Instead of going head to head with the demons and driving them out, as Christianity did in the West, Buddhism absorbed them as ‘awesome yet benevolent spirits’.* Their immense powers were respected: Jamun, who was known as the eminent enemy, specialised in crushing enemies not just between rocks but between mountains', the White Dakini used thunderbolts and when that failed to inspire, moved mountains too; the, for us, oddly named Sham-po was a great white yak from whose nostrils came blizzards and whirlwinds – and he too was the size of a mountain. Then there was the huge snakelike reptile as long as a chain of. . . mountains, which could turn up anywhere and leave you lost and stranded. These were true demons of the Himalayas – all of them were part and parcel of their mountainous background.
Crappy former life? Blame demons.
The demons of the Himalayas could not be ignored; after three generations of Gampo’s Buddhism they rebelled. They were so displeased they let the Tibetan empire crumble and fall. With a withering of its military strength, connections to the Silk Road routes worsened and Tibet became progressively poorer. In AD 703 the Nepalis decided they had had enough of Tibetan rule and chased their invaders back over the high passes to the plateau. The Tibetans did what they usually do in times of crisis (those not caused by China, at least) and turned to China. Another marriage of convenience was arranged and another Buddhist Chinese princess, complete with entourage of monks, was shipped in. Unfortunately – tragically, in fact – she brought an epidemic of smallpox with her that killed off many Tibetans, and some Chinese including herself.
The old Bon priests struck back. Raising harum-scarum images of displeased demons, they stirred the populace into uproar and discontent. This outcry crystallised in the expulsion of all Indian and Chinese monks (the Nepalese had already fled). By this time, the Bon was replete with its own scriptures, its own canon. Buddhism in Tibet seemed to be doomed.
In the eighth century, however, King Trison Detson (there were no dalai lamas at this stage) tried one last time to get the Tibetan people back on the Dharma path. The first attempt involved a learned Indian monk who had a very hard time getting back into Tibet. While preaching on the Red Hill in Lhasa, he incurred the seeming wrath of the White Dakini of the glaciers and the Royal Palace was struck by lightning. When the people heard the sermon and saw the lightning, the mild-mannered monk Santarakshita (which was his name) was in trouble. Then he had a brilliant idea: if demons were the enemy, all he needed was someone, or something, that killed demons.
Enter Guru Rinpoche – which means ‘precious teacher’ in a mix of Sanskrit and Tibetan. His other name is Padmasambhava: demon-slayer. Evans-Wentz, a pioneering Tibetologist, writes: ‘His [Padmasambhava’s] less critical devotees generally regard the strange stories told of him . . . as being literally and historically true; the more learned interpret them symbolically . . .’ Those who lack the skill or interest to see truths in a story-based format dismiss Padmasambhava as being about as real as King Arthur, but having, like Arthur, an awful lot of glamour and legend attached.
Unlike King Arthur, however, it seems beyond dispute that he actually did exist – though beyond a bit of travelling and founding monasteries, very little is known of his life. This obscurity surrounding the eighth-century Guru Rinpoche is further clouded by his roots in the tantric tradition of India. To Westerners weaned on Sting’s version of Buddhism (or the tabloid reports of it – apologies, Mr Sting), tantrism means sex. But actual tantric sex is a very small part of the whole tantric tradition. The main thrust, if you will excuse the term, of tantrism is rigorous control and subjugation of pleasure – one should be able to use it, without it using you; one should not be a slave to one’s pleasures. The way to bust these addictions is varied, and tantrism goes into complex Indian detail about all of them. Men are at a disadvantage, as semen loss reduces the benefit of any orgasm. They must practise holding on and having orgasms that are dry, so to speak. The training is meticulous and can only proceed at a slow pace. It involves using milk as a semen substitute and overriding autonomic muscles in order to reverse the flow, sucking instead of releasing. Have you ever started to wee and then forced yourself to stop? Well, that’s only the beginning of tantric semen retention practice. No doubt there are health benefits to the prostate – perhaps there is room for a PhD here – nevertheless, the important point remains: tantrism is about ruling the body and its passions rather than being ruled by them. In this very tricky (though obviously not impossible) enterprise it runs the risk of misinterpretation and degeneration into something rather less than spiritual. Cue tantric sex party jokes. Tibetan Buddhism has always faced such gibes and only now, with the extraordinary efforts at refining Eastern concepts for Western ears that the current Dalai Lama has managed, do we see a form of Buddhism not hideously shackled to a misinterpretable past.
Guru Rinpoche, like Christ – and trumping even the Buddha himself – was born not of womankind but of a lotus. The symbolic school naturally point to this simply indicating a level of purity – in other words, disregard the sordid details of his birth and ancestry and concentrate on what he has to impart. The location of his birth is disputed, Urgyan having long disappeared; it was thought to be either a little north of Kashmir or perhaps in the Kingdom of Swat. Urgyan was associated with miracles, so a miraculous birth was OK. The King of Urgyan, so the narrative unfolds, was walking by the River Indus when he espied a boy seated on a lotus flower. The boy was about ten years old – it was the infant Guru himself. Floating down a river – found in a plant – there is something of the Japanese Momotaro story here which involves a boy being found inside a peach – which Roald Dahl modernised into James and the Giant Peach.
The King, realising that this was no ordinary lad, brought him up as a young prince. But unlike the gentle Siddhartha, the youthful Padmasambhava was a more active type; in fact, he was a triple murderer – and this was just to get out of the grips of the royal retinue and routine. When he found himself blocked from leaving he got himself exiled by standing on the roof of the palace and magically zapping a passing man, woman and child, leaving them stone dead. In a gloss on this (for the faint-hearted, one imagines) we discover that this family, far from being innocent, had ‘harmed Buddhism’ in their current or previous life.
Padmasambhava now followed the usual training for a tantric magician – hanging around graveyards and cemeteries honing his skills and dealing with all manner of ghosts and demons. He also attended the great centres of learning to imbibe more mainstream Buddhist fare.
His abilities were such that he was able to lure the incredibly beautiful Princess Mandrava away from the land of Sohor to be his partner in sexual abstinence. The guru persuaded her to swap the usual honeymoon for a period of meditation in a cremation ground – no wonder her parents were not too pleased. The couple were captured and condemned to be burned at the stake. But the guru’s powers were great – the fire hosed itself out by turning into water and the stake flattened into a lotus on which the couple could be seen meditating a few feet off the ground.
The guru then put his powers to the test in India, combining magic and debating skills to defeat the Brahmins, who were jealous of Buddhism’s encroaching success. At the time, such debates were serious affairs. Whole monasteries were pledged as a stake – whoever lost, their followers had to convert to the opposing religion. In anti-Muslim rhetoric we hear that the Buddhist scriptures were destroyed in India by the invading Mongols. Except, they were lost way before this: when a debate was lost the Buddhists not only had to convert, they also had to destroy their scriptures. So it was Brahminical triumph rather than Mongol destruction which left India devoid of early Buddhist manuscripts.
In a country without sporting spectacles, these debates were something like a Super Bowl event, but over the years the intellectual Brahmins had been scoring more and more victories. Guru Rinpoche tried to counter the magic of the Brahmins and scored a last victory before heading off to Tibet. In his absence, Nalanda University
succumbed to the resurging Hinduism.
The Guru had been invited by Santarakshita to help save Buddhism in Tibet from the Bon masters of magic. Rinpoche travelled through Nepal and put down demons wherever he met them, getting into practice for the big confrontations that he knew lay ahead.
When Padmasambhava arrived in Lhasa there was the usual tussle about protocol – who should bow to whom? The Guru was in a hurry so he simply sent out a mild lightning bolt that incinerated the King’s clothes (not all of them, he wasn’t trying to completely humiliate the man). Anyway, the King hurriedly bowed and the fire was extinguished.
The Guru then set out to quell the troublesome demons and turn them into Dharmapala – protectors of the Dharma. In Samye he stopped a rumbling earthquake and began building the first monastery in Tibet. Along with Santarakshita, he started monastery after monastery and began the work of translating the Theravada scriptures from the original Pali, as well as the Mahayana scriptures from Sanskrit. With his tantric background in magic, the Bon priests had met their match. When others accused him – as some non-Tibetan Buddhists do to this day – of being a drunk, fornicating, violent murderer he would reply:
‘In as much as this man is ignorant, I should pardon him.’
It is with something approaching shock that a naïve Westerner (me) enters his or her first Tibetan Buddhist temple or monastery meditation hall. There is something very churchlike about the rows of benches despite the squarer floor plan of the temple. But there, where you might expect to see an altar – which there is, of sorts – are the biggest pictures of the grossest-looking demons and gods you could imagine. Confusion reigns: isn’t Buddhism supposed to be more or less god-free? What’s going on?
These demons look very like the crazy-headed gods found in Hindu temples, which I had seen all the way up the Ganges valley from Haridwar, Rishikesh, Badrinath and higher. Was the Indian tantric influence imposing its own weird gods on Buddhism?
The answer was far more subtle. Though there are tutelary deities in Tantric Buddhism, the wrathful and passionate faces depict personifications of the purified aspects of human nature. To the initiate, these highly emotional god faces are, if untransformed through meditation and other forms of self-work, capable of causing great suffering and harm to the individual. Yet, if transformed, their energy can be put to the service of wisdom. The demon heads are there to remind us of our own demons, which, as part of life, we must ride – but not necessarily over a cliff. By being aware of them, we can retain control.
* Scott Berry, A Stranger in Tibet
14
The Strange Death of René von Nebesky-Wojkowitz
To repeat another man’s word as your own makes your own word as valueless as water.
Himalayan proverb
In Delhi I diverted myself with studying Tibet. I wasn’t going there; I didn’t want to, despite the attractions of bicycling from Lhasa to Kathmandu – one of many holiday breaks I saw offered. Oh no, I had more serious work to do in the coffee shop and the Midland bookstore in Aurobindo market. I bought many books from this excellent shop which, very agreeably, always gave me a discount. My obsession with Tibet had to do with the sense that up there on the great plateau, 5,000 metres high, at the centre of the largest continent, some secret was being guarded. I knew that travelling there would only be frustrating (only group tours were permitted) and would simply distract me from the journey I was making through the endless complications of Tibetan Buddhist writing.
The man who uncovered most about the secret side of Tibetan demonology was a mild, scholarly Czech: René von Nebesky-Wojkowitz (or de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, as he sometimes styled himself in order to draw distance between himself and the unsavoury wartime German interest in Tibet).
Accounts of his death vary. Some suggest he was diagnosed with pneumonia in 1958, before succumbing to the disease in 1959, the year that Tibet finally fell to its Chinese invaders. In others, it is believed that on 9 July, after just a few hours of illness, he died from thrombosis in the lungs. Some hours later, his young wife died; most sources omit how, though some agree it was suicide.
He was a thirty-six-year-old assistant professor at Vienna University. A few months before his death – which was completely unexpected – he had returned from an expedition to Nepal, where he intended to start a new research project. His final Christmas, six months before he died, was spent in Kalimpong at the Himalayan Hotel – where I was told he liked to sit on the lawn, typing on a small Olivetti and endlessly going through tape recordings of Tibetan lamas.
He had a lot to live for. His 660-page magnum opus, Oracles and Demons of Tibet, had been published to great acclaim three years earlier. He was energetic and had studied Lepcha culture in Sikkim, as well as every aspect of Tibetan demonology.
Some believe that he revealed too much. He had interviewed monks, Bon priests, peasants and nomads. His main sources for Oracles were three monks: Dardo Tulku, Tretong Rinpoche and Nyingmapa Chima Rigdzin. Many probably had no idea what academic publication meant in the West. In Tibetan culture, such knowledge as he received would have come with a warning. Telling secrets in the East to those who are unready for them has a long history of retribution and vengeance on the secret-spiller. The very success of René’s book could have spelt his end.
Though fellow Tibetologist John Blofeld would joke that de Nebesky’s real crime was to make these terrifying demons boring, and that was why they killed him, one look at the vast array of materials conveyed – including detailed remarks on curses and black magic – leave one uneasy about the motives of the young researcher. It could be that he was driven by an obsession to find out and reveal everything – a compulsion not unusual among the academic. But did he understand that in the mysterious (and not so mysterious) East there is a stark functionality about knowledge, which is believed to have a counterpart in the world of action? If intellectual or merely theoretical knowledge increases too much, it creates an imbalance; various forms of action must then take place to restore balance.
It might be too much to suggest that retributive forces killed Nebesky, but a curse – if believed – might have done the job. Dr Stanley Milgram experimented by picking on a random person in a cinema and having three different students successively go up to the victim and say in a compassionate voice, ‘Are you OK? You don’t look so good.’ By the time the third person said it, the victim would either faint or rush from the theatre bathed in sweat. Very real physical symptoms can be suggested – or blocked.
René de Nebesky was fully immersed in the subject he studied. He spent three years based in Kalimpong, collecting information for his book on demonology and black magic. Is it too much to imagine some of it rubbed off? And much of the time he was accompanied by his young wife; perhaps she too imbibed the beliefs that led to her death. What drove her to take her own life mere hours after she discovered her husband dead? Granted, it is possible that she was mentally unbalanced to begin with, living in some kind of codependent relationship with the scholar. But if she believed that René had been killed by a curse, might she not also believe herself cursed? Too many questions; all that remains is the work of René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, and from the following glimpse at the kind of content to be found therein, you can see how it might lodge deep within your mind . . .
To put a curse on someone, Nebesky lists some of the things one should load a ‘spirit trap’ with. A net is filled with the following to capture a destructive tsan or spirit: soil from charnel fields, human skulls, murder weapons, tips of noses, hearts, lips of men who died unnatural deaths, poisonous plants and deformed animals – all of these will attract the demon spirit. He can then, with suitable rituals, be turned upon an enemy. After a purifying seven-day meditation, a lama is considered free to handle such a spirit without a problem. Did René meditate to purify himself while handling all this dangerous material?
Monkey gods offer much-needed protection
To kill someone, you make a doll or likeness – oddly,
this practice is a worldwide black magic exercise. If you can incorporate real hair and bits of cloth taken from the intended victim, so much the better. This is then stuffed in a magic horn filled with the teeth of children who failed to live to be older than ten.
Sometimes it is sufficient to simply name the victim. First a red magic diagram, drawn with the blood of a ‘dark-skinned Brahmin girl’, must be prepared. In its centre, a piece of cotton that once covered a plague victim is used to write the name and lineage of the victim (noting the names of their relatives makes it more potent). Stab the cotton several times with a magic dagger made from the thigh bone of another plague victim (you will see magic daggers in the museums of many Tibetan monasteries – there are several in the monastery at Tawang). Now the hard part – recite the death mantra 100,000 times. Assuming you can speak it in ten seconds, you will manage six in a minute, 360 in an hour, 3,600 in ten hours and 36,000 in a hundred hours. Two hundred and seventy-seven hours will get you to the right pitch for the curse to work – if you can put in a twelve-hour day of death mantras it will take twenty-three days – manageable, I guess, if you have nothing much else on . . . Once the plague-infested cotton is charged up, you should place it where the victim sleeps or makes camp.
To induce madness, draw a white magic circle on the summit of a mountain. In it, you place another victim figurine to focus the evil intentions that could so easily just go wandering off. In this case, the tiny doll is best made from the leaves of a poisonous tree. Write with white sandalwood resin the name and lineage of the proposed victim on the doll. Hold in the smoke of burnt human fat a demon dagger made from bone or iron – it doesn’t matter which. Touch the tip of the dagger only on the head of the doll. Now leave the doll in a place where demonesses are known to congregate – old mines and wells, dank gullies in cliff faces, stagnant ponds and houses deserted after an unexplained death.
White Mountain Page 10