A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality (20 page)

Géshipa, performing a divination

There was a prophecy written in a
pecha
, or scripture, that when the time came to open Beyul Demoshong, the lama who would open the way would first announce himself at the Tashiding Gompa. Though none of the lamas of that monastery—nor anyone else for that matter—could tell me which
pecha
it was written in, let alone show it to me, it is a well-known part of Sikkimese lore. It is a belief that has changed the course of many a person’s life. For when Tulshuk Lingpa and his followers arrived at Tashiding, though they arrived unannounced, there were people living there who had left their homes as far away as in Bhutan in order to be there when the prophesied lama arrived.

One such man was Géshipa. Now in his mid-eighties, he left his native Bhutan when he was thirty-six years old expressly to go to the Tashiding Gompa in Sikkim and await the arrival of the lama prophesied to open the door to the hidden realm. While others had been waiting in Tashiding for years, and even generations, Géshipa was an accomplished and well-known diviner, steeped in the prophecies. When he heard of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, the destruction of the monasteries, the incredible carnage and the exile of the Dalai Lama he knew that all these negative signs pointed in a single direction: towards the ripening of the time for the opening of Beyul Demoshong. He arrived there only a few months before Tulshuk Lingpa first walked up the hill from the village.

Both of Géshipa’s parents were dead by the time he reached his first birthday. When he was a child his grandfather, who was a great yogi, died while in meditation. They left him in the full lotus posture and, as is the case with many accomplished Tibetan lamas, his body did not decay.

At first the young boy did not understand what it meant for someone to be dead. His uncle explained it to him by reminding him of a dog that had recently died in the neighborhood. Géshipa had smelt it and seen its body rot and attract flies and maggots. When he understood what death meant, he didn’t believe his grandfather was dead, so lifelike his body remained. Far from smelling of decay, there was a scent in the air of flowers in the vicinity of his grandfather’s body. His uncle explained that it was his grandfather’s spiritual attainment that prevented his body from decaying. Because the boy had grown up seeing his grandfather deep in meditation and not moving for days at a time, he still couldn’t connect the state his grandfather was in with death. To make this connection clear, his uncle put the boy’s hand to his own mouth and asked him what he felt. He felt the warmth of his own breath. Then his uncle took his hand and held it before his grandfather’s mouth.

‘What do you feel?’ his uncle asked him.

‘Nothing,’ he was obliged to reply. ‘It is cold.’

It was then the boy realized something of the mysteries his grandfather explored while he was alive—sitting in meditation as if he were dead—and now that he was dead appearing still to be alive, preserving his body from the fate of the dog after death.

It was then the boy decided that he would dedicate his life to exploring similar mysteries.

He became the apprentice of a high lama who was a great diviner and soothsayer and the rainmaker for the king of Bhutan. As part of his training, he underwent the first of many meditation retreats, which lasted three years, three months and three days. Though most lamas undergo this meditation retreat, they usually do so in their late teens or early twenties. Géshipa was only in his early teens.

With hardly any food to eat his diet consisted mainly of nettles, which he gathered himself and cooked over a wood fire. He ate so many nettles that his skin turned green, just like the famous Tibetan poet yogi Milarepa.

He had inherited his grandfather’s scriptures and it was during this retreat, nearly starving to death and freezing, that he read in them about the Hidden Land. He read that in the Hidden Land you never have to worry about having enough to eat.

‘Plant a seed in the morning,’ he read, ‘and you can harvest by the evening.’ You never had to worry about having enough clothing. No matter how cold it was, you’d always be warm.

Hungry, cold and alone in his cave, these words left an indelible mark on his mind. He decided that he would devote himself to finding this hidden land. Now in his mid-eighties and having never returned to Bhutan, Géshipa lives north of Tashiding in Yoksum, the last village before the high mountains and the ‘Western Gate’ to the Hidden Land.

The Yabla family, the wealthy landholding family in the village who were major sponsors of Tulshuk Lingpa, put him up in a wood-slat room above their cowshed where he lives to this day, and where I met him many times.

Géshipa is perhaps the happiest man I’ve ever met. Combining the innocence of a child with the wisdom of a sage, his belief is so direct that it is infectious. It was in his presence, more than in anyone else’s, that I felt the lived reality of possibility that the quest for Beyul represents.

The first time I ventured to Yoksum to meet Géshipa I had the grown son of the Yabla family, who was well educated and spoke English perfectly, translate for me. When I communicated my reason for being there, that I wanted to speak of Tulshuk Lingpa and Beyul, Géshipa was reticent.

‘These are secret things,’ he said. ‘Tantra. I can tell you nothing.’

I tried to get him to mollify his stance. But my interpreter had to be somewhere and left Géshipa and me to our own devices without a language in common. Though Géshipa had lived in Sikkim for over forty years his Nepali—the lingua franca of Sikkim—was still rudimentary. He lived in a world that appeared only to intersect with ours, and it was a world one couldn’t help feeling immediately drawn into. By merely looking at him, one knew he held the keys to great mysteries—for not only did he look every bit the part of the Eastern sage, he lived with the simplicity of one.

When I was on my way to Yoksum and mentioned his name, people told me he was famous throughout Sikkim for performing divinations and controlling the weather. He was an accomplished rainmaker. It seemed whenever there was a drought, people would come to him, as they would if there was need for a dry day in monsoon. Shortly before I visited him, a newly constructed monastery nearby was to be inaugurated with a three-day ritual to which some high lamas were being helicoptered in, including a representative of the Dalai Lama. It was the middle of monsoon. Monsoon in Sikkim is severe, often raining incessantly for days at a time, and only rarely is there a twenty-four hour period without rain. The lamas of this new monastery came to Géshipa, who performed rituals he had learned as a child when he was apprenticed to the king of Bhutan’s rainmaker. Those three days were dry. It is a matter of record.

The village of Yoksum, Sikkim

On another occasion, Géshipa related to me a story from his time as an apprentice rainmaker when three representatives of the Bhutanese king arrived at his teacher’s retreat in eastern Bhutan with a letter from the king. The rains had failed and crops were beginning to wither in the fields across the kingdom. The letter—which had been sealed with the king’s own seal—instructed his teacher to make it rain, which he did with his usual alacrity. It rained so hard that within three or four days everybody in the kingdom had forgotten the drought and there was now a grave danger of floods. The king sent his representatives again, this time without the pleasantry of a letter but with instructions for him to stop the rain immediately. They had with them a heavy rope and instructions from the king to use it if within a day of their arrival the rain did not stop. They were to tie him up and douse him in water with only his nose above the surface until he stopped it.

When we found ourselves alone that first time with hardly a language between us, Géshipa pulled a kerosene cooker out from under his bed. He poured water from a plastic bottle into a pot, pumped and primed the cooker and started boiling tea. He was squatting on his haunches mixing in the tea and sugar, and though we tried we couldn’t converse. So I undusted one of the few Nepali expressions I had at my disposal. ‘
Kay garnu
,’ I said. What to do?

Géshipa found it so funny that of all the possible things I might know in Nepali I knew that expression, at once so common and so expressive of the simple wisdom of accepting what is and finding happiness in the present. This was something Géshipa seemed a master at—just plainly being happy at the passage of time—and he started rocking with laughter, squatting over the pot of boiling tea, saying, ‘
Kay garnu
,
kay garnu
!’

Then he said, ‘Englayshee?’ He wanted to know the English equivalent.

‘
Kay garnu
: Nepali,’ I said. ‘English: What to do.’

‘WaDoDo,’ he attempted, and I repeated it until he got it right.

Then he took out an ancient and battered address book and wrote phonetically in Tibetan script first
Kay garnu
, and then ‘What to do’, the whole time repeating it and laughing like a tickled Buddha. This seemed to have great importance for him; he wrote it in a few other places as well, so he couldn’t possibly lose the English for
Kay garnu
.

Géshipa’s room above the Cows

The next time I visited Géshipa was about nine months later. Wangchuk had taken well to his role as an interpreter between his father and me during our long interviews in Darjeeling. Now we had taken our collaboration on the road, tracking down people and places in Sikkim connected with his grandfather’s story. Speaking both Nepali and Tibetan fluently, Wangchuk was acting as my interpreter and wonderful companion as well as undergoing his own journey of discovery about his grandfather, about whom he had grown up hearing stories but with none of the details we were uncovering.

When we walked up the dirt trail from Yoksum and climbed the old wooden stairs above the cowshed and entered Géshipa’s room with
khatas
—the ceremonial scarves one presents to lamas—as well as a bag of fruits and biscuits to present to him, Géshipa stared at me, obviously recognizing me but trying to figure out from where.

So I raised my index finger to the heavens, twisted it and said, ‘What to do?’

Géshipa almost fell out of his robe. ‘What to do?’ he repeated. ‘What to do?’ He was howling now with laughter. ‘He’s calling you Mr What-To-Do,’ Wangchuk said as he handed Géshipa the fruit and biscuits and they started speaking Tibetan. I didn’t pay them much heed as I took my seat on the bed opposite Géshipa’s. Then I noticed Géshipa was writing in that same battered address book and Wangchuk was helping him sound something out.

Géshipa turned to me. He held the page close to his eyes so he could focus. Cautiously he mouthed out the words, ‘Bout do die. What to do? A bout to die—what to do?’ and he burst out laughing, even more intensely than before. He poked his finger to his chest: ‘About to die.’

Then he said something to Wangchuk in Tibetan, which Wangchuk then interpreted: ‘He’s saying that he’s very old now, and that he’s about to die.’

‘What to do?’ Géshipa repeated with the levity of Zorba when the towers came crashing.

Wangchuk had a girlfriend in Delhi, with whom he was always trying to communicate using his mobile phone. But in Sikkim the towers are far apart and the mountains high; even though he was forever pulling his mobile phone out of his pocket and trying to get a signal, he couldn’t get a signal strong enough to place a call. While we were sitting in Géshipa’s room conducting our interview with him, he quietly took out his mobile phone. He turned it on and, even in the dim interior of that room towards sunset, I could see the surprise on Wangchuk’s face.