A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality

by Thomas Shor

  With this background it was no wonder that when Yab Maila saw the crowds converging on his house with Tulshuk Lingpa at their lead, he began to panic. Though it was mainly villagers streaming into his house, there were some he didn’t recognize. They could have been spies from the palace. He managed to pull Tulshuk Lingpa aside and warn him.

  Tulshuk Lingpa took the situation, which was out of his control, and in his typically tulshuk manner turned it around. He sat cross-legged on the throne that had been set up for him in the main room. So many people were packed into the room that not another could have possibly fit, a fact which was attested to by the number of people pressed against each other at the doors to the room. The buzz in the room was palpable as anticipation grew of the words Tulshuk Lingpa would utter concerning his imminent opening of Beyul.

  But instead of speaking of Beyul, Tulshuk Lingpa started giving a very long-winded and exhaustive lecture on arcane points of Buddhist doctrine that had the exact effect he desired as the electric excitement in the room began to dissipate and the eyes of his audience began to glaze over. The press of people at the door began to let up as some of those sitting inside grew tired and left. After two hours, there was room for people to stretch their legs. After three hours, some were even dozing in the back and after four the room was almost empty. In the end everyone but those who were travelling with Tulshuk Lingpa had left, including any that might have been spies. Everyone thought it must have been only a rumor that Tulshuk Lingpa was going to open the Hidden Valley, which their ancestors had been talking about for countless generations. Otherwise, how could he be giving such a boring talk on the eve of his departure describing the thirty-seven bodhisattva vows and the ten stages the bodhisattva goes through on his way to Buddhahood, including the levels of indefinite transformation and expanding reality?

  Yab Maila gave Tulshuk Lingpa and his disciples a huge dinner. Then he gave them sugar, salt and tea to add to their rations of tsampa. He also gave them quilts, and ropes with which to strap them to their backs.

  Yab Maila used the opportunity of Tulshuk Lingpa’s going to the outhouse to try to give the disciples more provisions but everybody protested. ‘If we take more, Tulshuk Lingpa will scold us!’ Then Yab Maila spoke confidentially to the disciples. ‘You are twelve people,’ he said, ‘You hold all the responsibility. Look after Tulshuk Lingpa carefully. Don’t let him get lost. He might try to wander off. He could hurt himself. So you must watch him closely. But remember, no matter what, don’t contradict him.’

  When Tulshuk Lingpa returned, Yab Maila suggested that since so many people in the village wanted to go with them—and especially since some of them could be spies—they should leave before sunrise.

  Tulshuk Lingpa and his twelve disciples sneaked out stealthily by the light of the moon to begin their journey into the high, celestial mountains.

  By noon, they were met by a nomad by the name of Tashi who had heard of their coming and had come down to greet them below the nomad encampment of Dzongri. He brought them up to Dzongri and to a cave, which he had already prepared for them. He gave them a meal with butter and curd—everything fine that a nomad herder could offer.

  In the morning the herder came up to Kunsang, the youngest in the group, and showed him his sling. It was a simple device made of two lengths of cord with a cradle for a small stone in the middle. One swung the device, released one of the two cords, and sent the stone flying.

  ‘Why are you showing me this?’ he asked the nomad.

  ‘We use the sling when our animals get lost,’ the nomad explained. ‘When they get lost, they also get scared. When they see the stone fly and hear it smashing to the ground, they come.

  ‘You are heading high into the mountains,’ he continued, ‘and your father is quite crazy. He will take you to faraway places at the edge of which no one goes. You may lose your sense of direction, which is easy in the high mountains, especially when the slope you’re on pierces the clouds. Keep this sling with you, and if you get lost send a stone high in the air and the others will know where you are. If you are in a cloud and they cannot see it, when it falls to the ground it will make a sound. After it falls to the ground start whistling, and then the others will find you.’

  He taught Kunsang how to use the sling.

  When it was time for them to leave, the nomad offered to come with them. ‘I am familiar with all the ways,’ he told Tulshuk Lingpa. ‘With me you won’t get lost.’

  ‘No,’ Tulshuk Lingpa said. ‘You don’t have to show me the way. Though I’ve never been there, I know it already. It is better you stay here and tend to your flock.’

  As they were leaving, the nomad gave them each some cloves of garlic to suck on if the high altitude started to affect them. He gave them this advice: ‘Don’t get separated from each other; you might get lost. We nomads are acquainted with this area but even we have the fear of getting lost. Sometimes when our animals wander off we cannot find them for two or three days, so vast are the slopes of Kanchenjunga.’

  They started to climb up the mountain beyond Dzongri. When the herder’s encampment was out of view, Tulshuk Lingpa stopped and looked over the vast terrain of sharp mountains piercing the deep blue-black sky of high altitude. Plumes of snow waved from the mountain peaks like flags. There was nothing to indicate that human beings had ever trod there before.

  ‘From this point on,’ Tulshuk Lingpa said, ‘we will have no more contact with the outside world. We’ll encounter no more human beings. From now on we will only have contact with the guardian spirits of Demoshong.’

  As Kunsang said of that moment, ‘We were happy—happy, and a little afraid.’

  For the twelve, it was a defining moment of their journey. Inside each, excitement was vying with fear. As they climbed higher, some of them got headaches due to the altitude. So they untied the garlic they had tucked into their belts and sucked on it.

  After some time, they stopped for a meal of tea and tsampa. Huge boulders towered over them, and numerous caves honeycombed the landscape. They were tired from the climb and rested a while. Then they continued higher. The slope became steeper, the boulders even larger and the caves were more numerous. Tulshuk Lingpa went inside one cave and said the caverns and passages from that cave led to Nepal. After an hour or two of climbing, Tulshuk Lingpa stopped. They didn’t know why, whether he was tired or had some other business. They were always looking out for his unusual behavior.

  ‘You all think we are going to Beyul,’ he said, ‘but Beyul is not so near; it is very far from here. So don’t think we’ll reach Beyul so soon. It is very far.

  ‘I will stay here,’ he told them. ‘While I am here, I want you to split into four groups and go out in the four directions. Spread out and see what you can find. You will go in four directions and you will see four different things. Notice anything unusual, and then report back here to me. If you find anything, bring it to me.’

  At the beginning they didn’t split up. It was too steep and there was only one way to go. They recalled the warnings they’d received before leaving Tashiding, and they were afraid of leaving Tulshuk Lingpa alone, fearful that he would wander off and get lost. So they took a few steps, turned to make sure Tulshuk Lingpa hadn’t moved, then took a few more. Thus they went until the rock Tulshuk Lingpa was sitting on was engulfed by a cloud. They reached a flattish area where they could go in different directions and fulfill Tulshuk Lingpa’s request.

  As they were forming groups, Namdrol saw the sling in Kunsang’s belt. ‘What is this thing?’ he asked. ‘You didn’t have it before. Where did you get it?’

  Kunsang told how the nomad had given it to him to use if he got lost.

  Namdrol said, ‘Oh, this is a very good thing. I will take it from you.’

  ‘No,’ Kunsang said, ‘I won’t give it to you.’

  Namdrol was a grown man; Kunsang was in his late teens.

  ‘You are only a boy,’ Namdrol said. ‘You don’t have the strength to throw this thi
ng. It is useless in your hands.’ He snatched it from Kunsang and fastened it under his belt.

  The landscape they found themselves in was so vast that they were afraid they might really get lost. So they picked up two stones each to hit against each other to make a noise.

  Namdrol said, ‘Now we will split into groups. If you get lost, start knocking these stones together and we will find you. If that doesn’t work, whistle. If that doesn’t work, I will use the sling.’

  They formed groups, went in separate directions and did get lost.

  Kunsang was in a group of three. After maybe an hour of climbing, he stepped behind a huge rock to pee. When he was through the other two had left him behind. They simply disappeared.

  He called out but there was no reply. He knocked the stones together but to no avail. He was alone. Then he heard whistling ahead of him from a side valley he was certain no one of their group had gone up, so he thought it must be nomads. He walked a short way up the valley. Since he could see nothing but rocky slopes rising to snow and a glacier at the head of the valley, he could tell no one was there. He suddenly realized it must be spirits trying to lead him astray.

  Kunsang wasn’t the first to hear such whistling at high altitudes that issued from no human lips. Sven Hedin, who travelled through Tibet in the early part of the twentieth century and wrote about it in his book My Life as an Explorer, quoted a Chinese traveler of a thousand years earlier, ‘You hear almost always shrill whistlings, or loud shouts; and when you try to discover whence they come, you are terrified at finding nothing. It very often happens that men get lost, for that place is the abode of evil spirits.’

  Stumbling back down the valley, Kunsang’s thinking became confused. He lost all notion of the direction from which he had come. Then he noticed the amazing stones lying on the ground: flat stones, round stones, white stones, stones shaped like snakes of different colors, stones of shapes he’d never seen. He recalled that his father had told them to report back on what they discovered and, if they found anything significant, to bring it to him. Kunsang had never seen such beautiful stones in his whole life, such beautiful shapes and colors. He thought of home in Pangao and Simoling, so far away. He was certain with stones like those lying around in such abundance, Beyul must be close. He picked up some of the stones and started filling his pockets.

  He had already lost all sense of direction. When the sun passed behind an icy mountain towering over him and plunged him suddenly in the cool shade of evening, he realized he had lost sense of time as well.

  He was visited again by fear. He banged two stones together. But there was no reply. He was feeling tired and alone, more alone than he’d ever felt before. He started crying. He was lost without an idea of where to go. He wished he had a compass. He thought if he had a compass he’d be all right.

  He started back in the direction from which he thought he might have come, knocking his stones together the entire time. He realized he was completely lost. He was getting cold.

  Then he saw a stone thrown by Namdrol’s sling arcing through the sky. He walked towards it and then he saw others descending from other directions, converging on the same place. They had also been lost. Everyone was banging stones together and replying to the other’s knocks until they all converged on Namdrol. Everybody was there, and they were very happy. Night was advancing, so they started back to find Tulshuk Lingpa. They were afraid that maybe Tulshuk Lingpa had gotten lost. They thought that maybe when they got there he would be gone—gone to Beyul.

  But when they reached the place where they had left Tulshuk Lingpa, he was sitting on the same rock as where they’d left him. Soon it was night. They started making a fire for tea. But Tulshuk Lingpa said, ‘It is dark now. Remember Chatral Rinpoche warned us not to make fires at night or we’d risk attracting snow leopards or, even worse, spirits.’ Tulshuk Lingpa pulled out the human thighbone horn Chatral had given them, and he blew into it.

  They dispersed to various caves, wrapped themselves in the quilts given to them by Yab Maila and went to sleep.

  The next morning they awoke early because of the cold and made a fire and started boiling tea and preparing tsampa. They saw that Tulshuk Lingpa was some distance off, writing.

  When the tea and tsampa were ready, they offered some to Tulshuk Lingpa but he wasn’t interested. He was busy writing something down. He didn’t ask what they had seen in the four directions; he also didn’t say what he saw. He was busy writing, and they left him alone.

  Kunsang remembers how they sat some distance off, drinking tea and eating tsampa and watching Tulshuk Lingpa in the distance, writing. Namdrol and Mipham were discussing how it must have been that when he sent them to the four directions, he was sending them far away because he knew he was going to be visited by a dakini who would give him a ter. When a dakini comes to a lama, no one must see them.

  When Tulshuk Lingpa had finished writing he came over to them. ‘The work is done, the work is done—the work is done!’ he said. ‘When Khandro Yeshe Tsogyal came to me years ago in Lahaul, she said we would meet again. She appeared to me yesterday while you were all away. She told me where we have to go.

  ‘Come on,’ Tulshuk said. ‘Let’s go.’

  They doused the fire and packed their things. Now that they were getting close to the gate, they were all afraid.

  They followed Tulshuk Lingpa up a steep valley that had snow at its highest reaches. They climbed through the snow until they reached the top of the Kang La, a pass that forms the border with Nepal at over 16,000 feet.

  Tulshuk Lingpa pointed down the Nepal side to a tiny patch of relatively flat ground covered in green in an otherwise precipitous landscape. At its center a single nomad tent was pitched next to a cascading mountain stream that issued directly from a glacier.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s where Khandro Yeshe Tsogyal told me we must go. It is from there we will depart for Beyul. She even told me the name of the place: Tseram.’

  Atang Lama, who was from Tashiding and Sinon, became weak in his knees. He knew those mountains well. He knew the name of the encampment on the Nepal side.

  The excitement they all felt was tinged with the fear that arises when bravado nears its test. With wildly beating hearts, those who knew how to negotiate steep slopes were already scoping out the route to Tseram when Tulshuk Lingpa—as if to prove his tulshuk nature on the eve of such a discovery—suddenly announced, ‘Now we will return to Tashiding. The time isn’t right for the opening. The work we have come to these high mountains for is complete at this time. We have other work to do. Let us now return.’

  Shocked as they were, they were all secretly relieved in a way that can probably only be experienced by someone in their position, by someone about to leave everything, forever.

  When they passed through Dzongri, they met the nomad. Kunsang took the sling from Namdrol and returned it to him. ‘I told the nomad that his sling was very useful,’ Kunsang told me. ‘I said, “If it weren’t for your sling we would all still be lost on the mountain.” The nomad laughed. “I knew this was going to happen,” the nomad said, “I knew you were being led by a myonpa, a crazy person. That’s why I gave it to you.” We all got a good laugh.’

  They waited until night fell in the forests above Yoksum before descending to Yab Maila’s house. Though he had been sticking close to home awaiting word of the opening, ready to climb to the snowline and beyond, Yab Maila was not surprised to see them return. Such are the ways of the tertons: even when they leave, never to return, they return two days later. What to do?

  They slipped out of Yoksum early the next morning. When they passed through the village of Tashiding late that afternoon on their way to the Tashiding monastery, they created quite a stir. Nothing could dissuade believers in Tulshuk Lingpa from their faith in him. But there were others who thought all along that Tulshuk Lingpa was a mad lama; and for them, to see him and The Twelve returning after so short a time from their journey to forever only made them firmer
in their convictions. It set their tongues wagging as they watched the intrepid mountaineers and their lama pass; it also set the rumor mill turning. Word of their return reached the monastery before they did, and it didn’t take much longer for the news to reach Gangtok and the palace.

  The situation demanded a public appearance of the master, and that night Tulshuk Lingpa sat in the Tashiding Monastery surrounded by his many disciples and curious detractors. No doubt, there were also some spies working for the king among them. The atmosphere was electric.

  For Kunsang, this trip to the snow mountains was a tremendous experience.

  ‘Being alone on that mountain,’ he confided in me, ‘frightened me to the core. Yet even if I were lost, never to be found, somehow I knew it wouldn’t be the end. Maybe it was because I was just a kid. But remember, we were on the verge of another world. My father had sent us out to report on whatever we found. When I found those strange rocks lying around me, I was sure it was an important discovery. I knew it meant I was close. That’s why I filled my pockets with them. Yet here we were back in Tashiding. My father was sitting before his disciples ready, I was assuming, to report on what had happened and he had never once asked any of us what we had found or what happened to us when he sent us away. Those rocks were still weighing in my pockets. So I pulled them out of my pocket and showed them to him.

  ‘When my father saw what I was pulling out of my pockets to show him so earnestly, he burst out laughing. “It wasn’t for these stones that we went up there!” he boomed.

  ‘Then it struck me that when my father sent us in four directions it was the same as when he gave his speech in Yoksum and made all the people go away or fall asleep. He had done the same to us, and I was struck by the humor of my father’s tulshuk ways. By sending us to the four directions, it might be—it must be—that when he sent us far away, he knew a dakini would come. He must have known Khandro Yeshe Tsogyal was coming. He sent us in all directions just to get rid of us, so he could be alone with the dakini. No one else was supposed to see her. We were sent far, very far away—for nothing! It was just the same as in Yoksum.