The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye

by Jay Weidner

  To embody these metaphors was, as we saw among the Incas, to become the Sapa Inca, the divine god-man, Horus the pharaoh, the Sun King, or the Christlike redeemer Viracocha. These metaphors point to a successful completion of the quest by the hero/warrior/saint. These are beings that have become the Adam Kadmon, the universal man in tune with the sentience of all Mind in the universe, and the road or path to that attainment is the hero’s journey, an inner and outer quest for the Holy Grail.

  Alberto Villoldo, in his studies with the Quechua shamans of Peru, came to the conclusion that the current “Pachacuti,” the time when everything is turned upside down and reality is restructured, is also the point where a new humanity, a Homo luminous, begins to emerge.9 Villoldo’s Homo luminous sounds much like the Tibetan concept of the Diamond Imperishable Body, as mentioned in chapter 12. Could this also be an expression of the Sapa Inca, Atum-Re, or Universal Man? Indeed, when we look at India and Tibet’s foremost example of the attainment of the Diamond Body, Padmasambhava, we find not only linguistic echoes of our primal myths—padma is “lotus” in Sanskrit, echoing the lotus bud of Atum, and sambhava is “self-created one,” from the same root as skhamba, which is the pole or pillar of the unmoving axis—but also a mythic framework that is still psychically active and contains all the motifs presented to us by Fulcanelli and the Hendaye cross, from a place of refuge at the time of the catastrophe to alchemy and immortality.

  And so, having found Atlantis and the last catastrophe in the Andes, we must now turn to the East, toward Shambhala and the coming apocalypse.

  LOOKING EAST: A REFUGE IN THE HIMALAYAS

  Paul Mevryl, in his “Epilogue in Stone,” directs us to Jean-Julien Champagne’s frontispiece to Le Mystère, where “the alchemist stands elevated and protected between the front paws of the Sphinx,” looking east to the rising sun.10 As we saw in chapter 11, this is the place to stand to decode the astronomical riddle of the Great Cross at Hendaye. Mevryl is quite aware of this solution; he suggests that man and Sphinx “wait together for the return of Horus-in-the-horizon,” which is a direct reference to the rising of Leo on the fall equinox of 2002, a return, after 13,000 years, of the equinox Horus-in-the-horizon. But could this image also point to another place of refuge, as Mevryl implies?

  He [the alchemist] and Hu [the Sphinx] his protector, stare silently at the eastern horizon towards ancient Petra. In their narrow cone of vision is little Judea to the north and Ha’il to the south. Between them, very far away, is the Ande of Asia—the mighty Himalaya. Man and Hu-man wait together for the return of Horus-in-the-horizon. For now, in this Age, he will appear before them rather than behind their backs. . . . But Man and Human alike regard the future, not the past.

  Hu’s protection is twofold. Firstly, He symbolizes the protection of the illuminated state. Secondly, His gaze directs our attention towards one of the great refuges that man undoubtedly used during the Atlantean catastrophe. A refuge which, with others, may serve again? With these thoughts in mind, we note the similarity between the sound-forms of Cat Man Hu and Katmandhu, and the persistent legends of concealed entrances into the bowels of the mountains that are associated with that place.11

  To Mevryl, the place of refuge is clearly in the Himalayas, even though the inscription on the Hendaye cross points, by means of the anagram we examined in chapter 11, to Peru. Mevryl, in his somewhat tortured anagram of the inscription, draws attention to Ha’il in Saudi Arabia, but, with the exception of the odd use of Ande in reference to the Himalayas, Mevryl ignores any connection to South America. At first, we were inclined to see this as an example of Mevryl’s finely honed sense of misdirection, but after following our Peru interpretation and finding Atlantis in the Andes, we returned to Mevryl with new appreciation.

  His insistence that we should look east from the Sphinx, along the 30-degree latitude line, does in fact bring us to the “Ande of Asia—the mighty Himalaya” (note the singular) in the form of Mount Kailas, which sits just north of the 30-degree-east line. This stand-alone, A-shaped mountain, sacred to both Hindus and Buddhists, rises like a great planetary omphalos from the highest plateau on earth to almost 26,000 feet. It is also the origin point for the four great rivers of Asia, the Indus, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra, and the Ganges, which spin out from its base in the rough form of a sun wheel or swastika. Beyond that, just below the line, is the Tibetan capital of Lhasa at 90 degrees east longitude, exactly 60 degrees east of the Sphinx at Giza.

  And, without struggling for any green-language combination of Cat, Man, and Hu, Katmandu is simply the ancient Nepalese word for “place of refuge.”12 Mevryl then is forcing us to look in the direction of Nepal and Tibet. When we do, we find a semi-historical illuminated master, Padmasambhava, who hid teachings, texts, and treasures in statues, cliff faces, and sacred lakes and arranged secret places of refuge from one end of the Himalayas to the other. Behind these legends looms a lost civilization that rivals Atlantis for antiquity. Unlike Atlantis, this civilization supposedly still exists in, to quote Fulcanelli, a place “where death cannot reach man at the time of the double catastrophe.”13

  Once, a long time ago, according to the ancient Newarri chronicles of Nepal, the valley was a vast lake called the Nag Hrad, or Tank of Serpents. The nagas were dragon-serpents who guarded a treasure deep in the lake. A Buddha from a past age tossed a lotus seed into its placid waters, and from this grew an amazing thousand-petaled lotus that shone with the blue light of transcendental wisdom.

  Aeons went by. And then, one day, the bodhisattva Manjusri, a central Asian version of Apollo, who, having heard tales of the lotus and its light, arrived at the lotus lake to contemplate its splendor. He stopped at the edge and, being thwarted by the nagas, found that he could not approach the lotus. However, after consulting with Vajra Yogini, a manifestation of Dolma/Tara the mother goddess, he decided on a radical plan. He would drain the lake, bind the nagas, and thereby share the lotus light with everyone.

  Seizing the great Sword of Discriminating Wisdom, Manjusri sliced the mountainous rim of the valley in a single stroke, creating a gorge through which the waters of the lake, and its nagas, poured. As the water rushed out, the nagas were caught in a bottomless pit, where, along with their treasure, they remain to this day. The lotus settled to a small mound in the center of the emerging valley, eventually to become the stupa of Swayambunath.14

  Now, the curious point here is that geology agrees with and supports the myth. Roughly 15,000 years ago, an earthquake did in fact drain the vast lake that was Nepal valley, slicing open the rim as neatly as if it had been done with a sword. The lake formed as much as a million years earlier when the Himalayas lurched upward. Therefore, for many thousands of years, there was indeed a large, deep lake of placid blue water surrounded by high, white-topped mountains just as the traditions say. All we are missing is the giant lotus, radiating blue light.

  The Newarri chronicles continue in a similar vein, telling tales of gods in human form and of kings with the power of gods and of their interaction. In this magical era, a single king could rule for a thousand years and temples were endowed with images of the gods who sweated, bled, and spoke as they communicated their desires. This sense of a magical reality within a mythological landscape remains strong even today in Nepal.

  Buddhism arrived in the valley very early, so early, in fact, that it became woven into the fabric of its mythological past. During the reign of the semilegendary Kiratis—whose founder, Yalambar, fought and died in the epic struggle depicted in the Mahabharata—the Buddha and his disciple Ananda visited the valley. They founded a school in Patan, where the Buddha elevated a family of blacksmiths to goldsmith status and gave them his own clan name, Sakya.

  A few centuries later, the great Indian emperor Ashoka, a convert to Buddhism, made a pilgrimage to the Buddha’s birthplace at Lumbini, in the terai, or plain, to the south, and then continued on to Kathmandu valley. He built and enlarged stupas at Patan and Swayambunath, and his daughter married the
local prince, Devapala. This link to the original Indian traditions ensured that Buddhism would survive in Nepal long after it had died out in India.

  At the turn of the fourth century C.E., the last Kirati king, Gastee, was overwhelmed by an invasion of Rajaput princes from the areas of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in India. The Licchavi princes spread a veneer of Hinduism over the local Buddhism, creating a unique mixture of practical shamanism and sophisticated philosophy. This Nepalese Buddhism owed as much to Rajaput Tantra as it did to the teachings of Siddhartha.

  Later branches of the Licchavis, the Thakuris, were instrumental in bringing Buddhism to Tibet. Princess Bhrikuti brought some of the Buddha’s relics with her when she married the king of Tibet, Tsrong-tsong Gompo, and eventually converted him. For her devotion, she was identified with Tara, the Tibetan mother goddess.

  After this high point, the Thakuri dynasties settled into a kind of semi-mythological Dark Age. An example is the story of King Gunakamadeva. It seems that the god Indra, whose interest in the valley went back to the primordial blue lotus era, assumed human form to observe the Indrajatra festival in his honor. A group of tantric magicians spotted him and bound him with spells until he granted them a boon. Indra’s boon was the wood from a celestial tree, used by the king to construct a large seven-tiered pagoda called the Kasthamandap, or the Wooden House of Refuge. From this came Kathmandu as time chipped away at the extra syllables.15

  In these legends, we can see echoes of our primal theme. The bluelight lotus is the ancient primal center, dislodged by a catastrophe caused by the Tibetan sun god Manjusri. This center is then represented, in the same spot, by a stupa, an arrangement of the elemental shapes into an omphalos-like locator stone/tree. This same stupa/pagoda design, seen in the architecture of the original Kasthamandap, can be found throughout Buddhist Asia, from China to Burma. In the original hidden valley of Nepal, the place of refuge was clearly a magically constructed model of the World Tree.

  However, long before the Kasthamandap was built, Nepal was a place of sacred pilgrimage. The caves in the south rim of the valley had an ancient history of use by traveling saints and yogis as meditation sites, going back, according to legend, to the time before the lake was drained. Indra himself was thought to have spent a few aeons contemplating the blue light from a cave high on the south wall of the valley. At some point after the lotus disappeared, a demon, one of the asuras, occupied the cave. He was still in residence, according to the local tradition, until the arrival of Guru Padmasambhava, who converted him to Buddhism and then occupied his cave for the attainment of his Diamond Imperishable Body.

  Exactly when this occurred is obscure. The dating in the Newarri chronicles suggests that Padmasambhava’s retreat occurred during the reign of the last Kirati king, Gastee, in the late third century C.E., but Tibetan sources, such as Yeshe Tsogyal’s biography of Padmasambhava, point to an even earlier date, apparently in the era immediately before Ashoka in the second century B.C.E. Indications in some of Padmasambhava’s teachings, given to Yeshe and others in Tibet, suggest that he was influenced by Rajaput Tantrism, and therefore Buddhist scholars have surmised that he learned his tantric Buddhism in Nepal between the fifth and seventh centuries C.E.16 This is much closer in time to his historical appearance in the eighth century in Tibet, and therefore relieves the scholars of the burden of an individual almost a thousand years old when he first appears in the historical record.

  Whatever the date when Padmasambhava settled in the Asura Cave, there can be little doubt that something spectacular occurred there as a result of his practices. On the floor of the cave can still be seen the melted-rock handprint that was left as a symbol of the attainment of the Diamond Body (see fig. 13.6). The entire hillside—from the riverside temple, to Kali and Durga in the tiny village of Pharping, up the ancient steps past the Vajra-Yogini shrine, and farther up the mountain, past the Ganesh shrine where a miraculous image of Tara is slowly growing outward from the rock, and on past the crossroads village and the Tibetan monastery—is imbued with a sense of light and transformation that is as palpable as the smell of incense and yak-butter lamps.

  In front of the cave is a large flat space where one can sit and meditate on the entire range of the White Himalayas, with the peak of Chomolungma, the Mother of the Gods, Mount Everest, directly opposite to the north. Just to the east of Chomolungma is the White Mountain, Macherma Ri, and just beyond it can be seen the peak of Kangtega. Somewhere in between these two mountains is a real place of refuge on Mevryl’s sight line from the sphinx—the hidden valley of Khembalung.

  PADMASAMBHAVA AND THE TEMPLE OF THE COSMOS

  Sometime after 760 C.E., the king of Tibet, Tsrong-tsong Gompo’s son Tri-Tsrong De-tsen, summoned the most famous Buddhist tantrist of the era, Guru Padmasambhava, to help overcome the magical resistance of the older shamanistic Bön-pos. Buddhism had been brought to Tibet by his mother, Princess Bhrikuti of Nepal, and the king was determined to make it stick. However, the power of the Bön-pos had proved so far irresistible, and the new faith made little headway. Santaraksita, the king’s Buddhist adviser, suggested bringing in the help of a real magician, the legendary Lotus-Born One, and so the call went out.

  Figure 13.6. Handprint of Padmasambhava melted into the rock at the entrance to the Asura Cave. (Photo by Vincent Bridges)

  The king’s envoys found Guru Padmasambhava in retreat near the great cities of the Ganges plain, and intrigued by the king’s entreaties, he agreed to come to Tibet. “In the earth-male-tiger year, on the fifteenth day of the winter midmoon, under the sign of the Pleiades, he set out on his way,” Yeshe Tsogyal’s biography informs us.17 The guru lingered for three months in Nepal, visiting old meditation retreats and hiding termas for future use in caves and temples, until on the first day of the first summer moon he had a dream in which all the trees of India and Nepal pointed their crest toward Tibet, and all the flowers opened their blossoms. In that moment, we are told, all the wise men of Asia had a vision: the union of the sun and the moon rising over Tibet, the new dharma refuge in the darkness of the Kali Yuga.

  Guru Padmasambhava and his retinue of students and disciples set out over the high mountain passes for Tibet. Just inside Tibet, at Tengboche Monastery in the shadow of Chomolungma, he was met by the head of the Bön-pos and challenged to a magical contest.18 The first one to reach the summit of Chomolungma would be acclaimed the greatest of all. Padmasambhava accepted, and then retired to his tent for a good night’s sleep. The Bön-po lama, however, had a magic flying drum with which he planned to fly to the summit during the hours of darkness and so reach the top early in the morning, just as Padmasambhava had begun.

  His students spotted the Bön-po lama flying on his drum in the moonlight and went to awaken the guru. He responded that there was no cause for alarm, even though the Bön-po was already halfway up the mountain, and that they should sleep while they could. Just before dawn, the guru arose, positioned himself for meditation on the rising sun, and waited, deep in trance. As the Bön-po lama, exhausted by his all-night drumming flight, slowly circled toward the peak, the first ray of the rising sun pierced the gloom. Guru Padmasambhava mounted the sunray and flew instantly to the topmost peaks, seating himself on the Throne of Gold and Garnet. Abashed, the Bön-po lama fled, his magic drum tumbling down the mountain.

  While seated on the throne, Guru Padmasambhava looked out to the northeast toward the snowfields of Khumbu. Looking closer, he saw a perfect hidden valley, tucked away deep within the surrounding peaks and snowfields. Having the gift of seeing into time, Padmasambhava called upon the gods of the five directions, the Dhyani Buddhas, to hide the valley from the world and to provide for it all the needs of life. He declared that the hidden valley, Khembalung, would be a refuge for a time in the future when the barbarians of “Hor” would invade the central Asian plateau. He also predicted the names, in Tibetan, of its discoverers and the times in which its existence would be revealed, and hid as a terma a guidebook to its location
.19

  In the fifteenth century, a lama, Padma Lingba, found such a terma guide to the hidden valley and produced another prophecy of its use as a place of refuge. In 1976, Edwin Bernbaum, an American climber and Tibetan scholar, followed the directions in Padma Lingba’s guide and, with the help of several local lamas and his Sherpa guides, actually found and entered the outer valley of Khembalung.

  “The next morning, when we went exploring, we found an invisible palace in the beautiful forest of pine and rhododendron that filled the valley,” Bernbaum explains, waxing poetic. “We heard the clear voices of birds singing to one another and saw the golden mist rising like smoke off the treetops. In the woods around us, drops of bluish water gleamed like diamonds on necklaces of hanging moss. Passing through corridors of trees, we came to sunlit clearings hung with tapestries of rich brown shadows and emerald leaves, And as we went deeper into the forest, through gaps in the foliage, we glimpsed and felt the presence of a majestic snow peak that seemed to rule over the valley, like the King of Khembalung.”20

  Guru Padmasambhava came down from Chomolungma after sealing the place of refuge and proceeded toward central Tibet. Along the way, he was met by a delegation from the king, which he awed by first throwing their offered gold to the four winds. Then, scooping up a handful of dirt as his prima materia, Guru Padmasambhava transmuted it into gold. These triumphs made even the Bön-po into converts, and Padmasambhava continued on to Samye, where a mandala-shaped monastery was under construction. Using his command of the spirit world, Padmasambhava caused Samye chokor, the Dharmachakra, to be built in the grand pattern of the Indian vihara, or plan of the cosmos.21