A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality (29 page)

If on the other hand the king believed Tulshuk Lingpa held the key, he would have also known that the few hundred of his subjects who had given up all to go to Tashiding and follow him were but the vanguard of an exodus that would sweep his kingdom once word spread that the way had opened. I spoke with many older people in Sikkim who had known about Tulshuk Lingpa and had only been waiting to hear that the way was open. They were hedging their bets by not giving away their houses and possessions and by continuing to plant their fields. Yet once they heard the way had opened, they were ready to bolt for the door. Some were even hiding food in caves along the route so they wouldn’t have to carry it when they left Sikkim for the beyul encumbered by their grandparents and children. One never knew when the gate would shut. Many old people across Sikkim told me with a twinkle in their eye that they were just waiting for the news. There was even something slightly subversive about it—knowing that by leaving the Kingdom of Sikkim for a kingdom far greater, they were going against the king.

It would be an unprecedented exodus, one which would leave the king in the rather uncomfortable position of having to explain to an incredulous world how he became a king without subjects. There is bound to be inherent discomfort within the heart of a king when he tries to justify to himself his ruling an entire kingdom based not on merit but on heredity. How much greater would be this discomfort for a king whose subjects all leave for a kingdom they considered infinitely greater.

As I dug deeper, other possible reasons for the royal opposition surfaced. Could it simply have been that Tulshuk Lingpa was Tibetan? It was not hard to discern a mutual distrust and antipathy between some of the lamas of Sikkim and the lamas of Tibet. While the Kingdom of Sikkim was founded by Tibetan lamas and the religion of the country was Tibetan Buddhist in both origin and particulars, it was clear that many Sikkimese lamas felt it important to proclaim their independence and superiority. The Tibetan lamas, on the other hand, felt the Sikkimese lamas were uneducated. They were trained at one or another of the many village monasteries dotted throughout the kingdom, which lacked any of the larger institutions of Buddhist studies such as were found in Tibet.

I spoke with a Tibetan man in his lush private shrine room in the upper reaches of Gangtok whose father had been a secretary to a high Tibetan lama living at the royal palace monastery, and who himself grew up in the royal monastery. He told me outright—with an arrogance that shocked me for the boldness of its delivery—that all Sikkimese lamas were ignorant. ‘What could they know?’ he asked me. ‘Their education takes place in the village.’

The Sikkimese lamas clearly resented the Tibetan lamas with their self-proclaimed ‘superior’ education. Theirs was the land blessed by Padmasambhava, and it was theirs to rule both in a temporal sense and in terms of the dharma. I was told that the king was no scholar. He depended on his lama advisers when it came to spiritual matters. Since they had a natural feeling of mistrust towards Tibetan lamas, they were sure to feel resentment at a Tibetan lama coming to open
their
Hidden Land, and would have prejudiced the king against him. Their attitude would have been, ‘Why do
we
need a Tibetan lama to come and open
our
Hidden Land?’

As I spoke with people and my ideas changed as to why the royals were against Tulshuk Lingpa, I did what I could to get the perspective of those who would have known—those who had connections with the royals and the palace. I was far from successful. I followed my leads, and over the course of many visits to Gangtok went from the house of one of those connected with the royal family to another. I spoke to venerable octogenarians whose plush drawing rooms sported signed portraits of the royals, those who spoke of Wangchuk Namgyal (the son of the last king, Palden Thondup Namgyal, who was deposed in 1975 when the kingdom ceased to exist and Sikkim was absorbed into India) as ‘our present chogyal’(religious king). When I asked what they knew of Tulshuk Lingpa and the troubles he had at the hands of the government of the then Kingdom of Sikkim, I found myself continually rebuffed. It quickly became obvious that there was more to the story than met the eye, probable skeletons in the palace closets, and that I would get none of it from those who were on the inside.

I found, however, that the citizens of Sikkim outside the elitist circles—the villagers and lamas of Tashiding and Yoksum and the other places where Tulshuk Lingpa had a following—were more than willing to tell me what they thought was behind the royal opposition. While they offered a few interlocking theories that provided quite a few reasons for the opposition, I always felt hampered by those on the inside remaining tight-lipped.

The most common opinion I heard from those connected to Tulshuk Lingpa was that it wasn’t the king who was at the center of the opposition but the queen. Among the common people of Sikkim, this seemed almost universally accepted.

The royal family and most of the Buddhists in Sikkim are Nyingma, the oldest of the four main branches of Tibetan Buddhism. People told me that the queen Maharani Kunzang Dechen, who was at the time very influential in the kingdom’s ecclesiastic affairs, was bringing in lamas from one of the other major branches—the Geluks—to perform major state rituals. This would be loosely analogous to Isabella, the queen of Catholic Spain, bringing in Lutheran priests to perform Mass. Some even erroneously told me that the Maharani was a Geluk. The Chogyals of Sikkim traditionally married Tibetan nobility and, while she was the daughter of Tibetan nobility, it was a Nyingma family. Though as Captain Yonda—the captain of the guards under Palden Namgyal, the last chogyal of Sikkim and well known as a staunch royalist to this day—told me, the queen’s family were ‘strong supporters of the Geluk’.

Saul Mullard, Wolfson College, Oxford.

My quest for a wider understanding of the history of Sikkim and the historical background of the Hidden Land found me on a bicycle pedaling past the august stone buildings of Oxford University on a typically cold and rainy autumn afternoon. I was dodging puddles and spray to see a scholar just back from two and a half years of research in Sikkim. His name was Saul Mullard, and he had been searching out documents pertaining to the founding of the kingdom in the homes and private libraries of the elite families of Sikkim. He’d also been travelling to remote, vegetation-covered historical ruins: some dating to the first Tibetans who settled there over 200 years prior to the kingdom’s founding in 1646. Being the first serious scholar to search out and study these old documents and make the connections with ancient foundations and fortified walls in the steep jungles, Saul had thought a lot about Sikkim’s early history and had a unique understanding.

With my shoes by his door both in deference to their waterlogged state and the long time we’d both spent in the East, we sat by the window in his flat on the third floor of a sprawling Victorian-style house that had probably once belonged to a single Oxford don and now housed students and visiting scholars. The window next to him was open to the gusting rain and the ancient spires of the university so his cigarette smoke would curl out, and not into my lungs. He listened carefully to my synopsis of the story of Tulshuk Lingpa and his quest for Beyul Demoshong.

When I was through, Saul’s comment was swift and pointed, ‘You must understand that the Hidden Land is not
external
to this world. I’ve read the texts, and it doesn’t sound like what your lama was saying—that you’d pass through a portal to a land off the map. The Hidden Land is
in
this world. It is like the Kingdom of Shambhala, which is located somewhere behind a ring of mountains. No one’s found it but it’s there. It would be possible to get there, physically, without going through a “crack in the world”. Even more importantly, you’d be able to come back. While Shambhala has never been definitively located, Beyul Demoshong has been found. It has already been opened—over 500 years ago. It was opened by Rigzin Godemchen in 1373. He lived there for eleven years, before going back to Tibet. He even returned to the beyul and died there in 1409.’

Saul paused a moment to light another cigarette.

‘And by the way,’ he said, ‘I’ve been to the beyul.’

‘You’ve been to Beyul Demoshong?’ I was incredulous.

‘So have you,’ he replied dryly, pausing for effect. ‘Beyul Demoshong is congruous with Sikkim, superimposed upon its physical geography. It exists in a kind of parallel dimension. Physically it is Sikkim but it has all these other qualities. Beyul is
in
the physical landscape of Sikkim. You can physically go there—we’ve both been to Tashiding, so we’ve both been to the center of the Hidden Land. But we don’t know that we’ve been there because we don’t have the right realization.’

Saul took a long pull from his cigarette and blew the smoke pensively out the window, where it merged with the dense mist that had descended on Oxford.

‘Rather than Beyul being in a place outside the coordinates of latitude and longitude, it could be argued that Beyul is actually dependent on a state of mind.’

‘Beyul? Dependent on a state of mind?’

‘According to the old texts Beyul Demoshong exists on many levels, which accord to different levels of realization. So if you’re a normal bloke you can go to Tashiding, to the different caves, and say, “Wow, this was all blessed by Padmasambhava.” You are like a tourist following the big signs you see on the side of the road: “Sikkim, the Hidden Paradise”. Maybe you’ll even snap a few photos. Like the tourist your understanding will be limited, on the surface only. That is the outer level. That’s how it is when the tourist enters Beyul Demoshong. He is entering West Sikkim. Though he doesn’t know it, he’s in the beyul. That’s the point: Beyul
is
a physical place, yet without the spiritual attainment you won’t even know it.

‘On the other hand, if you have the spiritual attainment you’ll enter the same place but you are entering Beyul Demoshong, not West Sikkim.’

‘So it’s a bit like in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy finds herself back in Kansas?’ I asked. ‘She sees her neighbors who had all been transformed into other characters in Oz, and says to them, “You were there, and you too.”’

‘Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far,’ said Saul.

‘Then maybe it would be more like meeting a realized master,’ I said. ‘Someone might meet him on the road, think he is a bum and give him a coin. Someone else would see him and just know he’s the one. So it is dependent on the perceiver’s understanding.’

‘Something like that,’ Saul allowed. ‘The Hidden Land of Sikkim is firmly grounded in the geographical features of West Sikkim.’

‘This sounds so different from what the people of Sikkim were telling me,’ I said. ‘From where do you get your concept of the beyul?’

‘From the ancient texts, the writings of Sangye Lingpa, Rigzin Godemchen, the whole Northern
Ter
tradition, and from the documents and legends surrounding the founding of the kingdom of Sikkim, for which the opening of Beyul is key.’

‘But none of this seems to tally with the idea of the Hidden Land that Tulshuk Lingpa was heading to,’ I said, ‘nor the conception I came upon with the many people I spoke with in the region. The ancient texts seem out of sync with the common, present-day understanding of the beyul. Even those living in West Sikkim and Tashiding itself weren’t saying they were already living in the Hidden Land. Rather, they told me how they had been ready to give up their existence here in this world in order to go to another. They were clear: it wasn’t about transforming awareness and staying home. There was no talk of scales falling from the eyes to reveal Tashiding as the center of Beyul. They all spoke about the high snow slopes of Mount Kanchenjunga and a cave they’d enter, a gate they’d pass through or a pass they’d cross in order to enter a land from which they’d have no possibility of return. It seems to have little to do with what’s written in your scriptures.’