by Thomas Shor
‘Precisely,’ said Saul. ‘What your lama was doing doesn’t seem to accord with the scriptural tradition.’
From a scholar’s and historian’s perspective, that seemed the ultimate condemnation. The implication was clearly that Tulshuk Lingpa was just plain mad.
‘So exactly what is this tradition?’ I asked. ‘What is the historical concept of Beyul?’
‘First of all, even before discussing scriptures,’ Saul said, straightening himself in his chair, ‘you have to picture Beyul from a Tibetan point of view. Imagine: you are up on the high plateau, with little vegetation. Everything is windswept. It’s not a very nice place to live. Then you go to Sikkim, and you have these fertile valleys and that’s where the idea of the beyul comes in. Look, there are these wonderful places where there is no Tibetan government busy killing other Buddhists because they don’t believe in this, that and the other. So this is the place to go.’
‘When do you find the first reference to Beyul Demoshong?’ I asked.
‘Sangye Lingpa was the first to mention it, as far as I know. He lived from 1340 to 1396. He was a great terton, the reincarnation of the second son of the great dharma king of Tibet, Trisong Deutsen, who is credited with inviting Padmasambhava to Tibet in the eighth century. In 1364, Sangye Lingpa discovered his greatest revealed text, the Lama Gongdu, which spans thirteen volumes. There we find the first mention of Beyul Demoshong, as well as many other hidden lands.
‘The next was Rigzin Godemchen, the founder of the Yangter, or Northern Treasure School. He is the one most closely associated with the terma tradition of Beyul Demoshong. He prepared all the keys. He is credited with actually opening the beyul. He visited other hidden lands as well. A contemporary of Sangye Lingpa, he was one of the greatest lingpas Tibet ever produced. He was born in Tibet in 1337 and died in Beyul Demoshong in 1409. His birth name was Noedup Gyaltsen. Only later did he acquire the name by which he is now known, which translates to the one with vulture feathers. Legend has it that at the age of twelve, three vulture feathers—though I wasn’t there and I suspect they were tufts of hair that only looked like vulture feathers—sprouted from his head. When he was twenty-five, five more appeared. He seems to have had a particular and peculiar connection with vultures his whole life. When he was in Beyul Demoshong, he took out terma from the central peak of Mount Kanchenjunga. He took out other terma in Beyul as well and sent back some of these terma, as well as sculptures and various other things, to Tibet, suspended from the necks of vultures.
‘Tibetan Buddhism is transmitted largely through lines of great teachers and their disciples. These lines seem to be forever branching and ramifying, creating occasion for quarrels. Even though the land both Sangye Lingpa—the guy who first wrote of Beyul Demoshong—and Rigzin Godemchen were concerned with was a land free from strife, it didn’t stop controversy from arising. Rigzin Godemchen’s first trip to Beyul Demoshong lasted eleven years. When he returned to tell the tale, the followers of Sangye Lingpa were mocking, “You’re full of shit, mate.” They didn’t believe he actually made it to the beyul.
‘The Fifth Dalai Lama, known as the “Great Fifth”, who lived some three centuries later, said of these two great figures of Nyingma Buddhism in his study of the Yangter tradition—in quite a diplomatic literary style, I must say—that there were “disputes” between the disciples of Rigzin Godemchen and Sangye Lingpa, and this caused “some” hostility. But clearly Rigzin Godemchen is credited with being the first to bring the Tibetan dharma to the people of Sikkim.’
‘If he “opened” the Hidden Land,’ I asked, ‘who did he bring the dharma to?’
‘When Rigzin Godemchen came to Beyul Demoshong, the Lepchas were there. These are the aboriginal people of Sikkim, who had been there for who knows how long. There are no records of their migration. He encountered people there of Tibetan stock as well, speaking Tibetan dialects. Even the ancestors of Phuntsok Namgyal, the first chogyal—or dharma king—of Sikkim were already there. I figure they were there by 1270 or so. In fact Sinon, the village just up the hill from Tashiding where Rigzin Godemchen settled, is the very village where the Sikkimese royal family is from. It was in Sinon that Rigzin Godemchen died.
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Now I’m really confused. I can understand—human nature being what it is—that when Rigzin Godemchen, a Tibetan, arrived in this new land and found only Lepchas living simply off the forest, worshipping the trees and mountains, in history it would be recorded that he’d “discovered” or in this case—“opened”—this land. After all, that is what we’re all taught about Christopher Columbus, who “discovered” America—even though America had been populated by the Native Americans for millennia and he encountered them upon arrival. This is what Columbus said: “It appears to me, that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants and I am of opinion that they would very readily become Christians, as they appear to have no religion.” It sounds like he could have gotten his inspiration from Rigzin Godemchen over a hundred years before.
‘Where was Columbus from,’ I asked. ‘Milan?’
‘Genoa.’
‘OK. Say when Columbus arrived in the New World, he found people from a neighboring city, say from Rome, and he ended up living in a town that had been populated by Romans for 200 years. I’d imagine he would have had a much more difficult time claiming to have “discovered” the place. Just what was Godemchen’s conception of who these Tibetans were?’
‘The traditional view,’ Saul said, ‘was that the Tibetans in the beyul were a lost group, and that they had special powers. The Lepchas had been there since time immemorial. They were the true people, the dakinis and dakas of Beyul Demoshong. The Lepchas were considered pawo and pamo, spiritual heroes and heroines.’
‘So they weren’t considered physical people?’ I asked.
‘They were considered to be slightly magical. They were people but had incredible spiritual accomplishments. This is what Lhatsun Chenpo says in his works. Everything that grew in Beyul was medicine. The water was medicinal. The pawo and pamo were considered natural healers, probably because of indigenous Lepcha medicine and the knowledge they had of the local flora. This is a knowledge the Lepchas have retained to this day.
‘One time I was walking with this Lepcha chap from Sinon,’ Saul said, laughing, ‘and he took a piece of a plant and stuffed it up his nose. I said, “What’s that?” and he said he had a headache coming on. They know a lot about medicine.
‘Just imagine what it was like for Rigzin Godemchen when he saw the Lepchas who weren’t busy killing each other but were peaceful and quiet, and plucked their medicine from the nearest bush. Now, of course, the Lepchas have been marginalized. Actually, the writing was on the wall from day one. With the founding of the Sikkimese kingdom, the Lepchas that resisted were enslaved. The rest, simply wanting peace, moved off the good land and were eventually pushed into the most difficult and inaccessible mountainsides. That’s why the Lepchas, who called themselves the Matanchi Rongkup, or Mother’s Beloved Children, became known as the Rong, meaning the Ravine Folk. The first known usage of that term dates to 1735, and that is a quote from something that happened in 1712.
‘Just imagine coming to such a very peaceful climate away from all the troubles of Tibetan politics and religious political strife. You end up in this place that is completely peaceful, with all these flowers that no one’s ever seen before and all these foods and medicines. It was a beautiful paradise to these Tibetans coming from central Tibet, where there is nothing to eat apart from raw meat. For them, it probably was a beyul, a hidden land. No one ever knew it existed. It didn’t exist in the geography of ancient Tibet. It was just classed as monyul, along with all those places in the south. Since the Tibetan Empire Period, there had been this belief in these wonderful places in the Himalayas, which were so fertile, and then this got approximated into the beyul tradition.
‘The Himalayas have always been places where people have run to to get away from pers
ecution. Like Bhutan and Sikkim, many of the Himalayan kingdoms were established by refugees from Tibet. Just imagine arriving from strife-ridden Tibet. You cross a high pass and down into the green valleys, and come to a place like Tashiding—especially Tashiding because the mountains are so striking, dominating the whole region. It’s like, “Wow”. This is a hill of jewels, with all the flowers growing on it. The vegetation and flowers we see today must be nothing next to what they were.
‘I travelled north from Sinon for five hours on foot to go to Palung Ri to find the ruins of the monastery Rigzin Godemchen built in the fourteenth century. I had never seen trees like this in Sikkim. I’m talking about huge trees the width of this room, with moss hanging down. When we went up there, we saw red pandas and wild fowl. I’m quite an avid bird watcher, and I saw five or six species of birds I’d never seen before in Sikkim. I’ve never seen anything like it. Orchids were growing right out of the ground! Huge trees and thick undergrowth. There wasn’t a road—not even a path. At one point we were just holding on to the side of a mountain. There was this tree that had fallen and we were walking on it when it just snapped. We almost fell 100 feet to our deaths. This is what the entire kingdom must have been like.’
‘All of this is fine,’ I said. ‘They came from strife-worn Tibet, found this beautiful natural place to their south and wanted it. They called it a beyul to fit it into their mythical structure, and founded a kingdom probably to justify the subjugation of a people. What is the story behind the actual founding of the Kingdom of Sikkim?’
‘Ah,’ Saul said, ‘this is a particular interest of mine, and the subject of most of my research. The jury is still out on what actually happened but the official story is well known. It was over two centuries after Rigzin Godemchen first opened the beyul that three lamas from Tibet—Nadak Sempa Chenpo, Lhatsun Chenpo and Kathog Kuntu Zangpo—opened three of the gates of the beyul in order to fulfill a prophecy by founding a kingdom based on the Tibetan dharma.
‘The story of Nadak Sempa Chenpo was written by his son. Nadak was like, “Remember me?” He was talking to the gatekeepers of the beyul. “Remember in the time of Padmasambhava, when he asked you to guard the way to the beyul until the right guy arrived? Well, here I am!” He ritually cleansed himself, burnt some sang and did some rituals. As it goes with these rituals with local deities, you lure them in. You entice them by offering them chang—the local brew—and then you get them, saying, “Now you’ve got to do what I say: let me in!” And he got in.
‘Lhatsun Chenpo’s story is the best. We have this from a book written in 1908 by the king of Sikkim, Chogyal Thutob Namgyal, and his wife the queen. The book is called The History of Sikkim. The fact that it was the royals themselves writing the account makes it suspect, as far as reflecting historical truth is concerned, but it contains the clearest, most comprehensive and most-quoted rendition of the “official” founding myth.
‘It seems that when the third lama Kathog was wandering in the mountains trying to find his way through the gate into the Hidden Land, he came to a ragged wall of impenetrable rocky cliffs. He was forced to retrace his steps. He came to a place called Nyam Gyatsal, which translates to Grove of Joy, a beautiful meadow where Lhatsun Chenpo and his followers happened to be resting after his arduous journey from Tibet. When Kathog told Lhatsun that he’d have to retrace his steps because there was no way to penetrate the cliffs and precipices ahead of them which looked like the ‘gates of heaven’, Lhatsun told him that the opening of this gate was allotted to himself, and that Kathog would have to move on and find his own gate.
‘Lhatsun and his followers ascended the slopes until they reached the base of the same rocky cliffs and, like Kathog, they could discern no path through them. The difference was that Lhatsun was the one prophesied to open this gate. Lhatsun used his magic siddha powers, and flew over the cliffs to the top of the mountain Kabru. Or perhaps he wandered away from his disciples and disappeared into a low-hanging cloud. At any rate he disappeared and, as days went by with no sign of their master, the disciples concluded he had perished amongst the high, wind-torn cliffs. By the seventh day, they had completed building a stupa of stone in his honor and were preparing to leave when they heard above the blowing of the wind Lhatsun’s thighbone trumpet. So they waited on the mountain, praying. After three weeks their master returned as miraculously as he had left, having opened the way to the beyul. They were so moved by their faith in him that they followed him along a path that had been cut in the cliff face and went with him to Beyul Demoshong. They passed through Dzongri on their way to Yoksum. Because of the time Lhatsun Chenpo spent in the high snow and the cold he suffered, his skin is always depicted as blue.’
The day before our discussion I had received a book I had ordered from Oxford’s Bodleian Library and its vast seven-storey underground repository of books. The book was titled Round Kangchenjunga by Douglas
W. Freshfield. First published in 1903, it recounts a journey the author took around that great massif at the turn of the twentieth century. In one remarkable passage he locates the cliffs from which Lhatsun Chenpo opened the western gate of the beyul as just above Tseram: the place Tulshuk Lingpa looked down at from the top of the Kang La Pass and said they’d have to travel to in order to find the very same gate. Explaining to Saul the relevance of Tseram for Tulshuk Lingpa’s story, I fished the Xerox I’d made of the passage from my bag and read him the following passage:
After a brief halt on the meadow in front of the huts of Tseram, we crossed the river … A woodland path led us upward through a forest where the tints of autumnal foliage mingled with the dark green of the firs … and [we] found ourselves on a brow overlooking a lovely glade at the entrance to the long side-valley up which lay our course to the Kang La … Rocky banks, clothed in Rhododendrons and small bushes, enclosed lawns of smooth turf; clear springs formed pools in the hollows; the surrounding woods made a pleasing background. Late at night, when the dull mists at last cleared off, we saw in the moonlight an icy peak, one of the south-western spurs of Junnu; at early dawn we had a beautiful vision, framed between the slopes of the Yalung Valley, of the distant ranges above the Arun. Seen through an atmosphere suffused with the first sunbeams, their forested ridges lost all local color and glowed with the blues and purples of aërial distance. It was a picture which made me long for an artist to make some notes that might recall its loveliness.
The charm of this spot did not escape the native travellers who preceded us. Local tradition has it that it was visited by Lhatsun, the introducer of Buddhism into Sikhim in the seventeenth century, and the Saint is said to have given it the name of Namga Tshal or the Grove of Joy. According to the somewhat credulous Babu, ‘Lhatsun, when first coming to visit these Himalayan regions, spent a few days here, struck with the fine scenery and the spaciousness of the valley. The fatigues of his long and perilous journey from the northern solitudes of Tibet had broken down his health, but the few days that he spent here greatly restored him, not only by the delightful scenery of the place, but more especially by the comforts that he obtained both religious and physical.’ So much restored was the Lama that, according to tradition, he flew up through the air to the top of Kabru and spent a fortnight there. Would we might have been privileged to perform similar feats of ‘volitation.’
I noticed a glint of wonder in Saul’s eyes. ‘What do you make of such stories,’ I asked, ‘and stories of flying monks? Do you think he really flew?’ ‘Many strange things happen in Tibet,’ Saul answered. ‘There is a lot that we do not understand—and a lot of these stories are constructed a lot later.’
‘At any rate,’ I said, ‘the three lamas met in Yoksum, right?’
‘Yes,’ Saul said, ‘In fact, Yoksum means “the three great ones” in Lepcha in commemoration of these three lamas meeting there in order to found a new Buddhist kingdom. But Lhatsun stopped the other two from founding the kingdom then and there. “We three are lamas,” he’s reputed to have said. “We need a layma
n to rule this country.”
‘Probably a wise decision,’ Saul said chuckling, ‘to pick a local layman so as not to be perceived as an occupying force. Remember, Buddhism was a foreign religion. This was a religious—or spiritual—as well as a temporal takeover. Remember also, I’m now telling you the official self-justifying myth, the one you’ll find—perhaps not in such detail—in any number of tourist brochures.
‘Lhatsun pointed out the many prophecies about the “Four Avatars” that would found the new kingdom for the benefit of the dharma. He reportedly quoted one particular prophecy, which was given by Rinchen Lingpa, who died in 1375. It said, “One named Phuntsok from the direction of Gang will appear.”
‘So Lhatsun deputed a hermit to lead a group to find this place called Gang and find this man called Phuntsok living there in order to bring him back to Yoksum to become king. While Lhatsun and his disciples stayed in the hills above Yoksum meditating, the group he’d sent off had many adventures especially since they apparently had no idea where the place called Gang might be. The story has it that they finally made it to Gangtok, then a small village of no particular importance, which was “the same as the prophesied Gang”. This I find suspect for a couple of reasons. First of all, gang tok means hilltop, so it could have been anywhere. I have reason to believe that they actually went to Sinon, just up the mountain from Tashiding, which was a Tibetan colony at the time. Anyway, in this place called Gangtok they found Phuntsok Namgyal milking his cows. Phuntsok invited the party into his house and gave them some milk to drink, which the party considered especially auspicious. When they told Phuntsok why they were there, to take him to Yoksum and make him king, imagine how lucky he felt. Milking a cow one minute, and the founder of a royal line the next!