A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality (37 page)

About the gates of Beyul, it says,

In that place there are four main doors, four secret doors, the four cardinal directions and the four corners, which are all held tightly. The eastern great gate is blocked by three natural obstructions: narrow ways, mountain doors and curtains. The three conditions of the southern door are rocky hills, great rivers and innumerable ravines. The western and northern gates are entirely packed with natural barriers. Therefore this beyul is superior to other places.

Some of the directions in the book seem almost practical, as if their true meaning were only slightly veiled. ‘The country between the light and dark is blocked by dense snow and three different curtains, one after the other. From the four corners, if you could catch drops of water, then that secret door will not be blocked by the curtains.’ This seems to refer to curtains of ice such as you find blocking high mountain ravines and which in the warm season, when you can ‘catch drops of water’, melt and allow passage.

The guidebook, upon which they relied above Tseram as they neared the western gate, also has many instructions for rituals to be performed to appease the local deities and the deities of Beyul. To enter Beyul is not only a matter of getting yourself to the right place. The timing has to be right. The guidebook says, ‘When the world is devoid of happiness, the door of the ascetic valley will open. If one delays, troublesome things will occur and the great and small valleys will be shaken by a red wind of fire, and poisonous hailstorms will drop.’

In the guidebook it says that to open the gate you have to perform rituals and burn incense to the ‘deity owner of the treasures. Rituals should be offered to the important hills.’ So it was when Tulshuk Lingpa and his twenty disciples left Tseram that day in the early spring of 1963. Again, as he had when they left the nomad above Dzongri, Tulshuk Lingpa announced that from that point forward they would have no contact with the outside world. The only contact would be with the spirit owners of the land and the guardian deities of Beyul.

The directions he had received in the vision years earlier and ‘brought down into script’ in the guidebook were specific enough for Tulshuk Lingpa to know he had to search for the gate above Tseram but the conscious mind is not a powerful enough tool to locate such a gate. So he performed the
trata melong
, the mirror divination, and had Yeshe look into the burnished brass. She saw the way ahead of them turning into a green valley of flowers with huge old trees and innumerable waterfalls.

The first night they slept in the area that in Tibetan is known as the
vatsam
, the area above vegetation and below the snow.

The next day they climbed into the snow, and by late afternoon they reached a huge cave surrounded by snow in which they all could fit. There they made camp. From this cave the land dropped off and then rose again on the other side of a little valley, the snowy slope rising to a little notch in a ridge—a pass—across which Tulshuk Lingpa declared was Beyul Demoshong. They were finally within sight of the gate!

The next day, in the morning, Tulshuk Lingpa took twelve of the twenty disciples who were in the cave and led them to the slope rising to the pass. Just as they started their ascent, a cloud came low with a whirl of wind that blew snow from the slope and made the air thick with it. Blinded by the snow and pierced by the wind, they retreated, reaching the cave as a storm came low on the mountain. The storm kept them pinned in the cave for the next two days, during which time they were in the utmost state of concentration upon their pujas and spiritual practices. They needed to purify themselves to the point where the weather would clear and allow them to ascend the snowy slope to the pass leading into Beyul.

On the third day, they awoke to the sun shining into the mouth of their cave. Again, Tulshuk Lingpa headed out to make the ascent. This time he took with him six of those he had left behind on his first attempt. It would be the collective karma of all those attempting the opening that would determine the success or failure of the enterprise. But this time they didn’t even make it to the bottom of the slope below the cave when a cloud came in and made further progress impossible.

Thus it went for nineteen days. Some days the weather would look fine when they set out for the slope opposite but never could they even start the ascent before the weather changed. Obviously the guardian spirits were not ready to allow their passage. Some days they didn’t even try. Storms raged on the mountain for days at a time, piling snow outside the cave in huge drifts that dwarfed them. On those days, they remained in the cave performing pujas and reciting mantras.

On the twentieth day, they woke up to brilliant sunshine. Again they set out for the steep snow slope leading to the pass, now even thicker with snow than before.

Namdrol stopped Tulshuk Lingpa. Something had been bothering him.

‘Master,’ he said, ‘I am from Lahaul. I’ve spent my whole life trekking in deep snow. You are from Tibet. You’ve spent winters down in Pangao, where the snow doesn’t build up. What do you really know of deep snow, steep slopes and their dangers? To get to the pass, it is too dangerous to just go straight up. It would be safer to go that way, to the right, where the slope is gentler and the rocks are bare. When we reach the top of the ridge, we can cross to the same place you want to reach. But your way is just too dangerous. It is springtime; the underlying snow is old and crusted in ice. The new snow on it could slip.’

With this, Tulshuk Lingpa became furious. It was prophesied back in Kham that the one to open Beyul would have eyes like a tiger; now he had the disposition as well.

‘Who’s the
lingpa
here,’ he boomed, his breath condensing into clouds of steam in the frozen air. ‘If you’re a
lingpa
, if you know the way, then why are you following me? Why aren’t you in Beyul already?’

The slope Tulshuk Lingpa wanted to ascend
was
impossibly steep but when they were leaving Tseram hadn’t the others warned them not to contradict him, no matter how illogical he became? Now they had the full fury of Tulshuk Lingpa upon them. To contradict him or to bring in logical thinking or prudence at the very moment he was finding and preparing to pass through a crack in the logic that keeps the world in a seamless web is the greatest sin a disciple can make.

A moment of doubt can crush a lifetime of faith.

As William Blake said, ‘If the Sun & Moon should doubt/They’d immediately Go out.’

It is rare that conditions are right for the opening of a beyul, rarer still that a
lingpa
takes incarnation at that time. Conditions must be perfect. You need the help and guidance of any number of spirit gatekeepers and mountain deities, who control the weather and the subtle forces that allow the
lingpa
to discern the way. Those with the
lingpa
must be as one being in their single-pointed and clear-hearted intention to give up everything. They have to let go of all material possessions, home, family and the very notion of logic that would prevent them from leaping into a realm beyond the constraints of logic that hold them to this world. They must all jump, as a single being, into another dimension. And if at that vital moment—when all those conditions have come together into a single point in time at the prophesied place where a possibility exists for a crack to form—if just as they are to achieve this wondrous step, a doubt arises and is voiced the whole enterprise can be lost.

A very similar event occurred at the decisive moment for Dorje Dechen Lingpa when he came to Sikkim to open Beyul Demoshong in the 1920s. They were nearing this same gate, climbing a snowy slope towards a ridge—probably the very same ridge that Tulshuk Lingpa and his disciples would climb over forty years later—when he suddenly turned to his disciples and said, ‘Bring me a white
dzo
.’ A dzo is a cross between a yak and a cow.

‘But Master,’ they replied, ‘we are high in the snow peaks, far away from any settlement. Where are we to find a
dzo
, let alone a white one? It is impossible.’

This raised the ire of Dorje Dechen Lingpa. ‘Don’t you understand? Nothing is impossible,’ he boomed. ‘What we need is a white
dzo
. Make one, then, out of butter!’

‘But Master,’ they complained, ‘we have no butter. We used the last of it in the tea.’

This was described to me as the ‘bad omen’ that marked the end of Dorje Dechen Lingpa’s attempt to open Beyul Demoshong. They headed back down the mountain that day and returned to Tibet.

Now, forty years later, Namdrol voiced a doubt about Tulshuk Lingpa’s judgment and the very sky itself responded. Suddenly they were engulfed in thick cloud. Freezing winds lashed at them with biting snow. Having spent three weeks above Tseram living in the cave, they would have been unrecognizable to those below. Their faces were thickened like leather by the elements and the skin was almost black. The snow stuck to their faces and turned to ice. Wrapping themselves in their long sheep’s wool coats and shawls, they returned to the cave.

That afternoon, Namdrol set out without anyone knowing to try his route and see if it were possible. He didn’t make it very far. He slipped on the ice, gashed his forearm and returned to the cave with his arm bleeding.

The next morning the weather was good. Tulshuk Lingpa performed the
trata melong
, the mirror divination. He announced that the divination bode well. He told some to stay in the cave, while he went with the others to make a reconnaissance of the route they had been trying each day in order to see how the weather was developing. On the way he pulled one of his disciples aside. His name was Wangyal Bodh, a powerfully built man from Simoling in his mid-twenties. Now a retired civil engineer in his late sixties, Wangyal himself told me what happened next.

Wangyal Bodh.

‘Tulshuk Lingpa pulled me aside. “Today we’ll let them go by themselves,” he said. “You and I will try another route, alone—just the two of us. Too many people make difficult progress. It is good that you have a warm coat—and excellent, you have a climbing axe.”

‘He sent the others ahead. “We’ll go left, up that way,” he said to me confidently, indicating a little side valley that angled up to the sky. “That is what I saw in the mirror.”

‘I followed Tulshuk Lingpa up the valley,’ Wangyal said, his voice betraying the excitement he must have felt at the time. The way was steep, icy and dangerous. Water was gushing down innumerable rivulets from a glacier that loomed above them, the ice hard and green.

It was a raw and dangerous place of loose scree and precariously perched boulders balancing over the deep. The glacier was confined to the ravine where the snows of innumerable winters collected and compacted. It had turned an eerie blue. Above the glacier ice gave way to snow- and ice-covered rock rising to a windswept peak with a plume of snow blowing from its summit. The sky at that altitude was so deeply blue it was almost black. Wangyal’s heart was pounding—from more than just the altitude. He had the sense that with only the two of them, the way would open.

With a tremendous crack, followed by a resounding roar, a piece of the glacier the size of a house broke off. Scattering boulders and crushing others in its path, it was sliding down the valley directly at them. Wangyal grabbed on to Tulshuk Lingpa to save him but realized there was no way out of the glacier’s path. Terrified, he knew this was the end. Though he had first grabbed on to Tulshuk Lingpa to save him, when the lama yelled at him to let go, Wangyal realized he was now hanging on to him out of raw fear. Wangyal released Tulshuk Lingpa from his iron grip.

Tulshuk Lingpa reached under his sheepskin coat and, with the flourish of a knight presenting his sword to a foe, whipped out his
purba
and held it before him at arm’s length as the glacier crashed towards them with a deafening roar.

Holding the
purba
steady, one arm outstretched and his other arm extended with the index and small fingers pointing towards the onrushing wall of ice, his voice resonated such a profoundly deep note that the rumble of the oncoming glacier reverberated back on itself. His voice was elemental, pre-human. ‘Ha-ha-haaa …’ and the glacier broke into two pieces and thundered by them left and right, leaving them unscathed.