The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  19 Wordsworth’s thought extended themes in Paradise Lost, one of the most influential works in English literature. Both Wordsworth and Milton presented life as a pilgrimage from the innocence of undifferentiated consciousness to loss and ultimate reintegration of all that had been divided. This integrative journey necessitates not only the ascent to heaven but an equally vital descent into what Wordsworth called the “dim uncertain ways” of hell, a sentiment which pilgrims in Pemako would necessarily share. On his approach to the Tsangpo gorge, Lord Cawdor read a critique of Milton’s Paradise Lost that had been published in London’s Spectator in March 1712. (Cawdor’s other reading included the Bible—“more because it is such good reading than for any religious reason”—and Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Travels in the Hebrides.) Joseph Addison’s critique of Paradise Lost and subsequent essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” contributed much to the Romantic cult of the sublime and its influence on orthodox religious thought. Addison wrote how “The beauty and grandeur of nature do not exist independently of the human mind but only through interaction between them” and the extent to which the imagination, faced “with the extraordinary degrees of grandeur or minuteness” revealed by concepts of the sublime [largely forwarded by Thomas Burnett’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1680)] is “swallowed up in the immensity of the void that surrounds it.”

  Addison’s essay in the Spectator on June 23, 1712, prefigures the Victorian fascination with waterfalls and the continued quest for the Falls of the Tsangpo: “There is nothing that more enlivens a prospect than rivers, jettcus [jets of water,] or falls of water,” Addison wrote, “where the scene is perpetually shifting . . . and sliding away from beneath the eye of the beholder.” Addison’s writings suggest clues as to how the Falls of the Tsangpo had grown larger in imagination the more efforts failed to locate it geographically. Writing in 1712 of the poet’s prerogative to embellish nature, Addison maintained that, “he can as easily throw his cascades from a precipice of half a mile high as from one of twenty yards . . . in a word, he has the modeling of Nature in his own hands, and may give her what charms he pleases. . . . The understanding, indeed, opens an infinite space on every side of us.”

  20 The gardens at Auchindoune were laid out in the late 1920s by Jack Cawdor’s uncle, Ian Campbell. The young lord had entrusted him with the precious seedlings he had brought back from the Tsangpo gorges as Cawdor’s head gardener—who was nicknamed “Deathray”—was notorious for bringing plants to a premature end.

  21 Despite the fact that the lotus does not grow in Tibet’s mountainous environment, its symbolism was retained as a metaphor for the awakening mind. Buddhist deities are invariably shown seated on lotus flowers symbolizing the mind of enlightenment. These flowers are not simply graphic representations of psychic processes. As a 1996 issue of Nature points out, the lotus has the “remarkable ability to regulate the temperature of its blossoms to within a narrow range, just as mammals do. Only two other species of plants have been found to be able to regulate their temperature, both in the eaurum-lily family: the skunk cabbage and a philodendron known as elephant ear. Just how the lotus does it is unknown, but it begins heating up as its flowers start to bloom. Then as the night cools its petals, the flower takes in more oxygen and gives off more carbon dioxide, converting more carbohydrates to energy. As the sun rises, heat production wanes. A single lotus flower can put out one watt of energy. That means that forty lotus blossoms can put out the same amount of heat as one living room lightbulb, and seventy flowers can produce the heat of a human being at rest. It is believed that lotus flowers may act to lure in pollinators, most likely beetles. Beetles trapped in a closed blossom all night were found to be very active while inside, spending the night mating and feeding, and emerged covered in pollen and ready to complete their work as pollinators.” However potent the metaphor, the lotus itself was unknown in Tibet, as the climate could not support such tropical flora, except perhaps in Pemako. Yet here it was no ordinary lotus that pilgrims sought, but the thousand-petaled lotus symbolizing enlightened awareness. A Chinese artist once related a story from the Tang dynasty about a man who would sleep at night at the bottom of his wooden skiff, drifting on a lake full of blossoming lotus flowers. The purpose, he related, was not to experience his own dreams, but to dream the dreams of the lotus.

  22 Khamtrul Rinpoche offered vivid accounts of these plants in his manuscript, The Lama’s Heart Advice which Dispels All Obstacles: The magical herb that increases happiness is white in color and tinged with red. Its five flowering buds smell like elephant bile. Its petals are small and curled like an infant child.

  The magical herb that bestows immortality resembles a red lotus flower tinged with black. Its camphor-like aroma spreads in the wind. It has eight leaves and is shaped like a crimson toad.

  The magical herb that grants all supreme and mundane siddhis, is a golden flower tinged with red. It exudes a scent of nutmeg. The tips of its six petals are slightly curled; its blue leaves hang upside down like a cuckoo.

  The magical herb that empowers one to fly through the sky like the wisdom dakini Dorje Pagmo is a blossoming flower like red coral that has been polished with oil. It has an aroma of aloe wood and the pungent taste of cumin. Its three petals resemble the shape of a garuda [a celestial hawk] soaring in the heavens. Its leaves are formed like a peacock with breasts of lapis lazuli.

  The magical herb that reveals intrinsic realization is a blue flower shaped like a bell. A single whiff intoxicates the mind with its scent of white sandalwood. Its petals are contoured like a bulbous and shiny seed in the shape of a vajra. Its leaves resemble the plumes of a small light green rooster.

  This describes the five supreme magical herbs that are found in the Hidden-Land of Pemako. During the day they emit a shower of rainbow light while at night they burn like fire, quavering in dancing light. These herbs contain magical power. They are sacred to this holy land and extremely difficult to find.

  On the sacramental occasions of the 10th and 25th days of the lunar cycle, pray one-pointedly to Padmasambhava to fulfill . . . the stages of approach and accomplishment of one’s yidam [tutelary deity]. In preparing the tantric substances for appeasing the hosts of assembled dakinis, bind the dharma protectors and eight classes of gods and demons through oaths and commands. Throughout all times, encourage them to persevere in their entrusted tasks. Thereafter, by receiving their blessings and power, one will come to behold these five types of supreme medicinal herbs.

  Their rays of rainbow-colored light expand over the landscape like a stealthily creeping mouse. Whatever the direction of the wind, these medicinal herbs sway and bend like sharp swords. As they move, their dewlike nectar is flung outward and . . . their secretions can be collected in an oblong spoon like drops of precious jewels. As one ingests their inner essences, the plants’ innate blessing power is actualized and one experiences the co-emergence of bliss and emptiness. Physically, one begins to transform into the body of a youthful deva [divinity] and attains immortal life. . . . Pray that all sublime siddhis, both supreme and mundane, be instantly attained—like the sky-delighting dakinis who encircle the world . . .

  23 See Herbert Guenther, The Life and Teachings of Naropa (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 53: “When [Naropa] was waist-deep in the water, he slipped and went under. Since the water had been disturbed, leeches and other vermin came in swarms and bored into his body. The loss of blood gave him the sensation of being dissolved, and the water flowing into this emptiness made him feel frozen. Tilopa asked: ‘Naropa, what is wrong with you?’ And Naropa answered: ‘I dissolve, I freeze, through the bites of leeches, I am not master of myself and so I suffer.’ ”

  24 The takin has always been a semi-mystical beast in Tibetan belief, and its origins are attributed to the divine workings of a Himalayan saint named Drukpa Kunleg. Villagers in Bhutan wanted proof of th
e lama’s powers, and he asked for a cow, consuming the entire carcass. This was not enough, however, and he then asked for a goat. “This proves only your gluttony,” the distressed villagers cried. But then in a Tantric twist, he took the head of the goat and fixed it to the body of the cow, slapped it on its back and sent it bounding off into the mountains. The takin’s taxonomy is equally improbable, its closest relative being the arctic musk ox. Its habitat is confined to the eastern Himalayas. Bailey refered to the takin as “perhaps one of the rarest game animals in the world,” not because it was on edge of extinction but because “it happens that its habitat is almost unapproachable.” His comments reveal a perception of the natural world conditioned by his own imperial sensibilities in which physical objects were valuable in direct proportion to the degree that they could be possessed.

  25 In Tantric Buddhism, hunters also represent the notion of transformation and the deceipt of common perception. In one parable, the mahasiddha Naropa encounters a mystic hunter with a pack of hounds who states the following (quoted in Guenther, The Life and Teachings of Naropa): A hunter, I have drawn the arrow

  Of the phantom body which is free from preferences

  In the bow of radiant light, the essence

  I kill the fleeing deer of this and that,

  On the mountain of the body believing in an I

  Tomorrow I go fishing in the lake.

  Hunting even had its Tantric Buddhist proponents. The mahasiddha Maitripa traveled to the jungles in the Himalayan foothills, where he was initiated by a hermit-sage named Savaripa and his two huntress consorts. When he recoiled at their taking of life, one of the reed-clad women replied with this allegorical song: In the forests of cyclic existence runs the boar of ignorance

  Releasing the arrow of peneterating wisdom

  I slay the boar of primordial unknowing

  Will you partake of this flesh of non-duality?

  Enjoy the corpse—the Great Bliss!

  26 Shepe Dorje’s narrative helps illuminate this perspective. “When travelling to these sacred places, fear naturally transforms into great splendour and one remains perfectly at ease. A new spiritual awareness flares up in one’s stream of consciousness: a conception-free unity of bliss and emptiness. “Peculiar sounds are heard from assemblies of female deities, dakinis, and demi-gods (asuras). One hears the sounds of singing, dancing, and hidden instruments. Amidst it all are the spontaneous reverberations of secret mantras and the aroma of sweet smelling fragrances. The shared experience of these occurrences in the minds of different people is sufficient in itself to make these places objects of trust and veneration!”

  27 The well-known Tibetan lama Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche had traveled through Pemako in 1959 while escaping the Chinese invasion. He and his companions had run out of food, but did not realize that they could eat the oddly shaped fruit that dangled above their heads. “Our journey now took us through yet stranger country,” Trungpa wrote in his memoirs; “there were all sorts of trees forming a dense jungle with no level spaces; a tangle of mountains with continual rain and mist. For the first time we saw banana trees, but did not know that the fruit was edible and dared not experiment.” They resorted instead to boiling and eating their yak-leather bags. Chogyam Trungpa, Born in Tibet (London: George Alan & Unwin, 1966), p. 238. The fruit of the plantain, or cooking banana, is not only edible but its Latin name, Musa paradisiaca, denotes a time when it was considered to be the fruit of the tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. According to Islamic myth, Adam and Eve concealed their nakedness after the Fall, not with fig leaves, but with the more accommodating leaves of Musa paradisiaca. The notion that the fruit of the tree of knowledge was an apple came much later, possibly because, in Roman times, apples were highly regarded and eventually became the standard fruit of Western Europe. The paintings of Adam and Eve that show the first couple beneath an apple tree are all European; other cultures favored different candidates for the forbidden fruit, including the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria.

  28 A news brief in Outside magazine later that year (December 1993) stated: “In a world where uncharted territory is increasingly rare, this is the kind of competitive spirit that’s come to haunt the exploration of the Tsangpo Gorge.”

  29 The Puchu Serkyi Lhakhang immobilizes the Srinmo’s right elbow. Early in the seventeenth century, the terton Jatsun Nyingpo, Rainbow Heart, had discovered treasure-texts concerning Pemako inside the temple’s central pillar as did the treasure-revealer Rigdzin Chogyur Lingpa a century later.

  PART THREE: THE MOUNTAIN

  1 Kanjur Rinpoche followed a text entitled The Bright Torch Guide to the Path to the Secret Land of Pemako that had been written on sixteen sheaves of birch bark by Jedrung Jhampa Yungney in 1911-12. He followed the milk-white river to its source where he confronted a great waterfall. After days of prayer and meditation, the waterfall stopped of its own accord and revealed a deep cavern leading into the depths of the mountain. With a single attendant, Kanjur Rinpoche entered the cave and followed a passageway that led them to a numinous valley surrounded by glacier-covered peaks and rich in wild fruit and medicinal herbs. They spent three weeks inside the heart-shaped valley, although to them, it had seemed a single day.

  2 Bhakha Tulku was born in 1944, three years before the Communist revolution. His Holiness the 16th Karmapa and His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche had both recognized him at a young age, not only as the tenth incarnation in the Bhakha Tulku lineage, but also as a tulku of the fifteenth-century treasure-revealer Pema Lingpa. At the age of nine, he began a three-year solitary meditation retreat in Powo under the tutelage of a lama named Pulung Sangye Dorje. One month after completing his retreat, he embarked on a six-month pilgrimage through Pemako. Pema Lingpa’s teachings had spread throughout Pemako in the 1700s, and as the principal emanation of this revered terton, Bhaka Tulku was responsible for the spiritual welfare of the many temples in Pemako dedicated to the Pema Lingpa lineage. His uncle had traveled through China with Jedrung Trakpa Gyalsten—the reincarnation of Jedrung Jhampa Yungney—and witnessed the beginnings of a major cultural upheaval. Upon his return he urged his extended family members to resettle in the secluded valleys of lower Pemako. Together with a tutor, two monk attendants, his mother, two younger brothers, and three other families and their servants, Bhakha Tulku crossed the Dashing-La pass from Powo. His father was away on a trading expedition in Kham and his older brother had gone to study in Beijing, as was the custom among noble families.

  When Bhakha Tulku and his family members reached Chimdro, they stayed for a month as guests of Jedrung the second. Afterward, he traveled to Kundu Dorsempotrang and, over the next several months, to Rinchenpung and the lower Tsangpo valley, looking for a place where they might settle. In Medok, plans changed abruptly when Bhakha Tulku received news from Dudjom Rinpoche that he was to begin a rigorous course of study at Mindroling, the great Nyingma center of learning a day’s journey south of Lhasa. Three years later, after the Communist invasion, Bhakha Tulku fled to India where, in 1969, he married the daughter of the second Jedrung, Thinley Jhampa Yungney, who had settled in Tezu in Arunachal Pradesh.

  3 Current statistics from the Lohit district of Arunachal Pradesh (lower Pemako) show an annual rainfall of nearly 40 feet per square meter (12,000 mm). In their September 2000 “Ecological Survey of the Medog Area in the Yarlung Tsangpo Great Canyon National Reserve,” George Schaller, Lu Zhi, and Endi Zhang include a graph showing an annual rainfall in Medok of 3,000 mm, or only 10 feet. By comparison, the Amazon receives approximately 9 feet of rain per year, the Pacific Northwest, 7 .

  4 According to Bhakha Tulku, Powo may have been one of the first places in Tibet to be inhabited. The origin myth of the Tibetan race traces its line of descent to a monkey and rock ogress in the Yarlung valley. As Yarlung is high and arid, there are no mo
nkeys there and Bhakha Tulku believes it more likely that this myth was borrowed from the almost subtropical valley of Powo. Bailey and Morshead had reached Powo in 1913. A decade later the intrepid French adventurer Alexandra David Neal traveled through the same territory disguised as a Tibetan beggar.

  Waddell recounts that in 1793 a detachment of five hundred Chinese soldiers en route from Szechuan to the borders of Nepal lost its way in Lower Po and were so captivated by “the beauty and fertility of the country that the men decided to go no further and to make it their home. They married women of the country and greatly prospered, and their descendants still occupy the land. . . . While Po-tö (or ‘Upper Po’) is under the rule of Lhasa, Po-Ma is independent in fact, it being under the nominal control of a high Manchu officer stationed at Lhasa who is known as ‘Envoy to the Savage Tribes’ or ‘Third Amban.’ Po-Ma is visited by Lao-Shan and Yunnanese traders, and it carries on a large trade with Derge, Jyade, and Lhasa. The horses of Po-Ma are famous throughout Tibet, and its leatherwork, ironwork, and jewelry, as well as the products of its looms, are celebrated and in great demand. The products of the soil are varied and of excellent quality, and altogether this country would seem to be the most fertile spot of Tibet.” (Quoted in Waddell, Lhasa and Its Mysteries, p. 502.)

  5 Bhakha Tulku had explained the origins of the monastery’s location. In the seventh century, Tibet’s reigning emporer, Songtsengampo, had sent his most trusted minister to escort his Chinese bride from the Tang dynasty court. They fell in love, and the minister conspired to take the most circuitous route back to Lhasa as possible. As they entered the Powo valley, the princess gave birth to their stillborn child and consulted geomantic texts to determine the most auspicious burial site. Centuries later, Bhakha (Burial Ground) monastery was built at the site of the grave.