Fearless in Tibet: The Life of the Mystic Terton Sogyal (25 page)

With no direct contact with the Tibetan government, Younghusband marched his 8,000 troops northward and encountered the poorly equipped and trained Tibetan army at the town of Gyantse. Many of the Tibetan soldiers brandished lances and bows and arrows as weapons, and amulets believed to protect them from bullets. Fighting erupted and the Tibetans were massacred by the British. News of the carnage quickly made its way back to the Tibetan government. The Nechung Oracle was delivering regular pronouncements to the Dalai Lama’s advisors that the Tibetan leader should break his multi-year retreat and flee. Tibet’s Council of Ministers concurred with the Oracle’s direction and advised the Dalai Lama to leave immediately for Urga, the capital of Mongolia.

In the first days of August 1904, British forces entered Lhasa just below the Potala Palace without resistance. Had the Dalai Lama been in the Potala, he would have had a bird’s-eye view of the impressive legion of khaki-clad military units marching through the city’s west gate. But to the dismay of Younghusband and the British, they still had no Tibetan leader with whom to negotiate. A few days prior, under the cover of night, the Dalai Lama had fled northeast to exile in Mongolia.

Less than a month before the British entered Lhasa, Tertön Sogyal had been summoned to meet with the Dalai Lama. They discussed whether the tertön should take up residence in eastern Tibet, because he had been moving about continually for so many years. They asked the Nechung Oracle at which base it would be better for Tertön Sogyal to stay: in Dzak, where the tertön had an encampment near Derge, or at the new temple in Nyarong below Lhangdrak Peak.

“Go to Lhangdrak, and there stay in a retreat house below the peak. Build a residence not too big but not too small,” was the Oracle’s instruction.

Both the Dalai Lama and Tertön Sogyal agreed this was best. Tertön Sogyal sent a messenger straightaway to Dzak instructing Khandro Pumo and their son to move back to Nyarong.

“According to your predictions about these unstable times, both within central Tibet and coming from outside forces,” the Dalai Lama said to Tertön Sogyal, “I myself do not know if I can remain for long in Lhasa. But you leave first and safely return to Nyarong in eastern Tibet.”

They touched foreheads in a sign of mutual devotion and reverence. Tertön Sogyal knew that despite all of Padmasambhava’s prophecies and the ritual combat against foreign invaders, the collective negative karma of the Tibetans had weakened their national defense. There was nothing more for him to do. He knew that the battle for the spiritual life-force of his country was going to take him to the eastern regions of Tibet, and beyond. Tertön Sogyal and the Dalai Lama were never to meet face-to-face again, at least in their present incarnations.

CHAPTER 16

HIDDEN VALLEYS

N
YARONG
, E
ASTERN
T
IBET

Year of the Water Hare to the Wood Snake, 1903–1905

Tertön Sogyal returned to Nyarong and the Dalai Lama fled to Mongolia. Some say that the phurba dagger practices ensured that Younghusband’s forces only stayed in Lhasa for a month and were unable to secure their commercial interests. Others assert Young-husband’s late conversion to modern mysticism was a result of the ritual bombardment of phurbas directed upon him. Regardless, there is certainty that the invasion of Lhasa by British troops prompted the Qing government to consolidate its control in eastern Tibet to keep from losing ground to the British or Russians. This was a wake-up call for the Qing. Even before Younghusband’s march into Lhasa, the Qing had positioned their troops in eastern Tibet with the intent to establish forceful rule over the tribal chiefs and monasteries, and then extend their control to Lhasa.

When Tertön Sogyal returned home, he walked directly into this emerging battlefront between the Qing military and the eastern Tibetan tribal warriors. Qing troops arrived in 1904 in Litang and Batang, south of Nyarong, and were poised to conquer and begin the first-ever planned transfer of Chinese migrants into Tibet, as well as the initial mining of the area’s rich mineral deposits. By the spring of 1905, open rebellion against the Chinese troops and settlers broke out, and Han migrants and Qing government officials were killed. Reinforcements were sent from Chengdu to secure Litang and Batang and then turn north and move into Nyarong. Tertön Sogyal read with great concern ancient prophecies by earlier tertöns:

Another prophecy from the 16th century stated:

The prophecies were confirmed by what Tertön Sogyal saw in Lhasa, where, as it is said, drinking the wine of pride and wrong views makes one act like a crazy elephant. One particular Gelug teacher in Lhasa named Phabongka Dechen Nyingpo, who claimed he upheld the unsullied teachings of Je Tsongkhapa, the great 14th-century reformer and founder of the Gelug order, gained a large following of monks and laypeople; he preached widely that the teachings of Padmasambhava, and in particular the Dzogchen teachings, were not Buddhist, and that the treasure teachings were merely fabricated by charlatans. Phabongka and his followers claimed that the mantra of Padmasambhava was meaningless, and some of his disciples threw statues into rivers and burned copies of the Great Guru’s biography.

Why were Phabongka and his disciples so fundamentalist in their sectarian view? When Phabongka was 37 years old, he became very ill. A conniving spirit named Dorje Shugden, or Dogyal, offered to help him to recover from his sickness and fulfill his wishes. But he had to strike a deal—Dogyal demanded that Phabongka practice only the Gelug teachings. He insisted that Phabongka seek out and destroy those practitioners who practiced the teachings from other schools of Buddhism, namely Padmasambhava’s Nyingma school, alongside the practices of the Gelug order. The spirit promised worldly wealth along the way to enlightenment.

Phabongka asserted that Dogyal was enlightened, having transcended samsara’s cycle of birth and death. Dogyal appeared to Phabongka as a monk wearing a gold riding hat, seated atop a lion, and presented himself as a Dharma protector of the teachings of Je Tsongkhapa. In fact, Dogyal was nothing more than a worldly spirit, though powerful, with a particular bent toward intolerance and not a Dharma protector of the Gelug. Some say Dogyal was the spirit of a 17th-century monk who had been a candidate for the Fifth Dalai Lama but ultimately passed over. Having cursed the Tibetan leader and worked against him during his lifetime, he vowed on his deathbed to take revenge on the Great Fifth. The spirit has remained a perfidious force ever since, even to this day.

The Fifth Dalai Lama called Dogyal a malicious spirit, a demon who causes sectarianism. This was not just a doctrinal difference, for Dogyal was known to incite violence toward those who bring other teachings into the Gelug curriculum of study and practice. Phabongka was reflecting a sectarian response to the ecumenical Rime lamas like Khyentse, Kongtrul, Tertön Sogyal, and indeed the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama reprimanded Phabongka in no uncertain terms and told him to desist from propitiating the demon spirit. Feigning allegiance to the Dalai Lama, Phabongka ignored the Tibetan leader and spread sectarian biases, causing harmful rifts among different monastic colleges in Lhasa. Phabongka wanted Dogyal to replace Nechung as the State Oracle of Tibet, and he told his Gelug followers that if they practiced any of Padmasambhava’s teachings, Dogyal would crush them. Even the Thirteenth Dalai Lama himself practiced both the Gelug and Padmasambhava’s teachings, but still, Phabongka prayed:

Phabongka was not the first to promote Dogyal, but because of his charisma, the cult spread among Tibet’s political aristocracy and Gelug elite, major monasteries, and the common people, especially because the spirit often delivered on his promise of increasing material wealth. Soon, Phabongka’s Dogyal worship was taken eastward to challenge Rime masters. With such demon worship on the rise and Dogyal’s influence gaining traction in Lhasa and beyond, the foundation of Tibet’s strength—unity in the Dharma and devotion to Padmasambhava—was dissolving, making the country vulnerable to outside forces.

One of the foreign forces first to take advantage of Tibet’s weakened position was the Qing—led by the wiry imperial general of Han descent, Zhao Erfeng. Zhao had already earned himself the nickname among fellow Sichuanese of Butcher Zhao because of his favored method of execution—beheading. The eastern Tibetan tribal chiefs and the monasteries in Litang and Batang that were fighting the Qing’s advance came to lamas like Tertön Sogyal for counsel. They reported atrocities by Qing troops: looting the grain reserves of monasteries; plundering gold, silver, and rare bronze Buddha statues and other relics; and casting bronze and copper offering vessels of worship into bullets and coins. The most sacrilegious of all was that Butcher Zhao had paper shoe soles made from pages of sacred Buddhist scriptures. Local Qing officials in 1904 attempted to limit the number of monks who could stay in the Tibetan monasteries and ordered most to leave their monasteries to work as farmers instead. Opposition by monastic leaders led to armed battles. The abbots from Tinglin Monastery attempting to negotiate with Butcher Zhao were beheaded on the spot. He would eventually behead hundreds of Tibetans from Litang to Lhasa, and his brutal efficiency was rewarded with the highest Manchu military decoration. Tertön Sogyal said, “If Tibet is overrun by China, there will be an ever-turning wheel of blood.”

As Tertön Sogyal heard the reports from locals of Butcher Zhao’s violent activities, he stayed in retreat and focused on Vajrakilaya and summoned the two main protector deities of Kalzang Temple—Karmo Nyida, the White Lady of the Sun and Moon, who peacefully holds a jewel in her right hand and crystal prayer beads in her left, and Düdgyal Tötreng, the Skull-Garlanded King of Illusion, a black, wrathful male protector who rides a horse and holds a necklace of human heads symbolizing overcoming mortality. Precisely for the same reason that the Dalai Lama entered retreat when the British military was advancing to Lhasa, Tertön Sogyal also employed tantric ritual, mantra, and prayer to avert negativity and aggression. In deep meditative states, Tertön Sogyal manifested himself as Vajrakilaya and wielded his ritual phurba dagger to combat and subjugate military aggression.

It was as if the demon spirit Dogyal and Butcher Zhao were unknowing partners. Because the nation of Tibet existed as a support for spiritual practice, Tertön Sogyal knew the worship of the likes of Dogyal and other demon spirits could deal a fatal blow to Buddhism in his homeland—inflicted by the opportunistic Zhao. For Tertön Sogyal, everything was becoming unstable and unreliable; even the land itself, upon which the Dharma had been carried out for thousands of years, was having blood spilled upon it. The terma guardians cautioned him that even those close to him might be deceitful. Despite the many termas he had revealed and the rituals he continually performed, Tertön Sogyal told his student Lama Trime that, “an unending wave of obstacles keeps coming, so now finding perfect conditions for spiritual practice will be difficult!” As part of his efforts to repel the invaders, he completed the consecration of the temple complex at Kalzang, as well as a strategically placed stupa at Deer Horn Junction. While white-lipped deer, blue sheep, and Himalayan pheasants roamed the forests of Kalzang Temple, feeding on the torma cakes the monks placed outside following daily rituals, the suffering and screams of war were just to the south.

People began asking Tertön Sogyal where they should go if they were forced to flee Tibet. He had been asked the same question when he was in Lhasa. With violence just south of Nyarong, the villagers packed their bags but did not know where to go. Tertön Sogyal began to receive messages in visions about hidden valleys—
beyul
s—sanctuaries where the Dharma would survive, even if Tibet were lost. Padmasambhava and the Dharma protectors told Tertön Sogyal specifically about the remote region of Pemakö on the southern slope of the Himalayas, a hidden land shaped like a lotus, renowned for its fierce creatures, dangerous terrain, and near-inaccessibility beyond glaciers and impassable waterfalls. Yet finding the portal to the hidden land would open the pilgrim to sublime, mist-wreathed valleys where herbs and animals held miraculous powers, and the efficacy of Dharma practice was greatly enhanced.

“There, in Pemakö, my followers, you should take refuge in the future,” Padmasambhava told Tertön Sogyal.

Padmasambhava had concealed keys and maps to these hidden realms on earth, as termas, as well as specific meditation teachings and recipes for spiritual medicines. In dire times such as political upheaval, these sancta sanctorum were to be sought by yogis and pilgrims; the reason for finding the hidden lands was not so much to escape reality as it was to enter more deeply into the truth.