The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

When we finally emerged from the forest, we saw a double rainbow leading directly to the gilt-roofed temple. Uncannily, a maroon-robed yogi had already climbed halfway up the hill to greet us with a copper bowl overflowing with fermented chang. Rainbows like that only appear when someone is coming, he said. We drank deeply, as much to stave off the uncanny events as to refresh ourselves. The yogi led us to the temple where a monumental image of Padmasambhava in the wrathful form that he assumed in Pemako dominated the assembly hall. Above the head of the golden, four-armed statue was a repoussé image of a celestial hawk with a snake clutched in its beak and talons.

  ONE OF PADMASAMBHAVA’S TERMAS describes Rinchenpung as the “gathering place of dakas and dakinis . . . the preeminent Tantric pilgrimage site. . . . Whoever practices meditation here can accomplish in one night what in other places can be attained only after a year. Here, you will easily attain siddhis.” As we sat on the porch of a primitive shelter behind the temple, Kawa Tulku told us that he planned to remain at Rinchenpung for several weeks to practice metok chu-len, an alchemical yoga in which he would subsist on the essences of wildflowers and various herbs. The plants and flowers that grow around Rinchenpung are considered especially efficacious for this practice. The Luminous Web revealed by Dorje Thokme describes one flowering plant called “severing the five poisons (of desire, anger, delusion, pride, and envy).” By eating this plant, the text claims, adepts can release the psychophysical mdud, or knots of the subtle channels that obscure perception of the myriad Buddha fields.

  Apparently, the Monpa yogi at Kundu had given Kawa Tulku a favorable report about his experience with the psilocybin. Kawa Tulku asked Hamid and me whether we had more, and we gave him the remaining ones that we had collected. I explained that Lopas in our own country have used similar mushrooms to communicate with the spirits of their land and to open channels of perception. Kawa Tulku mused that perhaps these mushrooms would help him to find the other miraculous plants described in the Pemako neyigs.

  In the practice of chu-len, consecrated substances such as the white-petaled takmu flower are consumed with hot water from a skull bowl and their effect further enhanced by meditating on the five elements and the flow of amrita throughout one’s body. As a Tibetan healer had told me in Kathmandu, mushrooms described in their own pharmacopoeia can support certain kinds of meditation. But as I knew from my own experience, they can also be profoundly disorienting.

  That night it rained torrentially. The Gillenwaters broke out the last of their gourmet cuisine (smoked oysters), Christiaan wrote feverishly in his journal, and Oy and Hamid disappeared into a neighboring storage shed. The following morning, August 21, as we left Rinchenpung, I mused that the fall from the Garden of Eden—the state of humanity in its infancy—had begun with the ingestion of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But as as Milton suggested in Paradise Lost, the last chapter in the history of the world will be when we eat of it again, in what the poet Rimbaud might have meant by a “calculated disordering of the senses.”

  The Fortress of Flowers

  WHEN WE HAD SET OUT FROM RINCHENPUNG the year before, the presiding lama had warned Hamid and me of the leeches in the jungles above Medok. When they infest your legs and hair, he counseled, imagine that they are drawing out your karmic impurities. If we could maintain this attitude of intrinsic beneficence, he implied, our journey through the hidden-land would bring great merit. Otherwise, we would simply suffer.

  As we descended abruptly into the moisture-laden valley of the lower Tsangpo, bamboo and rhododendron forests yielded to a subtropical environment of tree ferns, wild plantains, and ubiquitous leeches. At times the leeches seemed to be raining from the sky, and we walked quickly to escape their predations.

  In 1994, I had arrived in Medok at dusk, and my first encounter amid the bamboo-thatched houses was with a Monpa with a monkey on his shoulder and a sinuous green snake in a bamboo tube—one of the archetypal similies of the Tantric path, symbolizing the mind’s potential, when freed of conventional boundaries, either to rise to celestial heights or fall to the lowest of the Tantric hells. Hamid had disappeared before we reached the village, and as night fell Ken Storm and Gunn mounted a search party to look for him, concerned that he might have been bitten by a venomous snake. Before Ken and Gunn returned, Hamid showed up inebriated and announced that he may or may not have just been wedded to an elf. He had followed the sound of drums and soon found himself in a thatch-roofed house, in which a chang-fueled religious rite transformed with his presence into an apparent nuptial ceremony with a Monpa sprite. Bhakha Tulku had alerted us to Pemako’s easy blendings of the sacred and the sybaritic. His previous incarnation—the 9 th Bhakha Tulku—had lived near Medok for several years and had many local liaisons. When Bhakha Tulku traveled through Pemako at the age of twelve, one of his predecessor’s consorts had come to meet him near Medok singing, dancing, and bearing gifts. She had introduced him to her son, Bhakha Tulku’s child from his previous incarnation.

  MEDOK DZONG LIES ABOVE THE TSANGPO on a broad plateau studded with rice paddies and stands of bananas and bamboo.30 Now we made our way through the village to a line of derelict wooden buildings raised ten feet above the ground on stilts and reachable by decaying sets of steps. Gunn and Cookie had taken up residence in one of the rooms to await our arrival. The Sherpas set up a makeshift kitchen in the one adjacent, while Hamid, Oy, Christiaan, the Gillenwaters, and I occupied two others. After hanging our wet clothing out to dry, we went out to explore our surroundings. Hamid tried unsuccessfully to locate the house of his alleged marriage the previous year.

  After we had all fallen asleep, a drunken, overweight Chinese official accompanied by two police officers, all brandishing guns, broke into the Gillenwaters’ room and demanded their exposed film. The trio gave them a few rolls of unexposed film, which seemed to placate the official’s need to express his authority. He stumbled back out and nearly careened down the steps when a rotten board collapsed beneath him.

  Medok would be a frustrating posting for any petty official. Many villagers still carried guns in the town despite a 1989 directive ordering that firearms be turned in to local authorities in an effort to control illegal hunting. The region was only sparsely settled until two hundred years ago, when Monpas from eastern Bhutan moved into the area, following Padmasambhava’s prophecies. At that time the Monpa settlers had sought isolation, but they now wanted a road connecting them with the outside world so they could market their rice, plantains, and chilies. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Chinese had constructed a road between Powo Dzong and Medok, where they hoped to establish a banana plantation, but continual landslides, tree falls, and year-round snow on the Gawalung pass soon made it impassible, and the road reverted to a jungle track. A more logical route to the outside world would be south to India, but even if this were politically feasible, a road would put great pressure on Medok’s timber resources and create easier access for poachers. It would also deprive many families of the income they receive from transporting goods with pack animals or as porters.

  On the morning of August 22, the Chinese official who had relieved the Gillenwaters of their film came early and conversed with a nervous Gunn. Gunn urged us to pack quickly, offering as explanation only “He is not a good man.”

  We needed little persuasion to leave this border town and its insolent officials. We headed out through the rice paddies and descended toward the Tsangpo. We intended to cross the river where we had the year before—on a hanging bridge made of woven bamboo.

  When we reached the Tsangpo, we found that the bridge had collapsed several months earlier, killing several Monpas. The local villagers had not rebuilt it, and they directed us to another bridge a day’s journey downriver. As we headed south along the Tsangpo, Yonten mentioned that we were headed into the heart of the poisoning district. In the settled areas of Pemako, villagers offer bowls of fermented chang to travelers and pilgrims. Members of the secr
et poisoning cult—usually women—conceal under their thumbnails a deadly toxin made from aconite, snake venom, and poisonous mushrooms, which they slip into the chang after sipping it themselves to show that it isn’t contaminated.

  Before my first trip to Pemako I had learned that the wife of Tenzing Norgay, who, along with Sir Edmund Hillary, completed the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953, had met her end after allegedly being poisoned by a Pemako witch. Adherents of this ancient cult believe that they inherit the good fortune of those they poison. The higher their victims’ status, the more luck accrues. Lamas and prosperous traders top the list of desirable victims, and foreign pilgrims are by no means exempt. If no suitable recipient appears, the dugma, as she is called in Tibetan, is compelled through a vow taken at the time of preparing the poison to use it either on one of her family members or on herself.

  The previous year, we had entered the Medok region over the Gawalung pass and traveled down the Tsangpo through scattered Monpa villages. In nearly every settlement, villagers had greeted us with hollow gourds or large brass bowls filled with fermented chang and urged us to drink, with the recurring claim that they hadn’t poisoned it. We mostly avoided the Monpas’ potentially deadly hospitality, but sampled the potent brew in households known to our Monpa guide. We watched carefully for any sleight of hand. In a land known for its miraculous healing plants, the female practitioners of this pre-Buddhist cult tempt travelers not with the forbidden fruit that can make humankind as gods, but with the proverbial poisoned apple.

  THE MONPA HUNTER WE HAD RECRUITED in Powo Dzong enlightened us to the particulars of the cult: like an inverse image from the Garden of Eden, the dugma hangs a snake from a tree and over a course of days allows its venom to drain into a bowl. She then mashes in a rotten egg, poisonous roots, and frogs and buries the concoction underground. She digs it up again under a full moon. With half of her face painted black and the hair on one side of her head braided and the other half left wild, she vows to use the poison within a fortnight—before the moon turns dark—on someone of the highest possible standing. The poison acts slowly, the Monpa hunter told us, and it’s difficult to determine when and where it might have been administered. Depending on the proportion of ingredients, the victim dies within a period of anywhere from three days to three months.

  The hunter further claimed that if the dugma isn’t able to slip the powdered toxin into a traveler’s chang, she often resorts to putting it under a fingernail and scratching her victims while they sleep. For this reason, our porters refused to sleep on the floors of Monpa houses and posted sentries at night to avert any potential sharp-nailed assailants.

  In one infamous village, our porters insisted that we camp a safe distance away. That evening the most notorious of Pemako’s dugmas—a woman ominously named Sonam Deki, Meritorous Joy, appeared at our tents to ask for medicine. Our guide whispered to me that she had reputedly poisoned fifteen people, among them several husbands and her own daughters. A short woman in her late fifties with long gray pigtails and dressed in a sleeveless chuba of black felt, the alleged witch seemed disarmingly docile. We gave her the medicine she had requested but turned down her invitation to come to her house for tea.

  AS WE DESCENDED TOWARD THE BRIDGE that would lead us to the west bank of the Tsangpo and onward over the Doshung-La, tree ferns, magnolias, and dense vine-choked jungle tumbled down toward the Tsangpo, which meandered below us through veils of mist. An old Monpa with a single tooth claimed that large reptiles lived in a lake an hour above the trail. From his account, they sounded like crocodiles. Gunn was skeptical. “We haven’t seen any crocodiles up till now. I don’t believe there can be crocodiles here,” he said. Snakes abounded, though—green and black serpents more than six feet long that stretched across the trail to absorb the feeble sunlight that penetrated the canopy overhead.

  Gunn had waited for us on the outskirts of Bepung, the village above the bridge. A Chinese military cantonment lay amid rice fields and banana trees below the village, and Gunn had brought out his sheaf of permits to account for our presence. “We aren’t supposed to be here,” Gunn lamented, “This bridge is too close to the border.”

  We walked along the perimeter of the army camp but encountered neither soldier nor villager. Only at the site of an old bunker directly above the suspension bridge did we finally run into four young soldiers who examined Gunn’s papers and sullenly let us pass. The liberation bridge had been constructed after border skirmishes with India in 1962 which established the current LOC, or Line of Control, a day’s walk farther south at the village of Geling.

  MY FIRST TIBETAN TEACHER, Dudjom Rinpoche, had been born just outside of Geling in a village called Tirkung in the Year of the Water Dragon (1904), in accordance with the prophecy left by his previous incarnation, Dudjom Lingpa (1835-1904). Dudjom Lingpa had died on the verge of journeying into Pemako, but had urged his followers to continue without him, vowing that in his next incarnation he would be reborn there to lead them into the heart of the hidden-land.

  The young Dudjom Rinpoche received Tantric empowerments from Jedrung Jhampa Yungney after his return from Mipi and established a training center for ngakpas, or Tantric practitioners, at his seat in Tirkung. He also established a college for ordained monks—the first of its kind in Pemako. But whereas the ngakpas thrived, the ordained monks soon lost their vows due to the ubiquity and great popularity of Pemako’s justly famous chang.31

  In the 1930s, the government of central Tibet sent representatives to Tirkung and forced Dudjom Rinpoche to leave the hidden-land. Only the state-sponsored Gelugpa order can found monasteries in Tibet, the monk official told him. After a period in Lhasa, Dudjom Rinpoche established his seat at Lamaling in Kongpo, where he built a replica of Padmasambhava’s paradise, Sangdopelri. It was destroyed in the great earthquake of 1950, and nine years later Dudjom Rinpoche fled Tibet in the wake of the failed uprising against a decade of Chinese occupation. He first settled in the Indian hill station of Kalimpong and later in southern France. The tower representing Padmasambhava’s paradise that had collapsed during the earthquake lay in ruins until the 1990s, when Dudjom Rinpoche’s chief attendant, Chonyi Rinpoche—whom I had met after my first journey into Pemako in 1993—began its reconstruction.

  The Pass of Sharp Stones

  TO LEAVE PEMAKO we had to cross back over the Himalayan barrier, this time over the Doshung-La, or Pass of Sharp Stones, on the western flank of Namcha Barwa. We began the ascent from the liberation bridge and climbed along the right bank of a river that cascaded through dense tropical foliage droning with cicadas. After climbing 2,000 feet above the Tsangpo, we reached a small plateau at 4 ,150 feet and camped in fallow rice fields swarming with moths and gnats. Oy had picked banana flowers and wild lemons along the trail, and her cooking added new dimensions to the evening meal. We retired close to midnight under heavy clouds. The temperature remained oppressive throughout the night, as did the plague of tiny gnats that penetrated the netting of our tents. Christiaan complained bitterly from within the dome tent he shared with Oy. “The world does not favor mammals,” I overheard her say, “It favors insects; they proliferate while warm-blooded species face gradual extinction.” Christiaan hardly seemed mollified.

  In the morning we set out again, climbing through dense forests of bamboo. High on the ridge above lay the village of Marpung, where Kinthup had worked as an indentured servant to the local lama. In 1994, we had crossed the Tsangpo on the hanging bamboo bridge below Medok, and our route had led us through this village. On our arrival Marpung’s presiding abbot had emerged from the monastery’s dark interiors, flanked by village lamas dressed in brocade robes and bird-headed masks.

  I had asked him about Yangsang Né. He told me that some neyigs indicate that Pema Shelri—the Lotus Crystal Mountain at the heart of Yangsang—lies to the south of Kundu Dorsempotrang, while others say it lies to the north beneath the walls of Namcha Barwa. He told me that dur
ing the 1960s many Tibetans had searched for Yangsang amid Namcha Barwa’s cliffs and glaciers. Some had heard the jangling amulets of dakinis dancing invisibly in the air around them and took it as a sign that they were approaching the fabled portal. The lama himself had been part of a group that had journeyed up a narrow gorge to a white cliff that many believed to conceal the door to the hidden paradise. They performed elaborate rites for weeks at the base of the mountain, but the door never opened, the lama said; the time had not yet come. Some of the Tibetan seekers had died of starvation; others survived by eating the leather of their shoes.

  When we arrived at a bridge leading across the Doshung Chu, villagers from Marpung recognized Hamid and me from the preceding year. They pointed up a gorge with steep ridges receding into the distance and asked if we were headed toward Pema Shelri. The route was overgrown by jungle and no one had gone up the gorge in years, they told us. Unless the right lama went with you, there was no point, they said. You will see only rock and ice.

  We told them that we had been to Kundu Dorsempotrang and were now headed back to Lhasa. The realm to the north would have to await a future visit. The temptation to venture into the unknown, inhospitable terrain was strong, and Hamid and I almost lamented the pull that Yangsang continued to exert on us. On one level we knew it was an unattainable realm, as fanciful as Shangri-La, but its obscure promise was impossible to deny. We knew that we would soon return.

  We had journeyed to Kundu Dorsempotrang to find a key to penetrate deeper into the mysteries of the beyul, and as we climbed through the forest we asked ourselves what we had found. Beyond the ostensible merit of having circumambulated the sacred mountain, the journey had conferred a sense of wonder and magic that more than compensated for any hardship we might have endured. Although we were fatigued and ravaged by insects and stinging plants, the endless days of trudging through leech-infested swamps and along treacherous cliffs had granted us an uncommon peace, a sense of having been to the heart of things. We could now approach the Tsangpo’s innermost gorge, the last secret place, with a new attitude. The gnostic Gospel of Thomas sums it up as well—and as cryptically—as any neyig: “The Kingdom is inside of you, and outside of you. When you have come to know yourselves, then you will be known . . . Recognize what is before your eyes, and what is hidden will be revealed to you.”