow Heart (Jatsun Nyingpo, 1585-1656), unearthed the first of Padmasambhava’s prophecies concerning the remote and unknown lands farther down the gorge. As Bhakha Tulku related, the scrolls proclaimed Pemako as the ultimate place of pilgrimage. Even taking seven steps toward this mysterious realm, stated one of Jatsun’s rediscovered scrolls, ensures rebirth in Pemako’s innermost sanctum—Chimé Yangsang Né, “the innermost secret place of immortality.” According to popular legend, if one could actually find this place one would live to be a thousand years old, and, at the time of death, dissolve into rainbow light. Hoping to establish a refuge from invading Mongol hordes and the resultant civil wars within Tibet, Jatsun Nyingpo encouraged one of his disciples to journey to the region of the Tsangpo gorges and to open a route to the prophesized sanctuary.

  Jatsun’s disciple, Rigdzin Duddul Dorje, the Vajra Demon Tamer (1615-72),9 crossed high blizzard-wracked passes from the valley of Powo and, with a retinue of followers, descended into the tangled forests of Pemako. Following the directives in Padmasambhava’s scrolls, the group made shelters from wild banana trees and subsisted on foods from the jungle. They built primitive stupas—reliquary shrines symbolizing the body and mind of the Buddha—to pacify the spirits of the land and performed Tantric rites to turn back the Mongol armies that had invaded Tibet. They penetrated deeper and deeper into the wilderness, but hostile tribes, unfamiliar diseases, and plagues of insects prevented them from reaching Chimé Yangsang Né.

  Duddul Dorje passed on his mantle of explorer-yogi to Taksham Nuden Dorje, Powerful Tiger-skirted Vajra, (1655-1708), a revered Buddhist master from eastern Tibet who had settled in the temperate forests of Powo and revealed numerous treasure-texts with detailed descriptions of Pemako’s innermost realms. Bhakha Tulku related how Taksham’s visionary texts describe Pemako’s mountains, valleys, and streams as geographical emanations of a Tantric goddess named Dorje Pagmo, the queen of all dakinis. Taksham’s texts invoke the Tsangpo as her spine and the regions through which the river flows as her chakras, or lotus-centers of psychic energy. Bhakha Tulku emphasized that these topographical regions ultimately correspond to the pilgrim’s own mystical anatomy as visualized during meditation, the ritual journey through Pemako’s sanctified landscape and the search for its innermost center paralleling an inner journey toward enlightenment.

  AS WE SAT ON GOATSKINS laid out by Saraswati’s hearth, Bhakha Tulku described a journey he had made in 1956 to a sacred mountain said to hold the key to Chimé Yangsang Né. Crossing over a high mountain pass from his monastery in Powo, he passed into dense, moss-thick forests abounding with musk deer, tigers, and leopards. At the mountain proclaimed to be the gateway to Pemako’s innermost realm, a white musk deer guided him in his quest. But, like those before him, he too had been unable to continue on to Pemako’s innermost secret realm.

  “Has anyone ever reached it?” I asked. Bhakha Tulku told me of the lama Kanjur Rinpoche, whom I had first heard about in Sikkim; how he had entered through a passage behind a waterfall into a mystical valley surrounded by glittering snow peaks. “The way is lost now,” Bhakha Tulku said wistfully. “Even Kanjur Rinpoche could not find the route again.” As Bhakha Tulku spoke, the haunting wails of ritual thigh-bone trumpets sounded from the surrounding huts.

  A burly Tibetan named Tsampten had recently completed his three-year retreat, but had stayed on at Neyding to manage the transport of supplies. One afternoon he invited me to his house for lunch. As he diced potatoes with a silver-handled dagger, Tsampten looked over his shoulder with a mischievous smile and told me that Bhakha Tulku wasn’t the only one in Neyding who had been to Pemako. In 1962 he’d been there himself on a covert surveillance operation for America’s Central Intelligence Agency.

  Hailing from a fierce warrior tribe in eastern Tibet, Tsampten and nearly three hundred other Khampa freedom fighters had been trained in guerilla warfare at a secret, high-altitude camp in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, supported by the U.S. government in a futile campaign against the Communist forces that had invaded Tibet. By the early 1960s a ragged battalion of the People’s Liberation Army had followed the Tsangpo River into the valleys of Pemako, destroying monasteries and laying claim to all regions north of the Brahmaputra River in the Indian state of Assam. Outfitted with a shortwave radio, pistol, machine gun, and a bracelet containing a vial of cyanide to be swallowed on capture, Tsampten parachuted into the subtropical jungles on the Tibetan border to assess the strength of the Chinese forces. He found a primeval realm, he told me, with foliage so dense that the enemy could be a few feet away and still not be seen. Cobras and deadly vipers abounded, Tsampten said, along with primitive tribes that ate monkeys and dressed in their skins.

  Tsampten’s interest in this disputed wilderness extended far beyond the shifting line of control that separated India and China. Like most Tibetans he knew of the lost paradise hidden in Pemako’s interior. “The Chinese will never find that place,” Tsampten told me. “It’s not on any map. It will remain hidden until the time is right for it to be revealed.” Later Tsampten had been stationed as a sniper with a 55-mm recoilless rifle on a ridge above the Tsangpo River. He slept in a cave where local villagers kept him supplied with meat and tsampa. From his hidden vantage he sabotaged convoys of Chinese supply trucks as they plied the torturous newly constructed road between Lhasa and Beijing.

  The survival rate of the Khampas who parachuted into Tibet was extremely low. The only l
iving member of the first mission, a man named Bapa Lekshey, described the operation as “like throwing meat into the mouth of a tiger.” When the U.S. government dropped its support for the Tibetan resistance movement after Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to Beijing in 1971, Tsampten traded in his commando gear for maroon-colored robes and entered a three-year meditation retreat in Yolmo.

  As Tsampten spoke, the daughter of a local herder came up the log ladder carrying fresh butter and a pail of dzomo milk. Pouring the contents into a wooden churn filled with an infusion of salt and boiled tea leaves, she pulled hard on the wooden plunger to make the dubious buttered tea consumed throughout the Tibetan world. “Why are you so interested in beyul?” she asked me teasingly. “Do you think they’re places where you won’t have to work?”

  The Search for Scrolls

  BACK IN KATHMANDU, I searched monasteries and private collections for Tibetan texts describing Pemako and other beyul. I also applied repeatedly to the Chinese authorities for permission to visit the Tsangpo gorges, but the same answer came back every time: it was a military zone and completely off limits. For the time being, I contented myself with tracking down and studying block-printed manuscripts based on Padmasambhava’s prophecies of the hidden-lands. Padmasambhava’s consort, Yeshe Tsogyal—Lake of Gnosis—had written down these accounts on amber parchment and concealed them in temple pillars, lakes, and walls of rock. Throughout the centuries, lamas and yogis were led to these yellow scrolls ( sghog-ser) in dreams and visions. Those who discovered them were called terton, or treasure-revealers, and what were often no more than fragmentary texts written on yellow parchment were called terma, or more simply ter— concealed treasures that also included ritual objects that inspired the quest for enlightenment. Like the papyrus scrolls of the Christian gnostics, the original manuscripts were often found in earthen jars hidden in caves and cliffs. Unique hazards are said to attend their discovery; a story is told, for example, of a terton who pulled a yellow scroll from an urn found in the opening of a cliff, only to have the rock close on his hand and chop off one of his fingers when he reached back in for more.10

  Some of the original revealed texts were reputedly written with invisible ink that appeared only when the paper was slowly heated over a flame. Others were coded in a runic alphabet called khandro dayig, or secret script of dakinis, which the terton could decipher and interpret only after months of meditation, often embellishing them with his own insights. The decoded yellow scrolls—full of ambiguous terms and cryptic allusions and almost entirely devoid of case particles—were later transcribed onto insect-resistant paper made by boiling and pressing the inner bark of a Himalayan shrub called yubok (Daphne papyyracea).

  The scrolls elucidated subtle teachings on the nature of mind and phenomena. Those that described routes to the hidden-lands were known as neyig, or guides to sacred places. Most of the neyigs I examined had been reprinted during the last century in loose folios stacked between wooden covers and wrapped in yellow and red silk. They typically opened with apocalyptic prophecies of war and devastation, but shifted into what read at times like a Fodor’s Guide to a parallel universe, with outer, inner, and secret descriptions of isolated regions of the Himalayas. Like a Tibetan Pilgrims’ Progress, the texts refer to the journey’s inevitable hazards as inner obstacles that, once surmounted, lead to greater merit and spiritual realization until, ultimately—in the innermost heart of the hidden-land—“the eyes can see and the ears can hear that which elsewhere is obscured.” Whatever the reality or coded metaphors behind such claims, the neyigs had reshaped Tibetans’ relationship to the natural world and revealed it as a place of continual revelation.

  Some collections of the neyigs had been preserved on microfilm at the National Archives in Kathmandu. Sadly, though, the duty manager informed me, the card catalogue was incomplete, as a “high-ranking officer” had stacked the bundles in a corner, where they had been eaten by moths. The greatest surviving collection of these esoteric manuscripts, he assured me, could be found in the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, India. In February 1989 I went there to meet the head of the research department, Tashi Tsering.

  I FOUND TASHI in his book-lined office chasing flies with a plastic swatter. Tashi was known both for being one of the most knowledgeable of Tibetan scholars and for his refreshing irreverence. He smiled when I told him I was interested in finding Tibetan texts about beyul, and Pemako in particular. “Ah,” he said, “you mean the Bermuda Triangle of Tibet.”

  Tashi’s own scholarly research had covered many aspects of Tibetan civilization, but he too had a personal interest in beyul and he waxed eloquent on their role throughout Tibet’s volatile history of invasions and civil wars.11

  He told me of the many lamas and pilgrims who had disappeared over the centuries while searching for Pemako’s innermost sanctuary, such as the treasure-revealer Rigdzin Choeje Lingpa (1682-1725), visions of whom Lopa hunters still claim to see, surrounded by a retinue of dakinis. He then introduced me to a monk who served as one of the librarians. Climbing up the wooden stacks in his heavy wine-colored robes, the monk returned with armfuls of dusty tomes containing accounts of hidden-lands and biographies of those who had revealed them.

  In text after text, Pemako was invoked as an earthly paradise: There is a secret place known as Pemako. It is shaped like a womb. All the trees are perfumed like akaru, sandalwood, and jasmine. Saffron grows like grass. Wheat, barley and rice grow wild and honey is found in abundance. The animals of Pemako provide endless milk. The rivers flow with amrita the color of milk. When you drink it, you will never feel thirsty. All fruit and water is medicinal. Everyone will become joyful and prosperous. Old men will become youthful. With perfume in the air, a rain of flowers falls and rainbows spread out everywhere. Food, drink, clothing—all needs are magically satisfied, whatever one wishes for . . .

  The happiness and enjoyments here are equal to a god-realm. Even without meditating, anyone who reaches here can attain the state of a Buddha.

  I soon had stacks of photocopies to take back to Kathmandu.

  When I returned to Tashi’s office, I asked him whether Western scholars had ever written about the sacred texts describing Pemako. The first account of Pemako to reach Europe was brought back by a French explorer named Jacques Bacot, Tashi told me. Bacot traveled through eastern Tibet between 1907 and 1910. Traveling toward the semi-independent kingdom of Powo, north of the great bend of the Tsangpo, Bacot learned of Pemako from Tibetan nomads who were fleeing there from the depredations of Chinese warlords in their homeland in eastern Tibet. Bacot was not able to follow the Khampa pilgrims, but he hand-copied the thirty-six folios of their guidebook, which likened Pemako to the terrestrial body of the goddess Dorje Pagmo—the same deity that, in the guise of a vulture, had guided Namkha Jikme into the depths of Sikkim.

  A LARGE ROOM IN THE TIBETAN LIBRARY and archives was devoted to works in English. During my stay in Dharamsala, I combed through glassed-in cases in the rare book section and came across several turn-of-the-century works that deepened my perspective on the region of the Tsangpo gorges. Although I had learned a fair amount about what Pemako meant to Tibetans, I discovered how significant a pull the area had also exerted in the West. I spent several days poring over these Victorian-era accounts. A medical officer attached to the British military campaign which had forced a trade treaty on the Tibetans in 1904 had written of efforts by the British Raj “to get a trustworthy map of the great unknown territory of the Land of Lamas which for so many hundreds of miles marched with the frontiers of India.” During the nineteenth century very little was known about the forbidden lands north of the Himalayas; as the eminent Victorian surgeon general L. Austine Waddell wrote, one of the “greatest geographical problems of the day” was the fate of the Tsangpo River after it disappeared into a “terra incognita [that] has never yet been penetrated even by the Tibetans.”12

 
I learned that geographers in the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India offices in the Northern Indian hill station of Dehra Dun had long speculated that Tibet’s Tsangpo River cut through the easternmost Himalayas to join the Brahmaputra River, in the jungles of Assam, but they had no direct evidence of the link between the two rivers. Rival theories, popular in Europe, speculated that the Tsangpo flowed instead into the Irrawaddy in Burma. Some, even more improbably, traced the Brahmaputra to the mythical Lake Chiamay that maps, based more on rumor than fact, situated north of present-day Thailand. As Waddell wrote: “This problem had baffled all attempts at direct solution; for not even the Tibetans themselves know what becomes of their river after it turns southward . . . and enters a tract of country absolutely unexplored, a no-man’s land, peopled by fierce savage tribes who have successfully resisted all entry of strangers into their country, indeed they kill Tibetans on principle.”13

  In 1824, the chief goal assigned to the Assamese branch of the Survey of India was to establish the source of the Brahmaputra River. Its officer-in-charge, Captain James Bedford, was ordered to “unravel the mystery regarding its fountainhead” and to make his way as far upstream as possible. Bedford forged his way through mountains and dense rainforests until his progress up the Dihang—the chief feeder of the Brahmaputra—was halted by hostile warriors dressed in cane helmets fringed with bear skin and brandishing spears; wide, sharp-edged swords called daos; and crossbows with arrows dipped in aconite and deadly nightshade. Bedford returned from this encounter unscathed, but his successor was not so lucky: he was hacked to death on a later expedition.