A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality (45 page)

‘But you can’t just go there. I know the way. I spent twenty days at the base of the slope to the pass which opens to Beyul. I could take you there. But what’s the use? I cannot do it alone. We have to wait for the lama to come. You have to believe in Padmasambhava. Beyul does exist.’

Looking into the old, calm eyes of Lama Tashi I had the wish to see what he had seen.

‘Once I had the opportunity,’ he continued. ‘I cut the path through the deep snow for my lama. We were just approaching the top of the pass when the cloud descended and everything turned white and then blackness descended. I got this gash over my eye and lost liters of blood. You can still see the scar. I broke my arm. Three ribs were broken. I vaguely remember the Lachung Lama wrapping the sleeve of his shirt around my head to stem the bleeding.

‘I lay for a night on that mountain wrapped in the others’ coats and scarves. The dead Tulshuk Lingpa was on one side, Yeshe on the other. She didn’t move all night; I thought she too was dead. Drifting in and out of consciousness I sometimes thought I was also dead, staring into that bright mountain sky illuminated by a myriad of stars, my body in pain and numb with cold. I didn’t yet comprehend what had happened. I remembered neither the avalanche nor being dug out from under the snow. I just wondered why we were lying there alone—the dead and half-living on a steep white cold slope when the young woman I thought was dead beside me had just that morning seen a vision of a green valley in the mirror.

‘In the morning, I saw the others coming up the slope to rescue me. I could hardly move but I waved my good arm. “Over here,” I called to them. “I’m not dead.”

‘It took us two days to reach Tseram. In Tibetan tradition, it isn’t good to cry at the death of a high lama but the people couldn’t help it. Since I was the
umzay
of Tulshuk Lingpa’s monastery, it should have been my job to perform the death ceremony. It was all I could do to stand up, offer a
khata
to my dead lama and prostrate one time before collapsing again. There were no doctors in Tseram, though there was a lama from Bhutan who knew how to set bones. He made a brace out of pieces of wood and bound them to my arm with cloth. When the death ceremony was over, most of the people just left. I stayed on with Tulshuk Lingpa’s family for a month, healing enough so I could travel.

‘It took us five days to walk from Tseram to Tashiding, and from there two more to Darjeeling. I went to see Chatral Rinpoche. He asked me what happened. When I told him, he told me to return to Simoling to take care of my land and take charge of the monastery.

‘I returned to Simoling. It took me two years of bed rest to recover from the avalanche and to take charge of the monastery. The monastery was in disrepair. The stupa was crumbling. I had to rebuild it. I have devoted the second half of my life to maintaining both Tulshuk Lingpa’s monastery and his memory.’

I asked him what it was about Tulshuk Lingpa’s character that led him to devote his life to Tulshuk Lingpa, even after his death.

‘Tulshuk Lingpa was spontaneous,’ Lama Tashi said, smiling with the recollection. ‘He didn’t follow rules. He would say one thing and then do something else. He didn’t believe one person was high caste, or one low. If he met a high caste person, he would treat him the same as he’d treat anyone else. He did as he wanted. He was a free man, the freest man I’ve ever met. He didn’t listen to what anyone else said. In Buddhism everyone is equal. Buddhists are very compassionate, helping others. That is the ideal.’

Lama Tashi squeezed his forearm as if to test his own strength. ‘Now I’m over eighty years old,’ he said. ‘I’m grateful for my good health. It is very important to keep this monastery well. We are accumulating merit. Even the fact that we are sitting here is the fruit we have generated.

‘Someone like Tulshuk Lingpa comes only once in very many years. Just to meet him and to be in his presence—even just to hear about him—you need special merit.

‘He wrote his guidebook to Beyul, which you have a copy of. Only a few people have seen it; it has been kept secret. Not everyone can write such a work. You need a mind as clear as the sky to understand it. Consider it a blessing that you have this book. Just be careful. Say you show someone a photograph of the footprint Tulshuk Lingpa left in the stone in Sikkim. Not just any lama can make such a footprint. Even the Dalai Lama hasn’t done such a thing. If you show it to someone who doesn’t believe in such things and if you don’t explain it well, his reaction will be to think it was a fake. This will cause him problems. It will create obstacles for him.

‘It is very difficult now to go to Beyul. You have to practice dharma, and keep practicing. But it should be in our minds. We must pray that we can go. If we pray for this now, even after we die, when we come back there will be the conditions. We will meet the right lama at the right time. We have to generate great love and compassion for human beings and then the fruit will come.’

‘Do you often think about Beyul?’ I asked.

‘I will think about it till the day I die,’ was his simple reply.

‘Just that you are writing this book,’ he continued, ‘and have come here at this particular point means that we have karma together from our previous lives. There are many people these days who don’t have pure motivation. It is best not to speak of it with them. We are like one family, those who believe in Tulshuk Lingpa.

‘Now we don’t have the opportunity to go to Beyul. But we have the belief. No matter how many years it may take, we have to keep the belief alive—and keep it secret. If we keep it really well in the cave of our hearts and keep our belief pure, then in our next lives we will all meet again and we can then go to Beyul.

‘I am very happy that you have come,’ he said. ‘May we meet again!’

Lama Tashi

Epilogue

While most accounts of a life story end with the protagonist’s death, Tulshuk Lingpa’s story has a breadth and depth to it that mere death cannot end. As with all stories of Tibetan lamas who have passed on, one must consider the reincarnation.

I met quite a few who said they wished they had died with Tulshuk Lingpa on that snowy slope, claiming he had made it to the Hidden Land. Some of these ones drew the logical conclusion that Tulshuk Lingpa’s case was unique and there would be no reincarnation. Breaking with traditional notions as laid down in Tibetan tradition, they claimed one cannot take one’s body to Beyul. Having left his body behind on that snowy slope in order to enter the Hidden Land, he had not died and therefore would not be reincarnating. This view was clearly in the minority. For the others, the topic of his incarnation was and is of keen interest.

In May 2003 Phuntsok Choeden, Tulshuk Lingpa’s widow from Tibet, had an operation for colon cancer in a hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal. It was a condition she was to die from three years later. Two days after her operation she was lying in her hospital bed surrounded by her son, three daughters and some of her grandchildren. Suddenly the door flew open and in strode a tall, slim Westerner with short hair dressed in a polo shirt.

Approaching the convalescing Phuntsok Choeden, he said, to the shock of everyone present, ‘In my last life, you were my wife.’ Turning to her children Kunsang, Kamala, Penzom and Kunsun, he said, ‘You were my son, and you were my daughters.’ To Wangchuk, he held out his hand. ‘We’ve not met,’ he said. ‘I was your grandfather Tulshuk Lingpa!’

Turning to Kunsang, he said, ‘How does it feel to meet your father for the first time in this life?’

‘Very happy,’ Kunsang replied, eyeing the stranger cautiously. ‘Very happy.’

‘If you are really Tulshuk Lingpa,’ Kunsang said, no doubt laughing, ‘tell me what happened in Simoling. Surely you must know,’ and he proceeded to ask the Westerner a series of questions about the life of Tulshuk Lingpa, for which the Westerner had not a single correct answer.

‘You don’t seem to know anything about Tulshuk Lingpa,’ Kunsang said.

‘I will educate myself,’ the Westerner said, opening a bag and giving Kamala some brocade and placing a wad of rupees on the little table next to Phuntsok Choeden’s bed.

He turned to Kunsang. ‘The last time I said I would take you to the Hidden Land. This time I will take you to Mongolia!’

‘Mongolia?’ Kunsang gasped. ‘Why Mongolia?’

‘I will take you to Mongolia because you are a lama, and in Mongolia lamas are rare. If you come with me to Mongolia you can ride a cart pulled by reindeer! In Mongolia people live in felt tents, they have excellent butter, and the women there—ah, the women in Mongolia are beautiful beyond compare. You will have a wonderful time in Mongolia. It is most auspicious to go in June or July. I will be going then, and I want you to come with me.’

So saying, the strange Westerner strode out of the room with as much suddenness as he had entered. They neither saw nor heard from him again.

When Kunsang told me this story I could hardly believe it was true. But Wangchuk, who was translating for me, assured me that he was present in his grandmother’s hospital room when this Westerner made his cameo appearance. Crazy as it may sound, it occurred exactly as his father said it. Though the way they told it—howling with laughter—made it obvious that though the story was true, the crazy Westerner was not to be taken seriously as the reincarnation. It was just another crazy episode in a story that attracts a certain madness.

There is, however, a serious contender for the post of the reincarnation of Tulshuk Lingpa.

In 1970, practically a decade after Tulshuk Lingpa died, the daughter of Jinda Wangchuk—the big sponsor of Tulshuk Lingpa from Pangao who prepared the cave on the cliff face there for Tulshuk Lingpa and his family—had a son. As soon as the boy was able to speak, he started saying, ‘I am Tulshuk Lingpa. I have a monastery.’ Jinda Wangchuk went to Lama Tashi in Simoling to tell him the news. Lama Tashi had of course been on the lookout for Tulshuk Lingpa’s reincarnation. He went to Pangao, offered the boy a
khata
and was quite impressed. But the determination of whether a boy is a true reincarnation, especially of such a high lama, can only be made by a lama of very high standing. He advised Jinda Wangchuk to bring the boy to a learned and wise lama named Gelong Tenzing, a former secretary of Dudjom Rinpoche living in Manali, which is not far from Pangao.

The night before Jinda Wangchuk brought the boy to see Gelong Tenzing, Gelong Tenzing had a dream in which he saw many lamas being given mandala offerings. There was a small stupa made of glass in the middle of the offerings. He picked it up and thought, ‘What a nice stupa.’ In the dream, it was said that an election was to be held between the lamas to see who the true lama was. The time came to vote. He picked up a piece of paper in order to write down his vote, and on the paper it was written ‘Tulshuk Lingpa’, then he woke up.

It was later that day that Jinda Wangchuk announced to Gelong Tenzing that he wanted to bring the boy to meet him.

Gelong Tenzing put photographs of many lamas on a large low table and he placed a piece of glass over them. Tulshuk Lingpa’s photo was amongst them. Jinda Wangchuk had scrubbed the boy clean and he was wearing new clothes. When the boy came in, the old lama said, ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you,’ and he offered the boy a cup of tea. The boy only laughed at his words. He wasn’t interested in the tea. With a serious look on his face, he went directly to the table with the photos. He looked at the photos, and then he looked at Gelong Tenzing. Again he looked at the photos, and again he looked at Gelong Tenzing. He had never met Gelong Tenzing, and he was shy. So he turned to Jinda Wangchuk and said, ‘Look Grandpa, there I am. That’s me.’ He was pointing to the photo of Tulshuk Lingpa.