A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality (11 page)

Chokshi, of Shrimoling, the ‘Place of the Female Cannibal’

Chokshi never considered leaving. Deciding not to wait until he saw his own flesh disappear before his very eyes, he set out to find help. He went up the valley to Kardang—near the district headquarters of Keylong—to consult with the highest and most respected lama in the valley at the time, Kunga Rinpoche.

Chokshi recalled for me what happened.

Kunga Rinpoche, the Lama of Kardang Gompa

‘I walked up the valley to Kardang, and there I made an offering before Kunga Rinpoche. I told him why I was there, that so many in my village were having their limbs slowly eaten away, that we were being isolated and no one wanted to come close enough even to talk to us. The lama listened carefully, and he said he would do a
mo
, or divination, to see what course we should take.

‘From the voluminous folds of his robe he produced a weathered bag, inside which there was a wooden box. He took the lid from the box to reveal two ancient bone dice. He intoned a prayer, blew on the dice, shook the box and let the dice fall on the low table before him. Noting the result on a scrap of paper with a pencil stub, he threw the dice again. He took from his shelf a
pecha
—a Tibetan scripture wrapped in silk cloth—and consulted it. He marked things on the paper, threw the dice again and consulted another
pecha
, all the time noting things on the paper. It was a full half hour before he spoke.

‘“The situation in your village is extremely serious,” he told me, “and fraught with dangers. I am afraid it is beyond my powers to help you. But there is a high lama at the monastery in Pangi. His name is Tulshuk Lingpa. My divination shows that only he can help you.”

‘I had never heard of this lama, or of Pangi.

‘“Where is Pangi,” I asked the lama, “and how do I get there?”

‘“Pangi is a two-day march from here,” he told me. “But you won’t find him there now. Go to Tso Pema, and look for him there.”

‘I’d heard of Tso Pema—Rewalsar as it’s known locally—the lake sacred to Padmasambhava. I’d never been there. In fact I only knew my village and the town of Manali, the first town in the low country just over the Rohtang Pass. Who had time to travel in those days, even on pilgrimage? But now the fate of my entire village depended on me. All of my limbs were still intact but I knew it was only a matter of time. I set out immediately for Tso Pema. Since I had no money for the bus, I walked. It took me five days.

‘When I arrived in Tso Pema I asked for Tulshuk Lingpa, and someone told me to look inside the old Nyingma monastery. When I went inside, I found only a Tibetan man sitting on a scaffold putting the finishing touches to Chenresig, the Buddha of Compassion, which he was painting on the wall. He was dressed in street clothes. When I asked him for Tulshuk Lingpa, I thought he must have misunderstood me when he told me it was him I was looking for.

‘We expected our lamas to be dressed in robes and to have shaved heads. Instead, he had long black hair, which was braided with a piece of red cloth and wrapped around his head as is the style of so many Tibetan men. He wore a regular pair of pants and an old shirt, both of which were spattered with the bright colors with which he was painting the gods, demons and Buddhas on the monastery wall. But there was something in his eyes; they penetrated me like two burning coals. I knew immediately that he could help my village.

‘I told him I had come from far away, and that Kunga Rinpoche had sent me. Even before asking what it was about, he put his brushes into a glass of murky water and brought me to his “home”. At that time he had two young children, Kamala and Kunsang. I’d never seen anything like it: he lived with his wife and children in a cave on the sharp slope above the lake. I had heard of lamas and yogis living in caves but never with their families! I was a little afraid of this man with burning eyes, the air of a great yogi and clothes of an ordinary man. One always had the feeling with him that there was more to him than he revealed.

‘Phuntsok Choeden, his wife, brought us tea. Sitting on the stone floor of his cave, his kids climbing on his lap, he asked why I had come. I told him about the dire situation of my village and how Kunga Rinpoche had performed the
mo
and declared that only he could help us. He listened carefully, and I sensed in him a compassion that would bridge the fear that everyone else felt of even stepping foot into my village. Though his monastery in Pangi was down a side valley from Simoling three or four days’ walk away, he had heard of my village and knew well why people feared setting foot within its precinct. Without hesitation, he agreed to come. In his wife’s silence I felt her fear. I knew that silence well, the silence of those who feared the dreaded disease but were too polite to voice it. It was quite natural: we felt it ourselves.

‘I started the return journey to my village that day. Tulshuk Lingpa waited a few days, then took his family over the Rohtang Pass and sent them on to Pangi.

‘After having been shunned and isolated and having helplessly watched the limbs of our parents, our uncles and aunts, brothers, sisters and—finally—ourselves slowly vanishing into festering wounds, Tulshuk Lingpa’s arrival gave us the hope we’d lost when this malady first arrived. His compassion enabled us to have compassion for ourselves.

‘The disfigured despise themselves; the horror of someone else’s leprosy gets turned on oneself when one wakes up one day and it is one’s own nose that is vanishing in an open wound. A face without a nose is no less horrific if it is one’s neighbor’s than if it is one’s own face in the mirror. We had forgotten how to love ourselves.

‘And then this lama did what no one else had dared: he actually came to our village. We knew we were grotesque. We knew, when we gathered around him—fingers, hands, forearms, elbows, feet, knees and legs, noses, ears and lips in various stages of decay and disappearance, slowly eaten by festering wounds—we knew and felt for ourselves the horror of the sight. Like a doctor arriving at an accident scene, he showed not the slightest horror at our disfigurement, handling our wounds and trying to heal them with Tibetan medicine. He climbed the mountain behind the village to the monastery and moved in. We could hear the drum and human thighbone horn at all hours of the day and night. At first the rituals he performed didn’t stop the course of the disease. So he went into a meditational retreat and he came out some days later having had a vision of Nagaraksha, the king of the
nagas
, or serpent gods.

‘He sent someone to get his close disciples from his monastery in Pangi, Lama Namdrol, Lama Lobsang and Lama Mipham. They were very learned men. They collected the materials needed to make a sculpture, and for the next few days nobody saw them as Tulshuk Lingpa sculpted this demon king and Lama Lobsang painted it.

‘When they were through, word spread through the village that we were to gather at the monastery. Tulshuk Lingpa told us the cause of our disease.
Nagas
, the serpent gods, are found—like serpents themselves—at springs and wet places, where trees and grasses and wildflowers grow. In Lahaul, you can tell a spring from a long way off; springs are the only naturally green places in our otherwise barren landscape. He told us that the
nagas
were angry at the village because the villagers had cut all the trees at the village spring and used them to construct houses. It was true. Shortly before the first of us had a sore that didn’t heal and the disease started eating our bodies, greed had come over us and we had cut the trees at the spring.

‘“Cutting trees at a spring,” Tulshuk Lingpa explained, “puts the earth out of balance and causes disturbances in the spirit world. Your disappearing flesh is the result of the
nagas
’ anger. It is because of that we now have the demon himself, Nagaraksha, before us.”

The Nagaraksha

‘The sculpture was every bit as horrific as the disease itself. When I saw it,’ Chokshi said, ‘I shuddered. The demon sat on a lotus pedestal resting on a seething mass of serpents. Instead of legs, he had a coiled snake’s tail over which he wore a tiger skin. His skin was blue, and he had snakes draped over his neck and wrapped around his arms. Nine out of his eighteen hands held snakes; the others held knives. A flayed human being was slung over his shoulders. All you could see were the feet and the legs’ empty skin slit down the side. He had three tiers of heads adorned with human skulls, and the heads of snakes poked out everywhere.

‘“Until now,” Tulshuk Lingpa said, “the leprosy has been eradicating you. Now we will eradicate the leprosy!” So saying, the lamas started a ritual—the intensity and length of which the people of Simoling had never experienced. The chanting went on day and night as the lamas called on and mollified the angry spirits. Drums pounded, cymbals crashed, and the clarinet-like
gyalings
sounded through the night. They constructed a huge
kyilkhor
, or sand mandala, on a platform that took four people to carry. Tulshuk Lingpa drew the design on the platform and the other lamas constructed it, “painting” it with different-colored sands. Huge caldrons of food boiled on wood fires to feed the lamas and the assembled villagers.

‘The ritual lasted ten days, and when it was through, Tulshuk Lingpa called for all of us villagers to gather. He told us to bring whatever hunting rifles we had, and together we marched down to the river. The lamas brought with them the sand mandala.

‘They placed dried grass on the mandala to set it aflame but before anyone could light it, it burst into flame by itself. The people were amazed and deeply moved, and they were saying, “Our lama is not crazy. This is not a drunken man! He is very powerful, most powerful!”

‘Then the lamas tilted the platform and poured the sand mandala into the mountain torrent, shooting their rifles into the air and whistling shrilly as they did so to send the demons off that had been eating our flesh.

‘“From this day on,” Tulshuk Lingpa told us, “no leprosy will come to this village. There is nothing to fear!”

‘Then the people said to him, “You have sent the demon away. Where have you sent it?”

‘“I have sent it to Afghanistan,” he said. In Afghanistan there is a place called Simoling connected to the life of Padmasambhava.”’

So it was that the flesh-eating spirit was eradicated in Simoling, and the leprosy that had been slowly eating their limbs disappeared. Their wounds healed, and no one else was affected. When I went to Simoling and surrounding villages to do research for this book, I was frankly skeptical that ritual could eradicate leprosy. All the older people remembered the incident. Every one of them attested to its truth.

The people of Simoling were so grateful that they all gathered at the monastery to show Tulshuk Lingpa their respect. The representative of the village’s thirty households got up.

‘We used to have sixty or seventy households,’ he told the lama, ‘but entire families have died of the dreaded disease you just cast out from our land—others fled. Now there are only thirty households left. With you here, we feel confident the demon will never come back. Without you, we are afraid. Therefore we would like to give you our monastery, Samdup Choekorling.’

Producing a paper stating as much, a member of each household pressed his right thumb on a pad of ink and left his print on the deed. Those without a right thumb used their left. One man used the big toe on his right foot. It was all he had.