A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality (34 page)

Some of the villagers were right there, and some of them were quite old, ‘We have been here since our birth,’ they told him, ‘and we have never seen this before. This was a miracle. There
was
no footprint before.’

The police commissioner had with him a little case with the tools of his trade. He opened it now and took out a tape measure. He measured the footprint, and it was quite small. Then he demanded to measure the lama’s foot. There was a murmur of dissent but Tulshuk Lingpa assented. He measured the lama’s foot, which was considerably larger than the footprint.

‘Unless you perform a miracle again right now and in front of my eyes and put your other foot in stone right next to this one, I will declare you a fraud and have to take you in. You think you are going somewhere from where you will never return? That might just be the case. I’ll take you to Gangtok—where there is a nice little cell waiting for you.’

Yab Maila protested. ‘Tulshuk Lingpa performed the miracle in front of Gonde Drungyig,’ he said, ‘one of His Majesty’s officials. What right do you have to take him away?’

‘You performed this before an official who was here in an unofficial capacity. While he might have been sent to perform a preliminary investigation, I was sent by the government to witness the miracle, not he. Now you must perform a miracle for me.’

The villagers got angry. ‘We thought he was the representative of the palace,’ they called out. ‘He came early in the morning. You were so late. We thought he was the official representative so we proceeded. Performing a miracle is no joke. It cannot be repeated!’

The police commissioner was not in the least sympathetic. He was not even Sikkimese. He was Punjabi, from way down on the Indian plains a thousand miles away.

As Rigzin Dokhampa told me, ‘What do Punjabis know about footprints in stone? The Indian police officer didn’t understand that when you put your foot in stone, you don’t leave the imprint of the tips of the toes or the back of the heel. The footprint is naturally smaller than the foot that made it. When the police commissioner measured it, he got it wrong. He said Tulshuk Lingpa was a fake; he didn’t know.’

The police commissioner announced that he was taking Tulshuk Lingpa to Gangtok. He grabbed hold of Tulshuk Lingpa’s arm to drag him to where they had tied their horses but he sorely misjudged the situation.

The man that the crowd had waited generations for, the one who had just performed a miracle to demonstrate his power to the king and who held the key to the promised land of immortality in his hand, was not so easily to be led off to jail by a Punjabi representative of the king, commissioner of police or not.

A melee ensued in which Tulshuk Lingpa and the commissioner of police formed the inner circle. They were surrounded by the ten deputies with their rifles ready but useless against this unruly mob of robed lamas, old ladies shaking their fists, children and barking dogs.

The police commissioner had no choice but to give in. ‘I’ll leave,’ he told the crowd, ‘but I will recommend to the king that Tulshuk Lingpa be ordered to Gangtok to perform a miracle at the palace—and that if he fails, he should be thrown in jail.’

One of the lamas shouted out, ‘Even if he performs a miracle for the king and all his ministers, you’ll still throw him in jail!’

‘That’s not true,’ he retorted. ‘If Tulshuk Lingpa performs a miracle, I will personally carry him on my shoulders and parade him around the palace grounds to the accompaniment of trumpets and drums!’

He pointed his finger at Yab Maila and Kunsang Lama, the head of the monastery. ‘You two came last time to announce the time for the miracle. You’ll come again and tell us when the next miracle will be performed but this time in Gangtok. You will come and announce it personally to me, the police commissioner.’

Neither of them gave the police commissioner the slightest indication that they would do what he said.

Someone yelled out, ‘You might want a miracle but you’re not going to get it. By that time, we’ll be in the Hidden Land!’

With that, the crowd let out a tremendous cheer.

The police commissioner and his armed deputies beat a retreat to their horses. They swung themselves up on to the saddles and thundered down the mountain towards the Rangeet River, where official police jeeps were waiting to take them back to the capital with their red lights flashing.

Even Tulshuk Lingpa, who had earlier not been afraid of going to Gangtok to perform a miracle for the king, realized the danger.

By the evening Tulshuk Lingpa, his family and disciples from Himachal Pradesh all started packing. Since openly fleeing would attract pursuers—and possible problems at the Indian border—Tulshuk Lingpa announced he was leaving the kingdom for a few days to see Chatral Rinpoche at his monastery in Jorbungalow outside Darjeeling and that he was taking with him only his disciples from Himachal Pradesh. Of course they would never return to the kingdom. Tseram, which Tulshuk Lingpa had pointed out from above Dzongri and which was near the Western Gate, was on the Nepal side of Mount Kanchenjunga. From Darjeeling they could easily cross over into Nepal and depart from this world for one so much greater without having to worry about so small a potentate as the king of Sikkim.

Fearing that the police commissioner had sent an order to all the border crossings not to let Tulshuk Lingpa and his followers flee the kingdom, Tulshuk Lingpa made sure they had a few bottles of liquor ready as they approached the Indian border at Jorethang. ‘If the border guards give us trouble,’ he told his disciples, ‘we’ll get them drunk. We’ll say we are only going overnight to Darjeeling.’

Shortly before they reached the border with India, he stopped at a stream known as the Rhambang Khola. He scooped some water in his hands and drank it. ‘This stream,’ he declared, ‘comes straight from Beyul.’

CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Flight

They crossed into India without incident and arrived safely at Chatral Rinpoche’s monastery in Jorbungalow.

During the next days, the disciples who had stayed behind in Sikkim started arriving there as well. No one wanted to let Tulshuk Lingpa out of their sight. The Sikkimese, Bhutanese and others were afraid as they often were that Tulshuk Lingpa would disappear into Beyul with his oldest disciples and biggest sponsors—those who came with him from Himachal Pradesh—and that they’d be left behind.

There were others who had the faith and wanted to go but could not afford it. Though money was superfluous in Beyul, one did have to pay for the journey and to eat until the gate opened and you could enter. With a leader like Tulshuk Lingpa, there was no telling how long that might take. One woman in Tashiding had a particularly touching story. She sold her pig to raise funds for the journey but even after she sold the pig she didn’t have enough money to go. She still sounded sad, all those years later. ‘I lost my pig,’ she said wistfully, ‘
and
my chance to go to the Hidden Land.’

The woman who sold her pig, Tashiding, West Sikkim

The longer Tulshuk Lingpa stayed in Jorbungalow, the more attention he drew; the more attention he drew, the more people flocked to him expecting to be taken to the Hidden Land. As the crowd of people clamoring to enter Beyul grew, so did the obstacles. Though timing was important, so was the collective karma of the members of the expedition in gaining the goodwill of the guardian deities. Though he didn’t feel the time was ripe to move on towards Tseram and would have liked to stay with Chatral Rinpoche longer, what could he do? Wheels had been set in motion that even he could not stop.

So the
jindas
arranged for three jeeps to take Tulshuk Lingpa, his family and the important people to the Nepal border. The rest followed by whatever means they could.

From the border, they walked north seven days through jungle-covered mountains towards Mount Kanchenjunga until they reached the first place of any size, the town of Yamphodin. With hindsight, one can see that the events that then unfolded were inevitable. Two or three hundred foreigners following a lama who was going to open ‘Heaven’s door’ setting up camp on the outskirts of a small Nepali hill town were sure to catch the attention of the head of the local government, who was bound to involve the police, who would find it their duty to inform the army, who would feel they had no choice but to pass the information on to the king, then residing at his palace in Kathmandu. When the king of Nepal heard of the situation and that many of his subjects were leaving their fields and homes in order to follow Tulshuk Lingpa to this hidden land of plenty, which they expected to access from
his
kingdom, he sent in the army.

From the army headquarters in Taplejung came seventy-five combat-ready troops with rifles drawn. They encircled Tulshuk Lingpa’s encampment in a most aggressive manner and cordoned them off for two days. During this time their commander interrogated people, starting with Tulshuk Lingpa. Protocol has it that one must always treat a lama, especially a high lama such as Tulshuk Lingpa undoubtedly was, with respect. So the army commander inquired politely from him what his plans were.

‘I hear you are going to Heaven,’ he said. ‘How many people are you planning on taking with you?’

‘300.’

‘300! That’s too many.’

‘But there’s room for 2000.’

Jinda Wangchuk, who Kunsang said was the cleverest of Tulshuk Lingpa’s disciples, whispered in his master’s ear that he’d better remember what happened with the king of Sikkim and be cautious.

‘Actually, we are not going to Heaven,’ Tulshuk Lingpa said, backtracking on what he had just told them. ‘We only want to go on a pilgrimage to Tseram to perform a puja. We have to go there every twelve years for a six-month puja, after which we’ll have better luck. That is why we are going.’

Tulshuk Lingpa’s new version of why they were going to Tseram, a tiny nomad encampment just below the line of glaciers, was completely contradictory to what he had just told them and to the stories that were swirling around this lama all the way to the palace in Kathmandu. But he managed to be entirely convincing. Such was the nature of his charisma.

For two days, while his heavily armed men held the perimeter of the encampment and didn’t let anyone in or out, the commander interrogated one after another of Tulshuk Lingpa’s disciples and everybody had the same story. ‘Hidden Land? What Hidden Land is that?’ they’d ask innocently, ‘We’re just on a pilgrimage.’

Ordinarily, the commander would have dropped it there in exasperation and let them go. Whether they were going to Heaven or only to Tseram mattered little to him; once they were in the high mountains, they’d all be out of his hair. But this order had come straight from the king himself. Besides, Tseram was at high altitude near the border with Sikkim where foreigners needed permits, which he wasn’t authorized to issue.

On the third day, it was clear they were at a standstill. Jinda Wangchuk said to the commander, ‘You are always asking questions about and speaking with our leader. Who is your leader?
We
want to speak with
him
.’

A jeep was brought, and Jinda Wangchuk led a delegation of five representatives, disciples of Tulshuk Lingpa chosen for their ability to speak well, and the commander brought them down to the army headquarters in Taplejung so they could speak with his superiors.

There the conversation between the head of the army in Taplejung and Tulshuk Lingpa’s representatives went something like this: