by Thomas Shor
Thrashing the snow like a dog, his hands bent like claws, the Lachung Lama dug. He didn’t stop until he found Lama Tashi who was bleeding from a gash above his eye, his left hand bent at right angles to the arm. He was in so much pain that he was in shock and barely conscious.
A loose page of one of the pechas that had been strapped to Tulshuk Lingpa’s back appeared out of the dense fog and slapped the Lachung Lama on the face in a great gust of wind. Following where it came from with his eyes, he saw more pages. They had been mixed with snow by the avalanche and were waving in the wind. He leapt down the loose slope and clawed at the snow. It was by following the density of pages that he found Tulshuk Lingpa.
Tulshuk Lingpa’s body showed no external mark of the accident. As the Lachung Lama dug him out, Tulshuk Lingpa’s legs were crossed. He was slumped over, his eyes closed and frosted with snow—and he was dead.
Uncovering but not moving the body, shocked by the magnitude of his discovery, he fell back in the soft snow and stared at the leaves of the pechas. They were blowing in the foggy gusts of wind, sliding by on the snow and disappearing into the steep grey distance.
The Lachung Lama ran down the slope to get help. He went to where the others were waiting and gave them the news. Then together they went up to care for the living and offer homage to the dead.
At first they couldn’t tell if Yeshe was dead or alive. The young woman, who had seen the vision of Beyul green and replete with waterfalls only that morning, lay on the snow at the edge of death. The snow beneath her head was red with blood. They wrapped her head in an effort to stop the bleeding. Then, stripping Tulshuk Lingpa of his heavy sheepskin coat, they rolled her in it.
Taking off their own coats, they wrapped Lama Tashi in them. They wrapped the two in whatever hats and scarves they had to keep them warm through the night, for evening was falling and both were hovering too close to the edge of death to be brought immediately down the mountain.
So they left the three of them there, the two living keeping half unconscious night vigil over their dead guide. Lama Tashi slipped in and out of consciousness all night. He thought the two motionless bodies beside him were dead and that for sure he was dying.
He awoke to the rays of the sun striking him from behind a distant peak. Shock soon gave way to pain. His arm was badly broken and his fractured ribs pained with every breath. The continual loss of blood kept him on the edge of consciousness while the shock of the avalanche kept him from remembering what had happened. He didn’t know why he was lying on that snow slope with his lama lying dead on one side and Yeshe hovering near death on the other.
When the sun was slightly higher in the sky and their companions reached them, Yeshe was in far worse shape than Lama Tashi. She had bled badly all night and they could hardly bring her to consciousness. They gave Lama Tashi something to eat, hoisted the three of them on their backs and carried them down to the cave to rest. Then they headed down the mountain. That night they slept where they had stopped for the night when they were coming up. The next day they reached Tseram.
The hundreds of people camped at Tseram hadn’t heard any news of the expedition since they left three weeks earlier. In a heightened state of excitement, they were awaiting word that the way was open, speculating on whether any of them had had the patience to postpone their entering to tell the others back in Yoksum and at Tashiding.
The sight of the column of climbers wearily descending to Tseram, three of them being carried on others’ backs, was enough to set off a collective wail as the cast of their heads let it be known that tragedy had struck.
When they realized Lama Tashi and Yeshe were injured and that the third one being carried was Tulshuk Lingpa and that he was dead, the cries echoing off the surrounding mountains made it sound as if the mountains themselves were crying.
As Dorje Wangmo, Tinley’s mother-in-law, told me, ‘Only the children weren’t crying because they were innocent.’
Tulshuk Lingpa died in his forty-ninth year, a particularly dangerous year by Tibetan reckoning. In Tibetan it is known as a kak year, a multiple of twelve plus one. He died on the twenty-fifth day of the third month of the Tibetan calendar, corresponding to Saturday, 18 May 1963.
Death ceremonies for a high lama are very elaborate. For seven days they chanted over the body. They offered incense and butter lamps, and prayed continually. On the seventh day Kunsang, his only son, put a flame to his father’s body and it was cremated.
Some of Tulshuk Lingpa’s ashes were mixed with earth and formed into a stupa at the spot. Some were scattered on the mountain. The rest Kunsang brought to some of the holy places in India—the Ganga River in Banaras, Allahabad (where the Ganga and Jamuna rivers meet) and to the mouth of the Ganga south of Calcutta.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
The Aftermath
‘The only paradise is paradise lost.’ —Marcel Proust
‘When the death ceremony was completed and they cremated the body,’ Dorje Wangmo, Tinley’s mother-in-law from Bhutan, told me, ‘it was like a bomb blast. Everyone just dispersed in every direction, without following one another.’ Those from Bhutan returned to Bhutan, those from Sikkim travelled via Dzongri and Yoksum to their villages there.
Dorje Wangmo’s husband wanted to return to Bhutan but she said no, and insisted they go on a pilgrimage. So they travelled together with a few monks west towards Mount Everest. In a place called Walung they found an abandoned monastery where they stayed for six or seven months performing pujas and religious fasting. To return to Sikkim they had to sell everything they had, first their meager jewelry and finally their clothes—everything but what they wore on their backs. When they reached Singtam, a market town in Sikkim on the Teesta River, they had nothing left and could proceed no further. So they collected wild fruits in the forest, laid out a cloth in the market and sold them.
When Dorje Wangmo returned to Sikkim, she was forty years old and pregnant with her first and only child, who was later to become Tinley’s wife. She has always considered her daughter a gift from Mount Kanchenjunga.
‘There was one couple,’ she told me, ‘a monk and nun from Bhutan, who decided to attempt opening the door to Beyul by themselves. So when the cremation was through, they carried a sack of tsampa, bedrolls and tin plates with them. They followed the tracks left in the snow by those descending with the dead and injured, and after two days they reached the cave where Tulshuk Lingpa and his followers had lived for three weeks.’
Dorje Wangmo started laughing at the recollection, and her eyes got a faraway mirthful look, sparkling with possibility.
‘From there,’ she said, ‘they disappeared. No one knows what happened to them. Their plates and bedrolls were found in the cave but they disappeared without a trace. Perhaps they made it. We’ll never know.’
Dorje Wangmo, Gangtok Sikkim
Atang Lama was in his early thirties when he first met Tulshuk Lingpa. He was seventy-four when I met him. He had grown up in Sinon and also lived in Tashiding.
‘That first trip to Kanchenjunga,’ he told me, ‘after which everybody thought Tulshuk Lingpa had failed and the rumors started to fly that he was a spy, was the beginning of difficulties. I was on that first trip along with Géshipa, Kunsang and the others. What struck me most was that the khandro had told him in a vision where to go and when he looked down the Kang La Pass into Nepal—and remember, he’d never been there before—he knew the name of the place was Tseram. I was a local boy so I knew. Just when others began to doubt, I knew first-hand the lama’s powers. What the others didn’t know was that he was only finding the way. That was the purpose of the first trip. Though people spoke ill of him, they were only the people who didn’t know him. Whoever came to see him became his followers. Such was the power of his personality. I saw him put his footprint in that stone. It was as if a fire was burning. But then the guy from the king said, “No, I haven’t seen it.”
‘I followed Tulshuk Lingpa to Nepal when he fled Sikkim. I was fr
om a good family. We had a lot of land. Though we didn’t plant that year, because we were going, we didn’t have to sell our land either. I was in Tseram when news came of his death. When those of us who were from Sikkim were returning home after the body was cremated, we hid in the forest during the day and travelled only by night.
‘We weren’t afraid of meeting a tiger in the jungle ,’ he said with a laugh, ‘only of meeting other human beings. We sneaked back to our villages because we were afraid of being caught by the king, whom we had disobeyed by going. He had warned us not to go. Our fields were lying fallow. When we returned, you can be sure we were subject to the ridicule of our neighbors who had thought Tulshuk Lingpa mad all along.’
There was something in Atang Lama’s tone as he recounted this failure to reach Beyul—the way he described sneaking through the forest by night and hiding during the day—that was tinged with embarrassment, as one might have while recounting a childhood prank.
‘In those days,’ he told me, ‘the king would come once or twice a year to Tashiding, and the next time he came he held a public meeting and chided us.
‘“Don’t go off chasing after every lama that offers you a ladder to the moon from the top of a mountain,” the king told us. “It is very cold up there, and you could have died. When Tenzing Norgay climbed Mount Everest, he knew what he was doing. He had the proper boots; he had the proper clothes and equipment. The only miracle is that more of you didn’t lose your lives. If the way opens, why should only you from the villages go? I would also be going, believe me! Next time listen to me, and don’t go chasing after mad lamas.”
‘That’s what the king told us the first time he visited Tashiding after we returned. He also told us that we were then forgiven, and the matter was dropped.’
Atang Lama, age 74, Tashiding, 2005
Baichung Babu was another Sikkimese who went with Tulshuk Lingpa. He was in his late twenties at the time; so he was in his early seventies when I met him. His name often came up when I spoke with the Sikkimese followers of Tulshuk Lingpa. It was not easy to find him, though I did track him down following trails and paths through villages in West Sikkim. When I located his house, I was informed that I’d find him somewhere up the steep slope working on the road. I climbed a trail until I came upon a gravel road under construction. I followed it until I came upon a small gang of boys working on the road with a white-haired man pounding a huge boulder in the roadbed with a maul, trying to crack it. The man was Baichung Babu, and he was the foreman.
It was a brilliant, clear day. Mount Kanchenjunga was glistening to the north not so far away, with its white slopes sharp as a jagged razor piercing the deep blue sky and a plume of snow streaming from its very peak. Baichung Babu was powerfully built, especially for an elderly grey-haired man. He was putting his entire body into cracking the huge boulder. As I approached, I wondered what it had been like for him to return to his daily life and to live the intervening forty-plus years within sight of the mountain into which he had expected to disappear.
If only that crack had opened forty years earlier and he had entered a land free from toil, he wouldn’t be putting his effort into cracking this boulder. I wondered whether this realization had turned him bitter with the years. So I approached him, and he let the head of the maul come to rest by his feet.
I told him my business, that I was interested in his feelings about his trip to Beyul when he was a young man. The boys gathered round, and he spoke rapidly—for them as much as for me—as he told the story of going with the lama up the mountain in order to find a place where you’d never have to lift a shovel or pound a maul. To the boys, such a trip made immediate and intuitive sense. Had a lama appeared at that moment who knew the way, I’m sure they would have left their shovels on the side of the road and followed him. Baichung Babu’s faith had not diminished with time. He didn’t seem embittered that here he was, white-haired and over seventy years old, still pounding rocks to earn his daily fare. His only regret was that the lama died at the crucial moment. ‘I won’t get the chance again,’ he said. ‘Such a chance only comes once in a lifetime. Now I’ll have to wait till another.’
Baichung Babu and his road crew.
I asked Rigzin Dokhampa why he thought Tulshuk Lingpa failed.
‘Tulshuk Lingpa was the right person to go,’ he said. ‘But there were many other people involved. Too many. Not all of them had the right karma. Without practice and accumulating merit, you cannot go. You have to be clean. If those who go with the right lama have good karma, they can certainly make it. Even then, it depends on time. Timing is everything.’
‘How can it be one’s destiny,’ I asked, ‘to open a beyul and fail? Both Tulshuk Lingpa and Dorje Dechen Lingpa were tertons, both found terma and both knew from within the way to Beyul Demoshong. It appears they were even attempting the same gate on the same snowy slope. How can you fail your destiny?’
Rigzin sat silently collecting his thoughts before speaking. ‘Seeds—like wheat or corn—have the power within them to grow. But what is within the seed is not enough. Doesn’t every seed need the proper soil and the right amount of water and sun? As it is for the seed, so it is for the terton. To discover terma, the terton must have the proper conditions. Both of these lamas had the karma to find the Hidden Land but nothing stands in isolation. Buddhism teaches the interdependence of all things. For the seed within any of us to grow, it needs proper conditions. Seeds need water. Tertons need not only a female consort, or khandro, to open a beyul. They also need disciples with unflinching faith.’
‘Were Dorje Dechen Lingpa and Tulshuk Lingpa the only tertons who have attempted to open the Hidden Valley?’ I asked.
‘Many tertons have tried, over the years.’
‘Were they the last two?’
‘Yes, as far as I know.’
‘What would you say to the typical Westerner,’ I asked, ‘who would argue that there are no hidden lands to be found, that by now satellites have photographed and mapped every inch of the earth?’
‘So far,’ Rigzin said, ‘even great scientists can only see germs with microscopes and other modern-day machines. With only their eyes, these microbes would have remained invisible and they would never have discovered them. Beyul is much the same. For the practitioner of Buddhism the instrument is consciousness itself. We develop our consciousness so we can see what does not appear to the common eye. That is the lens that allows us to see what remains hidden to your airplanes and satellites. Besides, Beyul is protected by a “circle of winds” that would prevent an airplane from even flying over it. There are many things that cannot be seen by scientists. No machine will show you Beyul. None will take you there. Anyone can look into a microscope and see the microbe. Only those who have developed their consciousness have a chance of entering Beyul. Developing such a level of consciousness, we Buddhists believe, takes many lifetimes. It is extremely rare. If everybody could go there, why would it be called the Hidden Land? It would be called the Open Land. Wouldn’t it? Those who have the karma to go there can go in this life.’
‘You were lucky to be born in Tashiding,’ I said. ‘I was born outside Boston.’
‘You were born in the richest country,’ Rigzin said. ‘Here in India, and in Sikkim, we are the poorest country but the holiest.’
‘Which would you choose?’
‘For the next life,’ he said, ‘our world is better. For this life, your world is better.’
‘Having been in both countries,’ I said, ‘what I see is that people are happier here.’
‘Really?’ Rigzin said. ‘That is the blessing of Padmasambhava.’
Wangchuk.
Wangchuk and I spent a lot of time together while tracking down his grandfather’s story, and we grew quite close in the process. We travelled together to Sikkim twice, and over the course of two or three years we spent a lot of time crammed together in the backs of jeeps bumping down rough roads clinging to mountainsides in the quest for ‘grandpa’s’ discip
les.
When meeting Tulshuk Lingpa’s disciples, Wangchuk’s presence gave me an immediate stamp of legitimacy that opened people to telling their tales. It was often a deeply emotional experience for those who had courageously followed Tulshuk Lingpa to the Gates of Paradise to find on their doorstep the grandson of their beloved lama and a foreigner wanting to hear what they had to say. As the gates opened to memories of what was for many their greatest adventure and their closest brush with something transcendent to their own selves, the specter of the beyul appeared before them. They described the reality not of how it felt to be on the threshold of another world but how it feels. Such was the immediacy they still felt after over four decades. I was always grateful to repay Wangchuk’s gift of accompanying me and opening doors by his presence and translating for me by having him present to receive the stories. He had grown up knowing his grandfather was a lama and had died in an avalanche but as is often the case, he had scant idea of his ancestor’s story or the extraordinary way his father had grown up.
The last of Tulshuk Lingpa’s disciples that Wangchuk and I spoke with was a woman named Passang Dolma. We had long been through with our interviews when Wangchuk told me that a friend of his, to whom he had been telling his grandfather’s tale, had told him he had once heard Passang—his mother’s friend—say she had been a disciple of Tulshuk Lingpa. Since she lived in Darjeeling, it wasn’t difficult to visit her. Passang must have been in her early or mid-sixties, which would have made her a very young woman when Tulshuk Lingpa was in Sikkim. She was neither learned nor particularly religious. She seemed in all respects a normal woman who had happened to participate in these extraordinary events.