A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality (38 page)

Tulshuk Lingpa tucked the
purba
back into his robe with a calm that was astounding. Wangyal trembled with fright, awed by what he had just experienced, shaken to the core.

Wangyal told me this story from when he was young while we sat drinking tea in his substantial home in Simoling. A more sedate, open and honest man cannot be imagined. I had just been travelling some days with him, visiting people and places connected with Tulshuk Lingpa. I had found him sober, level-headed and very exact in what he said. Exaggeration was not in his character. The way he told the story, I felt it was true. Even though it was embarrassing to do so, I had to ask. I tried to be diplomatic.

‘People make up stories and exaggerate,’ I said, ‘especially when it comes to things religious. Did this really happen how you tell it? The glacier split in two and passed you by?’

‘Absolutely. I am as amazed today as I was then,’ he said, staring me openly in the eye. ‘I also probably would not believe it if I hadn’t experienced it myself. But it happened exactly as I say.’

Both the man’s honesty and his integrity told me it was true.

‘The human mind is susceptible to all sorts of things,’ Wangyal continued, ‘especially doubt. I realized that until this point I had still harbored doubts; now that I had experienced Tulshuk Lingpa’s powers, doubt was no longer possible. Beyul Demoshong was now a certainty.’

When the crashing glacier’s echoes faded down the valley, Tulshuk Lingpa turned to Wangyal and asked whether he wanted to continue. Wangyal said, ‘Yes,’ without hesitation. Tulshuk Lingpa was happy. ‘Finally,’ he said, ‘a disciple with enough faith.’

Tulshuk Lingpa took a confident step forward and continued climbing the steep valley. Wangyal followed in a state of awe. Though his mind was calm and confident, his body quaked with animal fear.

Ahead of them was the glacier. Beyond the glacier, where earlier had been a steep slope of snow and ice topped by stone, the ground now appeared bare. Impossible as it might sound, above the bare ground was vegetation and it got greener as it went higher towards what now appeared to be a pass. Even more incredible than that was how the way was marked by rainbows—the most incredible rainbows Wangyal had ever seen, rainbows whose light and arcs were in the patterns of flowers. They looked strangely close—as if he could reach out his hand and touch them. The air was so thin that the rainbows could only be seen where they lay upon the mountains, as if the mountains at these altitudes had the density of air. The air seemed too imbued with the Celestial to contain them.

‘When we reached the edge of the glacier,’ Wangyal said, ‘it was smooth as only melting ice can be and flowing everywhere with water. Tulshuk Lingpa confidently climbed on to it, next to where the piece had broken off. He reached down his hand and lifted me up.’

Wangyal broke his narrative to take a sip of tea and look out the window of his living room at the surrounding mountains. Though it was June, the peaks were still covered in snow.

He told me that when he was a young man here in Lahaul he used to cross the Rohtang Pass in winter. It was dangerous but sometimes they had to do it. Just walking to the next village often meant negotiating snow so deep that houses would be buried in it. Trails were often swept away by avalanches. Since he used to go for treks in the high mountains and walk among the glaciers, he understood as well as Namdrol how treacherous glaciers could be. They were especially a threat in springtime when the ice melts on the surface and the resulting water opens deep crevasses. When the changing spring weather brings fresh snow, the fissures get covered. Under any other circumstance, he would have had more sense than to venture up that glacier. Now he did not hesitate. His awareness was as taut and sharp as the glacier was steep.

He followed Tulshuk Lingpa a few hundred yards up the glacier. The rainbows ahead of them seemed so close he could now practically scoop them up in his hands. The wind swept down the cold surface from the heights and the sky beyond. Suddenly the breeze turned warm and fragrant. The thin crystalline mountain air was bringing with it the scent of the most glorious herbs and flowers. He breathed deeply the fragrant air, and the smell of saffron filled his lungs. Tulshuk Lingpa was walking just ahead of him. His sight, however, was set on the rising greenery beyond the glacier from whence issued this beautiful smell.

Suddenly the ground gave way beneath his master’s feet and Tulshuk Lingpa was sliding headlong into a crevasse wide enough to swallow him. Wangyal lunged forward and grabbed on to his ankle. He tried to dig the tip of his boots into the edge of the crevasse to prevent them both from sliding into the dark chasm of ice. Could this be the crack to which they had been travelling so long?

‘The ice axe,’ Tulshuk Lingpa yelled.

In his panic Wangyal had forgotten that he had one on his belt. He swung it hard and dug its tip deep into the ice, stopping their deathly slide. There he was, lying on his belly with his face hard against the ice, watching his hand slowly slip down the ice axe’s handle. His other hand was stretched behind his back holding on to Tulshuk Lingpa’s ankle. For the second time that day death seemed unavoidable. How could he ever get his guru out of that crevasse? He turned his head to look at him, and to his amazement Tulshuk Lingpa was standing up! Yes, he was hanging on to Tulshuk Lingpa’s ankle but he was standing.

‘Hey,’ Tulshuk Lingpa said in a jocular voice, ‘what are you doing with your face on the ice. Get up!’

Wangyal got up, amazed at his guru’s strength. He wanted to bow down and touch his feet but if he did so he’d probably slide right into the crack from which they had just saved themselves.

Though immediately ahead of them it was even more treacherous, Wangyal was ready to follow his master. They were almost there. Just ten steps more, Wangyal told himself, just ten steps and we will be in Beyul. It seemed that close. He heard a sound from above and it took him a moment to realize he was listening to a
gyaling
, the clarinet-like instrument the lamas use. At first he thought he was hallucinating from the altitude. But he heard it and so did Tulshuk Lingpa. ‘It is the gatekeepers of Beyul,’ Tulshuk Lingpa said. ‘The
dharmapala
and the
dakinis
are coming to greet us.’

Wangyal started forward but Tulshuk Lingpa put a hand on his shoulder.

‘We can’t go, not just the two of us,’ Tulshuk Lingpa said. ‘The two of us can’t disappear. How can we go without the others? There is room for over 2000 in Beyul—this I know. We must turn back.’

‘Never did I feel disappointment so acutely in my life,’ Wangyal confided. ‘We were so close. We were standing in the snow but above us, beyond the glacier, there was no snow. It was so beautiful on the other side, green, and we were almost there. I kept thinking I was hallucinating. I even put my fingers in my ears to see if the sound of the
gyalings
came from inside my own head. The sound was real. The rainbows were real. And so was Beyul.’

They carefully picked their way down the glacier and descended the valley. By the time they reached the cave dark clouds had once again descended on the mountain.

The others were eager to know what had happened. Tulshuk Lingpa didn’t utter a word. He sat a short way off on a large stone, and the others surrounded Wangyal. ‘What happened up there?’ they asked him. ‘Your eyes are glowing. What did you see?’

He related all he had seen and how close they were.

‘I know why we couldn’t see it earlier,’ he told them. ‘There were too many doubts in all of our minds. That’s why we have been unable to see the Hidden Valley, even though it’s right
there
.’ He pointed up the snowy slope. ‘This time we really saw it, for real. Twice we almost lost our lives. It is really there. I saw it with my own eyes.’

The people thought, ‘We’ve travelled so far, from Himachal Pradesh and Bhutan and Tibet. We’ve come to Sikkim and now to Kanchenjunga, and still have doubts. We have too many doubts; that’s why we haven’t seen it.’

Tulshuk Lingpa had advised them all along, even before they left Lahaul, that if they had the slightest atom of doubt in their minds they would never see the Hidden Valley.

The others were really excited now. ‘We also want to see what you saw,’ they said to Wangyal. ‘Even if we cannot enter, we want to go to the point where we can see what you saw.’

Wangyal told them that if he hadn’t been nervous, if he hadn’t been shivering with fear because of nearly dying twice, he would have been able to reach out and touch the rainbows.

That afternoon, Tulshuk Lingpa performed the
trata melong
.

Yeshe looked into the mirror.

She saw a long pipe coming out of the sky. It was as wide as your outstretched arms, glowing with a golden yellow light like the sun but was also very white. It was coming straight out of the sky.

Though they asked Tulshuk Lingpa what it meant, he grew silent and again sat a short way off on a stone. The moment he sat, four white doves—what they were doing up there amongst the glaciers is anybody’s guess—flew low over Tulshuk Lingpa. They circled him three times before cooing as if in salute and flying off into a low-hanging cloud. The cloud came lower and engulfed them. Though it was the middle of the afternoon, a red light glowed through the thick fog they were suddenly immersed in. It seemed like sunset. Then the color changed, and there were flashes of pulsating colored light. Those in the cave came out and were staring into the changing, colored light of a fog so dense they couldn’t even see Tulshuk Lingpa. Then the wind blew. The cloud moved up the valley, and they were bathed again in sunshine.

These two events, the circling doves and the multicolored cloud, were corroborated by everyone I spoke with who was there. When telling me the story, each independently recalled these events with such vividness after four decades that it was as if these events had been etched in their memories.

The next morning Tulshuk Lingpa again did the
trata melong
and had Yeshe gaze into the mirror.

This time she saw Beyul, a beautiful place of natural wonder. Ancient trees surrounded a field through which water flowed. Waterfalls cascaded through the thick jungle that covered the surrounding mountains, and the field was filled with huge white mushrooms.

The sky was clear over the slope leading to the pass.

Tulshuk Lingpa smiled.

‘Today is the day,’ he said. ‘Today is not like the other days. Today we must be especially careful.’

He chose among his disciples twelve he wanted to take. They wore heavy jackets and scarves wrapped round their heads. Tulshuk Lingpa brought the
pechas
needed to open the gate and those he’d need once they entered. Wrapped in cloth, he strapped the
pechas
to his back.

When they were leaving the cave one of those being left behind said to Wangyal, who was amongst the twelve, ‘Why don’t you stay behind and let someone else go. You’ve already seen it.’

‘That, I thought, was extremely unjust,’ Wangyal told me. ‘I told the fellow, “That wouldn’t be fair. It was only because of all of you that we turned back!”’

Tulshuk Lingpa led the twelve towards the snow slope that rose to the pass.

At the base of the final slope, they stopped on a large flat rock for a final meal of tea and
tsampa
, after which their food was finished. After this, they would have no food until they entered Beyul.

Tulshuk Lingpa chose three to go with him further: Yeshe and Lama Tashi—both from Lahaul—and the Lachung Lama, not the one by that name still living in Sikkim but a Tibetan lama by that name. ‘If we make it,’ Tulshuk Lingpa told those he left behind, ‘we’ll signal.’

The four started pushing their way up through the waist-deep, newly fallen snow towards the pass. Lama Tashi was the
umzay
, the head of rituals, at the Simoling Monastery. In his late thirties, he was a mature man solidly built with years of experience of high mountain snow. He went first to break the trail. Tulshuk Lingpa came second, holding a page from a
pecha
and chanting aloud certain sacred syllables. Behind him was Yeshe, and taking up the rear was the Lachung Lama.

From a distance, they looked like four little dots slowly moving up the vast white slope.

When they suddenly dissolved into white and disappeared, it took a moment for those on the flat rock to realize that their comrades had been engulfed in a cloud that was pouring down over the pass.

On the slope, the cloud’s arrival—like a white and permeable wall—hit them with a sudden vertigo as the steep white plane of snow they were climbing suddenly merged with the air. Everything lost distinction, became uniform and started to spin.

As the snow slope gave way beneath them, the air itself became solid as they were plunged into a darkness that roared.

Each of them found themselves alone—the air sucked from their lungs and a crushing force hitting their bodies. In place of the green valley each expected to suddenly find themselves in, each, alone, found themselves plunged into a world of darkness and profound silence, unable to move—all except for the Lachung Lama who, when the avalanche ended, found himself with only his legs buried in the snow but otherwise unharmed.