by Thomas Shor
I drank the tea. They also gave me a delicious lunch. And I’ve lived to tell the tale. I do look at my fingernails from time to time but they haven’t turned yellow—yet.
I walked into X. It was just another dingy little bazaar town that looked like a Hollywood stage for a Western movie. While waiting there for about an hour for a jeep heading to Gangtok, I drank my own water and ate the crackers I had brought with me.
Poisoning was not always deliberate and inflicted on others. There was one disciple of Tulshuk Lingpa who poisoned himself. His name was Gyorpa, and by all accounts he was a bit crazy. He had been a student of Mandrel, one of Tulshuk Lingpa’s closest disciples and an expert in Tibetan medicine and herbal remedies. One day Gyorpa became ill with a high fever, and he decided to treat himself. He indiscriminately picked all sorts of herbs, ground them up into a powder, mixed them in water and drank them. Naturally, his condition only worsened. So he started climbing trees, breaking off branches and grinding up their bark and eating that. He developed continuous diarrhea, a tremendous headache, and his fever shot up and kept climbing until he was dead.
The old woman at Tashiding who told me about his death ended her story by saying, ‘I guess that will teach you not to eat ground-up trees.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lepcha Tales
Beyul means Hidden Land. Both its existence and its opening are cloaked in mystery and are meant to be kept secret. Tulshuk Lingpa’s teachers, Chatral Rinpoche and Dudjom Rinpoche, warned him to keep quiet and take only a few disciples. They cautioned that Beyul could not be opened by brute force. Yet events seemed to take on a life of their own. Tulshuk Lingpa had taken center stage at the central monastery in Sikkim and the numbers of his followers were growing daily, all of whom were intent on vanishing from this world and all its problems to enter a land that was known to exist on the slopes of Mount Kanchenjunga ever since people first started living in the land that became known as Sikkim.
The original inhabitants of Sikkim were the Lepchas, an ancient group of people who since the earliest times spoke of a valley hidden on the slopes of their sacred mountain Kanchenjunga. In order to understand the Lepchas’ knowledge of the Hidden Land I went to Sonam Lepcha, one of the culture holders of the Lepcha community, a musician and keeper of their most ancient lore.
‘We call this land—the land of the Lepcha, what others call the Darjeeling Hills and Sikkim—Mayel Lyang,’ he told me. ‘Mayel means hidden. Lyang means land. We also call it Mayel Maluk Lyang. Maluk means to rise up. The Lepcha god hid a treasure, and one day it will be found. So Mayel Maluk Lyang means “The land in which the Hidden Treasure will Rise”. We Lepchas, we call ourselves Matanchi Rongkup, which means Mother’s Beloved Ones. Though we call our land Mayel Lyang, Mayel Lyang is really the name of a valley high on the slopes of Mount Kanchenjunga.
‘It is called Mayel Lyang because the valley is hidden. The first god and the first goddess created the first Lepchas from the pure snows of the high mountains. This is where we came from. Westerners have written their books and they argue amongst themselves, saying we migrated from the east, the north, the west or the south. None of them can agree. This is because they are all wrong. We migrated from nowhere. We come from the high slopes of Mount Kanchenjunga. Our language is older than theirs. The Lepcha language is older than Hebrew. It is older than Sanskrit, Tibetan and even your English. Lepcha is the original language of the world. It was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden! In 1987 our written language was 5675 years old. Researchers don’t go from place to place; they don’t visit the villages. They just read the books written by other researchers and they write new books. The lies get passed on. They think Mayel Lyang is a mythical valley.
‘If you write of this, people might think it’s only a story, and that Mayel Lyang exists only in the imagination of a few crazy old people. But I will tell you a story that proves this place is real, that it isn’t mythical but only hidden.
‘Some time back, there was an old man named Teekoong Nanak. One day he went hunting blue sheep, which roam wild on the high slopes. He crossed Ponang Hill and started climbing. A cloud came low on the mountain and there was a storm. The storm passed but night had fallen. He saw a village. There were seven stone houses in that village. Blue sheep, usually so skittish and afraid of man, were sleeping in front of one of the houses. When he reached that house, an old couple came out and told him he could stay for the night. Though the house was in the high snow mountains, in its garden there were cucumber, pumpkins and other vegetables. He was quite dizzy, probably from the altitude. They served him food in a golden bowl with a golden lid. He couldn’t recognize what it was they gave him but it was extremely tasty. At night, when he was ready to sleep, the old couple who had served him seemed to have grown even older. He slept. He felt neither hot nor cold.
‘In the morning when he awoke no one was there. He called out but there was no answer. So he opened the door to the room where the old couple had gone to sleep. On the bed were two babies: one, a boy and the other, a girl. Since there was no one else there, he could not leave the babies alone. As the day progressed, the babies grew older. At midday they were middle-aged, and at night they were again the old couple he had met the night before. They served him food in the same golden bowl. The golden bowl was full of food and it was hot. When they turned their backs he took the golden bowl, shoved it under his jacket and ran out the door. As he was running away the old couple shouted after him, “You have to eat that food here.” But he didn’t listen to them. He ran away along a trail but whenever he turned back he couldn’t see the trail he had just run along. The jungle was so thick and the slope so steep that it seemed impossible he had just passed through it. A cloud came low and he could see nothing. He came to the Rangyong River. There was a small hill just beside the river. He stopped there and took out the bowl but it wasn’t made of gold. It was nothing but leaves stitched together, and the food inside was nothing but rotting leaves. But it was still warm.
‘The hill where he stopped was called Kazimpon. The hunter was from Lingtem Village. This is in the Dzongu district. The man’s name was Nanak. The place he went to was Mayel Lyang. Now no one knows where that is.’
‘What does it mean,’ I asked him, ‘that people in Mayel Lyang change from being babies to old people every day, only to become babies again?’
‘It means they are immortal,’ he said.
‘I went to Dzongu,’ he continued, ‘to a remote village called Sakyong. This is where Nanak set out to hunt the blue sheep. An old person there told me this story. Then he took me to Kazimpon Hill, where Nanak discovered that his golden bowl had turned to leaves. There is a hot spring just at the base of the hill.’
Mount Kanchenjunga straddles the Sikkim–Nepal border, on both sides of which there are stories about a herder who stumbled into the Hidden Valley. The tales vary slightly with the tellers but it typically goes like this:
A herder of sheep goes into the high snow slopes of Mount Kanchenjunga looking for one of his animals who has gone astray. He follows its tracks in the snow until the tracks disappear in a green valley of tremendous beauty. He comes to a house and they ask him why he came there. He tells them he was looking for his sheep, and asks them if they’ve seen it. Like a man who drops a coin into a gutter only to find a bar of gold, they tell him he needn’t worry about the sheep. It is nothing. They tell him he has made it to the Hidden Valley.
In another version, a herder of sheep is grazing his animals on the high slopes of Mount Kanchenjunga and every day one of his sheep comes back with fresh seeds and greenery stuck to its coat from plants that grow nowhere near such high altitudes. He decides to follow the animal to see where it goes. Thus he happens upon the Hidden Valley.
The inhabitants of the valley give him food and a place to sleep and the next day they give him a pumpkin. They show him the way out of the valley, warning him not to tell anyone where he’s been. They also warn him not to break the pumpkin open until he reaches
home. But on the way their warning eats into him. He is overcome by impatience and curiosity, and breaks the pumpkin open. Half the pumpkin is filled with gold coins and the other half, with seeds. If he had waited until he made it home, it would have been entirely filled with gold coins.
In another version, the herder is watching his hosts in the Hidden Valley cook. He sees them put a grain of rice into the boiling pot but when they open the lid, the pot is full. There is enough rice for everybody. Everything in the valley is very beautiful, and he finds that he has become very intelligent and his mind has become clear.
He is so happy in the valley that he wants to bring his wife and children there. He tells his hosts that he wants to leave, without telling them why. When he’s leaving they give him a few grains of the special rice, and tell him not to let anyone know about the Hidden Land. He can use the rice for others to eat—one grain will even feed a thousand people—but he is not to let anyone know.
Climbing out of the green valley, he finds himself back in the snow. He knows he’ll have a hard time finding the valley, so at a strategic point he takes off his jacket and pins it under a stone so he will know where the way to the valley begins. Then he continues down to where he had been herding his sheep. All of his sheep are still there except for the one he went looking for when he stumbled upon the Hidden Valley. He herds them together and drives them down out of the high pastures to go and get his family. In the late afternoon he comes to a little hut where there are seven other herders, all spending the night. He stops with them for the night but they’ve looked through the hut and there is nothing to eat. Thinking of his magic grains of rice, he offers to cook. They laugh at him, ‘What will you cook when there is nothing to cook?’
They make a wood fire and put over it a pot of water to boil. While they’re distracted for a moment by a rustling in the bushes, he puts one of the magic grains in the pot. They sit around the boiling pot for close to an hour, at which time he opens the lid and it is full of rice. The herders are amazed. How did this happen?
‘I put rice in the pot,’ he says.
But the others don’t believe him.
‘We were sitting here the entire time; we never saw you put rice in the pot.’
They eat the rice, which has a most delicate flavor, and they won’t leave him alone. All night they badger him about how he made the rice, until finally in the wee hours of the morning he confesses everything: how he had made it to the Hidden Valley and gotten the magic rice.
At sunrise they insist he show them the way to the valley. They force him. So he leads them up above their grazing lands into the snow, and though he knows he is close he cannot find the way. Then he sees his jacket he left to mark the entrance to the Hidden Valley. Though it is pinned under the same stone, it is high on a rock face the size of a mountain—impossible even for a mountain goat to reach, let alone a human being.
Close-up of Darjeeling & Sikkim and the way to Beyul Demoshong
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Monarchical Machinations
With Tulshuk Lingpa and his swelling group of followers occupying the central monastery in the kingdom, sooner or later the king was bound to find out. The first communication between the two of them was actually initiated by Tulshuk Lingpa. To increase auspiciousness and remove obstacles in the way of opening the gate to Demoshong, Tulshuk Lingpa decided it was important to build five stupas of different colors: one at each of the four major caves sacred to Padmasambhava, and one at Tashiding. The one at the eastern cave was to be yellow; the western one, green; the northern, red; and the southern one, blue. The fifth stupa, at the auspicious center Tashiding itself, was to be white.
When Yab Maila—the elder brother of the big house in Yoksum—heard of Tulshuk Lingpa’s plan he warned the lama that if he went ahead and built the stupas, he’d get in trouble with the king. ‘We’ll have to ask the king’s permission first,’ he said. So Yab Maila went to the king (as the king’s regional tax collector he had easy access to the palace and the king) and asked for his permission, which the king refused. ‘If I have to build these stupas,’ the king said, ‘I’ll consult our own Sikkimese high lamas, and after such consultation I’ll build the stupas myself.’
When Tulshuk Lingpa got the news, he said, ‘The king’s ignorance on these matters will only cause him obstacles; if these stupas were built, Sikkim would be a better and stronger kingdom.’
Many to this day believe if the king had allowed Tulshuk Lingpa to build the stupas, Sikkim wouldn’t have been taken over by India and would have remained an independent kingdom.
Tulshuk Lingpa’s days were spent performing rituals and preparing for the journey to Beyul. Then one day he announced it was time to go to Mount Kanchenjunga.
Kunsang remembers it well. ‘When my father announced that it was time to go, there was tremendous commotion and of course nobody wanted to be left behind. “The work we are about to do,” my father said, “is very delicate. I cannot take everybody. If we have important news to relay, I will send someone back to tell it.”
‘The Lahaul people said, and they said it in their own language, “Rinpoche, we think only Lahaul people should go with you.”
‘But Tulshuk Lingpa said, “No, I’m taking some people from Lahaul, some from Bhutan and some from Sikkim.”
‘And so it was that Tulshuk Lingpa chose twelve of his closest disciples, mostly strong young men both from Himachal Pradesh and Sikkim, local guys like Atang Lama who knew the mountains well. He also said I should come.
‘But my father was crazy! As we were preparing to leave, we asked him what we should bring. “Nothing,” he said. “Only the clothes on your backs and a little tsampa.” When we protested about the distance we’d have to travel and the cold nights on the high snow slopes, he told us with confidence—which couldn’t help but rub off on us—not to worry. “We will have no troubles where we’re going,” he told us.
‘Though my father was serious about the work before him, he was laughing and joking with those he’d leave behind. They were excited too, even though they weren’t coming, even though they were secretly afraid that Tulshuk Lingpa and the rest of us—the Lucky Twelve—would all just disappear without a trace. They feared the gate to Beyul would open, the guardians would admit us and then close without a trace.
‘Just before we left, while my father was busy with something else, the lamas of Tashiding and Sinon pulled aside those of us who were chosen and gave us stern advice. “Be very careful with Tulshuk Lingpa,” they told us. “No matter what he says, no matter how crazy, just listen to him and never say no. Never contradict him; it could cause a bad omen. No matter what, just obey him. Guard him properly. Most important of all: don’t let him get lost.”
‘As we left Tashiding, my father was at the head. I can still see him to this day. He was wearing a white robe and a silk shirt. His hair was braided into two ponytails, which reached the small of his back. Clouds of sang, the pine bough incense, engulfed us all. For the first hundred yards down the hill our route was marked by buckets of water with flowers floating in them as a sign of auspiciousness, as is the custom. All of Tashiding accompanied us down the hill to the edge of the village, at which point Tulshuk Lingpa sent them back to the monastery. He didn’t want to draw the attention that hundreds of people passing through the center of the village would attract. They presented him with innumerable khatas, silk ceremonial scarves, for his safe journey.
‘“Go back to the monastery and wait there,” he told them. “The next time we’ll see each other might just be in Beyul Demoshong! The guardian spirits of the Hidden Land will be putting khatas around your necks in welcome!”’
They walked that day to Yoksum, the last village before the trail rises through the deep pine forest’s timberline, where it opens out into slopes of steep rock, deep snow, vast glaciers and peaks piercing the heavens.
‘When we arrived in Yoksum,’ Kunsang recalled, ‘things were immediately out of hand. News of our coming had
preceded us. The entire population was lining the way into the village, bowing and placing khatas around our necks. As we walked to Yab Maila’s house, where we were to spend the night, we passed through clouds of incense. Yab Maila’s house was packed with people, each more anxious than the next not to be left behind when Tulshuk Lingpa opened the way to the Hidden Valley.’
Yab Maila was a shrewd man. When he had approached the palace about Tulshuk Lingpa’s five stupas, he hadn’t done so as a devotee or sponsor of the lama but as a representative of the palace relaying a request from the district in which he was in charge of collecting taxes. The manner in which the palace turned the idea down made clear to him that opposition to Tulshuk Lingpa lurked in the palace, though at first he didn’t fully understand why. When his younger brother Yab Jantaray—who happened to be the head of palace security—met Tulshuk Lingpa and became his follower, he too kept his involvement with Tulshuk Lingpa secret. One couldn’t hope for a more trusted member of the palace to act as spy; as head of palace security, he was perfectly placed to know the palace’s thinking concerning Tulshuk Lingpa and his trip to Beyul. Since he was fully expecting to depart shortly from the kingdom of His Majesty the King for a kingdom far greater and not so far away, it appears he had no problem keeping his brothers informed as to what was brewing at the palace concerning Tulshuk Lingpa and his trip to Beyul.
Sikkimese lamas, especially those in the hierarchy around the king, felt that if Mayel Lyang were to be opened it was to be done by one of their own lamas and not a Tibetan.
The security people also had their concerns. This was early autumn, 1962, and the Chinese invasion of Tibet was a fresh and ongoing concern in everybody’s mind. The Chinese, who had long considered Sikkim part of their territory, were on the verge of betraying the brotherly relations with India by invading regions of the Himalayas under Indian control—a move that would plunge the two countries into the 1962 Indo-Chinese War, which began on 20 October. It was in this atmosphere that the security people started floating theories that Tulshuk Lingpa was really a Chinese spy looking for a new route to Tibet by which the Chinese could invade the kingdom.