by Thomas Shor
‘“In my last life,” Tulshuk Lingpa said, “My name was Kyaray Lama. My monastery was up the valley, and my end came early.
‘“An old man had fallen ill down this way, and every day I went to the man’s house and performed the rituals to restore his la, or vital essence. The family had many fields and animals and kept me coming for over a month. Every day I’d ride my horse down the valley to this house, and every evening I’d return, usually quite sleepy from both the exertion and because of what they gave me to drink before leaving. But my horse was faithful and knew the way. Though I dozed on her back, she always brought me back home to my monastery.
‘“Along my way the valley grew steep and narrow. Nobody lived there but an old woman in a house surrounded by a few meager fields. The trail crossed through her fields, and every day she grew more and more angry at my intrusion, shaking her fist at me as I passed and shouting abuses. There was no other way up the valley. It did not matter to her that I was wearing a lama’s robes.
‘“One day the old woman had had enough, and she decided to kill me. After I had passed up the valley to perform my pujas, she dug a huge pit right in the middle of the trail. She covered it with branches and dried grass and waited for me to come.
‘“What she didn’t know was that I had secret insight. I knew what she was going to do, and that I would die. Yet I chose to let her kill me. I knew that after I died she would be so repentant that she would become a hermit, devote herself to the dharma, and reach enlightenment. I chose to sacrifice myself to her enlightenment.
‘“Sure enough, there I came after nightfall. My sponsors had given me chang, and I was dozing atop my horse when suddenly the horse’s foot crashed through the grass-covered branches and we tumbled into the pit. Somehow the horse was able to get back on its feet and jump out of the pit unharmed. I was killed instantly. The old woman rolled a rock on top of me and filled in the pit so no one would ever know. Then she took the branches to her house, cut them up and burned them to stay warm that night.”’
Kunsang got a nostalgic look on his face.
‘I still remember how it felt,’ he said, ‘sitting on a stone by that rushing river, the horses grazing in the background, surrounded by the other lamas, and to hear my father tell the fate of his previous incarnation. I was filled with wonder.
‘Since we were coming back from a sponsor’s house, we had many bottles with us; my father and the lamas were all quite drunk. One of the lamas asked him, “Master, could you still find the spot where this happened? It would be a great place of pilgrimage for us. We should do a puja for Kyaray Lama!” The others were enthused by the idea, and Tulshuk Lingpa agreed.
‘“It isn’t far from here,” Tulshuk Lingpa told them. “Let me see if I can find the spot.”
‘So we packed up our lunch and went down the valley. My father rode in front; I sat in front of him on his saddle. When we got to a narrowing of the valley, my father looked around. He started speaking about fields and the old woman’s house, how it was years ago and how they were now all gone. Then he jumped from the horse. He started circling the area as we all watched.
‘“This is the place,” he exclaimed of a stony area covered in brush. “Here!” he said. “This was the woman’s house.”
‘Sure enough there was the stone foundation of a small house all in a tumbledown state.
‘“The fields were there,” he said, “and the trail went this way.” He started walking into the undergrowth. Then he sat cross-legged on the ground. We stood some distance off, watching. He closed his eyes, and for a few long minutes he did not move. Then he suddenly got up and took fifteen large and deliberate steps. “Here,” he said. “Dig here.”
‘Some of the villagers who were travelling with us had tools for digging their fields strapped to their horses’ backs. They got them and set to clearing away the brush and digging a hole.
‘“Wider,” Tulshuk Lingpa said. “Dig deeper.”
‘They dug for half an hour, the men taking turns, until they came to a huge flat stone that they could only find the edges of by digging the pit wider.
‘And when they’d done so, Tulshuk Lingpa said, “Turn the stone over.”
‘But they couldn’t. It was too heavy.
‘There was a village not far away. A fast horse and rider were dispatched, returning an hour later with half a dozen young men with big iron rods, and together they were able to turn the stone over.
‘To our great amazement, on the underside of that stone was the imprint of the dead lama. He had died with his hand on his hip and his elbow sticking up, which was clearly impressed in the stone.
‘They hoisted the rock out of the pit and set it on edge, propping it up with smaller stones. They lit pine bough incense, took out their malas, or Tibetan rosaries, and reciting the mantra of Guru Padmasambhava they circled the stone in deep reverence for my father. It is rare someone can remember a past lifetime.
‘Later, my father had Lobsang write down the story of his previous birth and how he had died. Lobsang asked him how long it should be, and my father said it should be only seven or eight pages.’
‘What happened to that book?’ I asked.
‘I do not know,’ Kunsang said. ‘Perhaps Lama Tashi has it. He’s now the head of my father’s monastery.’
‘Have you ever been back to that spot?’ I asked.
‘No, but my aunt, Tulshuk Lingpa’s younger sister, Tashi Lhamo—the one whose husband was trained by the CIA to fight the Chinese and who now lives in Paris and New York—took a journey a few years ago to the Pangi Valley in order to see this stone. She found the place but the stone had been moved. Kyaray Lama’s monastery was further up the valley, and the monks of that monastery had moved the stone there. She heard that the stone was so heavy they had to break it into seven pieces, carry them on the backs of horses, and then reconstruct it. Unfortunately the way to the monastery was difficult, and my aunt was too old to make the journey.’
CHAPTER SIX
The Place of the
Female Cannibal
“The Place of the Female Cannibal”
Shrimoling [Telling], Lahaul
There is no external mark of a truly spiritual person. You’ll recognize it not by whether he or she wears a robe or a business suit, a turban or a baseball cap. How versed he is in the scriptures or whether he knows the rituals has nothing to do with it. It doesn’t matter whether he eats meat or not, takes his rest on Saturday or Sunday or whether he spends his days in devotion or in the office. The mark of a person who is spiritually advanced is that he or she has natural and spontaneous compassion.
Compassion is not what the people of Telling were receiving from their neighbors in surrounding villages, who had renamed their village Simoling. Kunsang explained to me that Simoling is a Tibetan name. It translates to the Place of the Female Cannibal. It was thus renamed because people from every household in the village—perched on a steep rocky slope with glaciers above it and a roaring boulder-strewn river below in the high Himalayan region of Lahaul—found their fingers, toes, ears and noses being slowly eaten away and disappearing, the open sores refusing to heal. We would call it an epidemic of leprosy. To the people of Lahaul, it was the work of an unknown spirit who was slowly eating the villagers’ flesh because of some unknown transgression against the spirit world. Outsiders believed that if you slept one night in Simoling you would awaken in the morning with a little piece of you having been nibbled away. People ceased going to the village; they would pass by it only in broad daylight.
The modern Western world view allows for unseen agents of disease in a realm invisible to the common man. This realm is visible only to specialists using specialized instruments in places marked out for such investigations. The Buddhist people of Lahaul also have their specialists: the lamas, who, like doctors, ascribe the origin of disease to realms as hidden to the layman as doctors with their microscopes and microbes. While the scientist prepares his slide for viewing in the labor
atory, the lama prepares his mind for receiving the understanding that will allow him to ascribe cause to a disease.
While a Western-trained doctor would dismiss spirits as a cause of disease, he might very well be able to demonstrate to a lama the role of microbes in a disease such as leprosy. While the lama would be quite capable of understanding the physical role of microbes in disease, he wouldn’t see the microbe as its root cause. He would ask a further question: Why was this particular person or community being affected at this particular time? To answer that, he would make investigations in the hidden realms he was conversant in, the realms of spirits and demons.
The Rohtang Pass between the Kullu Valley and Lahaul
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the people of Simoling found their limbs and facial features being eaten away, it was a very remote place. To reach the village one had to cross the 13,000-foot (4000 meter) Rohtang Pass on foot or on horseback. In Tibetan, Rohtang means Plain of Corpses. Snowstorms are known to suddenly appear out of a blue sky and swoop down on the pass with the suddenness and deadly fury of a gang of mounted brigands, leaving frozen corpses and livestock in their path. This can happen any month of the year. There was no motorable road crossing the pass, let alone a clinic or health care as we know it on the other side. The steep, rock-strewn valley was cut off from the rest of the world during the six-month long winter in which travel even to neighboring villages was impossible. The people of Lahaul lived such isolated lives that people in neighboring villages, sometimes a kilometer away, often spoke languages that could not be mutually understood. They lived a life closer to the time of Padmasambhava than to the world of today, with mountains inhabited by gods and dramas being played out in spirit worlds that could only be understood and controlled by their ‘technicians of the sacred’, the lamas.
When I went to Lahaul to investigate this story, I met a man from Simoling in his early sixties by the name of Chokshi. He grew up watching his relatives being slowly gnawed away by this flesh-eating disease. Though he hadn’t yet been affected, people close to him—his uncle, an aunt and many cousins, as well as uncounted neighbors—had. Many of those who hadn’t yet awakened with a piece of their flesh missing abandoned their houses to the elements and fled. Desolation vied with despair. Hope was an early casualty. Even the monastery perched on the rocky slope above the village had been abandoned by the very ones who could have helped them, the lamas.
Chokshi, of Shrimoling, the ‘Place of the Female Cannibal’
Chokshi never considered leaving. Deciding not to wait until he saw his own flesh disappear before his very eyes, he set out to find help. He went up the valley to Kardang—near the district headquarters of Keylong—to consult with the highest and most respected lama in the valley at the time, Kunga Rinpoche.
Chokshi recalled for me what happened.
Kunga Rinpoche, the Lama of Kardang Gompa
‘I walked up the valley to Kardang, and there I made an offering before Kunga Rinpoche. I told him why I was there, that so many in my village were having their limbs slowly eaten away, that we were being isolated and no one wanted to come close enough even to talk to us. The lama listened carefully, and he said he would do a mo, or divination, to see what course we should take.
‘From the voluminous folds of his robe he produced a weathered bag, inside which there was a wooden box. He took the lid from the box to reveal two ancient bone dice. He intoned a prayer, blew on the dice, shook the box and let the dice fall on the low table before him. Noting the result on a scrap of paper with a pencil stub, he threw the dice again. He took from his shelf a pecha—a Tibetan scripture wrapped in silk cloth—and consulted it. He marked things on the paper, threw the dice again and consulted another pecha, all the time noting things on the paper. It was a full half hour before he spoke.
‘“The situation in your village is extremely serious,” he told me, “and fraught with dangers. I am afraid it is beyond my powers to help you. But there is a high lama at the monastery in Pangi. His name is Tulshuk Lingpa. My divination shows that only he can help you.”
‘I had never heard of this lama, or of Pangi.
‘“Where is Pangi,” I asked the lama, “and how do I get there?”
‘“Pangi is a two-day march from here,” he told me. “But you won’t find him there now. Go to Tso Pema, and look for him there.”
‘I’d heard of Tso Pema—Rewalsar as it’s known locally—the lake sacred to Padmasambhava. I’d never been there. In fact I only knew my village and the town of Manali, the first town in the low country just over the Rohtang Pass. Who had time to travel in those days, even on pilgrimage? But now the fate of my entire village depended on me. All of my limbs were still intact but I knew it was only a matter of time. I set out immediately for Tso Pema. Since I had no money for the bus, I walked. It took me five days.
‘When I arrived in Tso Pema I asked for Tulshuk Lingpa, and someone told me to look inside the old Nyingma monastery. When I went inside, I found only a Tibetan man sitting on a scaffold putting the finishing touches to Chenresig, the Buddha of Compassion, which he was painting on the wall. He was dressed in street clothes. When I asked him for Tulshuk Lingpa, I thought he must have misunderstood me when he told me it was him I was looking for.
‘We expected our lamas to be dressed in robes and to have shaved heads. Instead, he had long black hair, which was braided with a piece of red cloth and wrapped around his head as is the style of so many Tibetan men. He wore a regular pair of pants and an old shirt, both of which were spattered with the bright colors with which he was painting the gods, demons and Buddhas on the monastery wall. But there was something in his eyes; they penetrated me like two burning coals. I knew immediately that he could help my village.
‘I told him I had come from far away, and that Kunga Rinpoche had sent me. Even before asking what it was about, he put his brushes into a glass of murky water and brought me to his “home”. At that time he had two young children, Kamala and Kunsang. I’d never seen anything like it: he lived with his wife and children in a cave on the sharp slope above the lake. I had heard of lamas and yogis living in caves but never with their families! I was a little afraid of this man with burning eyes, the air of a great yogi and clothes of an ordinary man. One always had the feeling with him that there was more to him than he revealed.
‘Phuntsok Choeden, his wife, brought us tea. Sitting on the stone floor of his cave, his kids climbing on his lap, he asked why I had come. I told him about the dire situation of my village and how Kunga Rinpoche had performed the mo and declared that only he could help us. He listened carefully, and I sensed in him a compassion that would bridge the fear that everyone else felt of even stepping foot into my village. Though his monastery in Pangi was down a side valley from Simoling three or four days’ walk away, he had heard of my village and knew well why people feared setting foot within its precinct. Without hesitation, he agreed to come. In his wife’s silence I felt her fear. I knew that silence well, the silence of those who feared the dreaded disease but were too polite to voice it. It was quite natural: we felt it ourselves.
‘I started the return journey to my village that day. Tulshuk Lingpa waited a few days, then took his family over the Rohtang Pass and sent them on to Pangi.
‘After having been shunned and isolated and having helplessly watched the limbs of our parents, our uncles and aunts, brothers, sisters and—finally—ourselves slowly vanishing into festering wounds, Tulshuk Lingpa’s arrival gave us the hope we’d lost when this malady first arrived. His compassion enabled us to have compassion for ourselves.
‘The disfigured despise themselves; the horror of someone else’s leprosy gets turned on oneself when one wakes up one day and it is one’s own nose that is vanishing in an open wound. A face without a nose is no less horrific if it is one’s neighbor’s than if it is one’s own face in the mirror. We had forgotten how to love ourselves.
‘And then this lama did what no one else had dared: he actua
lly came to our village. We knew we were grotesque. We knew, when we gathered around him—fingers, hands, forearms, elbows, feet, knees and legs, noses, ears and lips in various stages of decay and disappearance, slowly eaten by festering wounds—we knew and felt for ourselves the horror of the sight. Like a doctor arriving at an accident scene, he showed not the slightest horror at our disfigurement, handling our wounds and trying to heal them with Tibetan medicine. He climbed the mountain behind the village to the monastery and moved in. We could hear the drum and human thighbone horn at all hours of the day and night. At first the rituals he performed didn’t stop the course of the disease. So he went into a meditational retreat and he came out some days later having had a vision of Nagaraksha, the king of the nagas, or serpent gods.
‘He sent someone to get his close disciples from his monastery in Pangi, Lama Namdrol, Lama Lobsang and Lama Mipham. They were very learned men. They collected the materials needed to make a sculpture, and for the next few days nobody saw them as Tulshuk Lingpa sculpted this demon king and Lama Lobsang painted it.
‘When they were through, word spread through the village that we were to gather at the monastery. Tulshuk Lingpa told us the cause of our disease. Nagas, the serpent gods, are found—like serpents themselves—at springs and wet places, where trees and grasses and wildflowers grow. In Lahaul, you can tell a spring from a long way off; springs are the only naturally green places in our otherwise barren landscape. He told us that the nagas were angry at the village because the villagers had cut all the trees at the village spring and used them to construct houses. It was true. Shortly before the first of us had a sore that didn’t heal and the disease started eating our bodies, greed had come over us and we had cut the trees at the spring.