A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality (24 page)

In the course of writing this book, I went with Kunsang and his son Wangchuk to Tashiding. Kunsang hadn’t been to Tashiding in forty-three years. I had been to Tashiding on my own and with Wangchuk the year before. Having seen how reverentially the lamas of Tashiding treated Wangchuk when they heard he was Tulshuk Lingpa’s grandson, I knew it would be a great occasion for them when Kunsang—Tulshuk Lingpa’s spiritual heir—arrived unannounced.

‘Just think,’ I said to Kunsang as we sat resting on a rock on the side of the steep path to the monastery. ‘The Prince of Shambhala is coming, and they don’t even know! How can this be? This just isn’t right.’

I stood up and motioned Kunsang to lead the procession up to the monastery, for Wangchuk to follow, and I took up the rear. Making my hands into a pretend trumpet, I puffed out my cheeks and made the sound of a fanfare by pressing air through my lips.

‘Bumb-be-de bummm, be-de-dummmm! The Prince of Shambhala is arriving! Bumb-be-de-bummmm!’

‘The Prince of Shambhala,’ I announced, making a flourish to Kunsang. ‘The Crown Prince,’ I continued, motioning to Wangchuk. Then I pointed my finger to myself, ‘And their scribe!’

That is how we arrived at Tashiding, like three raving lunatics, hysterical with laughter, ‘Bumb-be-de-bummmm! The Prince of Shambhala, the Crown Prince, and their scribe are arriving!’

Wangchuk & Kunsang, Yoksum, West Sikkim

Word quickly spread of our arrival, and soon all the lamas and many of the older people who were there in the early sixties were gathered around Kunsang who started telling stories. Then we all got up and went to the
drakar
, the stone door to Shambhala. Ever watchful and hopeful that the terton will arrive to open the way, perhaps they thought Kunsang was their man and this was the time. But Kunsang, with whatever powers he inherited from his ancestors and with whatever wisdom he gleaned from his life experience growing up in the extraordinary way he did, is always quick to say he is not a terton.

Instead of opening the door, he and the lamas of Tashiding examined the stone noting how the door used to be of a lighter color, which was interpreted as indicative of the darkness of our times. They searched for Tibetan letters imbedded in the stone, an
Om Ah Hung
—the opening syllables of the mantra of Padmasambhava—which used to be above the door. They discovered that the letters had migrated across the stone face. Pointing them out to each other, they were each more hopeful than the next in locating these migrating letters in the magic rock, door to another realm. I don’t read Tibetan, though I can recognize Tibetan letters. I recognized no letters in the cracks they pointed out in the rock face. Perhaps my powers of imagination weren’t great enough.

Then, to see who might open the way, the ancient robed lamas of Tashiding took turns playing a sort of spiritual pin the tail on the donkey. Each lama would take five paces away from the stone face, turn and stare straight at the ‘key’ to the door—the fist-sized hole in the rock within which was a loose stone. Holding his right arm out before him with index finger extended and taking his bearings, he then covered his eyes with his left hand and took stumbling steps towards the wall until his finger touched the rock. Tradition has it that if your blind finger finds its way into the hole, the door will open. When my turn came to see if I might be the one to open the door and let all these venerable lamas—who had been waiting so long—through, I came up wide of the mark. Opening my eyes, I felt inside the keyhole but the stone inside wouldn’t move. One of the old lamas told me, with an edge of anger in his voice, how a Bengali tourist had heard of the secret of the keyhole and its miraculously loose stone imbedded in a stone wall. When no one was watching he took out his penknife and tried to pry the stone out, in the process jamming it forever.

Followers of religious leaders are notorious for lowering their teachers’ understanding to the level of their own while exalting their teacher’s attainments beyond all measure. Therefore we needn’t judge the terton’s level by that of his followers. Lamas earnestly stumbling blind with their index fingers stretched before them and stubbing them against a stone wall don’t necessarily reflect the terton’s understanding of just what a crack in the world might be and the methods he’d employ to open it.

Where did Tulshuk Lingpa draw the line between fact and fancy, or between metaphor and literal truth? Just what did he have to fulfill before he could attempt an opening? We know he had to do certain things before an opening could be made. He had business, for instance, in two of the major caves in Sikkim visited by Padmasambhava.

One of them was the northern cave, known as Lhari Nyingpuk, which translates to the Heart Cave on the Gods’ Hill. Tulshuk Lingpa left Tashiding at one point to go there with five of his close disciples including Géshipa, Namdrol and Mipham. When Kunsang, Wangchuk and I were in Yoksum, Géshipa described what happened.

They got to the cave—a few days’ march from Tashiding—and Tulshuk Lingpa performed a puja after which he picked up a stick, scratched a circle in the floor of the cave and told his disciples to dig. They didn’t have any tools but used stones and their bare hands. As the hole grew, Tulshuk Lingpa was staring into it. Then he suddenly told them to stop. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Fill it back in.’ When they had, he told them he had seen
ter
in the ground but it wasn’t the time to take it out. ‘I saw a stone
dorje
,’ he told them. None of them had. ‘It is one of a pair,’ he continued. ‘The other one is in Demoshong. I only had to confirm it. It is not for me to take this one out.’

We know there are four gates to Demoshong, one in each of the cardinal directions. There are also four caves, which are allied to the four gates. Tulshuk Lingpa also went to another of the caves—the western cave—called Nub Dechen Phug, which translates to the Western Cave of Great Bliss.

Again he went with five or six of his closest disciples, among them Géshipa, Namdrol and Mipham. This time his disciples were ready for anything, and they brought tools just in case. Tulshuk Lingpa did a puja, indicated a place outside the cave in the ground just before the entrance and told his disciples to dig there. Proud of themselves for the foresight of bringing digging implements, they started digging. At three or four feet down their shovels and picks all glanced off a huge flat rock covered in a strange brown material.

‘Turn the rock over,’ Tulshuk Lingpa commanded, ‘and I will take out a tremendous
ter
.’

‘But Master,’ Namdrol protested, ‘it is too big to turn over. We don’t have the tools. We’ll hurt our backs.’

Tulshuk Lingpa became furious. When a terton is taking out
ter
, you should never contradict him. He is stepping through a crack in the logic that holds the world together; therefore you should not hold him to your own paltry standard of what is and is not possible.

Tulshuk Lingpa reached into the belt beneath his robes and pulled out his
purba
, the magic
purba
he had taken out of the cave in Tibet with Dorje Dechen Lingpa. He held it before him, point up. Then spinning it in his hand, he jumped into the hole with a flourish, stood on the flat rock and touched it with the tip. Though he had only touched the tip of the
purba
to the rock, the rock cracked and a piece broke off. Tulshuk Lingpa reached into the crack and took out a small piece of tightly rolled yellowed paper.

Jumping out of the hole, he told the others to fill it in and he walked away.

Back at Tashiding, he unfolded the meaning in the few scratches written on the tightly rolled paper. He dictated it to one of his disciples who wrote it down. Usually he would have had Namdrol be his scribe but he was still angry at Namdrol for having introduced doubt at the decisive moment. The resulting book, of only three pages, was only a minor
ter
: a prayer to make the deities happy on the way to Demoshong. The
ter
he could have taken out, if they could have miraculously turned the large stone, would have been a guide to all the
ter
in Demoshong. Some of his disciples tried to convince Tulshuk Lingpa to go back to the cave with the right tools to turn the rock so he could get the
ter
he had gone there for but he said the time for that was past.

Most of Tulshuk Lingpa’s disciples from Himachal Pradesh were from Simoling. By most accounts, over half the village went to Sikkim, selling enough of their possessions to make the journey and giving away the rest. There were also two families from a village down the valley called Koksar, which is just north of the Rohtang Pass, including the
khandro
, her sister Yeshe and their mother. People in that village tried to dissuade those who wanted to go, saying Tulshuk Lingpa was crazy and would lead them to ruin. The two families who were followers of Tulshuk Lingpa made their preparations for leaving in secret and left in the middle of the night without telling anyone. They walked over the Rohtang Pass to Manali, where they got a bus to the Plains.

As the waves of people from Himachal Pradesh arrived in Tashiding, the atmosphere became electric. Word spread throughout Sikkim and the Darjeeling Hills that the long-prophesied lama had arrived, and everybody had to make a decision. People’s faith was so great that many were divesting themselves of their material goods—land and homes included—without ever meeting Tulshuk Lingpa, just on the word that he was the one. Fields were lying fallow. Many more were staying at home but had provisions ready so when they heard the time had come, they could leave everything and head directly for Mount Kanchenjunga and pass through the gate while it was still open. I spoke with people who had gone north into the high mountains to hide
tsampa
, corn and other provisions in caves so when they heard the way was open, they could go as quickly as possible without having to first buy food and then carry it into the high mountains. It looked as if half the Kingdom of Sikkim would have left for the Hidden Land once Tulshuk Lingpa had made the opening.

Tulshuk Lingpa’s followers who gathered at Tashiding were from all over the Tibetan world—Lahaul, Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal and the Darjeeling Hills. They spoke a polyglot of languages. With each group from their own distinct region, speaking their own language, they tended to form groups and live together in encampments slightly set apart. Everybody was suspicious of the Lahaulis, since they were the ones who came with Tulshuk Lingpa and were his oldest and closest disciples, some having known him for over twenty years. Often they would speak with Tulshuk Lingpa in a language the others couldn’t understand. The others always feared that when the time came, Tulshuk Lingpa would take with him only his older disciples and sponsors—the ones from Lahaul whom, one old woman from Bhutan told me (with more than a hint of jealousy even after all these years), he treated like his own children. While it is true and quite natural that his closest disciples tended to be Lahaulis, there was no reason to think he would have left the others behind. Yet such is human nature, even for those attempting to leave this world for a world beyond war and ethnic troubles.