A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality (25 page)

Kunsang told me that when people came to see his father they would often bring offerings of food. After everyone left, Tulshuk Lingpa would instruct them to throw the food out. They were afraid of being poisoned. Chang, homemade beer, was especially suspect.

I too in my travels around Sikkim was often warned to be careful of being poisoned. At first, I thought people were warning me because hygienic conditions can sometimes be less than optimal. But the poisoning I was being warned against and about which Kunsang was speaking was not accidental but deliberate—and deadly.

The first time I heard of this was while walking in North Sikkim, relying on the kindness of strangers to put me up for the night. One night I told my host my intentions of walking to a small town I will call X (so not to bring insult to an entire town), and he gave me a stern warning.

‘If you go to X,’ he told me, ‘bring your own water and food. Don’t accept anything there, not even a cold drink or tea.’

I asked him why.

‘Food poisoning,’ he said.

‘Bad hygiene in X?’

‘They poison people there.’

‘On purpose?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Black magic. Human sacrifice. There are people there who worship a dark goddess who demands human sacrifice. They believe by killing you they will gain the wealth you would have accumulated over the course of your life. They also believe they will acquire your luck. Look, you are a Westerner. Just by the fact that you can travel so far means you are both extremely lucky and wealthy, at least by local standards. Therefore you would be a perfect target. So be careful!’

The next day I walked down the Teesta River Valley, through little villages in a vast mountain landscape. The other side of the river, where deep forests rose to spectacular heights, was Dzongu. It was a reserve for the indigenous Lepcha people restricted to foreigners. I enjoyed my walk immensely, passing through the tiny mountain villages, stopping now and again on a flat stone overlooking the deep to have a snack and take off my shoes and relax. My host’s warnings had made me change my plans. Instead of spending the night in X, I’d get a jeep from there back to Gangtok.

A few kilometers before X, I met a man who invited me to his house for tea. He was a farmer, mainly of cardamom, but also had a nursery and pigs and was quite wealthy. His house was large, rambling and quite new. We sat in his living room, and he asked me where I was headed. I told him to X and then on to Gangtok. ‘When you are in X,’ he said gravely, ‘don’t take any food. Poison.’

I acted as if I didn’t know anything about it: ‘They have bad hygiene there?’

‘No,’ he said in a hushed tone, ‘they will poison you. Black magic. Human sacrifice. They believe by killing someone they will gain wealth. Don’t take even tea there.’

‘What poison do they use?’

‘It is called
kapat
,’ he said.

He told me the symptoms of poisoning by
kapat
. ‘First your throat will begin to hurt and it will go dry. Your eyes will grow pale; your lips will become papery and dry. Your fingernails will become yellow; your teeth will turn blue and form cracks; your joints will ache. Then you will feel dizziness and your heart will feel pain. It will kill you from within five minutes to six months, depending on the dosage.’

‘Where do they get it?’

‘In the market. But if anyone sees someone buying it, they will go through the village yelling out “So-and-so bought
kapat
!” So no one will eat at his house.’

‘Do you think it really works? Do people gain wealth through this human sacrifice?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have seen it. People do grow rich, for a while. Then things turn bad for them, and they become very poor. They become like beggars. They become outcasts of society because people know what they’ve done.’

As he was telling me this, his wife brought me tea. I suddenly felt myself in an episode of
The Twilight Zone
. I could just hear the viewing audience all yelling out, ‘Don’t drink the tea! How do you think a simple farmer lives in such a rich house?’

‘How would I know if someone was trying to poison me?’ I asked. ‘For instance, how do I know what’s in this tea?’ I asked it jokingly, though with a tinge of concern.

‘You can look at me and tell I wouldn’t hurt you, can’t you?’

I drank the tea. They also gave me a delicious lunch. And I’ve lived to tell the tale. I do look at my fingernails from time to time but they haven’t turned yellow—yet.

I walked into X. It was just another dingy little bazaar town that looked like a Hollywood stage for a Western movie. While waiting there for about an hour for a jeep heading to Gangtok, I drank my own water and ate the crackers I had brought with me.

Poisoning was not always deliberate and inflicted on others. There was one disciple of Tulshuk Lingpa who poisoned himself. His name was Gyorpa, and by all accounts he was a bit crazy. He had been a student of Mandrel, one of Tulshuk Lingpa’s closest disciples and an expert in Tibetan medicine and herbal remedies. One day Gyorpa became ill with a high fever, and he decided to treat himself. He indiscriminately picked all sorts of herbs, ground them up into a powder, mixed them in water and drank them. Naturally, his condition only worsened. So he started climbing trees, breaking off branches and grinding up their bark and eating that. He developed continuous diarrhea, a tremendous headache, and his fever shot up and kept climbing until he was dead.

The old woman at Tashiding who told me about his death ended her story by saying, ‘I guess that will teach you not to eat ground-up trees.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lepcha Tales

Beyul means Hidden Land. Both its existence and its opening are cloaked in mystery and are meant to be kept secret. Tulshuk Lingpa’s teachers, Chatral Rinpoche and Dudjom Rinpoche, warned him to keep quiet and take only a few disciples. They cautioned that Beyul could not be opened by brute force. Yet events seemed to take on a life of their own. Tulshuk Lingpa had taken center stage at the central monastery in Sikkim and the numbers of his followers were growing daily, all of whom were intent on vanishing from this world and all its problems to enter a land that was known to exist on the slopes of Mount Kanchenjunga ever since people first started living in the land that became known as Sikkim.

The original inhabitants of Sikkim were the Lepchas, an ancient group of people who since the earliest times spoke of a valley hidden on the slopes of their sacred mountain Kanchenjunga. In order to understand the Lepchas’ knowledge of the Hidden Land I went to Sonam Lepcha, one of the culture holders of the Lepcha community, a musician and keeper of their most ancient lore.

‘We call this land—the land of the Lepcha, what others call the Darjeeling Hills and Sikkim—
Mayel Lyang
,’ he told me. ‘Mayel means hidden. Lyang means land. We also call it
Mayel Maluk Lyang
. Maluk means to rise up. The Lepcha god hid a treasure, and one day it will be found. So
Mayel Maluk Lyang
means “The land in which the Hidden Treasure will Rise”. We Lepchas, we call ourselves
Matanchi Rongkup
, which means Mother’s Beloved Ones. Though we call our land
Mayel Lyang
,
Mayel Lyang
is really the name of a valley high on the slopes of Mount Kanchenjunga.

‘It is called
Mayel Lyang
because the valley is hidden. The first god and the first goddess created the first Lepchas from the pure snows of the high mountains. This is where we came from. Westerners have written their books and they argue amongst themselves, saying we migrated from the east, the north, the west or the south. None of them can agree. This is because they are all wrong. We migrated from nowhere. We come from the high slopes of Mount Kanchenjunga. Our language is older than theirs. The Lepcha language is older than Hebrew. It is older than Sanskrit, Tibetan and even your English. Lepcha is the original language of the world. It was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden! In 1987 our written language was 5675 years old. Researchers don’t go from place to place; they don’t visit the villages. They just read the books written by other researchers and they write new books. The lies get passed on. They think
Mayel Lyang
is a mythical valley.

‘If you write of this, people might think it’s only a story, and that
Mayel Lyang
exists only in the imagination of a few crazy old people. But I will tell you a story that proves this place is real, that it isn’t mythical but only hidden.

‘Some time back, there was an old man named Teekoong Nanak. One day he went hunting blue sheep, which roam wild on the high slopes. He crossed Ponang Hill and started climbing. A cloud came low on the mountain and there was a storm. The storm passed but night had fallen. He saw a village. There were seven stone houses in that village. Blue sheep, usually so skittish and afraid of man, were sleeping in front of one of the houses. When he reached that house, an old couple came out and told him he could stay for the night. Though the house was in the high snow mountains, in its garden there were cucumber, pumpkins and other vegetables. He was quite dizzy, probably from the altitude. They served him food in a golden bowl with a golden lid. He couldn’t recognize what it was they gave him but it was extremely tasty. At night, when he was ready to sleep, the old couple who had served him seemed to have grown even older. He slept. He felt neither hot nor cold.

‘In the morning when he awoke no one was there. He called out but there was no answer. So he opened the door to the room where the old couple had gone to sleep. On the bed were two babies: one, a boy and the other, a girl. Since there was no one else there, he could not leave the babies alone. As the day progressed, the babies grew older. At midday they were middle-aged, and at night they were again the old couple he had met the night before. They served him food in the same golden bowl. The golden bowl was full of food and it was hot. When they turned their backs he took the golden bowl, shoved it under his jacket and ran out the door. As he was running away the old couple shouted after him, “You have to eat that food here.” But he didn’t listen to them. He ran away along a trail but whenever he turned back he couldn’t see the trail he had just run along. The jungle was so thick and the slope so steep that it seemed impossible he had just passed through it. A cloud came low and he could see nothing. He came to the Rangyong River. There was a small hill just beside the river. He stopped there and took out the bowl but it wasn’t made of gold. It was nothing but leaves stitched together, and the food inside was nothing but rotting leaves. But it was still warm.

‘The hill where he stopped was called Kazimpon. The hunter was from Lingtem Village. This is in the Dzongu district. The man’s name was Nanak. The place he went to was
Mayel Lyang
. Now no one knows where that is.’

‘What does it mean,’ I asked him, ‘that people in
Mayel Lyang
change from being babies to old people every day, only to become babies again?’

‘It means they are immortal,’ he said.

‘I went to Dzongu,’ he continued, ‘to a remote village called Sakyong. This is where Nanak set out to hunt the blue sheep. An old person there told me this story. Then he took me to Kazimpon Hill, where Nanak discovered that his golden bowl had turned to leaves. There is a hot spring just at the base of the hill.’

Mount Kanchenjunga straddles the Sikkim–Nepal border, on both sides of which there are stories about a herder who stumbled into the Hidden Valley. The tales vary slightly with the tellers but it typically goes like this:

A herder of sheep goes into the high snow slopes of Mount Kanchenjunga looking for one of his animals who has gone astray. He follows its tracks in the snow until the tracks disappear in a green valley of tremendous beauty. He comes to a house and they ask him why he came there. He tells them he was looking for his sheep, and asks them if they’ve seen it. Like a man who drops a coin into a gutter only to find a bar of gold, they tell him he needn’t worry about the sheep. It is nothing. They tell him he has made it to the Hidden Valley.

In another version, a herder of sheep is grazing his animals on the high slopes of Mount Kanchenjunga and every day one of his sheep comes back with fresh seeds and greenery stuck to its coat from plants that grow nowhere near such high altitudes. He decides to follow the animal to see where it goes. Thus he happens upon the Hidden Valley.