A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality (9 page)

His first line of attack was on the spirit level utilizing ritual.

In an ancient tradition such as the Bonpo, which Padmasambhava came to supplant, there are both benevolent and malevolent entities—with and without bodies. There are worlds we cannot see with our natural eyes. The priests of this tradition pass between worlds, communicate with spirits, intercede on our behalf and fight brave battles in realms most people outside such a tradition would call pure imagination. Padmasambhava resembles more a shamanistic wizard than what we’d normally associate with the Buddha as he is understood in other Buddhist traditions.

Christ is the example for Christians, and the goal of Christian religion is to become more Christlike. Buddhists of the Southern School emulate Buddha by following his teachings on meditation and following a clean, simple life. In the religion of the Nyingmas, the oldest branch of Tibetan Buddhism, Padmasambhava is the example the lamas emulate. They too act as wizards, performing rituals in order to make contact with hidden realms. They too make war by fighting the malevolent entities that stand behind that which manifests here in three dimensions.

True to this tradition, Tulshuk Lingpa mounted his first offensive against the Muslim invasion by performing rituals. He called upon the deities of his tradition to fight off the Other. But it didn’t work. News still came from down the Pangi Valley towards Klaath that the Muslims were coming over the Such Pass. So finally Tulshuk Lingpa said, ‘I’ve done the rituals but they haven’t worked. Now we have no other choice. If the Muslims really want to fight, we’ll have to go up the valley and fight!’

That’s what the man from Klaath had wanted all along. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘We need at least one man from every house!’

‘No we don’t,’ Tulshuk Lingpa said. ‘We must attack the Muslims but we don’t need an army. We’ll beat them back with only five or six of us.’

‘How can we?’ the others cried. ‘We’ll be outnumbered. We have no guns.’

‘Guns are not needed!’ Tulshuk Lingpa said. ‘Bring your axes and your tree-cutting saws. That’s all we’ll need.’

Crazy as they thought he was—leading them into battle with axes and saws against an army of heavily armed Muslims—they went, only a half-dozen of them, to fight off the invaders.

The trail followed the river at the bottom of the rugged valley. When the valley narrowed to the point where both the river and the trail were pressed between two perpendicular rock faces, Tulshuk Lingpa led the way up a treacherous cliff towering over the narrow path and told the others to cut down some old, wide-girthed trees. They limbed them and left them in long sections. They found huge boulders and, leveraging them with long poles, moved them to the edge of the precipice. They left the logs teetering over the edge, awaiting the nudge that would send them and the boulders down on the invading troops. There they waited, camping at the top of the ridge.

The invaders didn’t come.

After three days Tulshuk Lingpa told the men, ‘I’m going back down to the trail. When I find the invaders, I’ll lure them beneath the precipice. When I whistle like this,’ and he whistled the call of a bird that is only found in Tibet, ‘let the logs and boulders fly!’ Thus saying, Tulshuk Lingpa went down into the valley. After a day and a night, not as much as a local man did he see or hear.

He called the others to come down, and when they gathered with him by the river, Tulshuk Lingpa said, ‘They must be holed up in Klaath. We’ll march up there and rout them out.’

‘But master,’ they said, ‘there are only six of us. They will kill us!’

Tulshuk Lingpa knew no fear and, as if it were a test of their faith in him, they followed Tulshuk Lingpa without weapons of any sort down the stony valley to Klaath.

When they marched into Klaath—five terrified men following their white-robed general—they didn’t see a soul. The village appeared deserted. Everything was locked up tight, abandoned. It was only when they heard a baby cry that they realized the population of Klaath was in hiding behind locked doors, quaking with fear, defenseless against the Muslims. Each household feared the Muslims were hiding in the next house or in the neighboring shop, whose door was shut.

Tulshuk Lingpa himself called at each door, and those that wouldn’t open to his call he kicked open with his own foot. He took rocks and smashed locks and opened every door in the village that wouldn’t yield to his command. In such a way, the village came to know that the Muslims had completely deserted the village and that they were free. The only doors Tulshuk Lingpa wasn’t able to make yield were the government offices’, whose doors were fortified. It was only when the entire village gathered at these doors whooping with joy because they were free from the Muslim menace did the officials crack their doors open and peer out. When they saw the people gathered around Tulshuk Lingpa, they asked who he was. ‘This is our guru from Pangi taking a break for war! This is our guru—now Major General!’

The people threw garlands of wildflowers around Tulshuk Lingpa’s neck. The government officials mustered a marching band and they paraded their savior through the market to let everyone know they were free. When it was over, they asked Tulshuk Lingpa if he would stay on in Klaath for a few days.

‘We are afraid the Muslims were only here on a reconnaissance,’ they told him. ‘We fear they’ll come back with greater numbers.’

‘We have come here for war,’ Tulshuk Lingpa called out over the crowd. ‘Now that the war is over, we will perform rituals!’ and so saying, he led the entire community through three days of rituals. The Muslims never came back.

It is generally agreed that Padmasambhava planted within the unchanging layer of selected disciples’ consciousness the knowledge of particular

terma, as well as where and how to find them. So the following question naturally arises: Which of Padmasambhava’s disciples was Tulshuk Lingpa the reincarnation of?

I put this question to many people close to Tulshuk Lingpa, and though they all had definite opinions, their opinions differed and there was no consensus on the most basic questions such as the number of disciples Padmasambhava had, how many of them might have ended up as
tertons
, how many of
them
were part of the elite known as
lingpas
. Rigzin Dokhampa, the senior researcher at the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology outside Gangtok with whom I spent a lot of time asking questions of doctrine and who was also a disciple of Tulshuk Lingpa, told me there were twenty-five
lingpas
and that Tulshuk Lingpa was the incarnation of one named Lang Palgyi Senge. When I checked this out with Kunsang, he told me flat out that Rigzin Dokhampa was wrong, and that Dorje Dechen Lingpa had
perhaps
been Lang Palgyi Senge’s reincarnation. He told me that Padmasambhava gave the prophecy that Lang Palgyi Senge would be the one to have the power to open Beyul Demoshong. Others say there are a total of twenty-one beyuls. But Kunsang told me with tremendous certainty that Lang Palgyi Senge said there were eight and that Dudjom Rinpoche, Tulshuk Lingpa’s root guru, was destined to open Pemako. Pemako is a beyul east of Bhutan where the Tsang Po River, after crossing Tibet, falls through a series of gorges and becomes the Brahmaputra. ‘The reason Dudjom did not open Pemako,’ Kunsang informed me, ‘was that he was such a cautious lama. He wasn’t crazy—like my father. He had the opposite nature.’

Supplying numbers for such things as the number of hidden lands or disciples of quasi-mythical beings, I found, is not a very fruitful activity. You might as well try to determine how many angels can dance on the head of a medieval pin.

Another time Kunsang told me, ‘There were eight emanations of Padmasambhava, and Nyima Odser was the last. Nyima Odser said, “After me, there will be 108
tertons
.” Dudjom was one of the 108. It is said that at the end of time, at the time of the Great War, Dudjom will take incarnation as the king of Shambhala and lead the battle that will usher in a great age of peace.’

Once when Kunsang was trying to explain to me his father’s nature and the meaning of tulshuk, he said, ‘My father was just like the eighth emanation of Padmasambhava, Guru Nyima Odser. Nyima Odser was like a sadhu, a wandering holy man, never staying in one place. He was not a stable type of person. He was a crazy yogi like my father. And like my father, he drank a lot.’

The story goes that one time Nyima Odser was riding his horse across the vast Tibetan Plateau when he spied the black felt tent of an enterprising nomad who had set up a little drinking establishment.

Nyima Odser stopped his horse and started drinking chang, the thick, milky, butter and cheese millet beer of Tibet. After he’d drunk quite a few, the proprietor became nervous. A wild-looking lama riding out of the vast plane with eyes like a tiger’s and now drunk beyond all measure was sure to try to pull something when it came to paying the bill.

Nyima Odser called out for another chang. ‘Not until you’ve paid for what you’ve drunk,’ was the proprietor’s response. Though the sun was still high in the sky, it was arching towards the horizon, which in Tibet seems infinitely far away at the edge of the vast plateau, which serves as the roof of the world.

‘Give me that chang and keep it flowing,’ Nyima Odser said, ‘and I swear on my faith in the Buddha and all the bodhisattvas that I will pay my bill the moment the sun goes down.’

The proprietor agreed, having little choice after the lama put such an oath on it.

What the nomad did not know was that Nyima Odser was an emanation of Padmasambhava and that he held control over almost everything, including the sun. In fact, his name translates to Golden Sunlight. He also didn’t know that Nyima Odser had no money. He gave the lama another big bowl of chang. The lama drank it, ordered another, and while he was waiting, performed a little rite accompanied by an incantation.

As the afternoon seemed to drag on for some uncountable number of hours, the nomad had to keep supplying chang to the increasingly drunk lama; the poor man had no idea that Nyima Odser had used his mystic powers to stop the sun in its course across the sky in order to delay the moment of reckoning.

That night, night did not come. Nor did it come the next day, when the fields already started to parch. Soon the crops began to wither. It seemed to the nomad that all the moisture in Tibet was going down his customer’s throat.

The highest lamas, soothsayers and oracles of Tibet gathered to divine the hidden reason the scorching sun was stuck in the sky. Their divination led them right to Nyima Odser, who was enjoying his chang outside the nomad’s tent. They asked him why he had stopped the sun.

‘I have no money to pay for my drinks,’ he explained. ‘If the sun goes down, I have to pay; that was my oath.’

When they offered to pay his bill Nyima Odser ordered one last bowl and then released the sun, which immediately fell to the horizon like an overripe cherry, releasing the land of Tibet from its grip.

‘Each of the 108
tertons
of Guru Padmasambhava has the power of Nyima Odser.’ Kunsang concluded. ‘But not all of them were as crazy as my father.’

‘You say your father wasn’t the incarnation of Nyima Odser,’ I said. ‘Do you know anything of your father’s previous incarnations?’

‘Verrry good question!’ Kunsang said, ‘Verrry interesting!’

‘I told you that I was born in Pangi, where my father had his first monastery,’ Kunsang began. ‘Until this point, my father knew nothing of Beyul Demoshong. Yes, he was a terton, a revealer of hidden treasure. He could reach into a vision and bring back a magic dagger. He could be directed in a dream to a hidden scroll. But he was also a village lama, and as such was often asked to perform rituals in people’s houses. Sometimes I’d go with him. I was young, and I’d ride in front of my father on the same horse, hanging on to the horse’s mane as we negotiated narrow trails along vast stony slopes running with water from the melting snows above. Once I went with him to a house up the valley in the direction of Patanam. A few lamas from his monastery were with us. I loved going along to see new places and to be with my father. Many things happened in his presence that happened nowhere else. Being the son of a high lama, I was always treated with special deference. Even his lamas treated me with respect.

‘When we were heading home, some villagers from further up the valley were going the same way, so we travelled together. We stopped for lunch by the river and were then enjoying the warmth of the mid-summer day, when someone asked my father whether he remembered anything of his previous incarnations.