As part of the Sacred Himalaya Initiative, ICI scholars and research assistants collected numerous folk stories from across the KSL region. Based on the stories collected over three years, two books of folk stories from the region were published. One book is titled Shared Sacred Landscapes: Stories from Mount Kailas, Tise & Kang Rinpoche and the other book is titled Folk Gods: Stories from Kailas, Tise & Kang Rinpoche. Cover images for both books are shown below.
The books were published in 2017 by Vajra Books in Kathmandu, Nepal. The Shared Sacred Landscapes book [buy online] is edited and re-told by noted authors Kamla K. Kapur and Prawin Adhikari, and includes 7 stories expanded upon by the authors. The Folk Gods book [buy online] features 10 original folk stories retold by Prawin Adhikari. Each book was published in translations with Hindi, Nepali, Tibetan and Mandarin. You can purchase hard copies of the Shared Sacred Landscapes and Folks Gods books at the Vajra Books store in Thamel, Kathmandu.
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As part of documenting these folks stories for historical preservation and cultural learning, ICI and ICIMOD are making all of the stories included in these collections available for public access and use over several years following publication (2017). After May of 2019 all of the story text will be made publicly available under a Creative Commons license. As the stories become available they will be included below, with a link to the pdf file for each story and its translations.
Excerpts from individual stories, as well as pdf links to the currently available full stories, can be found below. Click on the + menu items to see more information.
Shared Sacred Landscapes
Stories from Mount Kailas, Tise & Kang Rinpoche
Kamla K. Kapur
Kamla K. Kapur was born and raised in India and studied in the US. Her writing has included plays, novels, poetry, essays and reimagining Indian spiritual writings. Her critically acclaimed books include Ganesha Goes to Lunch: Classics from Mystic India (2007, Mandala, USA; also retitled Classic Tales from Mystic India, Jaico Publishing, 2013), Rumi’s Tales from the Silk Road, Pilgrimage to Paradise (Mandala USA and Penguin India, 2009), and The Singing Guru, on the legends of Guru Nanak (Mandala USA, 2015). Her highly praised books of poetry are As a Fountain in a Garden (Tarang Press, 2005) and Radha Sings (Dark Child Press, 1987). Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Yellow Silk (Berkeley, California), Journal of Literature and Aesthetics (Kerala), and the anthology, Our Feet Walk the Sky (Aunt Lute Press, Berkeley, California, USA). Kapur was a semi-finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize competition in 2006, and three of her poems were published in Nimrod, International Journal of Poetry and Prose (2007). Five of Ms. Kapur’s short stories were published in Parabola, journal of Myth, Tradition, and the Search for Meaning (New York), two in The Inner Journey, (Parabola Anthology Series, 2007), and one in The Sun (USA, December 2012) Ms. Kapur divides her time living in the remote Himalayas and in San Diego, California, with her husband, the artist Payson R. Stevens. Visit her website.
Prawin Adhikari
Prawin Adhikari writes screenplays and fiction, and translates between Nepali and English. He is an assistant editor at La.Lit, the literary magazine. He has translated Chapters (Promilla & Co., 2011), a collection of short stories by Amod Bhattarai, and A Land of Our Own by Suvash Darnal (LSE, 2010). His collection of short stories The Vanishing Act (Rupa, 2014) was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize. His stories and translations have appeared in publications like The Open Space and in House of Snow, an anthology of Nepali writing. His translation of short stories by Indra Bahadur Rai is forthcoming from Speaking Tiger.
Journey to Bone and Ash
Original illustration by Rabin Maharjan.
There was once an old woman called Dechen. People called her Dechen Budhi – Dechen, the old woman. She wasn’t always old, of course. Once she was youthful, vibrant, very beautiful, with a slim, slight figure, high cheekbones, dimples, unusually large, dark eyes, smooth, clear skin like ivory, and thick, black hair. She took pride in her beauty and youth. A singer and dancer, she was adored and worshipped by men, and envied, if not hated, by women. The men courted her and lavished gifts and money on her, which she managed very carefully because she had known extreme poverty while she was growing up in a large family. She had eight siblings who were always inadequately clad, and she had experienced the death of two in the freezing winters. As a child Dechen was always hungry, like her brothers and sisters.
It was the custom of her polyandrous tribe for one woman to marry three or four brothers. “Even one husband,” she could hear her dead mother’s voice in her head, “is one too many. Managing four has brought me to an early grave.”
Dechen had determined early in life not to marry but support herself by her own talents, and because she had many of them, she became very wealthy.
Dechen worshipped all the gods of prosperity: Pehar, Ganesha, Lakshmi, and all the Naga goddesses who generate and protect wealth. She buried her money under straw and grass piles on the ground floor of her three-story stone, wood, and mud house, the floor of which was used by cows, yaks and sheep. She even kept a few yaks and dogs on that floor to deflect attention from her secret hiding place, and hired the village idiot as a servant to graze and tend them.
In her mid-twenties, Dechen supplemented her wealth by weaving and tailoring woolen dresses that were much in demand. Both men and women wore them all year long in the high desert plateau where they lived. She also began to make chhang, the favorite stimulant of people in the winter months when the high plateau, home to some of the highest mountains in the world, was freezing cold. Dechen’s chhang, however, was much more than just local beer made with barley. Using her grandmother’s secret recipe, she fermented it with the best of yeasts and infused it with the highest quality cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, pepper and ginger. Moreover, she made it from the waters of Manasarovar, the healing, holy lake at the foot of the great Kailas Mountain, home of all the gods and goddesses of the Hindus, Tibetans, Jains and the indigenous Animist religions. Many swore Dechen’s chhang was a tonic that cured them of colds, body and joint aches, stiffness and indigestion. People traveled far to buy it from her at a high price, and it swelled her wealth a hundred fold.
Because Dechen did not believe in sharing – a habit she had developed early in life on account of having altogether too many siblings to share food and clothing with – by the time she was thirty, not an inch remained beneath the entire mud floor that didn’t have a thick wad of money or bags of coins. She had to find other secret places to store it all. She sacked the village idiot for fear he might accidentally discover it, got rid of her yaks because she didn’t want to risk leaving her house to graze them, and spread a rumor that all her wealth had been stolen, and a lot eaten by silverfish. To confirm her lie, she began to wear rags even though she had exquisite dresses of Chinese silk and woolen brocade hoarded away in wooden trunks. She also pretended to be mad as a result of the “theft” of her money.
Dechen had no friends, but she didn’t care. She was self-sufficient and content with her wealth, the very thought of which was enough to send her into paroxysms of ecstasy. She spent her time hollowing out the legs of her bed and the frames of her looms to hide her money in and boarding up the windows.
In her early thirties, upon seeing a woman in the haat wearing an exquisite necklace made of gold, lapis, turquoise and coral, Dechen’s lust for gold objects and jewelry was aroused. She decided that it wasn’t enough to just have money that was hoarded away in various secret places of her home. She wanted to buy lovely objects that she could see, touch and admire – something real, solid, material and lovely.
For many years, with her house safely boarded up, she traveled far and wide, to India, Nepal, China, to find and buy up rare treasures made of gold and precious stones. She brought back her purchases– jewelry, mirrors, jars, boxes to hold her spices, finger rings, earrings, necklaces, and gold images of the gods and goddesses of wealth – hidden in ragged-looking gunny sacks filled with rice, kindling, lentils and dung.
She placed the gold statues of the gods and goddesses of wealth on an altar, bowed to and worshipped them three times a day: Lakshmi; Ganesh adorned with garlands of gems, his rat regurgitating jewels; Demchong Chintamani, guardian of wealth, holding the luminescing wish-fulfilling jewel of abundance in his hands. She had fallen in love with a statue of Vajrayogini, a female Buddha, and even though the goddess was not associated with wealth, she had bought it impulsively. It was only much later she saw some disturbing elements in the statue: Vajrayogini held the curved driguk, a fierce- looking flaying knife in her right hand, and the kapala, a skull cup in her left as she danced in fire. But because Dechen had paid so much for it, she kept it and placed it on the altar.
Buying, organizing, arranging, dusting, admiring her home filled with her precious purchases for hours on end in the light of the yak- butter lamps that illumined her dark house became Dechen’s whole life. Her other favorite preoccupation and passion was wearing her silk brocade gowns, adorning herself with necklaces, earrings, nose rings, and admiring herself in her jeweled mirrors. How proud she was of having fulfilled her heart’s desire to be wealthy and never lack for anything! How proud she was of her beauty! Her intense attachment to her youth, her wealth, and her home were enough to give purpose to her life.
Dechen didn’t realize then that having too much, and not sharing it, is worse than not having enough. She couldn’t see how her obsession had made her a captive in her own home. She often wished she could hire servants to help with her many tasks, but since she didn’t trust poor servants not to steal her things – any one of which would have helped them retire and live well for the rest of their lives – she had become her own servant and slave.
One day, however, as Dechen was sitting on the balcony on the third floor of her over-stuffed home, overlooking a playground in the village in which young children were playing, accompanied by their parents or older siblings, she felt something she hadn’t felt before. She couldn’t describe the feeling, but the first symptom of it was that she felt dreadfully lonely. She hurried inside to her pretty objects, lit her candles, and hoped they would cheer her up, but they failed to do so. The solitude to pursue her material passion turned into a haunting aloneness in which the walls of her self-made prison seemed to close in upon her.
A big, dark, frightening emptiness opened up inside her and she was certain she would fall into it and drown. As this was such a horrible feeling, and as she hadn’t yet learned to give each feeling its due of attention and introspection, she now did everything in her power to ignore it, lock it up, throw it away, bury it.
But because she had buried a living and kicking feeling, it kept resurfacing, again and again. The only way she could think of banishing the feeling was buying more lovely things. So, wearing her rags and a cheap necklace of glass beads around her neck, she went on another tour. She bought turquoise artifacts and jewelry from China, amber beads from Tajikistan, coral and pearl necklaces from India, heaps and mounds of treasure to take back to her home.
Living her life the only way she knew how, without thought and reflection, Dechen didn’t notice how Time was weaving its invisible net inside her body till she woke up one day and saw it in her jeweled mirror: a network of wrinkles crisscrossing her face like the gossamer threads of a spider that had caught her eyes, nose, mouth in its web; gaps where her teeth had fallen; the thinning, grey hair on her head. She turned to another mirror, and yet another: each of them had turned traitor and reflected the same image of a face ravaged by time. Dechen threw them away in disgust; people started calling her Dechen budhi, old Dechen, and paagal budhi, the crazy old woman.
The old feeling of despair rose from its grave and haunted her in nightmares. She dreamt about missing caravans because she couldn’t pack her enormous treasure in time to take it along with her, of not having enough mules to pack them on, of thieves breaking into her home and carrying it all away. These nightmares were mild in comparison to the darkest ones that emerged from the crack in her psyche: gods and goddesses she worshipped to fulfil her material lust turned hostile and came to her as dark, evil, wrathful, demonic forces bent on destroying her. Demchong, Mahakal, came to her with the ashes of the dead spread on his body, beating his drum louder and louder as he did his dreadful dance of destruction, and trampled Dechen underfoot; Vajrayogini came, her fierce third eye spurting fire that burnt down Dechen’s house with Dechen in it, turning it all to ash. In yet another nightmare Vajrayogini stepped on Dechen’s body, bent her head downward, snapping it till it reached down to her heart. In another she flayed Dechen with her knife, catching her blood in her skull cup and drinking it as if it were the most delicious of wines. Dechen felt possessed, taken over, inhabited by dark and evil forces.
In her desperation she called for a Buddhist Lama to do a kurim, an exorcism, to expel the evil spirits. He came with his dorje, a two- sided metal arrow, and phurbu, a staff, to drive them away and release Dechen from hell. But though the ceremony was elaborate and expensive, her nightmares continued. Next, she went to a dhami, the local spirit medium, and a dangri, an interpreter of the messages received by the dhami. The two would charge a great deal for their services. Besides, goats would have to be sacrificed and cooked for the village. Dechen was very reluctant to part with any of her wealth.
She would rather have bought another gold object. But on the verge of madness, she decided to go ahead with it.
With ashes smeared on his face, matted hair coiled on his head, the laru, a long hairpiece wrapped with silver threads, draped around his head and neck like Shiva’s snake, a trident in one hand, and a two- sided damaru drum in the other, the dhami began the ceremony after drinking copious amounts of chhang. The dangri and dhami both beat their drums, accelerating from a slow and steady rhythm to a maddening tempo that chased all thoughts away from Dechen’s head.
The dhami shook his hair free, his eyes rolled up in their sockets, his body quivered, his movements became spastic and uncontrolled as he went into a trance. He began to dance, laugh and cry as the gods and goddesses entered him, talking simultaneously and cacophonously. He began to make pronouncements in a language that was neither Nepali, Kumaoni, Tibetan, Hindi of Hoon, nor any recognizable dialect. Dechen couldn’t understand a word. She looked to the dangri, who had the skill to interpret what sounded like gibberish to most people. He was silent a long time, trying to decipher the words while Dechen stood by them, looking lost and confused.
“The gods and goddesses are saying you have poverty of the soul.
You must die.” the dangri said.
Dechen felt a bolt of fear shoot through her. Her knees gave way and she fell in a heap on the ground, weeping and wailing.
“But isn’t there anything I can do? I don’t want to die!” She wept as thoughts about leaving behind her precious treasure stung her brain like serpents.
The dhami muttered some more, and after a pause the dangri said, “It seems like a waste but he says you should throw all your valuables into the Dhauli River. Or you will go mad and then die.”
Dechen was devastated by the message. Her long-cherished treasure, dumped in the river! No, she thought, this was a plot by the dhami and dangri to divest her of her wealth. They would waylay, loot and kill her.
But as the days passed, her state of mind worsened. After much deliberation and vacillation she decided that very night to take a muleload of her wealth to the river. She packed gunny sacks with the first objects to fall into her hands, boxes full of jewelry, tea sets and jugs made of gold, and loaded them on the mule.
The moon lit the path as she made her way to the river in the middle of the night and very reluctantly dumped the contents of the sacks into the swift waters that carried them away.
Meanwhile, from the other shore, a man watched an old woman wearing a ragged go pung gyan ma, gown, a worn hat and shoes, remove sacks from her mule, and empty glittering objects into the river. After she left, he went to the spot and saw them being swept away. He waded in and retrieved a gold box full of jewelry. He was baffled, and decided to see if the event repeated itself the next night. This time Dechen decided to rid herself of all the gods and goddesses from her altar. It was a beautiful night as she stepped out of her house with her mule loaded down with sacks. The moon was almost full in its reflected radiance, bright and lovely despite its blemishes, its orb floating past a dark cloud edged with golden light as if pushed by the gentle breezes flowing down through high mountain passes.
As she arrived by the banks of the Dhauli River and unloaded a sack, a man came towards her. Dechen was dreadfully afraid: he was going to kill her and steal all her things! But the thought that disturbed her much more was: “I can’t die now! I haven’t lived yet!”
“What are you doing?” he asked her.
Dechen was stunned by his words. Nobody had ever taken the trouble to ask her, nor had she ever asked herself this question. His words came to her like a revelation, peeling away hardened scabs on the many wounds of her heart, allowing long-ignored feelings to seep through. She sat down on a boulder and burst into tears.
The man just stood by her and waited as she wept, letting the wave of her emotion break and pass, careful not to interrupt her tears with words.
Dechen looked up at him with swollen eyes. He was about the same age as she was; his overgrown hair and unkempt beard were grey, his mouth missing a tooth or two. Though he wore red velvet boots that came up to his knees, a bakkhu, long robe, an embroidered cap on his head, and spoke in her language, Hoon, there was something about his looks and his accent that told her he was not a local man. Because his eyes were gentle when he looked at her, she surprised herself by her instinctive choice to trust him.
“I am Terry, an Englishman. I have lived in these regions for over thirty years,” he explained.
Dechen laughed out loud, something she hadn’t done since she was a child.
“I thought you were a thief!” she laughed. “How foolish of me to fear losing that which I myself am dumping into the river!”
“Tell me why,” Terry said.
Dechen burst into another heaving, wracking sobbing. Her madness had softened her to the point where she not only appreciated and valued, but craved real contact with a human being capable of listening with attention. Quieting down, she patted the boulder and invited him to sit by her.
“I’m very thirsty,” she said. Terry fetched some water from the river in his kapala, a skull cup, which, along with a knife and a kangling, a horn made of a human femur, hung from his leather belt. Dechen was afraid again – the skull cup was an image from her nightmares. But her thirst made her reach for it and take a long draught.
Dechen told Terry her whole story. He listened without interruption as she spoke, wept, and opened up the sack of her heart, stuffed with sorrow and fear. He was silent a long time and then said to her.
“When I was in England, I too found myself buying too much, accumulating too much, consuming too much. When my marriage broke up – I have no doubt because of my own unconscious feelings about wanting more than I was getting in my marriage, I indiscriminately went through many women. Then one day I asked myself the question, ‘What hunger are you trying so desperately to fill?’ The answer came to me with total clarity: all desperate hungers, like yours, like mine, seek only one food: the divine within and without us. All our striving must be to clear away the weeds that choke the divine inside us. When we find it inside ourselves, we find it reflected in the whole world.”
Dechen was quiet.
“Let me see what you have brought to give away to the river today,” Terry said.
Together they unloaded the sacks. Terry opened one of them and brought out the statue of Vajrayogini.
“Throw her away,” Dechen exclaimed. “I hate her!”
Terry held it in his hand lovingly. Dechen once more questioned his motives, and once more laughed out aloud.
“Don’t hate her,” Terry said to Dechen. “She is your best friend, a guide, a heavenly messenger who has been speaking to you in your dreams and has come to bring you that which no money can buy: peace, joy, happiness, love.”
“She hurt me terribly in my dreams!”
“They were the wounds inflicted by your perverse passions, Dechen.”
“No, it was her! She tried to kill me! She did kill me!” Dechen cried.
“She kills our old, wornout selves that do not serve us any longer, like the tight skins of snakes, that have to be shed if we are to grow into our fullness. I have worshipped her for many years, not as a statue, which is only a representation and reminder, but as an energy that pervades the universe, an energy we have named Vajrayogini. She is the reason why I left England, where I was wealthy, but very unhappy, lost, confused, aimless, to come live in your land, abandoning my religion to find a home in yours. Vajrayogini tramples on distorted desires, worldly wealth, and the small, unconscious ego. She is the one who transformed my many material passions into the light of consciousness; now I live each moment with the awareness of the impermanence of everything, including my body. You already know, I am sure, that drinking and eating from a human skull serves as a reminder of the dream-like nature of our bodies and possessions.
Vajrayogini comes to destroy false illusions, delusions, ignorance, and bestows wisdom. She has blessed you by throwing her thunderbolt at you with full force; your wounds are invaluable; they will turn you towards the path of the Invisible Spirit, the dark and light filled, male and female primal energy of the universe; the energy of which all our lamas, rinpoches, gurus, gods and goddesses are emissaries. Open your heart wide and accept the death she is offering, Dechen; it is the beginning of new life.”
Even though Dechen didn’t understand everything he was saying, she listened intently. All her suffering had prepared her, like soil is prepared by the wounds of the plough, to receive the seeds of wisdom, our only true treasure, which transmutes lead into gold. She looked at Terry with tears in her eyes. Someone had finally taken the time to teach her her own religion, which was so rich in meaning.
“Are you married?” she asked, directly.
“No. I always thought spiritual development was more important than being a householder.”
“And I have always thought that material possessions were more important than a family and love,” she said, sadly.
“I have an idea,” he said, sitting down on a mound and stroking his beard. “Instead of just dumping all your treasure in the river where it will be of no use to the fish, why don’t you use your
wealth to do some good?”
“Like what?”
“Let me see,” he said, scratching his beard and looking thoughtful. “You know, so many pilgrims from so many countries and so many religions – Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, Bönpo, Animists – come to Kailas every season. I myself have traveled to the holy mountain and done the kora more times than I can count. I can tell you from my own experience that the pilgrims have to brave many hardships on the way: hail, storms, snow, tornadoes, avalanches, blizzards, freezing cold, hunger, thirst, and countless other tribulations. I have had to sleep in hollows of ice to keep myself warm; the only habitations on the way are filthy and I couldn’t rest in them because of the fleas and lice. Once I slept with lambs to keep from freezing. I have eaten whatever leaves I could find, and gotten diarrhea and a terrible upset stomach and lain on the snow encased in an inch of ice, my half-starved mule, collapsing with weakness and cold, lying next to me. Once it broke my heart to see the poor beast eating dry dung in his hunger.”
Dechen saw tears in Terry’s eyes as he recalled the event. She realized how her lust to accumulate, her avarice, greed and selfishness had hardened her heart so much that there was no room in it for others. She looked at her mule, standing by the river, loaded down with sacks full of heavy gold, and realized how little, if at all, she had thought about anyone but herself. But seeing the tears in Terry’s eyes, her heart opened wide. Concentric circles of compassion radiated out from it to Terry, her mule, the hardships of the pilgrims and all the suffering people and creatures of the world.
“On my journeys,” Terry continued, “I often wondered why there aren’t any dharmashalas, buildings that provide food and shelter to pilgrims at points along the way. It would be such a caring thing to do. Think, Dechen, of how many dharmashalas we could set up on pilgrimage routes with all this wealth.”
The we in his sentence made Dechen’s heart leap into her mouth. “Yes,” she said, happily. “Yes, let’s do it.”
Terry looked at Dechen. Her small, long face, unmistakably Tibetan, was a mass of wrinkles, her eyes grown smaller with age. He saw beyond it to a beauty that bordered on luminescence, as that of the moon. He smiled at the image of two-ratty looking people in ragged garments, both of flesh and dress, planning a future together.
Dechen looked at the old Englishman who looked like a tiger that had allowed time and age to work their magic on him, and felt a great warmth suffusing her heart.
In the long silence that followed as they sat under the stars, Terry removed the flute made of a human thigh bone from his belt, and began to play it. The, deep, haunting, eerie, harmonious sound singing its urgent reminder of our unshunnable journey to bone and ash, drove home its message and dissolved whatever doubts and resistance remained in Dechen.
They loaded the sack with the gold divinities onto the mule again and tied them down.
“Come,” he said, turning the mule around to face the village. “Let’s give some of this away to needy people, make our plans for the dharmashalas, and get you some nice garments to wear. This is no way for a rich lady to dress.”
“I have many,” Dechen said. “But they may be all moth-eaten by now.”
Day was dawning as they walked together to her house in the village. Released of her heavy burden, Dechen’s steps were light and buoyant as she walked straight and tall beside Terry in the early morning. As the sun poured liquid gold on the trees and rooftops of houses, Dechen, vibrantly aware of the fleeting nature of all phenomena, including herself, looked at everything with new eyes. She found reality pulsing with an intensity she had never felt before.
A sweet love, the kind that can only happen later in life when youthful passions are spent, sprang up between the two people who had known aloneness so intimately. Together, Dechen budhi and Terry budha worked towards their goal, building well-stocked dharmashalas for pilgrims in Darma, Tibet and in the Humla, Jumla and Bajhang areas of Nepal. If a pilgrim looks closely at the surroundings of a temple in Darma, she can see a weathered statue of Dechen budhi, the woman who transformed from a dragon hoarding treasure to a compassionate being capable of sharing and caring for those in need.
About this story:
Collected from Chaudhans, Uttarakhand, by Himani Upadhyaya from Dhiren Budhathoki. Retold by Kamla K. Kapur. Translated into Tibetan by Bhuchung D. Sonam.
The Color of the Name
Original illustration by Rabin Maharjan.
The villagers of Kudang, a mix of Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Bonpo, Pagans and Animists, with antecedents from India, China and Tibet, and indigenous people, were poor, old, sick, physically incapacitated and chronically hungry. Not much grew in the highlands and food was scarce. Even their goats and yaks were skinny and did not yield much milk. In the winter, the small lake froze and it was arduous work to dig up ice with their feeble bodies and heat it with fuel that was hard to come by. They felt helpless, bereft, abandoned by life because of, they feared, sins committed in their previous lives to which were added sins from the current one. They felt trapped in an endless round of accumulations of bad karma.
The main cause of their unhappiness was their frustration about their inability to undertake the long and difficult yatra to sacred Mount Kailas and do a kora around it. They believed that if only they were able to have a sight of the holy mountain, they would be healed and absolved of all their sins and be happy and rich ever after. They had heard stories, echoed down the generations, about all the gods and goddesses that meditated and sported eternally, joyously around the holy mountain, which was the very center of the universe, the very point, bindu, from which all life originates, and to which it returns.
One cold, overcast day, when the villagers were particularly morose, Sagar, a skinny, lame, half-blind, orphaned child, an outcast of mixed descent, whom the villagers considered a bit crazy, hobbled as fast as he could, followed by his bony dog and lean cat, to the village square and shouted joyously:
“He is coming! He is coming! He’s coming to make us happy! My heart has been calling to him every day. I dreamt about him last night and he is coming up the hill to our village with another man following him! Padmasambhava is coming with a devotee!”
The villagers were convinced the boy, given to flights of fantasy, was just imagining things. Besides, no pilgrims ever visited their village, which was not on the way to Mount Kailas.
“Who is Padmasambhava?” someone asked. “Didn’t he live and die hundreds and hundreds of years ago?”
“Yes, but he is still with us, though he is invisible. His body is made of a rainbow, and his eyes can see the Invisible!”
“Like yours!” someone said to a peel of laughter.
“It’s all true! Padmasambhava was born as an eight-year-old boy in the blossom of a lotus! My father tells me all about him.”
The villagers rolled their eyes. His father had been dead for four years.
Sagar looked at them and said, innocently, “But he comes in my dreams to tell me stories. He told me Padmasambhava’s name means ‘The Lotus born.’ Padmasambhava can fly, and though he has been burned and destroyed, he is always here, and comes to the aid of those in need. He is a savior who kills demons that want to destroy mankind and he performs many miracles.”
“Miracles!” someone scoffed.
“Mother always says that miracles are holes in the cloth of reason. I don’t know what she means, but she says it so many times that I remember her words. Can anyone tell me what it means?”
“Nothing,” someone smirked.
“If we listen carefully and walk on the path shown to us by Padmasambhava, we can drink the blissful drink of amrita, ambrosia!” Sagar exclaimed, his eyes sparkling.
“Amrita! Water would do.”
“But hurry! We don’t want to miss him!”
Most of the villagers went home, but a few, a mix of old and young people and children, followed the boy, his dog and cat at his heels. Sagar took them past the lake that froze solid in the winter, past the arid terraces where nothing grew for lack of rain, to the edge of the village, and pointed to the steep path ascending up to it.
“There! See, by the rock that looks like a bird. I see him clearly, walking with a danda staff, a jhola bag slung on his shoulder, a turban on his head, and a long beard. He is short, and a taller man carrying an instrument on his shoulder, is following him. The short holy sadhu man, in the long beard, is the same person, the very same that came to me in my dream. He laughed, picked me up, and held me near his heart! I woke up feeling so very happy! There he is, closer now, near the boulder that looks like a god with wings. He has come to remove all our troubles!”
The villagers thought the boy had lost his mind. They didn’t see anyone or anything. Several more returned home. Some of the adults and most of the children, however, stayed. They wanted to have some fun with Sagar, whom they bullied as often as they could. They knew nobody would show up and then they could beat him up. They never played with him because even the untouchable children considered him more untouchable than they were.
“Can you hear that?” Sagar said, straining his ears. “They are sitting in the shade of the boulder. The taller man has taken out some instruments, and is playing. They are singing!”
“We hear nothing,” the villagers said.
“Listen! Listen! Listen!” Sagar said, urgently. “You can!”
The villagers turned around and began to leave for their homes. “You have come this far. Come further! Listen with the ears of your soul!” Sagar shouted. “Listen to the words of the song: ‘Don’t be one of those who are born only to die without hearing the music of worship.’”
Then, the strangest thing happened with Sagar’s words. Streams and filaments of a blue, diaphanous mist shimmering with light arose spontaneously around them, wrapped themselves around their heads, entered their nostrils and mouths and lifted them as if they were made of air, and transported their brains with the speed of light into Sagar’s spacious, open, wide innocent heart! Or was it Sagar’s brain? It didn’t matter, for Sagar’s brain and heart were both in the same place, stimulating, questioning, guiding each other towards one goal. Although Sagar didn’t know the name of this goal, he had been moving towards it like an unwavering arrow from the moment of his birth. No, perhaps even before it, even before conception, for our ancestors and guides have taught us that our souls have long roots that extend all the way to the beginning of time.
For an instant the villagers were bewildered and wondered where they were. They had never seen the world like this before.
Looking through the innocent child’s eyes, the landscape was transformed. They saw it suffused with beauty. The bare mountain ranges surrounding a rolling valley lit up by the radiance of the early evening sun vibrated with subtle browns, blues, violets. In the distance they saw the snow-capped peaks standing tall and majestic, like guardians. Their practical, workaday sensibility that had been blind to the beauty all around them lit up with wonder; they began to see and hear invisible, unheard things.
They saw two strangers sitting by the boulder they had seen thousands of times without noticing that it looked like a god hovering from the ground up, wings spread wide in a gesture of protection; they heard drifting up on a current of air the musical strains of a song sung to the accompaniment of strings and the haunting melody of a flute. Though they could not understand the words, the language of music, beyond meaning and sense, penetrated their slumbering, despairing souls. Echoing through the valley, bouncing off the mountains, entering through the portals of their ears, reverberating in the hollow chambers of their hearts, it aroused in them a longing to connect more deeply with life, their own selves, and their gods; they tasted that hunger without which human life, no matter how luxurious and ease-filled, is a grind.
The sound, pouring into their ears like amrita, stilled all the noises of worry, anxiety and doubts in their heads. It unfurled a silence they had never heard before, nothingness, a shunya opening petal by petal like a lotus, space upon limitless space, empty space, without stars or clouds. In that silence something stirred, like a slumbering seed in the ooze of mud and waters. It awakened them to the sweetness of a long-forgotten dream: a path visible through the surrounding darkness winding soulfully up into the unknown to a magical perch, a perspective that turned every sorrow into mulch and slush from which blue lotuses bloom.
“They are singing, ‘Remain awake and aware. Do not fall asleep!’” Sagar, who understood all languages of the heart, translated for them. The words were like bolts of blue lightning that tore through thick veils in their minds. Passion awakened in their hearts. One young girl remembered how she used to sing when she was a child; another recalled with what joy she used to spin and weave; a young, how he used to collect colorful pigments from the mountains and paint images of gods and mandalas on stones; another remembered his desire to become a herbalist and curing sickness. In that instant they resolved to pursue their long-forgotten dreams.
When the strangers were done singing, they picked up their bags, musical instruments and resumed their climb up the hill. Though the path was steep, they climbed up lithely, like birds cruising on an invisible current of air.
The strangers came closer. Though they had obviously undertaken a long journey, they looked fresh, vibrant, glowing with health and well-being.
They were not dressed in any garb that would distinguish them as belonging to any religion, though the taller one may have been Muslim, by the cut of his beard. They wore no saffron clothes, rudraksha beads, or matted hair to indicate they were Hindus; no maroon robes, shaved heads and begging bowls, like of Tibetan lamas. Though their countenances were radiant, like the faces of gods, they looked just like ordinary men in ordinary Indian clothes. Sagar ran to the shorter of the two men, the man he had met in his dream, and threw himself at his feet. The stranger helped him up and Sagar instinctively clasped his neck with his arms and clung to him, sobbing and weeping with joy. Though the villagers fed Sagar now and then, nobody, other than his parents, had ever embraced him like this. One day he ate leftovers in one home, the next day in another, and he slept with the yaks on the straw on someone’s ground floor.
Sagar’s dog leapt on the strangers, and his cat purred and rubbed herself against their legs.
The villagers, moved by the sight of the holy man embracing the ragged orphan, bowed and touched his feet. As they did so, they felt remorse at their treatment of the orphan child. They also touched the feet of the other stranger, who shone brightly from long proximity with the Enlightened One.
Without a word, the villagers followed Sagar, his dog and his cat galloping ahead of them, as he led the holy visitors back to the village. Passing by the terraces the stranger with the long beard took a handful of some grains from his bag and scattered them wide. On the next terrace, he took out a ball and threw it to Sagar, who caught it. They played so vigorously and joyfully that the other children who had accompanied their parents to the edge of the village, children who had never played with Sagar, joined them, jostling each other, running and shouting.
Later, on the way to the village, the stranger stood by the lake, plunged his danda with seven knots in it into the waters and stirred it, as if churning something up, laughing all the while. By the time they reached the village, a sweet rain had begun to fall. Everybody rejoiced, for they hadn’t had any rain that year and the buckwheat and barley were drying up. Leaping and skipping, Sagar proceeded to the barn that he called home. A few roosters and hens greeted the throng, for that was what the meager few had become.
The dog and the cat that had followed Sagar to welcome the guests curled up on the straw in the barn that the boy called his bed, and fell asleep. When it was very cold, Sagar burrowed beneath it to stay warm.
The villagers surprised themselves by running to their homes to fetch precious food for the strangers. They discovered to their surprise and delight how much more food than they had thought they had. They brought buckwheat and barley cakes, tea leaves and yak butter for tea, dried yak meat, not just for the strangers, but also for Sagar and the others, and even something for the dog, the cat, and birds. Some brought extra mattresses, quilts, and hand-woven blankets.
Everyone partook of the feast. Even the holy stranger with the long beard ate heartily and moderately. Then he lay down on one of the mattresses, and fell fast asleep.
The villagers asked the taller stranger his name. He said he was Mardana from Punjab. “Most people call me Bhai Mardana.”
“Bhai Mardana Lama,” Sagar bowed to him. “And he is Guru Nanak,” Bhai Mardana said.
“Padmasambhav Rinpoche Nanak Guru,” Sagar said, prostrating before him as he slept. “Does he kill demons?”
“All the time,” Mardana laughed. “But the demons he teaches us to subdue – not kill; for they are unkillable – are the demons in our own minds.”
“What is your relationship to Guru Nanak Rinpoche?”
“I am nothing if not the minstrel, companion, servant and devotee of my Guru. And he calls himself his Beloved’s minstrel and slave. The Beloved has made him his instrument and sings through him. Baba Nanak doesn’t speak much these days, unless he has to.”
“Who is the Beloved?”
“The One who lives in all hearts, regardless of caste, color, race, class, nationality.”
“But what is the One’s name?” someone queried.
“The One is Nameless, though people call it by different names. Some call it Energy, some Mystery, some the Universe. The One has as many names as there are people who worship them and call them Shiva, Brahma, Durga, God, Tara, Shakti, Durga, Bhagwan, Allah, Rab, Waheguru, and thousands of others.”
“Is the One a man or a woman?” a woman asked. “Both and neither,” Bhai Mardana replied.
“Yes, yes, my mother says that, too. She made a painting, there, that one, Shiva and Parvati, together, one body, one mind, one soul.
She called it Ardhanarnari.” Sagar went to the wooden wall of the barn where he had tacked his mother’s paintings, and pointed at one of them. In the light of the lamp the villagers saw one body, half male, half female in its dress and anatomy, the former blue, unclad, the latter green and adorned with jewels. Their boundaries were fluid, merging into one another, dancing, changing, getting more and more abstract, almost invisible towards the top of the painting where waves of clouds dissipated into an undifferentiated blue.
“Mother father God!” Sagar said, exuberantly. “Exactly!” Bhai Mardana said.
“What is your religion?” they asked.
“The religion of Nature and its Maker: the religion of the Creator of rivers, wind, fire, mountains, lakes, all of Nature inside and outside us. We are slaves of Banwari, the Lord Creator of the Universe, the Husband for whom all Nature, animate and inanimate, is bride, adorned in all her finery for her wedding night. We travel all over the world to worship beauty and to meet people from all countries. Whenever Baba Nanak sees any awe-inspiring place, he goes into a deep trance, marveling at and praising the grandeur of this Earth, and falls in love all over again, with the intensity of first love, with the Beloved. We have traveled all over the world, seen many places, met many people, seen their customs and rituals, and though there are different countries, different ways of living and worshipping, Baba knows the beautiful Earth, mother of us all, though she is cut off and parcelled into small countries, is one country, and all the people, in all their amazing distinctions, beliefs, and many-colored variety, are one people.”
“What do you call yourselves?” Sagar asked. “Sikhs.”
“What does it mean?” The villagers, hungry with questions, asked. “It comes from the Sanskrit word shishya, which means a student devoted to learning in all its forms. Above all, a Sikh yearns passionately to know, examine, explore the unknown country inside himself or herself, for that is the ultimate knowledge. Baba knows that this is the inward path that takes us to the Beloved.”
“What else do you believe in?” someone asked.
“Baba tells his followers to live their lives fully. He himself is a farmer, a guru, a husband, a father, and performs all his roles well, participates in and engages with every aspect of his life dispassionately and detachedly. He lives like a hermit amidst life, like a lotus, unsullied by the dirt and slime out of which it springs. He tells his devotees to earn their living honestly, share what they earn with others, and treat everyone equally. Baba also says don’t get stuck in superstitions. Live bravely and without fear. Use your mind but know its limits. Use the senses but know their boundaries, and above all, remember! Remember, remember the Great God’s Great Name, especially when you are suffering!”
“Why?” a child asked.
“Because when we remember someone, that person comes alive in our memories and our minds, becomes present; because as soon as you remember the name of your Beloved, the Beloved is there! Repeat it whenever you can, make it your friend, so when you can’t even remember to remember it, when you are in the deepest distress, it will remind you to remember. Ah, the name of our Beloved is our closest friend whose long, strong hand reaches down through the layers of thick snow when you are buried in an avalanche, plucks you to safety, and lights a fire in the blizzard to warm your bones! On our way to Mount Kailas we encountered a blizzard and let me tell you…”
“You’ve been to Mount Kailas?” the villagers asked in a chorus. “Yes, we’re returning from a yatra, a pilgrimage to Mount Kailas and Lake Manasarovar, where Baba and I swam with the fishes,” Bhai Mardana said.
As soon as the villagers were reminded of their unattainable desire, the source of all their misery, a swirling, whirling blizzard with icy, furious winds flung them out of their warm, cozy corners in Sagar’s expansive soul and hurled them back into their own unhappy brains. The storm that blew them out was nothing like the hurricane in their heads that raged furiously with wailing sounds, deafening them with its frightening cacophony. As they sat in the barn a change came over their bodies, too. Their limbs and bodies collapsed, slumped, their faces became long, their eyes mournful. Their moaning, groaning and whining began as they complained to Bhai Mardana about their miserable lives, their feeble and diseased bodies, their inability to undertake the pilgrimage that would cure them of their diseases, and absolve them of the sins accumulated over lifetimes.
“So that’s why both of you are pure and radiant!” someone said bitterly. “Your sins and curses dissolved in the sacred waters and you have been made holy by your pilgrimage! Well, welcome to our unholy village.”
“Kailas and Manasarovar are splendid sights, indescribable, but they are no holier than any other awe-inspiring place in Nature, no holier than your own village, homes and bodies,” Bhai Mardana said. “Blasphemy! Mount Kailas is the most special place in the whole world. It is the center and navel of the universe!”
“There are as many centers of the world as there are people and creatures,” Bhai Mardana said. “Mount Kailas was and is a mythic metaphor before it was ‘real.’”
“What do you mean? What is a metaphor?”
“A metaphor is a physical object, like Mount Kailas, that stands for a truth that cannot be described any other way. Mount Kailas stands for what Hindus, Buddhists and Jains call Mount Meru, or Sumeru, around which the sun, planets and stars are said to circle. Some say Meru is in the middle of the Earth; some say it is in the middle of an ocean; some say it is the Pamirs, northwest of Kashmir, some that it is Mount Kailas; most believe it is the place where all the gods live, the high mountain from which humans can climb into heaven and paradise,” Bhai Mardana explained.
“Yes, we believe this, too!” the villagers cried with one voice. “But we will never be able to reach it! We are doomed!”
“But we must not make the metaphor the thing itself. If you worship an image made of stone, or a mountain, and forget that it is only an image, a representation, a reminder, then you close yourself off from the boundless, imageless, formless One that no metaphor can describe, the One who is not confined to any one thing or place. We must question our beliefs when they limit us and the Limitless One. On my way to Mount Kailas I was wondering what the word ‘Meru’ meant. I asked many priests and holy men but none knew. And then one day I realized that it must be an affectionate variation of the word ‘mera,’ mine. ‘Mera’ has a lot of ego in it, but ‘Meru’ has sheer love. And in a way, it is all mine. In this sense, the whole universe is mine. This belonging happens when I enlarge my ego, like a balloon. But unlike a balloon that bursts as it enlarges, the ego stretches to include everything there is. Everything. Nothing left out. This is who we truly are, tiny but at the same time large enough to house the whole big universe!
Though people think Meru, or what you call Mount Kailas, exists in different places, yogis know it exists inside us. Enlightened ones of all times have known that our spine, which they call merudanda, the staff of Meru, is the axis and center of the world. We have to learn to climb from our baser instincts to the higher ones; from the bottom of our spine, where Mara and his many demons live, up through the nodes and knots in the spiral of our spine that lead to the thousand- petal lotus on top of our skull. This is the true pilgrimage, what Baba calls ‘the pilgrimage to yourself.’ It is this journey that makes us aware of our sins and with the Beloved’s aid, makes us pure.”
“Easy for you to say all this because you have been there,” someone said angrily. “But we are physically debilitated, poor, hungry, and very unhappy. Our crops are blighted every season; the winters are so harsh that we lose many from our community; our children don’t have enough to eat and many die before their first year.”
“We have rotten karma, we are decayed from the inside out, stained and grimed with sins. We will never get to Mount Kailas, the Dharma Dwar, the gateway to heaven, that will make us healthy and whole again,” a woman began to keen.
“Baba says in one of his songs: When your clothes are soiled and stained by urine, soap can wash them clean. But when your mind is stained and polluted by sin, it can only be cleansed by the Color of the Name.”
But the woman continued to cry. Bhai Mardana despaired. He felt the villagers hadn’t heard or understood a word he had said. Only Sagar was listening to him intently, eating and digesting all his words. Perhaps he had not been sincere enough, or sermonized too much, Bhai Mardana thought. He doubled his efforts.
“There is hope,” he said. “I too was full of sins. I have doubted, cheated, lusted, raged, envied, coveted, held ‘me’ and ‘mine’ too tightly, been proud, arrogant and ungrateful. But Baba has helped me to become what I am, a gurmukh, one who faces the Guru of all Gurus, God himself, instead of his own ego. He has also taught me that what I was truly seeking beneath my searching for wealth and fame was the fountain of amrita that is within me. It is wherever I go. You don’t need to go anywhere to be happy and healthy. Now that Baba has come to you, you have to trust that all will be well. You too will learn that your village, your home, your body is blessed and beautiful.”
“What’s so blessed and beautiful about it? What do you see here?” “You have to learn to open your eyes,” Bhai Mardana said.
“But our eyes are open,” they replied. “We are not blind!”
“See?” Bhai Mardana said, looking at the gallery where Sagar had hung his mother’s paintings. He pointed at an image of two eyes shaped like fish and a third sitting calmly above them.
“See with your third eye, the one that unites our conflicts, our double vision and shows us the Truth. When you see through it, your sorrows become lotuses, and your curses turn into gifts.”
“Tell us how to do it,” the villagers pleaded. “We will work very hard to open our third eye.”
Just then a loud chuckle was heard from Baba Nanak as he turned over in his sleep. Bhai Mardana shut his eyes and was silent, as if listening to something his guru had just conveyed to him. Then he opened his eyes and said, “Effort is important but will get you nowhere. See, I have been making so much effort to explain all this to you, but I am a fool. I forgot something very, very essential. I should have begun with a prayer to ask the magnanimous Fulfiller of Dreams to help me in my efforts. Without the One’s aid, all our efforts are straw in the storm.”
“We pray a lot but nothing ever happens,” the villagers complained. “But how do you pray?” Bhai Mardana asked.
“With our mouths, of course.” Bhai Mardana laughed.
“Learn to pray with your heart. Be present. Know that the One you address is present, more present than what you see with your two eyes. ‘He is! He is! He is! He is, He is – I say it millions upon millions, millions upon millions of times,’ Baba sings ecstatically. The Truth of the One is Guru Nanak’s most important message. Remember that when you take even one step towards trying to open your third eye, the Beloved, if you have remembered to love the Lord of the Universe, to ask for His aid on your pilgrimage, He will come towards you a thousand steps to help you to see. There are many, many precious rewards for our love. Baba says, ‘If you listen to just one thing the guru says, pay attention to and act on it, keep it in your ear and heart, your mind will become a treasury holding precious rubies, pearls, coral and diamonds.”
“Is it really true that the guru can give us wealth and precious stones?” someone asked.
“Our real wealth, the highest and best, is the One, in loving whom we can get both material and spiritual gifts, the most important of which is learning to see with the Third Eye. It is the Magical Eye that can turn ugliness into beauty, poison into amrita, and, as Baba sings, ‘our sorrow into the most health-giving of tonics.’ There are ways of seeing things from a height, as if from a star, as if from the pinnacle of Time that is far, far larger and vaster than our own past, present and future. Let me give you an example.”
Bhai Mardana reached for his bag and took out a handful of seashells, worn smooth with age, some brittle, some whole.
“I know!” Sagar said. “They are called ‘shells’ and they are found on the ocean floor.”
“What is the ocean?” someone asked. They lived so far away from the ocean that they hadn’t even heard the word, let alone understand the concept. But somehow, somewhere, in the deep recesses of their memories, the ocean roared in their dreams.
“It is what my name means, Ocean!” Sagar said excitedly. “It is a vast body of water that . . .”
“Like Manasarovar?”
“Nothing like Manasarovar! There is much more ocean than there is land on this earth!” Sagar said excitedly. “My parents told me all about it! The ocean is so deep that there are mountains in it, large mountains and volcanoes. We know very, very little about it, it is mysterious and without limits, like God. They told me to always remember what my name means, that I have an ocean in my heart, and I must never forget it! Maybe that is what Rinpoche Mardana is talking about! Even though I have never seen it I feel it in my heart!”
“How can that be? We haven’t seen it!”
“We have to admit to ourselves that many things exist that we can’t see with these eyes,” Bhai Mardana responded. “Did you know, for example that your high plateau and Mount Kailas were once the ocean floor? These shells are proof of it. Baba and I collected them on our way to Mount Kailas.”
It took a while for the villagers to understand what Bhai Mardana was saying. They were silent a long time, trying to stretch their minds to envision Mardana’s words.
“Nothing is forever on this earth. Mount Kailas, too, one day, will be beneath the sea again. But the mythic Mount Meru will never perish. It is within us. But I have been talking too much. Come, let us meditate and pray together.” Bhai Mardana sat cross-legged, and instructed the villagers in a few brief sentences how to pray and meditate. His voice was gentle and full of compassion as he said, “Sit comfortably, shut your eyes, know that we are in the presence of the One who is within, like breath, and surrounds us, like air. If many thoughts crowd your mind, let them be, but gently steer yourself back to the presence of the One. Be grateful for what you have before you ask for what you want. Today, ask for help to embark upon the journey of all journeys, the journey to the home of the Beloved in your heart, the Beloved that erases suffering.”
Their brief sojourn in Sagar’s trusting and hopeful heart had made the villagers want to return to that place where they saw, heard and felt things that had filled them with hope. They were sick of being sick and sorrowful. They did as they were told.
When they opened their eyes after meditation, they felt something had shifted in their consciousness. They had moved on from their locked in, habitual mode of thinking and feeling. Their minds, which had been stagnant for so long, were flowing again.
Bhai Mardana yawned. It had been a long night, and he had talked too much. He smiled to himself as he recalled the sound of Baba’s chuckle. In the silence that followed he had asked for help to help the villagers. After all, that was the reason Baba had suddenly changed course in the middle of his travels and headed towards Kudang. He went where he was needed.
The villagers, relaxed into peace, began to yawn, too.
“I have a message to convey to you from Baba,” Bhai Mardana said, as the villagers began to touch his feet before leaving for their homes.
“Tomorrow morning, when the night is drenched in dew, and the stars are still twinkling brightly in the sky, gather in the center of the village and follow Baba and me to the crest of the hill that separates your village from the next village, Sosa. Baba will take you to the dharma dwar, the gateway and threshold of all that is sacred. By visiting it whenever you feel you need to, you will dissolve your suffering. It is a place holier than Mount Kailas and more sacred than Manasarovar.”
Although their old minds still whispered to them that the crest was too high to climb and that they would never be able to do so, the villagers, eager to follow Bhai Mardana and Baba Nanak on the path that would give their suffering wings, agreed.
At dawn the next day, all of them, including some old people and children, assembled in the center of the village. The dog and cat were there too, excited at the prospect of an adventure. They too were eager to follow a path that would help them reincarnate as humans in their next life. Guru Nanak, whom the villagers now called Padmasambhava Rinpoche Nanak Guru, was vital and energetic. Bhai Mardana Lama too was glowing with energy and health. More than anything else, their aspect and appearance, conveying well- being and vitality, made the villagers trust them.
After a prayer led by Bhai Mardana, the villagers took their first step in the direction they had never gone before. Although some of the villagers huffed, puffed and groaned a bit, they all made it up the hill to the crest. They were amazed at looking down the path they had climbed, it seemed in retrospect, so easily. They saw their village as if for the first time. How lovely, cozy, heartwarming it was, their collective home, tucked into the sides of their mother mountain, as if in the folds of Parvati’s protective body.
The villagers felt invigorated, healthy, alive after the exercise. Their bodies sang with gratitude and joy. This, they knew, was the purpose of the ascent, for Mardana Lama had already told them they contained Mount Kailas, the axis, the center of the universe where gods meditated and sported. The lesson was driven home on the summit of the crest.
Morning had not yet dawned though there was enough light to see by. It was the brief and fleeting time of day when gates to others world are wide open for all to walk through. The indigo sky was still embroidered by stars as the holy current of healing and awakening dawn breezes, that sages in India called malyanil, blew gently down from the peaks of the high mountains, caressing their limbs and entering their lungs.
Guru Nanak pointed his staff to a large arch in a huge rock eroded by the elements of wind, water and time. Through it towered snow- capped peaks that were so high that their tops were veiled with clouds and mist, peaks unseen by any human eye. The sight filled the villagers with wonder, and as one body, they bowed down in worship and awe that something existed so close to them without their knowing it. The sight opened their hearts and minds to humility: how little they knew! How closed and blind their sight had been as they huddled in misery in their village of Kudang, without venturing out of the borders of their minds!
The insight, accompanied by harmonic chords of music, filled them with amazement at the mystery of their own existence within the presence of the universe. They turned around from the sight of the peaks to see that Bhai Mardana had taken out the rabab and was playing it. Baba cleared his throat, shut his eyes.
A note, emanating from somewhere deep within him, was carried on the waves and currents of air all around them till the mountains, valleys and high peaks echoed with it. It drifted back into their hearts and minds, enlarging them in a way they had never dreamed possible. The note, unfurling in its many permutations, under and over tones, morphed like a wave into another note that reflected and contained it, and then another, and another, all strung together like prayer beads on a string, till it became an irresistible melody that penetrated, possessed and suffused their beings with its magical, transformative power. All their suffering and Bhai Mardana’s sermon the previous night had ploughed, cleared and prepared their hearts and minds for Baba’s song and message, for blessed music and winged song reach to the depths and pinnacles of our soul where no words can go. They did not understand the words Baba sang but since they had already imbibed its lesson through Bhai Mardana, the song worked its magic in their souls. They would never be the same again.
They understood that though the dharma dwar existed for those who wanted to make an external pilgrimage, they didn’t need to go anywhere to reach the fountain of healing within them. All they had to do was sit in the comfort of their own homes, meditate the way Bhai Mardana had taught them to, and bathe in the holy waters of Manasarovar at the foot of Mount Kailas within them.
Bhai Mardana and Baba Nanak got up, picked up their bags and began their descent to the next village that needed their presence to open its eyes. Sagar was about to cry but understood instantly that he would never again be separated from his Padmasambhava, who had come to transform his life.
The villagers strained their eyes to follow them down the long and visible path to Sosa, but they never caught sight of the strangers again. They had disappeared as if they had never been.
In the days, months, years, and decades that followed their sudden appearance and disappearance, the villagers saw green shoots of rice spring out of the soil in the terraces that Rinpoche Nanak Guru had strewn with seeds of rice; the lake didn’t freeze where their holy visitor had roiled its waters with his danda; the child Sagar grew up and funds arrived magically for him to open up a gompa, a small temple of religious learning; the villagers, much more prosperous than before Baba Nanak paid them a visit, told, retold and embellished the story of the visit of the holy ones to their children and grand- children. They and their descendants often wondered if the story was just a myth and a dream – a dream that had changed everything.
About this Story:
Collected from Chaudhans, Uttarakhand, by Himani Upadhyaya. Retold by Kamla K. Kapur. Translated into Hindi by Chandresha Pandey.
You Don’t Die Till You’re Dead
Original illustration by Rabin Maharjan.
The following in an excerpt of the full story…
A herbalist, a stone carver and a cook were very close friends, even though the herbalist was a Bonpo, the stone carver a Buddhist and the cook, a Hindu. They had a lot in common: they were weary of their wives and their children’s demands. Their wives nagged them to get better and bigger houses, better kitchens to cook the family meals, more and more land to grow fruit and food, better conditions for their children and their families, while the children were fighting bitterly among themselves and with their parents for the family’s inheritance.
All three felt tormented by their wives and mauled by family conflicts. They decided that life was not worth living on these terms, and what they really wanted was to renounce “Maya,” the illusion of the material world, all attachments and possessions, and take a holy vow to go on a quest to affirm, protect and worship the sacred in nature, undertake a pilgrimage to the holy Mount Kailas whose one glimpse washes away sins, enlightens the soul and elevates it above attachments and afflictions. They would gain merit by circling the inner, more difficult path at its base, then spend the rest of their lives meditating, the way Lord Buddha had done under the Bo tree, or Shiva had done in the lap of the sacred mountain near the holy lake, Manasarovar. Lord Buddha, too, had left his young, beautiful wife, Yashodara, their son and kingdom. Lord Shiva had shunned the comforts and struggles of a household, left his wife, Parvati, for solitude and peace in the very navel of Mother Earth. Both had learned to control their minds so strictly that they did not stray to material things.
They decided, as many before them who had taken the same path to liberation, to perform their own funeral rights as a symbolic gesture of dying to the world, to everything profane including their bodies and their incessant needs and cravings, before leaving. In the middle of the night when the villagers and their families slept, they made their way to the village cremation spot by a pool on the banks of the river. They placed effigies of themselves on piles of wood that served as funeral pyres, poured ghee on the effigies, and set them ablaze. Throughout the burning they chanted mantras and prayers for their own souls. When the effigies turned to ash, they took fistfuls of their own remains and consigned them to the river in a ceremony that included the lighting of lamps and feeding the fish the cooked rice and lentils they had brought with them in lieu of feeding the villagers, to whom they owed a feast on their deaths.
At three in the morning, when the ceremony was over, the friends left their sleeping wives and children and set out on their journey with only the clothes on their backs, the shoes on their feet, and their begging bowls. But each, without telling the others, had sewn up money in his clothes. The reason for the secrecy was because they did not want to appear to be materialistic. They also wanted to keep the money safe from the many deadly dacoits whose profession it was to guiltlessly rob and often kill pilgrims as they trudged devoutly on in their quest towards godhood in the difficult, dangerous terrain and inclement weather to the very center of the world: the axis from which one made it to another dimension, known to the gods as Mount Meru, and to humans as Mount Kailas.
They climbed throughout the day, chanting “The tree is holy; the dirt on the path is holy; the stone is holy; the river is holy; the sun, stars, moon are holy; all nature is holy, holy.”
In the late afternoon they rested in the shade of a boulder at the foot of a mountain of sheer rock devoid of vegetation, their feet, limbs and joints hurting, their mouths parched with thirst, their bellies growling with hunger. But they had to keep up appearances and did not admit any of this to each other.
Finally the cook, feeling faint, said, “It would be so good to have some tea.”
About this Story:
Based on a Tibetan story recounted by Tshewang Lama (Chakka Bahadur) of Humla, Nepal. Retold by Kamla K. Kapur. Translated into Hindi by Chandresha Pandey.
The Attitude of Gratitude
Original illustration by Rabin Maharjan.
Matsya and Devi, an aging fish couple, lived in a pond of the Karnali River by the village of Chhipra. Since the pond was by the village crematorium, fishing was not allowed, so the couple was safe and survived into adulthood and beyond. They fed on the bones and mineral-rich ashes of the dead, on smaller fish, and the rice grains that relatives and friends consigned to the river to carry to their loved ones in the afterlife.
Matsya had been very discontent lately. He knew he was aging. Also, being used to the clean, clear waters of the Karnali River all year round except during the monsoon, he was particularly distressed and depressed as our story begins. It was monsoon season and he was weary of the muddy waters of his habitat and of being pelted by rain. The year before they had hardly had a monsoon, and they almost perished from lack of water.
“What is life all about?” he would frequently ask his wife, Devi. “Yes, we have increased the population of Karnali River by our offspring, we have hunted and eaten, and now we are going to die.”
Devi, who had grown happier as she aged, tried to tell her husband about the attitude of gratitude that had enriched her own life in her later years. She reminded him that they were lucky to be alive; that even at this late age they hadn’t been caught and eaten; that while so many other fish starved for lack of food, they had plenty; that they now had a measure of peace and leisure after a lifetime of spawning and rearing.
But nothing affected Matsya’s discontent.
Devi, who knew that her husband had always wanted to travel to newer territory, had an idea to cheer him up.
“Let’s go on a pilgrimage like the humans! Let’s get away from the heat and the constant rain. Let’s go to the Mount Kailas, home of the gods and center and axis of the universe! The place where Lord Shiva dances and sports with his consort, Parvati, and the Ganga River streams out of Lord Vishnu’s big toe,” she said, flapping her fins and looking at her husband with eyes wide in her head.
“Are you mad?” he replied. “We are not young anymore like these other fish that sometimes take the long and arduous path to the source. My digestion is bad. I can’t eat the bones anymore, and sometimes even the smaller fish upset my stomach. The only thing that goes down well is rice, but sometimes even that passes through my body without being digested. Go upstream at this age? It will kill us!”
“We are going to die, anyway,” Devi reasoned. “Everything that is born, dies. We should know that from a lifetime of living by the cremation grounds. Why not die doing something you have always wanted to do? Some Hindus who undertake the sacred journey perform their own funeral rights, kill their fears and desires, and head up to Kailas, source of the many rivers, and the turquoise lake, Manasarovar, the Lake of the Mind. It is a boundless expanse of blue that mirrors the heavens and is the true home of so many fish like us. It is our source, beloved, from which our own home river flows!”
Devi knew the last detail of her description was false. A visiting fish returning downstream had told her the Karnali originates far west of Manasarovar. She forgave herself the lie because she had heard her husband mention the lake before and knew he would be excited about visiting it.
Matsya looked at her skeptically and Devi wondered whether he had seen through her lie.
“Even if we don’t reach it, we could have a glimpse of Mount Kailas, and that alone will be enough, and more than enough! I would be so happy if you agreed!”
Matsya was silent. He felt the stirring of desire in his heart, but his fear subdued it.
“You, Matsya, are named after Vishnu himself, Lord of the Waters,” Devi reminded him.
“Oh, what was that story again?” Matsya asked, almost despite himself.
“In one of his incarnations Vishnu became a huge, horned fish named Matsya.”
“Why did he bother? Wouldn’t it have been better for him to have stayed a god?” Matsya replied cynically.
“Manu, the first man Vishnu created,” Devi began her tale, glad to see that her husband’s eyes had a sparkle of interest, “was bathing in the river one day when he caught a tiny fish. It flopped about in his cupped hands, scattering rainbow reflections from its shimmering scales, and cried, ‘Please don’t eat me! I am not even a morsel for you, and I want to grow up, live and experience my life!’
Manu, feeling his heart opening with love and compassion for this tiny creature with fins, small round eyes, and colorful scales, agreed to release the fish back into the water.
‘Please also protect me from the bigger fish,’ the little fish pleaded. ‘How can I do that?’ Manu asked. ‘If I throw you back in the river so you can live, you will be eaten up unless Vishnu protects you.’ ‘Keep me in a jar,’ the little fish advised. ‘When I grow bigger, put me in a small pond. When I become too big for the pond, put me in a bigger pond, and finally, when I am so big no little pond can contain me, put me in the ocean.’
‘The ocean! But you are a freshwater fish.’
‘Never mind the details. In time you will know who I am.’
Manu did as he was told. The fish grew and grew till it became so enormous that Manu – reluctantly, because he had grown to love and adore the fish – had to take it to the ocean and release it. But before the fish swam away with a huge splash, it said to Manu,
‘Let me repay you for your kindness. A great deluge is coming; all land on this planet will become the bed of the sea. Build a ship, and stock it with grains, seeds, all varieties of creatures, and the Vedas, repository of all the wisdom of the Earth. Call on me when you find yourself in trouble, and I will come and rescue you.’
Manu, who trusted the creatures of the Earth and knew that they knew far more than he did, built himself a ship and stocked it with animals, seeds, grains, and a copy of the Vedas. Just before the deluge came, rending and tearing the skies in a thunderous uproar, Manu climbed aboard. And just in time. Incessant torrents flooded the banks and shores of rivers till the great ocean rolled upon land and swallowed up everything.
Manu felt safe and in his mind thanked the fish for saving him. But he didn’t know what danger lay ahead. Huge waves and swells rose all around him, wide vortices appeared before him that threatened to suck his little ship down to the dark depths and destroy the very seed of all life. Manu was dreadfully afraid.
Just then he heard the fish’s words in his head: ‘Call on me. I will save you.’
‘Oh Fish, great Fish, come, please come and rescue me!’
A huge hump obscured the horizon as the Great Horned Fish, grown so large that Manu couldn’t see the end of it in any direction, appeared before him. It dived beneath the ship, rose till the ship rested safely on its back, and began to swim with great muscular force towards the North in a journey that took a long time. It swam till Manu saw on the horizon a huge round peak covered with snow, standing tall and majestic above the waters. The Fish, which as you know, was Vishnu himself in his incarnation as Matsya, threw a great thick rope around the peak and moored the ship to it so it was safe till the flood receded. That peak, my beloved husband, was Kailas!”
Matsya was silent. He had to admit to himself that Devi’s story had cheered him up and calmed him down. Yet his mind kept interfering with his peace.
“Why did you tell me that story? What relevance does it have to what we were talking about? I don’t believe these stories. They are just stories,” Matsya grumbled in his habitual way.
“Don’t you see? Remember, we both have a spark of Vishnu in us! He will protect us! We both have a purpose to our lives.”
“Yes, he’ll protect us like he protects all the fish that get eaten up by other fish. Purpose! There is no purpose!”
“Let us not fear and doubt, dear husband. Take courage, and let us begin our quest!”
Matsya grumbled and was quiet. But his wife’s words and descriptions stayed with him all night, entering his dreams and his fantasies. In the morning he said to her,
“Oh, alright! Let’s give it a try. But will I find rice on the way? It is the only thing I can digest now.”
“We know that humans always burn their dead by rivers and many cast grains into the water together with bones and ashes.”
“Why?” asked Matsya.
“Rivers are symbols of life, dear, the energy stream that generates all life, that brings, gives, takes away, and brings again.”
Matsya looked uneasy, and Devi reassured him, “We can keep an easy pace, and when we get tired, we can stop and rest.”
Because fish don’t have to pack anything when they go on long journeys – they are luckier than humans that way – and because they were refreshed by a night of sleep, they started right away after Matsya had had his fill of rice. While Devi was much more excited than her husband about the adventure ahead, Matsya prided himself on being realistic, and said over and over, “We will die before we get to the lake.”
They swam upstream, a little bit at a time, pausing to catch and eat smaller fish and nibble at the grasses and moss on the many boulders in the river, avoiding and dodging bigger fish, resting and sleeping when they needed to. Fortunately, because it was harvest season in the lowlands, there were always, in addition to other fish, some grains of rice for sustenance in the shallows around cremation grounds. And as they swam further, their stamina and excitement grew, for the holy journey they were on fueled their quest.
But though their hearts were aflame to reach their goal, their bodies were wearing out.
Midway through their journey, it was evident that their life force was ebbing. They spent more and more time trying to recoup their energy, resting instead of swimming upstream. They knew their end was near. When they reached Kholsi, Matsya’s guts gave out, and Devi’s body, too, was spent. Though she was, through a long practice of acceptance of all life brings and takes away, reconciled to her fate, Matsya, his eye dimming in the dawn, looked at this wife and whispered,
“Purpose?”
With one final burst of energy, Devi leapt out of the river, landed on the shore, flip-flopped her way further inland, and looked around her.
“Look,” she said to her husband. Matsya, too, wanting to die within sight of his wife, sprang out of the water and onto land. He followed her gaze as she looked north at the banks of the Karnali. A clump of rich, emerald green swam into his dimming eyes.
“Rice,” whispered Devi, with her fading breath. “You, my beloved, have brought rice where it has never grown before! You have performed a great deed in your life! How glad humans will be when they see this!”
“What about Manasarovar? What about Kailas? We have . . . failed,” he gasped.
“Manasarovar means the ‘Lake of the Mind,’ my husband. It exists within us. And wherever we, sparks of Vishnu, are, is the axis of the world.”
Matsya looked at the Karnali River, in which he had lived all his life. Now that he was out of it, he could truly see it for the first time, bouncing, leaping, dancing and shimmering downstream in the morning light, lovely beyond description; he could see, too, how every little pebble changed the flowing pattern of the river.
“What a lovely river was given to us as our home, my wife,” he said, looking at his mate with eyes full of love for her and everything he saw around him.
As the light began to fade in his eyes, his inner vision sharpened. Matsya closed his eyes for the last time. As he did so, he found himself leaping with a rainbow flash into a boundless turquoise lake so tranquil that he knew he had arrived at his source in Paradise.
Matsya and Devi’s bodies began to harden into stone at the arrival of day; in time the rock bodies of Matsya and Devi grew larger, like Vishnu morphing from a tiny fish to a huge horned fish. In time, the sprouts of rice, too, grew to maturity, the wind scattering the seeds far and wide till there grew entire fields and terraces of it; in time humans migrated to the blessed rice fields. Worshipped by the villagers for bringing them rice from the lowlands, the fish couple can still be seen today, side by side, standing tall, firm, majestic in Dharapori, the habitation that sprang up around the fields of rice, that rich and delicious source of sustenance.
About this Story:
Collected from Dharapori, Humla, by Sagar Lama from Krishna Bahadur Shahi. Retold by Kamla K. Kapur. Translated into Nepali by Kriti Adhikari.
Ripples on the Mirrored Lake
Original illustration by Rabin Maharjan.
As surely as sowing must come before the harvest, and as surely as a pebble thrown into a still pool creates ripples, cause and effect are forever related: the cause must precede the effect, just as the effect must follow a specific cause. As simple as this may seem, most people do not immediately understand it; instead, they spend most of their lives fighting hard, pretending that this law doesn’t apply to them. They will pray to a god, if that helps, or pretend to be a god, if that makes matters easier, instead of sitting down to close their eyes, introspect and acknowledge that, indeed, effect follows cause, and that rejecting this law leads to sorrow.
Once upon a time, in a roving settlement of felt tents in the grasslands of Tibet, lived a king blessed with a plentitude of cattle and sheep and horses, a kingdom full of pastures and gentle streams, a son and a daughter, and a queen. His name was Joro.
His wife, Lhamo Tsendama, was his true treasure, for she caused his prosperity to grow through diligence and diplomacy. She established ritual friendships with the nomadic traders from south of the Himalayan mountains, and begged them to take the extra trouble of bringing her timber, so that she might build monasteries. Whenever she managed to bring the statue of Milarepa out from a cave high on the face of a cliff to the spacious and well-lit wood-paneled halls of a monastery, nomads from as far away as four days’ ride would make a pilgrimage, bringing offerings to the monastery and commerce for the people of her husband’s kingdom. When Lhamo Tsedanma received Indian sages versed in the art of healing, the Gyeshe at the monastery obtained invaluable supplies of herbs from the Indian coasts, or even the island of Sri Lanka, and the ailing and infirm among her husband’s subjects benefited. She possessed soft words and grace, which she often had occasion to employ on behalf of her husband and young son, for they lacked these virtues.
Joro and his son Palden possessed the pride that is the particular mark of those who are born into divinely ordained kingship: their word was law, this they knew. They therefore keenly enforced their superiority over their subjects: the fattest sheep and the finest wool in the kingdom were demanded in tribute from all who toiled in Joro’s kingdom. Palden played at being a king and ordered his playmates to carry him on their shoulders. When a merchant arrived from Persia or Mongolia, Joro demanded that they beg for an audience in his stately tent and present him with turquoise and silk. But he didn’t share his wealth with his subjects.
Joro and Palden liked to ride their swift horses and chase and shoot deer and pheasants, while Lhamo Tsedanma taught her daughter Dolma the prayers to the Avalokiteshwor who offered wisdom and protection. With the wind sweeping through the manes of their horses and with their mastiffs running down stags, the men of the family felt their power ripple outwards through the world, subjugating and conquering everything within their dominion. But the women of the family felt their compassion radiate out to bring succor to the suffering of the people, and knew that they accumulated merit for themselves and for every sentient being in the universe. By the time the children had reached adolescence, Dolma’s prayer beads were worn smooth with the oil of devotion whereas Palden’s prayer beads hung around the forearm of his right hand, knocked coarse by mindless action.
On a morning dulled by grey clouds that covered the skies after the southern wind had been beaten back by the cold northern winds, Lhamo Tsendama felt fade. As she watched her husband laugh loudly with his men, the hair on his chin wet with chhang, and as she watched her son wrestle away the rib of a yak from his favorite dog while his playmates pretended to feast on dishes of dry grass, she understood that the men didn’t possess the virtues of kindness or the grace needed for serving others.
“Dolma,” she called to her daughter, who came and sat by her. Lhamo Tsendama took her daughter’s hand and said, ‘Yama, the lord of death, will come to take me to the underworld soon, but you will have a long life ahead of you. Make no mistake, daughter – it will be a life of hardship and trials, for suffering is the nature of the world, and only mindful action and constant compassion will deliver you from suffering. There is nothing I can do to mitigate the vagaries of the world, the miasma that is samsara, but I will give you this gift,’ she said, and handed Dolma a box made of tough ox-hide and tied shut with a leathern cord.
“Your father and your brother will require compassion from you: they do not have the inner eye to see the future results of their actions. Nor do they possess the eye that looks inward in introspection to identify the past causes of their present actions. I fear that they will treat you cruelly and with disdain. Forgive them. But, do not abandon yourself to suffering. When the peril is the greatest – and this you will recognize when the time comes – when you realize that your mortal life is in danger, open this box, read the letter inside, and do exactly as I ask you to.”
“Yes, mother,” Dolma said and quietly accepted the box, for she was obedient.
And, as the air turned colder, as snow first fell like a dusting of tsampa flour and then as heaps of lamb’s wool and then turned into hard stones of ice, the flame of life in the queen’s heart grew dimmer, and her breath turned short as the days turned shorter, until one night she quietly passed away, led by Yama’s servants through the gates of the afterworld. Dolma, who had been attentively praying by her mother’s side, recognized the passing of the soul. She lit a lamp by her mother’s head and through the night recited mantras to the compassionate forms of the Avalokiteshwor.
Joro was astounded to find his wife dead, and Palden wailed like a child, for Lhamo Tsendama’s death had caught them unaware. Seeing that neither her father nor her brother had the fortitude of spirit to confront the death of her mother, Dolma went to the monastery and informed the Gyeshe, who made arrangements for the funeral. The men of the camp carried away Lhamo Tsendama’s body to the cremation grounds and consigned it to flames. From her tent across the frozen meadow Dolma watched the dark smoke from the pyre rise to the skies.
Dolma gave away her mother’s possessions to mendicants and minstrels who passed through the camp, and she fed the hungry so that they would offer prayers in her mother’s name. After fortynine days, when a portrait of her mother was offered up to a ritual fire to signify the final perishing of Lhamo Tsendama’s mortal form, Dolma set about keeping house for Joro and Palden as if her mother had never existed. From nothing Lhamo Tsendama had passed into nothing, and Dolma was certain that her mother’s noble virtues and accumulated merits would free her from rebirth into the lower orders, perhaps opening the path to rebirth as a highly realized man who would, over the next few births, pass forever into the great nothing. But the actions of her father and brother, who, although they had been born as men and into the light of the Buddha’s teachings, still neglected their duties towards all sentient beings, and towards their own consciousness, worried her.
A few days after the last of the snow had melted, Dolma heard heartrending squeals of pain mingled with laughter of bloodcurdling cruelty outside the tent. Palden’s dog was tossing about a gaunt marmot, its hindquarters mangled, but the life in it still strong. Perhaps it had strayed out of its burrow after the winter, weak from the hibernation, and had been set upon by Palden’s mastiff. Each squeal of terror made Palden laugh, which encouraged the dog to toss the poor rodent about to elicit more laughter from Palden.
Dolma was transfixed with horror: compassion melded her mind with that of the marmot, and she experienced its pain and fear, along with its strong desire to live. Many moments had passed before she could move to intercede on behalf of the marmot. Joro had emerged from another tent. “What is this noise?” he bellowed, took a brief look, clipped Palden on the side of his head, kicked the dog in the rib and stomped the marmot on its head.
“No!” Dolma screamed, but knew immediately that the marmot had died.
“Did you want the rat to scream more? Did you want it to live in pain?” Joro turned his angry eyes to her.
“No,” she said, eyes downcast to hide the hot tears. “It could have lived.”
“It is a rat. Dogs kill rats,” Joro said, and returned to the tent from where he had emerged.
A few days later, Dolma found Palden alone. “Brother,” she said haltingly, “the dog, the yak, the rat, the men and their horses – they are all the same.” She had given this speech great thought and carefully chosen the words, for she knew these would be the first words he would hear of the path towards compassion, the path that leads away from suffering. But Palden laughed.
“Are you the old Gyeshe at the monastery?” he shrieked with laughter. When the noise made one of his lackeys peep into the tent, Palden repeated Dolma’s words in a high, mocking pitch, making it preachy and singsong. Palden’s friend joined in the mocking.
“The worm and the bird are the same,” one said.
“The mud and the dung are the same,” another said.
Yes, they are, Dolma wanted to say triumphantly, but that was not in her nature. Instead, she turned away from them and found refuge in the corner where her mother used to pray, and where she had given up her spirit.
Over the next month, Joro’s attitude towards her turned from negligence to disdain to something akin to barely suppressed hatred.
As if she had deeply offended him by showing concern for the mangled marmot, he now sought every opportunity to force her into situations of cruelty and degradation: he put her in charge of the hunting dogs.
“Palden, you will learn the son’s trade: you’ll study the horses in our possession, for they are true wealth. Dolma, you will care for the dogs.” Joro intended his son to grow up to be a great king and owner of a prosperous stable, so he taught Palden how to recognize strength and stamina in a horse. He would prop Palden before him on the saddle of his horse, so that he might learn to ride the steed, and chase the other horses through the meadows as he exercised them. Dolma was plopped behind Joro on the same horse, learning to command and bring to heel the mastiffs that ran after their quarry.
But the dogs had eaten from Palden’s hands since they were pups, blind balls of fur and teeth. Palden knew everything about them, as he liked to boast to Dolma, and he relished the opportunity to show how he knew more about the task given to her. Also, it was in his heart to hunt and kill, skin and roast, eat and belch out the flesh of birds and animals. He became more animated each time the ferocious mastiffs stretched their necks and shot through the grass of the meadows. Dolma, on the other hand, could barely see the dogs, since she had to close her eyes tightly and cling to her father’s back as the horses galloped through the grass. She learned to become one with the horse, to feel the dirt and grass through the horse’s shod hooves, to register the tremors of hesitation or excitement in the horse’s muscles and sinews when it prepared to leap over a brook or bank around an insurmountable obstacle. The horse was of the wind, while the dogs were of the earth, and Dolma learned to fly with the horse.
And that was no accident, for her father’s horse was capable of flying; just as it was capable of understanding the suffering of the people around it. Gyadong Syabu, the treasure of the kingdom, and the pride and joy of Joro, could fly into the skies and over the mountain, not merely as metaphor, but in substance and body. Similarly, Senya Chumo, the second best prize in the stable, was like a golden fish in the ocean, for it could glide through the grass of the meadows and over the rocks and snow of the mountains, and turn in a flick to face the direction whence it had come, just like a nimble fish in the ocean.
On the day when the sun took the longest to journey across the skies, and the shortest night was set aside for bonfires and feasting, Joro took Palden and Dolma on a hunt and quizzed them about horses and dogs. While Dolma did not surprise her father with the meager amount she knew about dogs, he was dismayed to know how little Palden knew about horses.
“Son,” Joro said, “We are nothing without our horses, for they are the source of our wealth and power. If you can’t learn about the horses in your herd, how will you learn to understand your lieutenants, your allies and your enemies? How will you be king?”
Dolma saw the distress on her brother’s face and out of compassion whispered answers to him. When Joro saw this, he was alarmed. “Does your sister know more about horses than you do?” he asked in disbelief.
“How does it matter?” Palden answered with irritation. “I knew all the answers to your questions about the dogs, just like she knows about the horses!”
“She is a girl,” Joro muttered. “I am not disappointed that she doesn’t know about dogs. But you…” he said, but he didn’t finish his sentence. Instead, he quietly turned around, and without waiting for his son or his daughter, Joro walked his horse back towards camp.
Dolma watched as Joro became more and more restless, sometimes asking for chhang even before Dolma had finished her morning prayers. He would stare at her with undisguised hatred and mutter under his breath. One day, late in the night, as she lay in bed, she heard her father growl, “I’ll kill her if I have to, but my kingdom will not pass to a woman. I’ll be mocked by all kings and princes of the world if they learn that my son is unworthy.”
Dolma now understood the extent of her father’s pride, and the utter absence in his heart of any light of compassion or humility. A man so engrossed with his picture of himself as a man of strength that he would resent his daughter the knowledge of horses! What might she have possibly done in her past lives that she should be born a daughter, only to be murdered by her own father? She wept silent tears, decided to pray for safety through the night and, oppressed by gloom, resigned herself to her fate. She didn’t indulge in the selfish act of counting the merits of her karma to find a way of explaining her present predicament. What shall come shall come, she thought: I can only be righteous in my actions; I cannot be responsible for the thoughts and actions of others.
Yet, the next morning, when her father left on yet another hunt, seating Palden behind him on the horse, Dolma sought out the box made of ox-hide. Inside were a pendant of silver and a letter in her mother’s hand.
“Go to the kingdom of Lo, to the south. There, present this pendant to the king, for it once belonged to his house, and was given to me as a token of respect. Lose not a moment, daughter – make haste. Take with you the flying stallion Gyadong Syabu, for he is the fastest, and not even the second treasure of your father’s stable, the mare Senya Chumo, who can outrun the wind, can catch him.”
Dolma was too afraid to be seen flying through the skies in the day, so she waited for the night. In the night, when she stole to the stable with nothing but the ox-hide box and a handful of tsampa, she hesitated to steal Gyadong Syabu: after all, the flying stallion was her father’s favorite horse. The loss of the flying horse would cause immense anger and grief in Joro’s heart, and his anger and grief would amplify upon learning that his daughter had stolen his beloved steed. Dolma, through her compassion, felt just a fraction of Joro’s emotions of disappointment, loss and anger. She turned away from Gyadong Syabu and defied her mother’s wish. She felt a barb of regret for disobeying her mother, but she put away that feeling, like an oyster does a grain of sand, or a wound does the sting of a thorn, not knowing what fruit it would bear far into the future.
She said to herself – “Flying through the skies could bring me face to face with the siddhas and dakinis, those who traverse the skies on their magical tasks. What if they take my flight as an insult and punish me for my hubris?” And, so, Dolma took the mare Senya Chuma and rode towards the kingdom of Lo.
The next day, as she was resting the mare in the shade of a large rock in the desert plateau between the meadows of her father’s kingdom and the fertile lands of Lo, an old man in a long, worn robe approached her. “Where do you go, daughter?” he asked.
“To the kingdom of Lo, old father,” Dolma replied. The old man regarded the mare and smiled at Dolma.
“I have water to share if you are thirsty,” the old man offered. Dolma accepted the water with gratitude, but she shared it with her mare before wetting her own lips.
“Why do you go to the kingdom of Lo?” the old man asked. Dolma’s eyes welled up with tears, but she didn’t want to speak ill of her father. “My fate takes me there, old father,” she said.
Dolma offered the old man half of her tsampa and watched him eat it. When he had finished, she made the rest of the tsampa into a ball, divided it into halves, and gave one portion to her mare.
“Ah, daughter!” The old man scratched his head. “You show compassion, yes, but daughter, she is a mare. She will happily eat grass when she reaches the valley.” Dolma then laughed, because her stomach did growl with hunger still.
The old man and the young princess traveled towards Lo. Sometimes the princess rode on Senya Chuma, and sometimes she dismounted to beg the old man to rest his feet astride the mare, and sometimes they led the mare as they walked. This they did not merely out of compassion for the mare, but also because there was joy in conversing, and telling each other stories about their lives and the sights they had seen along the road.
“My mother asked me to visit the king of Lo, old father,” Dolma told her fellow traveler after they had exchanged enough stories to build trust.
When they reached the gates of the walled city of Lo Manthang, the old man bid Dolma to stay outside the city. “But, do give me your mother’s pendant,” the old man smiled.
Soon, a young man came running out of the gates, and begged Dolma to ride the mare while he led them into the city, his hand on the bridle, until they reached the house of the Gyalpo, the king of Lo. The old man, still in his robes, sat to the right of the king’s throne, on a chair piled high with yak pelts and sheep skin.
“Bring her to me, my son,” the king commanded in a kind voice. “Yes, father,” said the young man by Dolma’s side, and with a sweep of his arm, begged her to approach his father, the king.
“Your fate and mine met on the road, didn’t they?” the old man said with a chuckle as she approached the king of Lo. “Nephew,” he addressed the king, “This young woman is the treasure born to the wise and pious Lhamo Tsedanma, wife of Joro, to whom our house had sent this pendant as a token of our esteem. It is true that I failed in my embassy to the kingdom of Amdo to return with the princess betrothed to your son. But, instead of a lotus from the gardens of a mansion, I have brought you a blue poppy of the vales. Instead of a painted doll swathed in silks, I have found a compassionate heart and boundless virtue.”
Dolma slowly understood what was happening, and with astonished eyes looked at the king, the old man and the young prince by her side. The prince smiled back kindly; there was no spark of mischief in his eyes, but they pooled deep with a constant light of compassion. Dolma saw that she had been delivered into a new family that welcomed her. She would respect and love her father as long as she lived, but this would be her new home and family to which she would forever be devoted.
She bowed with gratitude and prayed to the siddhas and Avalokiteshwor to bless every sentient being in the universe.
Many years passed. Joro tried to forget his losses – a daughter who would have made a good bargain as a bride for a merchant or a prince, along with the jewels of his possession, his miraculous horses.
Years of increasing poverty had forced him to part with the flying horse. Joro had entrusted the money from the sale of the horse to Dorje, a nephew, who then bought a large herd of horses and trained them to be sold to warring kings in India. Palden and Dorje had crossed the mountains to the south to sell the horses. But when they returned, Palden had brought Dorje home bound in ropes. Refusing to believe Dorje’s protests that he was innocent, Joro had his nephew’s eyes put out with hot needles for stealing the money earned from the sale of his herd. When Dorje shouted, rolling in the dust outside Joro’s tent, that someone in the king’s caravan had stolen the money, and that he was innocent, Joro had the blind man’s tongue cut out for his lies.
Joro treated his other subjects no better, and Palden learned no better from Joro than to bully and exploit. His subjects began pitching their tents farther and farther away from the large tent of their king, until, one winter night when Joro came out of his tent, desiring more beer with which to warm himself, he could barely make the outline of the nearest tent, pitched a hundred yards away, and with a blizzard raging in between.
“Fetch me a bowl of beer,” he growled at Palden.
“Do it yourself,” the prince muttered as he turned around on his pile of sheepskin and went back to sleep.
Joro kicked Palden. “I am your father! Is this how you show obedience?”
Palden reluctantly got out of bed, grumbled under his breath as he swaddled himself in a coat of fur, braced against the cold and went into the blizzard. When he returned an hour later, most of the beer had spilled or frozen into slush. Joro glowered at Palden, but the prince laughed derisively and said – “Are you the only one who feels the cold?”
As Palden lay snoring drunkenly in his corner, Joro thought of his tent, his grasslands and his kingdom. When merchants came from the south or the west, they rarely stopped with him for the night anymore. Instead, they quickly paid their respect in reluctant bows and tribute in goods of inferior quality, and journeyed with their caravan to the edge of his kingdom. Although his subjects grazed their sheep and yaks on the greenest and sweetest grass of his kingdom, the cattle he received as tribute rarely had a shiny coat or fat thighs. The tent was always dim, even in noon when the sun glimmered fiercely outside. A pall lay over everything that he touched.
Joro closed his eyes and tried to find the signposts along the path of life that had brought him to a place where he found no love or respect, but only barely concealed contempt and fear. He remembered the manner in which he had treated his daughter, and realized that she had run away because of his own conduct. He remembered the insolence Palden showed him. Doesn’t the tree show what seed it came from? Joro had never taught his son kindness and grace: he had only taught him strength of arm and roughness of voice. Joro thought of his wealth and influence: he had scared away his kinsmen by forcibly taking from them without ever giving them anything in return, so that when his people fell away from him, just as birds flee a blazing tree, he had been left with nothing. The monks at the monasteries built by his wife no longer invited him to the many ceremonies to which people flocked from miles around because he had once tried to strong-arm them into paying him a tithe instead of offering them his share of wool and sheep. As he lay there in the dark, Joro saw that every misfortune that smothered the peace of his mind now had its origin in an act of unkindness or a hurtful remark. For the first time in his life, in the autumn of the breaths left to his name, tears of remorse wet Joro’s cheeks until he fell into a sweaty, uneasy sleep.
“Father!” Palden awoke him the next day. Joro sat up with bitterness clinging to his tongue, his breath foul even to himself. A merchant stood by the entrance, cap in hand, confusedly studying the tent.
“Am I in the right home?” the merchant asked. “Am I before our king?”
Joro waved him towards a low table by the stove gone cold in the middle of the tent. The merchant took out a sack of hulled rice, a bundle of incense sticks, silver coins from the valley of Nepal, which was now the currency at Lhasa, and a small lump of deer-musk. He bowed deep and started walking backwards towards the mouth of the tent.
“Wait,” Joro said. “Sit.”
The merchant looked at the lackluster surroundings.
“Where do you come from, friend?” Joro asked as politely as he could.
“From Leh, south of the Shang Shung,” the merchant replied. A curious smile spread on Joro’s face. He walked to the merchant and held him by the arm and sat him down.
“Son,” Joro said to Palden, “Go to Dorje’s and ask his wife to come here. Without a woman’s graces in the house, hospitality is incomplete.”
Dorje’s wife arrived with dried jimbu grass, the rare pods of red chili, flakes of sun-dried yak meat and anything else her neighbors could afford to share to welcome their king’s guest. Palden watched the sudden turn in his father’s behavior until, his belly filled with warm food and beer, the merchant boasted of his kingdom’s splendors and his king’s riches. After drinking some more, he raised his arms and made swooshing sounds, as if flying, and then neighed and snorted like a horse.
“It is a splendid horse, but it keeps trying to fly back to where it came from,” the merchant said with a twinkle in his eyes. “Do you know where my king bought it?”
Joro smiled broadly and slapped the merchant’s back and roared with laughter. Palden also laughed.
“It is your horse!” the merchant pointed to Joro and giggled. “My horse,” Joro laughed. “My flying horse!”
A scheme had suggested itself to Joro’s mind, and, for the first time in his life, he was putting aside his pride in order to plot, scheme, deceive and trick someone. One aspect of evil had shielded itself from him while another aspect now befriended him and whispered into his ears. Was it really stealing if he could affect the theft without once setting foot into the house of the owner of the goods? Was it collusion if his partner in crime knew nothing of what he was doing, and why?
The day came for the merchant to leave for his home. Joro bowed before him and said, “Sir – have we not become the best of friends over the past week?”
The merchant blushed at being addressed so intimately by a king, albeit a poor king in a shabby tent. When Joro took his hand, the merchant began nodding vigorously in agreement.
“Have you not made me happy, my friend, by sharing my hospitality?” Joro asked again, and the merchant stuttered in agreement, “Yes, my king, yes! The honor has been immense.”
“You will go home and brag to your wife about sharing a table with us!” Palden joined in on the ribbing. The merchant beamed brightly.
“I beg you this small favor, my friend,” Joro said as he took off a boot and pulled out the insole. “Take this to your king’s stables and burn it in a place where my beloved Gyadong Syabu lives now. When I had to sell him to your king, a piece of my heart withered and died. I am sure my horse grieves for me, too. If he smells the odor of the insole of my boot he will remember the fond hours we spent together, roaming through the grassland and climbing to the night sky. It will bring him solace to know that I still remember him, and it will bring me solace to know that he will embrace me once more, through the joy in his heart, over these vast distances that separate us.”
The merchant was overcome with sorrow for Joro and the horse, and immediately agreed to do as instructed. He took his leave and headed homewards.
“A day will come when I will need your help, Palden,” Joro said to his son. “You will do exactly as I ask you to, and our fortunes will turn for the better.”
And so the father and son waited for the day when the merchant would reach Leh, steal into the king’s stables and burn Joro’s insole at a spot where Gyadong Syabu could smell it. The scent would be the magical signal to put the horse into a frenzy; it would break all chains and fly into the skies and race swiftly over meadows and valleys, rivers and mountains to alight outside the tent. Joro’s wealth would return after years of want and penury!
Joro would close his eyes through the long autumn afternoons and imagine the path to Leh, just where the merchant would rest for the night, or just when he would approach a village late in the evening. Joro counted the days on his fingers, then with knots of grass outside his tent, then with scratches into the tent-pole nearest to his bed. He forgot the taste of food and the comfort of his bed because the constant coveting of the mere possibility of wealth grew too big inside him and made him restless. Until one evening, he suddenly sat up in his bed and shouted.
“Palden!” he said, “prepare for Gyadong Syabu’s return!”
“From where?” Palden asked. “It has been many years since we sold him. Why would he return to us now?”
“You don’t know of the scheme I have effected, and you don’t know of the magical bond I have with the horse. Just do exactly as I say, and we shall have our wealth return to us.” Joro told Palden to find a wide clearing with soft soil underfoot and burn a bright line of torches to guide the horse safely to the ground. “Go now!” Joro shouted, “And do exactly as I have said. When the horse approaches the torches, it will neigh loudly. You must shout out his name at that exact moment, so that he knows he is awaited. If you fail to do this, all will be lost!”
There always comes a moment in a story, just as in the pages of our lives, when events shape up in defiance of our expectations; these are either moments of unexpected joy, or of undeserved violence and grief. When they happen in our lives, such accidents make us wail in grief and disbelief and ask the skies –“Why?” The mind searches for reasons why something should have occurred in the manner it did; then it fantasizes about all other possible alternatives. Then it seeks to lay blame on anybody or anything at all, and, if nothing surfaces, it tries to make sense of the strange thing called coincidence. The mind resists seeing it for what it truly is: the inevitable result of a past action. It resists giving credence to the inevitable bond between a moment and the next: an action and its consequence. The mind tries to live in fantasies of how an event would have turned out if, at the most crucial juncture, an event or intention or word or action had been ever so slightly different; it desperately invents fantasies of alternate futures. The mind bathes in the kaleidoscopic pictures of fictional pasts and fictional futures, while stubbornly refusing to see the plain, unadorned nature of everything that unfolds in the present.
What happened next wouldn’t have come to pass if Dolma had obeyed her mother and escaped with Gyadong Syabu. It certainly wouldn’t have happened if greed hadn’t entered Joro’s heart, or if Palden had obeyed his father. But, these three actions were already in the tomb of the past, and in the womb of the future the consequences were sliding towards the moment when they would become actions in the world, the echo in the samsara of past deeds.
Palden found a wide, soft clearing, but he didn’t bother to light the torches. A magical flying horse should have enough sense not to fall to the ground. What is a torch to a fantastical beast that can fly over fortresses of snow and rock, high in the southern skies? When Gyadong Syabu approached the meadow near his former master’s dwelling, he saw no beacon to guide him. Palden didn’t see the horse rapidly approach him against the dark sky, and therefore didn’t call out Gyadong Syabu by his name, which was itself the magic and talisman, and thereby caused the horse to slam headfirst into the ground, break the bones in his neck, and instantly die.
There is a story, repeated over the ages in many books, about two birds sitting on the branches of a fruit tree. One bird feels hunger and thirst; it feels also the sweetness of ripe fruits and the bitterness of the unripe. So it pecks at the fruits, titters in delight when the flesh is juicy and sweet, and screeches in dismay when it is raw and bitter. The other bird doesn’t feel hunger or thirst; it feels no need for the sweet or bitter tastes of the fruit. It merely witnesses the first bird, for it is the first bird, snared inextricably in the senses, and it is also the second bird, aloof from the material world. It is aware of its separation from the world of sensations and desires. The first bird doesn’t know that it also exists as the second, on a different and higher branch of the same fruit tree. And, so, the first bird thrashes about in briefest agony or joy, never once looking up to watch the serenity and majesty of the second.
When Joro was brought news of his horse’s death, Joro suddenly understood what had happened: he had murdered Gyadong Syabu! His greed had called the horse over the mountains. His conduct towards Palden had made the young man disobedient and insolent, lacking in industry but brimming with arrogance. There was no such thing as a coincidence: no effect arises without a precedent cause. Just as joy is a consequence of a past action, so is grief a consequence; and all are ripples on the mirrored surface of the great lake of Time. A bird flew out from Joro’s body and climbed to the top of his tent and watched down, detached from this world of words and signs, attachments and desires, the incessant deluge of consequence after consequence that tumbled forth from all the nodes and moments in the past, incessantly being devoured by a million different possible futures. It watched itself, Joro, as the old king went blind in a flash of comprehension, for the sudden confrontation with the light that separates this world from its eternal and unblemished second self is too terrible to behold.
About the Story
Story told by Po Wobu, Ngari, Tibet Autonomous Region. Collected by Kelsang Chimee. Retold by Prawin Adhikari. Translated into Tibetan by Thinlay Gyatso.
Godsland
The following is an excerpt of the full story…
Original illustration by Rabin Maharjan.
In Humla, gods and goddesses walk among the folk in the guise of men and women. They have multiple abodes, inhabiting villages far and wide, and they keep the dharma in the world. They answer the prayers of their worshippers, and they enforce the laws of dharma by punishing transgressions. The land touched by the river Karnali is strewn with evidence of their prowess: in cliffs and along river banks, deep in alpine forest or in unattainable caves are the petrified remains of demons and monsters slain by the gods. In the lives of the people of Humla are echoes of old tales transmitted over the generations, recounting the glory of ancestors who became gods, or gods who granted protection or delivered retribution to ancestors. Their stories are retold during the festivals all through the year: each deity’s dangri, who is the interlocutor between the heavenly world of the deities and the mortal realms of the people, recounts in painstaking detail the journey his deity must make from the holy mountain of Kailas, passing the holy lake Manasarovar, and entering the body of the deity’s own dhami, so that they may listen directly to the petitions made by the sick and the unfortunate, or accept the grateful offerings of petitioners who have received grace and benevolence from them.
Jumla, an empire to the south of Humla, was once called Vishnubhumi, or the land of Vishnu, signified in the person of the king who ruled there. In Jumla, the laws of the king were kept. But in Humla the laws of the gods, or dharma, were kept by the dhamis and dangris, speaking directly to the gods and to the people. This is the story – or, rather, the manifold stories – of how the gods came to walk the earth in Humla, giving their patronage to the land and people there, and thereby giving it the name Devbhumi, the land of gods. If the stories seem a babble of voices, a polyphony of narratives, it is because there are many gods speaking simultaneously through a host of dhamis spread from Kholsi in Humla, where the Khas have their farthest-upstream settlement, to villages in Achham, far downstream. Each dhami or dangri will expand the story of his deity and embellish it with details about their lord’s latest outburst of anger or most clement act of mercy.
Each sacred shrine or grove, or stream or meadow or pass or recess in the forest, has a story, enmeshed with the lives of the villagers in nearby settlements, of gods and demons, or of ordinary men and women who were suddenly confronted by divine or hellish beings from other worlds. It is only possible to imagine a complete canon of these individual stories; it is not possible to collect every story of every god’s exploits in this vast, difficult land. These are not static stories belonging to a specific place and time alone, but are stories that are ever-mutating, growing with every new act of divine miracle or human error. But it is possible to discern the outlines of the astonishing web of stories that bind the world of the twelve brother gods and cast their awesome shadow over the Karnali and Mahakali region in Nepal and India. Here is such a story, significant for the fact that it recounts the arrival and settlement of the gods, but insignificant in the fact that it is but a mere fragment of the great repository of images, songs and rituals preserved in the magical nexus between a divine being, their shamanic medium the dhami, and the dangri interlocutor between the realm of the gods and our own world.
In Indralok, where ruled Indra, king of the gods, his younger brothers who are the twelve gods of Humla heard that a heap of cowdung had taken the form of a mountain and that a half-liter measure of water had become a lake in the plains to the north of the Himalaya. The gods said to each other, “It is a sacred sign. The mountain is Kailas, and the lake is Mankhanda, and there is merit to be earned by bathing in the sacred lake and circumambulating the mountain.” They approached Indra and begged his permission to make a pilgrimage to the newly emerged abode of the holy and the sacred.
“Yes, brothers,” Indra said to the twelve brothers. “Go to the land to where Kailas transfi xes all realms, and around which the cosmos revolves. And make haste: once the mortals learn that the briefest glimpse of Kailas or the touch of the waters flowing from the lake of Mankhanda liberates the soul from the eternal cycle of rebirths, they will flock thither, wishing to shed their mortal selves on the arduous pilgrimage. Before their presence befouls the sacred, go and pay your respects.”
About the Story
Based on conversations with dhamis Man Bahadur Shahi, Tul Bahadur Shahi and Suvarna Roka of Humla. Written by Prawin Adhikari. Translated into Nepali by Samip Dhungel.
The Miller’s Song
The following is an excerpt of the full story…
Original illustration by Rabin Maharjan.
We do not know how long ago the events described here occurred – or where in the weft of events past or yet to come these people lived and died – but, in the village of Yari, deep in the shadows of the Himalayas, in a valley of plenty and gurgling with the restive Karnali, lived a merchant with an insatiable desire. It wasn’t merely greed or ambition, for he was a learned man, a man of the world who believed in hardwork and who had met and studied a thousand other men just like him. His desire was built on caution and thoughtfulness: as a child he had seen deprivation, and as a merchant he had profited from the hardships and the excesses of others. But, as much as he knew how to gain and gather wealth, the miracle through which it could be retained for all ages to come had eluded him.
Every morning, well before his sons or their wives awoke, the merchant chased away sleep and wiped clean his mind muddled with dreams. He cleaned the shrine for the ancestors kept in a corner of the wide, flat roof of his splendid house. He offered water and incense to the aged brass statue of the Buddha in the shrine, and remembered the gods of his home, of the village and the valley, and then remembered all the shrines, peaks and passes, rivers and lakes, meadows and forests where he had prayed for safe passage. In the few moments of rest before the day awoke like a beast in a hurry, he allowed the mind’s eye to wander, and allowed himself the proud but quiet joy of watching himself on his roof, in the home he had built to tower above all the houses in the village, a house that was slightly bigger than the village monastery. There were forty rooms under his roof, each built during the spring thaw of the forty years since he had started his life as a trader.
The merchant hadn’t started rich; he had grown up in a two-room hut, fatherless, in the bosom of a mother who shied from accepting charity and chose instead to labor for each rope of garment and each morsel of food. When his brother, older by two years and a lifetime of hardship already, had failed to return after a summer of herding cattle in the highpastures, he told his mother that he wanted to become a trader instead of working his kinsmen’s fields in exchange for just enough grains to see them through the long winter.
His mother had taken his face in her hands, gazed into his eyes, and quietly walked out of the house. She returned in the evening with a bundle of lamb’s wool. “Urgyen, you’ll repay them, each of them, before you gather your own wealth,” she said and recited to him a list of names and measures: women in the village who had put them in debt by sparing a handful of wool each. Even now, in his ripe old age, standing on the roof of the house where he had gathered more wealth than all the wealth of the richest men in every village within three days in every direction, he could recite the list of names, recall the face of every aunt or elder who had gently pushed him towards his fate.
About the Story
Based on a story told by Kharkyap Dorjee Lama of Yari, Humla. Collected by Sagar Lama. Retold by Prawin Adhikari. Translated into Nepali by Rajendra Balami.
The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) is a regional knowledge development and learning centre serving the eight member countries of the Hindu Kush Himalayas – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan – and based in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Globalisation and climate change have an increasing influence on the stability of fragile mountain ecosystems and the livelihoods of mountain people.
ICIMOD aims to assist mountain people to understand these changes, adapt to them, and make the most of new opportunities, while addressing upstream-downstream issues. We support regional transboundary programmes through partnership with regional partner institutions, facilitate the exchange of experience, and serve as a regional knowledge hub. We strengthen networking among regional and global centres of excellence.
Overall, we are working to develop an economically and environmentally sound mountain ecosystem to improve the living standards of mountain populations and to sustain vital ecosystem services for the billions of people living downstream now, and for the future.
Within its Transboundary Landscapes Programme, Kailash Sacred Landscape Conservation and Development Initiative (KSLCDI) is a flagship transboundary collaborative initiative between China, India, and Nepal that has evolved through a participatory, iterative process among various local and national research and development institutions within these countries. The Kailash Sacred Landscape represents a diverse, multi-cultural, and fragile landscape. The programme aims to achieve long-term conservation of ecosystems, habitats, and biodiversity while encouraging sustainable development, enhancing the resilience of communities in the landscape, and safeguarding and adding value to the existing cultural linkages between local populations across boundaries. The Kailash Sacred Landscape Conservation and Development Initiative (KSLCDI) is supported by partner organizations: Department for International Development (DFID) – UK Aid, and Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft liche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung/Deutsche Gesellschaft for Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.
Folk Gods
Stories from Kailas, Tise and Kang Rinpoche
Mortal Gods
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
Many cultures and religions imagine a time very long ago when gods and demons lived among the people. In such an age, a god in the Himalayas had five young and strong sons. The youngest was called Pipihya, and his name meant ‘one who has four older brothers’.
The five brothers loved each other and went everywhere together. They chased blue sheep over the Himalayas into the meadows of Tibet. They bathed in the glacial waters of the Ganga and in the hot-water springs of Kermi, in Humla. Each of them had a flying chariot, so they traveled widely. On the islands in the Langar Tsho they watched birds build nests in the spring. In the Limi Valley they watched snow leopards. Disguised as shepherds they traveled down to the Byans Valley to dance in the mustard fields.
One day, when they were making crowns of marigolds and poppies in the Valley of Flowers in Garhwal, they heard an enchanting song.
‘Brothers,’ Pipihya said to his elders, ‘we may be gods, but I will die if I don’t see who sings this song!’
‘Pipihya,’ his brothers warned, ‘some kinds of desires are only for humans who live and die. For us, youth is eternal, and so will longing be if we are made unhappy.’
But Pipihya insisted upon finding the singers. His eldest brother said, ‘Alright, Pipihya. But we must all promise never
to eat anything the humans offer us. If even a grain of rice goes into our mouths, we will be trapped on earth forever.’
After a short search on their flying chariots they found the singers in the Byans Valley, where the Rung people still live. The five daughters of Lord Runglin were the most beautiful in the world. Pipihya and his brothers introduced themselves and immediately befriended them.
Lord Runglin had built a pleasure palace for his daughters. From there, the sisters could see the Saipal Mountain to the north-east, and the Mahakali flowed in the valley beneath it. There, the gods and the young women played chess on beds covered in red velvet and danced barefoot on soft grass and spent the entire night laughing and talking. The gods played flutes and drums while the young women danced. When the sisters asked, the gods happily danced for the young women. Pipihya and his brothers always made excuses to avoid eating any food that was offered to them. And they left the pleasure palace before sunrise.
After a few days of blissful friendship, the sisters noticed that all the food they laid out for their guests was left untouched. ‘From their stature and beauty it is clear that the brothers are gods. Maybe they think our food is impure,’ the sisters said. They decided to peel with their own hands every grain of rice, and to make rice pudding themselves. They wondered – ‘What kind of a friend would refuse to eat something made with so much affection?’
The sisters spent the entire day peeling rice grains. They sang to chase away the boredom of the work. But they were also happy because they knew the pudding would make the gods smile. After boiling the pure rice in pure milk with the finest spices from Kerala and Kashmir, the sisters prepared five big bowls of kheer, milk-and-rice pudding.
The gods arrived in the evening. The sisters asked them to sit on rugs made of the finest wools, fanned them with yak-tails, and put bowls of pudding before them.
With a wink and a nod, the oldest of the brothers signaled to the others to pretend to eat the pudding but never let a single grain of rice into their mouths. This was a strict rule that separated the pure gods from the impure humans. To break this rule was to defy Creation itself. His brothers understood the signal, so they laughed and praised the pudding. ‘Oh, the cardamom smells beautiful!’ one said. ‘Surely the fragrance of saffron is more enticing!’ another added.
The gods pretended to take the pudding to their lips, but cleverly threw it over their shoulders. But as he was loudly laughing and praising the pudding, a grain of rice went into Pipihya’s mouth.
As the night passed, the gods and the sisters whispered secrets to each other and danced with arms around each other’s waists. They tested who could resist the tickle of a peacock feather the longest. They played games of the mind and of the body, until the goddess of dawn painted the eastern skies red. The gods promised to return in the evening, gently peeled away from the embrace of the sisters, and mounted their chariots.
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
Five chariots of gold and silver flew up from the pleasure palace as the five sisters waved silk-tasseled shawls in goodbye. But Pipihya’s chariot soon began descending slowly, as if an invisible burden pulled him back to earth. His brothers saw that and worried. When the chariot finally settled at Sirkha, they spoke to him from beyond the clouds. ‘Pipihya! You have eaten human food, and now you must endure your punishment. Settle here, and live like a king. We will send you everything you need.’
Pipihya agreed with his brothers and built himself a great fort on the Sirkha hillside with the chariot in the middle of the courtyard where he had fallen. The eighteen-story fort was the most magnificent building in the whole world. His brothers sent him the wealth needed to hire masons and carpenters, weavers and potters, and every kind of worker needed for a large fort. Pipihya also hired and trained an army. He began eating mortal food. After all, he was stuck on earth. Why shouldn’t he enjoy his time here?
But he had so much wealth that it spilt out of the windows and roofs of the fort. Pipihya used his army to distribute his wealth among the poor farmers and shepherds of the Byans Valley, and to his cooks and cleaners and cowherds and tailors. He built roads, bridges and rest-houses to make trade with Tibet easier and faster. He trained young men and women to recognize, process and store the herbs in the mountains so that they could heal the sick and also earn a living.
Time passed at a different pace for Pipihya than it did for the humans around him. He visited the five sisters as they grew older and finally died. The chariot in his courtyard rusted and broke. Generations of servants joined his service with energy and enthusiasm, then grew thick around the waist, then stooped and squinted, and finally died. This journey from birth to death stopped amusing Pipihya and he, too, began desiring liberation.
‘If only my brothers would come from heaven and take me away! I am tired of all this wealth and prosperity because it keeps me here,’ he moaned one day as a maid peeled grapes for him. This maid had grown old peeling grapes for Pipihya and was tired of hearing him complain. After all, she didn’t get to complain about how peeling grapes strained her eyes or gave her arthritis in her fingers.
‘If you are so tired of being rich and beautiful, why don’t you offer your ancestors a shield made of ashes instead of flour and a dog instead of a goat for the yearly feast?’ the old woman said.
Some rules of society and religion are very clearly established and most people know them. Some rules are not clearly known by everybody, but they still bring punishment if broken. Some rules are broken unknowingly. But sometimes even gods knowingly break society’s rules to invite change. Pipihya called the people he trusted and said, ‘I am going to destroy my fortune.’
‘No! That would be bad for us,’ said his ministers and commanders, fearing the loss of wealth and power. But Pipihya made a shield of ashes instead of flour and chose a dog instead of a goat to offer to his ancestors. This was terribly insulting. That misfortune soon befell Pipihya should surprise nobody. His wealth decreased. Thieves stole what was left of his chariot of gold, silver and rust. Finally, a day came when his fort lay in ruins, and he had to eat scraps thrown to him by strangers.
Pipihya only had a wooden bowl to eat out of. All splendor and beauty disappeared. When a tooth fell off while he was chewing rice, he laughed like a mad man and rolled in the dirt.
‘Brothers! Have you forsaken me?’ he said to the heavens.
His brothers appeared on their magnificent chariots of gold and silver and picked him up from the dirt and pulled him into the skies. Pipihya had finally been forgiven for eating one grain of rice. Nobody has heard from him since that day.
When the fort was great and prosperous, five hundred Rung families of traders and farmers had settled to the west of the fort. To the east lived three hundred families of blacksmiths who served the fort and its armies. But after Pipihya offered a shield of ashes along with a dog to the ancestors, the people knew that the land would never see wealth again. They left, never to return.
Tourists who visit Sirkha today can see the ruins on the hill. These ruins are a reminder of what happened when a god broke a simple rule.
About the story
Story by Gokul Singh Tatwal in Himalayan Dipti, 28 September, 1987. Sourced and translated into English by Himani Upadhyaya.
Mother’s Grief
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
People all around the world walk around objects, temples, mountains or lakes that are sacred to them. It is an ancient way of showing respect to the Creator. In the Tibetan language, such a walk around a great stupa, statue, lake or mountain is called a kora.
Kang Rinpoche, the holy mountain in the Ngari region of the Tibet Autonomous Region, has been a sacred site for far longer than anybody remembers. Pilgrims of many faiths travel there to perform koras around the mountain, which is also known as Kailas or Meru. The mountain is respected in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Bönpo, and pilgrims from many other religious traditions visit. The Bön walk the kora in the anti-clockwise direction while others do it clockwise. Buddhists believe that performing 13 koras around Kang Rinpoche brings most merit. How did this come about?
In the Kham region of Tibet, far to the east of Ngari, lived a devout woman who gave birth to a son and was overcome with the desire to earn religious merit. ‘Everybody says that the greatest merit comes from performing a kora around Kang Rinpoche. I will take my son with me, so that we will both gain merit and the kindness of the gods,’ she thought.
After saying goodbye to her family and friends, she walked for many months with her young son. They had to cross dry, cold deserts and vast grasslands where wild donkeys ran in herds. Flocks of black-necked cranes crossed the skies and deer darted through the knee-high grass of the marshes. On some days they met many pilgrims on the road, smiling and silently reciting their mantras. The Bön recited Om Ma Tri Mu Ye Sa Le Du; the Buddhists recited Om Mani Padme Hum; the ascetic Hindus from the south of the Himalayas recited Om Namoh Shivaaya. On some days the mother and baby boy met nobody but wild dogs scurrying across the plains.
After many months, the mother and son finally reached Kang Rinpoche. The mother tied her son securely to her back with a shawl and started her kora. As she climbed the mountain, she felt hunger and thirst; but she knew that the Drolma Pass was the highest place on the kora, and that it would be easier to breathe on the other side of the mountain.
She chanted Om Mani Padme Hum with each breath, hugged her son close to her body, and climbed. She finally climbed to Drolma Pass and offered her prayer of thanks. She felt very thirsty. But there was no water to drink, and the thin snow around her was covered in trampled mud. She saw a few small ponds about fifty meters below the path.
The mother knew that these were the bathing pools of a dakini, a goddess who can be very kind to good people and very angry towards bad people. The Hindus call these ponds the bathing pool of Gauri, who is the wife of the great god Shiva. In Tibet the dakini is known as Khadroma. The thirsty pilgrim knew that the dakini didn’t like it when someone disturbed her home. But unable to bear her thirst anymore, the mother climbed down to a pool.
She was so thirsty that she hurriedly bent down to drink water. Her baby boy slipped off her back and fell into the ice-cold water of the pond.
‘No, no, no, no, no!’ she shouted. She tried desperately to pull him out, but the cold water instantly killed the baby.
The mother was heartbroken. She clawed at her own face and beat her chest. She threw dirt into her hair and cried and begged the gods to make her son live again. But the gods didn’t bring the child back to life. She hugged her son close to her chest, but the beats of her heart didn’t make his heart beat again. Hot drops of her tears fell on the baby’s face, but it didn’t bring warmth to his body.
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
She had walked all the way to Kang Rinpoche to earn merit. But one moment’s carelessness had taken away everything that was dear to her. Who can imagine guilt greater than that of a mother who has caused the death of her own baby?
The mother mourned and cried throughout the night. In the morning, when her eyes had run dry of tears and her throat hurt from crying, she felt her grief decrease a little. She realized that she needed to continue her kora to pay for her sin. ‘O, Kang Rinpoche! I pray to you to forgive my sin and lift this unbearable grief away from me. I shall walk around you until I see signs that I have been forgiven. Only complete forgiveness or death can set me free,’ she said to the mountain.
She set out to perform as many koras as were needed to set her heart free. She walked past pilgrims who measured the entire length of the fifty-two kilometer path with their bodies, saying prayers all the while. She walked past long- haired ascetics praying and performing yoga in caves. She asked nobody for food or drink. Every time she climbed up to the Drolma Pass, she looked with longing at the pond where she had lost her child.
She finished seven, ten, twelve koras, but the grief and guilt stayed. Still, she walked around the sacred mountain.
On the thirteenth kora, she became very tired. Unable to take another step forward or keep her eyes open, she lay down on a rock to take a short nap.
When she awoke, she saw that her body, hands, and feet had left deep dents on the rock where she had slept. She understood that Kang Rinpoche had forgiven her and taken away the guilt and grief from her. The marks on the rock were proof of that. She thanked the mountain and made her long walk back to her village in Amdo where she started her life anew.
Pilgrims who go to Kang Rinpoche can still see the marks left behind by the mother who lost her child and performed thirteen koras around the sacred mountain. Ever since, Buddhists believe that performing thirteen koras will bring great merit to the pilgrim.
About the Story
Narrated by Trashi Pingtso from Purang County, Tibet Autonomous Region, China. Collected and translated into English by Kelsang Chimee.
Battle of the Brothers
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
In the village of Pangu in Uttarakhand of India is the temple of Shyangse. Nearby in Chaudans is a temple of the mother goddess Purnagiri whose original home is in Tanakpur, in the hot plains to the south. Shyangse is an ancestor-god of the Rung people of the Byans Valley. But Purnagiri is a famous Hindu goddess. How did Purnagiri travel from the hot, humid plains to a mountain village?
Long ago, a dhami (shaman) who worshipped and represented the god Shyangse traveled with his younger brother to Tanakpur. Just as they arrived in Tanakpur, which now lies on the border between India and Nepal, a wave of cholera swept over the region. This was an age when cholera and smallpox regularly attacked the Himalayan foothills, killing hundreds of thousands of people, destroying families and entire villages.
‘If we stay in Tanakpur, we are sure to die,’ the brothers decided and hurried back towards Chaudans as quickly as they could. They were also worried about bringing back cholera to their village and making their friends and families sick.
But the invisible germs had already caught the younger brother. He tried to walk as fast as he could, but soon he started falling behind his brother. The elder brother, who was the shaman to a powerful god, looked at his brother and realized that cholera would kill him.
‘Brother! Don’t walk away so quickly,’ the sick man called out. ‘I can still walk, and if you boil some water for me, I can reach home.’
‘You have been marked for death. I cannot risk catching the disease. Somebody has to run to our village and warn everybody,’ the older brother said and hurried away. He left his sick brother lying by the roadside.
‘It is difficult to say if an action is good or bad without understanding everything,’ the sick man thought. ‘My brother left me here to die, but if he can reach the village without catching cholera, he will save many lives.’
After reaching Chaudhans, the shaman told everyone what had happened to his brother. Villagers made haste and prepared themselves by boiling their drinking water and not letting any outsider enter the village. Nobody became sick, nobody died.
But the heart is always full of hope. The people of Chaudans waited for the sick man to return. When he didn’t return even after many weeks, with great sadness they prepared to perform the man’s funeral. They thought he had died, and he needed a funeral to pass into heaven. Those who were alive also needed the funeral to lay their hopes to rest and carry on with their lives.
Just before the funeral rites could be carried out, the god Shyangse entered the shaman in a trance and told him that his brother was still alive in Tanakpur. He hadn’t passed into the realm of the spirits.
On the road between Tanakpur and Chaudans, where his brother had abandoned him, and without anybody to help him, the younger brother had been close to death. As he suffered between life and death, a wandering yogi carrying two chimta tongs walked towards him. These tongs were carried by ascetics to use as a musical accompaniment for devotional songs, and to help them tend fires. Of the two pairs of tongs, one was of gold, and the other of iron.
The yogi crouched by the sick man and touched him, one by one, with the gold tong and the iron tong. He asked, ‘Which of these tongs will you take?’
The sick man thought, ‘I am weak from cholera. If I carry gold, I may be robbed by bandits who covet gold. If I live and return to Chaudans, I may be attacked and killed.’ He said to the yogi, ‘I will take the iron tong.’
The yogi disappeared immediately after giving the sick man the iron tong. ‘Am I waking from a dream?’ the sick man asked himself. But he saw the iron tong by his side and knew it had not been a dream. He drifted in and out of sleep, unable to separate what was dream and what was real.
‘Are you alright?’ he heard a young child ask.
She was a young girl in Tibetan dress, a child of the mountains. He tried to answer, but he was weak with disease and could barely speak. The child ran off, and within moments brought her parents, who carried him away to their tent and nursed him back to health.
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
When the younger brother became strong enough to return to Chaudans, the goddess Purnagiri chose him as her shaman and traveled to Chaudans. Had Purnagiri tested him disguised as a yogi, offering him iron and gold tongs? Or, was it Yama, asking him to choose between life and death? Or maybe Purnagiri had woven the illusion of the tent and the Tibetans to help her chosen shaman. Maybe the girl was the mother goddess herself.
The new shaman and his goddess Purnagiri reached Chaudans. But Shyangse, who was the main god there and worked through the older brother, didn’t like the arrival of a new goddess in the village. He told Purnagiri to leave.
‘I am a goddess, and I will not be bullied,’ Purnagiri said to Shyangse. Or rather, she spoke through her shaman to Shyangse’s shaman.
The gods chose to determine superiority through combat in the human world. Each shaman attacked the other shaman, and they performed many miracles before a crowd of amazed villagers.
Purnagiri picked up a millstone and thumped it on her chest. The millstone shattered. Shyangse didn’t pick up large rocks to show his strength. Instead, he grabbed a handful of rice grains and threw them with the great force that only a god can create. The battle continued. Each deity displayed more strength than the other until Shyangse finally accepted defeat before Purnagiri. The goddess from the plains had defeated the god of the mountains. A temple was built for Purnagiri, but Shyangse still disliked her.
Another wave of cholera reached the mountains and spread rapidly. Entire villages died. People panicked and fled their ancestral lands. But the shaman of Purnagiri had survived cholera before, so people put their hopes in him.
‘You defied death once, O shaman of Purnagiri! Save our lives!’
The young shaman prayed to his goddess, and Purnagiri appeared in his mind. ‘Don’t worry, and do as I command. Light a large fire, and offer it barley, ghee and sesame seeds.’
The smoke from the ritual covered the village of Pangu and protected everyone while cholera killed people in other villages. Purnagiri’s glory increased. When Shyangse saw Purnagiri’s powers, he accepted her as a sister. Ever since, Purnagiri has been worshipped in Chaudans, and a mountain god and a goddess from the plains have peacefully coexisted.
About the Story
Narrated by Jagdish Singh Hyanki, Chaudans, Uttarakhand, India. Collected and translated into English by Himani Upadhyaya.
Seven Horses in a Forest
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
Thousands of years ago in Tibet, an ancient religion thrived around the mountain known to some as Kang Tise and to others as Kailas or Kang Rinpoche. The religion practiced compassion and good deeds, and tried to erase ignorance from people’s minds. It was called Bön, and was the religion of the great Zhang Zhung empire which ruled over a vast stretch of the ancient Silk Road.
A greatly compassionate prince named Tonpa Shenrab was born into the Zhang Zhung empire. He was destined to be a great leader of the Bönpo. He had arrived to lead humans away from suffering. He saw people sacrificing animals to the good and evil spirits of the land. The animals bleated with terror before dying, and that filled his heart with sadness. So he taught the people compassion.
‘Instead of offering the life of a sheep, offer a sheep made from dough. Instead of offering blood, offer milk,’ he said. It took time and patience for him to convince the people, but when people truly understood the value of compassion, they followed him. Tonpa Shenrab became a beacon of bright light in a land darkened by violence and ignorance.
But darkness also has its worshipers. Gods, demons and kings need the praise and fear of ordinary people, otherwise they grow weak. Gods spreading kindness grow powerful only if people believe in what they preach.
Similarly, demons spreading fear can grow stronger only if people fear them.
Chapba Lakring, the demon king of a place called Kong, far from Kailas, was the opposite of Tonpa Shenrab: he ruled over his people by controlling everything in their lives. He created trouble for people who didn’t worship him, and rewarded only those who sacrificed animals to him or offered gold and jewels. Nobody was free to choose if they wanted to follow him, because only he could give them grains, cloths and medicine.
When Chapba Lakring heard that Tonpa Shenrab taught about truth, kindness and beauty, he was very upset. People who understand compassion and beauty treat each other with respect, because of which fear in society decreases. But fear was the strength of the demon king. Worried that he would lose power, he came to Kailas to attack Tonpa Shenrab.
He spread mistrust, greed, jealousy, anger, lies, arrogance, disobedience, and laziness among the people to lead them away from the light of compassion shown by Tonpa Shenrab. But the people had already understood Tonpa Shenrab’s teachings, so his tricks failed.
Chapba Lakring commanded his army of a million demons, who were always intoxicated with power, to destroy Tonpa Shenrab. When the demons attacked, Tonpa Shenrab showed them compassion and shared his wisdom with them. The demons, who were humans distorted by arrogance and ignorance, gave up their weapons and became peaceful shepherds and traders. They followed Tonpa Shenrab as he traveled even farther to spread the light of compassion.
But the demon king’s anger hadn’t disappeared. Evil thoughts buzzed around him like flies around rotting flesh.
One day, when Tonpa Shenrab was traveling around the Cha area to bring the light of compassion to even more people, Chapba Lakring entered his tent as a tired traveler and asked the women inside for water and porridge.
He praised one woman’s beauty and the fine weaving skills of another. He whispered into the ear of one wife to make her jealous of another wife. He put suspicion in the heart of the mother and anger in the mind of the daughter. In this manner, with magical ropes made of clever words, he captured the women and took them away with him.
Tonpa Shenrab returned to find his tent empty. No fire had been lit, no incense had been offered to the ancestors, and the wind passed right through without permission. He flew to Chapba Lakring’s kingdom and with words of logic and the light of compassion took away the evil thoughts and deeds that had tied the women to the demon king. Before traveling back, Tonpa Shenrab and the women prayed that Chapba Lakring would abandon evil.
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
Ignorance is stubborn. Chapba Lakring was like a man who wants to race over a mountain while covering his eyes with his own hands. Quarreling gave him pleasure and made him feel alive and strong. So he ran ahead to Tonpa Shenrab’s pastures and stole seven beautiful horses and fled to a place called Gongbu.
Tonpa Shenrab understood that unless he showed Chapba Lakring the light of compassion, the fighting would never end. So he traveled to the place where Chapba Lakring hid. The demon king saw the prince of light approach Gongbu and transformed the horses into trees and hid them in a thick forest.
But Tonpa Shenrab possessed eyes of wisdom, so he correctly recognized the seven trees that were his horses. Once the lie was caught, people shook their heads and wondered why they had seen the horses as trees. The roots of the trees became hooves, the mossy trunks became the shiny coats of fine horses, and instead of nodding in the wind the horses snorted and neighed.
Chapba Lakring was defeated again. He roared in fury and turned the sky black. The valley became a churning sea of fog. Chapba Lakring quickly stole the horses back from Tonpa Shenrab and hid them under a large red rock and spread thick darkness over everything. Nobody could see anything.
Tonpa Shenrab meditated and asked himself: ‘Until when should someone be patient?’ The answer was clear: if being patient allowed another person to continue being an ignorant sinner, patience is no longer good. Out of compassion for the people who lived in fear of the demon king, Tonpa Shenrab created a bright white light and the darkness disappeared completely.
Even though the brightness of Tonpa Shenrab’s light blinded him, Chapba Lakring transformed himself into a black mountain and leapt on Tonpa Shenrab with the intention to crush him into a red paste of blood, bones and hair. Tonpa Shenrab took the form of an even larger mountain with the ability to heal the body and the mind and softly covered the black mountain that was Chapba Lakring. When the weight of compassion smothered him, Chapba Lakring turned himself into a rain of rocks, which Tonpa Shenrab scattered by dancing with a gleaming, bright sword. The demon king’s attacks were defeated one by one by Tonpa Shenrab’s great compassion. Finally, he collapsed and became Bonri Chinbu, the sacred mountain.
The people of Tibet saw that compassion is more powerful than weapons, and that tolerance and kindness outlive fear and tyranny. Since this great battle between Chapba Lakring and Tonpa Shenrab, many evil forces have tried to defeat compassion. But even today, new Bönpo monasteries are being built in Tibet, and kindness is alive all over the world.
About the Story
Bönpo legend. Collected and translated into English by Kelsang Chimee.
The Fall of the Demoness
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
The god Harki was found in the village of Jaira, in Jumla district of Nepal. Here, a cow offered her milk to a quartz rock every evening. When her angry cowherd attacked the rock, it broke into three pieces and miraculously flew to three places where shrines were built for Harki.
Many centuries later, a woman of the Pariyar caste was making a long journey from her father’s village of Jaira to her husband’s home in the village of Thehe, which is in Humla. Sitting on a hill above a branch of the Karnali, it is the last Khas village in that direction. Hundreds of houses huddle together. Children play on rooftops joined to each other. Steps are carved into a single tree-trunk to make ladders that go from one level to another level. Families divide the same house into smaller and smaller homes rather than move to another part of the country. Often, men migrate to seek work in India and Purang in the Ngari prefecture of the Tibet Autonomous Region.
The Pariyar woman had seen the powerful gods of the so-called ‘upper castes’ in Thehe – the elder Rampal, with his own shrine, and his younger brothers. But, as a Pariyar, she didn’t have her own god, and the god of others often behaved as the others did: they didn’t respect her wishes, nor were they friendly.
‘Father,’ she begged, ‘give me a drum, so that my son may play it and call upon a god from my village.’
Her father said, ‘The drums at the shrine of Rampal are too big, but I will give you a drum from the shrine of Harki. Careful! Hide it well. Let nobody see you take it into Thehe!’
She left Jaira with a small tyamko drum hidden under her dress and her son in a wicker basket on her shoulders. They headed up the Karnali towards Thehe.
The travelers in her group were puzzled to hear the sound of a small tyamko drum beating on its own. After a few days of walking, they couldn’t control their curiosity any longer. When they finally reached Thehe, they crowded at the woman’s house and asked what was meant by the omen of the drum that beat on its own.
It was on the fourteenth day of the waxing moon in the month of Magh, in the deepest of winter, when villagers gathered around the young mother, the year-old boy, and the tyamko drum that played itself. The year-old baby had been chosen by the god Harki as his dhami. His name was Aashe Pariyar.
The year-old baby went into a trance and said to everybody, ‘I am the god Harki from Jaira!’
But the other gods already living in Thehe were angry at the new god. What they hated the most was that Harki had traveled there with a woman of the tailor caste, and had chosen her baby as his dhami.
The god Rampal and his younger brothers Betal, Mashto and Banpal banded together to chase Harki away from Thehe. ‘Go away,’ they said to him. ‘You are not needed here, neither are you welcome among us. You have insulted us by choosing to live among people of low caste.’ That wasn’t very polite of them. But Harki replied politely, ‘I will live in Thehe with the people I choose.’
In those very days, Thehe was being terrorized by the demoness Kodiyamal, who lived in a cave deep inside the River Karnali, just below the village. She traveled as far up north as the plains of Tibet and as far south as the plains of India to snatch children from villages along the river. As horrified villagers watched, blood gushed out of her underwater home whenever she ate a child. Even from under the fast and roaring waters of the Karnali the screams of children could be heard, some in Tibetan, some in Humli, and sometimes even in Urdu. Mothers blocked the ears of their children and tried to hide the bloody foam coloring the Karnali. But the crunching of bones and sucking of marrow echoed through the valley for many days.
The people of Thehe thought that their gods were incapable of defending them from Kodiyamal. One by one, Betal, Mashto and Banpal had greedily accepted sacrifices offered by the villagers and jumped into the river to battle Kodiyamal. But they had come running back after short battles, barely escaping with their limbs intact. With every victory over a god the demoness grew stronger and angrier.
The day after arriving in Thehe, Aashe Pariyar’s mother sat massaging him in the sun when Kodiyamal stretched her tongue all the way from her cave and snatched away another child. The cries of the mother broke the hearts of everybody in Thehe. They waited in dread to hear the crunch and slurp, but no blood was seen. Instead, they heard Kodiyamal burp. ‘Rampal! You are the eldest and most powerful god.
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
You are worshipped before any other. If you can’t protect my child, who can? I promise you the fattest and purest sacrifice!’ the mother cried.
Rampal reluctantly entered the river to fight the demoness, but he too fled back uphill to his shrine to hide in a pine grove.
Aashe Pariyar, as the god Harki in human form, flew from his roof, over the roofs of the Pariyar neighborhood.
He flew south over fields of barley and mustard and hemp until he hovered over the Karnali.
‘Kodiyamal, give up the baby, or prepare for a fight to the death!’ Harki said in a clear and loud voice which everybody heard. The gods Banpal, Betal and Mashto came out of hiding to watch, half-wishing that Kodiyamal would eat this upstart god, but also hoping that Harki would kill the demoness who had defeated them.
What Kodiyamal said in reply is too horrifying to write here, but it was arrogant enough that Harki dived into the waters of the Karnali. Their fight continued until the full moon of the month of Margh shone in the winter skies. After many hours of battle inside Kodiayamal’s underwater cave the river frothed with blood.
As the gods and the people of Thehe watched, the miraculous child flew out from the Karnali carrying the baby that he had torn out from Kodiyamal’s belly.
Having seen Harki’s strength, Rampal, Betal, Banpal and Mashto met to discuss Harki’s place in Thehe. They believed themselves to be superior to Harki, but they had been proven wrong when Harki killed Kodiyamal. After debating through the night, they came to him the next day.
‘You are a strong god,’ Rampal said reluctantly. ‘You may live here. During festivals, people will worship you before they worship me.’ Ever since then, the fourteenth day of the waxing moon, a night before the main festival, has been the day of the god Harki.
Aashe Pariyar, the dhami for the god Harki, grew up and battled more demons from around the village, saw a thousand moons, and lived to the ripe old age of eighty- four. Since his passing, the god Harki has chosen men from among the descendants of Aashe Pariyar as his dhami. If a person of the so-called ‘upper caste’ treats a Pariyar person rudely, or cheats them out of wages, they remember that the god of the Pariyars is a powerful god who killed a demoness who had defied their four strong gods. The caste system may treat the Pariyars of Thehe unfairly, but they have a god among them who loves justice and fights for the weak, and who doesn’t accept bullying.
About the Story
Narrated by Dabbale Pariyar of Thehe, Humla, Nepal. Collected by Prawin Adhikari.
Three Good Princes
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
In the four cardinal directions were four kings: King Nangka Wa in the east, King Bada Hor in the south, King Nangsi Lha in the west, and King Shingling Tsa in the north. Of these, King Nangka Wa was the most powerful and wealthy. He had 7,700 sheep, 5,500 yaks, and 3,300 horses.
Nangka Wa has a son named Nangka Dsi, whose mother died when he was three years old. The king raised the child by himself and had a very hard time of it. One day, he thought, ‘It will be very difficult for my son to grow up alone. I must find playmates for him.’ So he took his son, a bag of gold and another of silver, and set off to buy a friend for his son.
The king and his footman Koryu Senge Rabdhan reached a place called Chisha Gyamo. There, they met an old woman with two boys.
‘Can you please sell your boys to me? I have a son who has no brothers. I can pay you one bag of gold and one bag of silver, and the three boys can look after each other for the rest of their lives,’ the king said.
The old woman replied, ‘I cannot sell you these children. But please look away, and then turn back again.’
The king looked away, and turned back again. The old woman had vanished, but the two boys remained. Although the old woman wasn’t there, the king left behind the bags of gold and silver and brought the two boys home.
The king now had three sons: his prince, and the two boys. One boy was named Chibun Dayu Tribung, and the other was named Luphun Norbu Tsenba.
The king treated the two boys as his own children, and they also loved him like their own father. He taught them to be loyal, brave and kind. When the prince was seven years old, the king passed away. Overcome with grief, the prince dedicated himself to the Buddha.
Soon, the king’s wealth decreased. Of the 7,700 sheep, only seven remained; of the 5,500 yaks, only five remained, and of the 3,300 horses, only three remained. Luphun Norbu Tsenba became very worried. He said to his brother and the footman, ‘Our father left us 7,700 sheep, but now only seven remain. I will find a fertile pasture where I can increase the flock. Take good care of the prince.’
Sometime later, Chibun Dayu Tribung said to the prince, ‘Our father left us 3,300 horses, of which only three remain. I will find a place with plenty of water and grass to increase their number.’ He asked the footman to take good care of the prince, and left on his quest.
The prince stayed home with his footman and the five yaks. He took care of the yaks and worked hard. After a few years, the five yaks increased to over 5,000. The footman said, ‘Prince, this is a good sign. Good people are always rewarded.’
The Prince replied, ‘We have plenty of livestock. But I miss my brothers. I want to know how they are. Please find them and bring them home regardless of how many sheep and horses they have now.’
Koryu Senge Rabdhan, the footman, obeyed the prince and left to find the other two brothers. When he reached Chisha Gyamo, at just the spot where the old king had found playmates for the prince, he found a flock of sheep numbering far more than 7,700. He wondered whose flock of sheep they were, and, thus wondering, lay down to rest.
Just at that moment, a ewe gave birth to a lamb covered with spots all over its body and wearing a conch necklace. The little lamb asked his mother, ‘There are so many other little lambs in the East Kingdom, but I am the only one born with a conch necklace. Why is that so?’
The ewe replied, ‘Soon, many fairies will gather to bathe in the lake near Chisha Gyamo. Of them, the fairest is named Lhamo Tongduo Ma. She can be caught only with your conch necklace. And if she marries the Prince, it will be the greatest luck and brightest joy for all of the East Kingdom.’
Then, suddenly, she became alert and said softly, ‘But son, there is a man here who understands our tongue. We must run away.’
Indeed, the footman Koryu Senge Rabdhan understood the language of the sheep. He jumped at the newborn lamb and captured the conch necklace and hid it in his felt hat and set off before the hooves of 7,000 sheep could trample him into the dust.
Very soon, the footman ran into Luphun Norbu Tsenba and gave him the prince’s message. Luphun Norbu Tsenba said, ‘Alright. I am coming home. But you should find Chibun Dayu Tribung and bring him home.’
The footman walked further on and tracked down Chibun Dayu Tribung, who was sitting inside a tent of black wool, but with just one horse lazily grazing outside the tent. Disguising his disappointment with the utmost good sense, Koryu Senge Rabdhan said to him, ‘The prince now has over 5,000 yak, and Luphun Norbu Tsenba now herds over 7,000 sheep. The wealth of your father is sufficiently restored. Come, let’s go home.’
Chibun Dayu Tribung sprang up, as if he had been waiting for just this news, and said, ‘Yes! Let’s go home right now.’ He raced off on his only horse towards a rock that shimmered as if covered all over with feathers. Koryu Senge Rabdhan hurriedly followed. When they reached the feathery rock, Chibun Dayu Tribung said, ‘Goddess Pacha! Please open the door for me.’ He then clapped three times.
The rock opened up slowly. Inside the rock were more than 3,300 fine horses. Chibun Dayu Tribung led his father’s horses out of the cave and said to the footman, ‘Let’s go now. The other horses will follow.’
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
After traveling some distance, riding the horse Chibun Dayu Tribung had given him, Koryu Senge Rabdhan turned back to look at the cave. All the horses were following them at a respectable distance. And what splendid colors they were! From the black of a midnight in the forest, to the white of mare’s milk, there were horses of every color. What a wonderful sight it was!
Each of them was received warmly by the prince, and they lived together in their father’s kingdom. The prince sat on a golden throne, Chinbun Dayu Tribung sat on a silver throne and Luphun Norbu Tseba sat on a copper throne. They ruled the kingdom together. But the court didn’t have a queen to increase its beauty. And the prince wasn’t yet a king because other kings hadn’t seen his wealth and power. Koryu Senge Rabdhan, the trusted footman, remembered the conversation between the ewe and her young lamb. ‘Take this conch necklace and catch yourself a
fairy for a bride!’ he suggested.
Although his brothers laughed at Koryu Senge Rabdhan, the prince said, ‘Koryu Senge Rabdhan has always been loyal to us. He has never told a lie. If he says so, I will travel with the conch necklace to the land he describes, and see what happens.’
The prince set off with the conch necklace. When he reached the lake described to him, the prince saw many fairies swimming in the lake. Because the prince was a mortal, the smell of his body scared the fairies playing in the water. They suddenly flew away. But the fairest fairy of them all, Lhamo Tongduo Ma, remained behind, half in the lake, and half out of the water.
For half a moment, the prince forgot why he had traveled to the lake. He was blinded by Lhamo Tongduo Ma’s beauty. But, like a flash of lightning, the prince regained his wit and threw the magical necklace around the fairy and caught her. Lhamo Tongduo Ma agreed to marry him and return with him to the palace. Her beauty and her virtues brought glory to the court.
Having regained the wealth of his father, and having found the fairest of the heavenly fairies as a wife, Nagka Dsi thought, ‘My kingdom is more prosperous than it was in my father’s times. I must celebrate this achievement.’
With the help of his footman and his brothers, the prince sent out invitations to all known corners of the world, inviting kings and princes to come to a tournament. ‘Bring your best horses,’ the invitation said in polite language, ‘Bring horses which can fly like a bird in the sky, or which can swim like a fish in the river, or which gallop like the wind sweeping over the grassland. If your horse wins the race, I will reward you with a hundred more horses that are just as magnificent.’
Kings and princes from across Tibet gathered within a few days to win a hundred horses from the prince’s stable. After welcoming the guests and serving them a feast, the prince announced that the race would start early in the morning.
Out of respect, the young prince’s brothers did not participate in the race. Only the four kings of the four directions would compete. King Bada Hor, King Nangsi Lha, and King Shingling Tsa would race against the prince. The prince rode Zagar Lheqin, the old king’s favorite horse. When the race began, the horses flew from start to finish in the time it takes for the eyes to blink. But it was the horse belonging to the King of the South which won the prize. Because a guest had won the competition, nobody could accuse Nagka Dsi of being ungracious. The laughter of guests enjoying his hospitality brought much honor to the house of the prince.
At the feasts held in honor of the guests, the host and his guests sang and danced and ate to their heart’s desire. Everybody was very happy with their lives. The prince remembered what his footman had said – ‘Good people are always rewarded.’ He had devoted himself to the Buddha, treated his adopted brothers fairly, and shown respect and love to his queen. He was being rewarded for his good conduct. The prince vowed to always be virtuous so that the Buddha would always bless him.
About the Story
Narrated by Grandpa Drudi, Hor Xiang, Purang County, Tibet Autonomous Region, China. Collected and translated into English by Kelsang Chimee.
Godsland: Devbhumi
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
Humla is at the top left corner of Nepal. To its north is the Ngari province in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, and to its west is Uttarakhand, a state in India. The river Karnali originates in Tibet, flows through Humla, and travels south into India to join the river Ganga. Buddhists, Bönpos and Hindus live here. Great snowcapped peaks, beautiful grasslands and steep mountains are seen in Humla. Some people are farmers, and some are traders who have historically connected the plains of India to the Silk Route that passed through Tibet.
Humla is rich in stories. Every village has sacred spaces where ancestors and gods are worshipped. The Hindus of Humla worship the twelve gods, namely Rampal, Haripal, Ghantapal, Banpal, Madhumpal, Shankhapal, Kalshilta, Gura, Betal, Shuklahansa, Daarhe-Mashto and Dudhe- Mashto. Bhawani, who is their sister, is also worshipped. Others like Lauhasur, Lhango and Harki are nephews of the twelve brothers.
Each village in Humla has shrines for various gods. Big villages like Simikot or Thehe may have more gods than other villages with fewer gods. Each god or goddess is born in human form as a dhami shaman. Another person trains to become the interlocutor dangri, who speaks the ancient language of the gods. The dangri translates the prayers and wishes of the people for the gods, who take their dhami into a trance and listen to prayers. The dangri also translates the speech of the gods for the people of Humla.
In the time of gods, before time had become real, the twelve gods heard about the creation of the Mount Kailas and the Lake Manasarovar. They asked their eldest brother Indra, who was the king of the heavens, for permission to visit the sacred pilgrimage sites. They bathed in the holy lake and walked around the holy mountain and sang praises of the Creator. But on the way home, they were captured by the demon of Dangechin. The gods fought the demon’s army for a thousand years before defeating him. They threw his head many kilometers away from his body. The soil around Taklakot in Tibet turned red from the demon’s blood.
The gods returned to Indra and said, ‘We have been hungry and thirsty for a thousand years. Give us food and drink!’
Indra replied, ‘Go to Humla. Protect my rule there by punishing evil and rewarding good deeds. So that the people may offer you sacrifices and a part of their harvest, bless them with children and cattle, or make them ill. When they pray to you and offer you food and drink, heal their diseases!’ This pleased the gods. They descended from heaven to Naumule, in Hilsa. After bathing in a holy spring with nine fountains, they danced into Humla to live in various villages. They danced and sang through their dhamis and kept the law of Indra. In exchange, the people of Humla sang their praise, offered sacrifices and grains, and promised to be good.
A powerful king ruled over the empire of Jumla, which is to the south of Humla. He was the incarnation of Vishnu. He heard of the miracles being performed in Humla by the dhamis, for which the people of Humla made offerings. The half-kilo of rice offered to dhamis and dangris for making it possible to talk to the gods also made the king angry because he believed that only a king could collect taxes and accept offerings.
The king became even angrier when he heard that the gods of Humla also rewarded good behavior and punished bad behavior, because justice could come only from the king. The gods made sure that men and women, and people of each caste, lived according to ancient rules. Everybody had a place in the hierarchy of society, which could never change, no matter what happened. As incarnations of the gods, the dhamis enforced these rules.
So, the angry king of Jumla sent his fearsome soldiers to arrest the dhamis of Humla and bring them to his court. Or, as the dhamis of Humla say, Vishnu’s incarnation arrested the incarnation of the gods.
‘Who gave you permission to live among my people? Who gave you the right to take offerings from my subjects?’ the king growled at the dhamis.
‘Our brother Indra sent us to Humla. He said we could rule over the people of Humla.’
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
When the dhamis saw that the king was still angry, one of them took a fistful of barley and crushed it into black powder to show the power of the god who lived in his body. But the king was also full of great power as the incarnation of Vishnu. He also crushed barley into black powder with his bare hand.
‘You dare challenge me with these simple tricks?’ the king roared in anger. He was proud, and he wanted the dhamis to say that they were weak and worthless.
Another dhami took a fistful of barley and crushed it into red flour. The haughty king did the same. Next, the dhami crushed a fistful of sesame seeds until oil flowed from his fist. The king laughed and twirled his moustache, and he also made oil from sesame with his bare fist.
The dhami grabbed a rock and crushed it with divine power into dust, but the king also did the same.
‘Enough of these tricks!’ the king of Jumla shouted at the dhamis from Humla. ‘You will stop claiming that you are the voice of the gods! You don’t have any power that I don’t have. You will stop accepting offerings and dispensing justice!’
But the dhamis hadn’t finished showing their strength. They heated oil in a large copper pot. Once the oil boiled, a dhami drank the hot oil like it was water from an ice-cold lake. The king lifted the hot pot of oil, but he didn’t have the courage to drink it.
‘You do have powers greater than mine,’ the king finally accepted defeat. ‘You may rule in Humla as the voices of the gods. I am the incarnation of Vishnu. Therefore, I am your elder. So, you shall keep my laws in Humla. You shall reward good deeds and punish evil deeds according to my laws. You won’t allow anyone to commit adultery or theft, or to deceive anybody.’
‘You are the elder, and we are the younger,’ said the gods through the dhamis. ‘We shall reward and punish according to the ancient laws. We shall bathe in Manasarovar and pay our respects to Kailas by walking around the sacred mountains. We shall never accept anything that doesn’t belong to us.’
Forever since then, Jumla has been known as Vishnubhumi, where the king’s laws apply. Humla, where the dhamis uphold the rules of the gods, is known as Devbhumi, or, the land of gods.
About the Story
Based on conversations with dhamis Man Bahadur Shahi, Tul Bahadur Shahi and Suvarna Roka of Humla, Nepal. Collected by Prawin Adhikari.
The Clever Ancestor
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
Until recently, history spoke only of kings and their wars instead of recording the stories of everyone, rich and poor, strong and weak, man and woman. In older histories, when two kings fought, the soldiers and villagers were forgotten. But it was the villagers and soldiers who fought and lost their lives.
More than two hundred years ago, an army from Gorkha, in central Nepal, attacked villages in Garhwal, which is many days’ walk from Kailas, due south of the Himalayas. There, farmers and traders of a peaceful village called Sirdang were worried about being attacked. The Gorkhas had a bad reputation: they would loot the grains and cattle and burn down villages. Some soldiers even believed that dying in battle was a good idea. They would kill unnecessarily just to remind themselves that they were not afraid to die.
Among the Rung people of Sirdang was a wise old man with many children and grandchildren whom he loved. He wanted to protect his family so that they would remember his good deeds and praise him as their ancestor. If enough of his progeny praised him, he might even become a god someday! Through his wisdom, he realized that the Gorkhas would attack Sirdang for the abundant grains, fine wool, fat cattle and coins gathered through trade in Tibet.
‘We must flee to the hilltop fort to survive,’ the old man told the villagers. ‘The Gorkhas will come, and their greed is as vast as their cruelty is deep.’ The villagers collected their wealth and families, and fled to a fort at the top of a nearby hill. A bearded Gorkha commander, carrying a curved sword and a round rhinoceros-skin shield, marched into Sirdang with his cruel soldiers. The village was empty. Although the houses were pretty and clean, there was no grain, gold or cattle in them. The commander saw the fort on top of the hill and took his men there.
A group of unarmed men from Sirdang waited outside the fort with cool, sweet water from a nearby spring. ‘You must be tired after climbing up,’ they said with kind smiles on their faces, and offered water to the commander and his soldiers. The wise old man drank the water first to show the Gorkhas that they didn’t need to fear being poisoned.
‘Why have you come here, commander?’ the old man asked. ‘Your home is a month’s walk away, perhaps more. Your wife must be worried!’
The commander looked at the old man with suspicion. ‘I am the emissary of the king of Gorkha. I expand his empire, and am here to loot and pillage your village.’
‘And kill,’ a soldier growled, but became quiet when the commander glared at him. This soldier wasn’t very intelligent or brave.
‘There is no need for war!’ the old man said. ‘Come inside. Rest for a while. We are a peace-loving people. We’ll gladly give you what you need if we can avoid bloodshed. The gods of our village dislike violence.’
The commander grinned. He had burned many villages and killed many men, women and children to build a reputation for cruelty. Finally, somebody was afraid of him. He twirled his moustache and entered the fort.
A long line of mats and yak-hair blankets had been laid out. Freshly cooked meat glistening with fat waited in copper bowls. Large pots of millet beer sat in a corner. Smiling young men stood ready to serve meat and beer.
Before the commander could say anything, his soldiers sat down and quickly took a sip of beer or bit into a nice piece of roasted goat liver. They smacked their lips and salivated.
‘Alright, alright!’ the commander said. ‘Don’t drink too much, because we still have to loot and plunder.’
The greedy Gorkhas started gobbling down the food. The fat from the meat stained their moustaches and beer dribbled down their beards. Soon, they became drunk.
From a secret door in the back of the fort, the Rung people of Sirdang were quietly escaping one by one. The elderly and the children went first, followed by young men and women. When the wives started leaving, their heavy necklaces of silver and gold coins jangled and alerted the Gorkha commander. He leapt up from his seat and rushed to the door.
‘Where is everyone going?’ he shouted.
The wise old man said politely, ‘Your appetite is large, and your men are still thirsty. My people must show hospitality to their guests. Please go back and enjoy the meat and beer!’
The commander realized that the wise old man was fooling him. He pretended to go back and sit with his men. He picked up his bowl of beer and whispered into it just loud enough for his trusted assistant to hear, ‘Pretend to go outside for a walk and see where everybody is fleeing.’
His assistant pretended he was going for a walk and went towards the gate. Now, the wise old man realized that the commander suspected that he was trying to fool the Gorkhas. He sneaked to the outside of the door and hid in the dark.
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
And, as alert as the assistant may have wanted to be, the beer in his belly made him sway a little and think a bit slower. Once he was out of sight of the Gorkhas, the wise old man grabbed the assistant with one hand on his neck and another by his waist and flung him into the air, spinning away and over a cliff into the darkness.
Inside, the commander waited for his assistant to return. He ate another bowl of meat and drank another bowl of beer, and finally whispered to another assistant to go outside and check.
The old man grabbed the second assistant by the neck and waist and spun him away over a cliff, sending him flying into the dark. A Gorkha soldier came out every five or ten minutes. The old man grabbed each one and sent him flying into the dark.
Finally, just around midnight, the Gorkha commander looked around the room and saw that his best soldiers had disappeared. There were more Rung men around than Gorkhas. The remaining soldiers were feeble and cowardly, just like the commander. When he realized how the peace- loving and hospitable villagers of Sirdang had cunningly defeated him, the Gorkha commander ran towards the door and jumped with so much force that he sailed right into the dark sky. The old man didn’t have to throw him over the cliff at all.
There, in the darkness of the valley below Sirdang, the Gorkha soldiers were still spinning and flying in the air. All through the night, they bumped into each other in midair. Slowly, by sunrise, they fell to the valley as a single clump of limbs, beards, teeth, swords and bellies. They untangled themselves and counted each other to make sure everybody was present. They looked up the hill at the beautiful village of Sirdang and shivered with fright.
‘The beer was good,’ the first assistant said in a quiet voice. He had been spinning in the air for the longest, so his beard and hair now pointed straight towards his home in Gorkha, far to the east of Sirdang.
‘The meat was good, too,’ said the Gorkha commander sadly, as if he had lost a dear friend. Then, heads hanging in shame, they walked away from Sirdang.
The villagers in Sirdang served the wise old man with delicious food, put a fresh white turban on his head and praised him. He had been wise to avoid bloodshed, honorable in doing his duty of hospitality towards outsiders, and brave in spinning and throwing away the Gorkhas. He is praised even today by his progeny. If more people praise his wisdom, cunning, and honor, who knows, he may even become a god!
About the Story
Collected in Sirdang, Uttarakhand, India by Himani Upadhyaya.
The Hungry Ogre
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
So long ago in the past that only in stories can we imagine the time, the people of Barkhyang, Nyiondrang and Drangshod in Humla of Nepal lived in terror of an ogre called Shabdag. He haunted the forests around the meadow called the Mi Sol Sa, or the human-sacrifice site.
The ogre had magical powers and a great greed for the suffering of people because he thought that was the true nature of the world. He filled homes with the cries of fatherless children and childless mothers. He stopped the rains and forced the villagers to beg him for water during the season to sow new seeds. He destroyed crops by bringing hailstorms when the ears of the uwa wheat ripened. He broke the legs of yaks and sheep, or worse, he made them disappear. A sheep that dies in an accident can be fleeced and butchered, but a sheep that is lost is truly a heartbreaking loss.
Therefore, to keep Shabdag happy, the villagers brought an eight-year-old boy each year to the meadow and left him to be eaten by Shabdag. Then they hurried to their homes to hide in fear. Shabdag ate first the feet, then the legs, the fingers, palms, arms and the stomach of the boy. The villagers tried not to listen to the crunch of bones and the tearing of flesh. Shabdag chewed off the boy’s ears before sucking out his eyes one by one. But only after he slurped and swallowed the boy’s screams did everything became quiet, then the villagers felt a heavy guilt oppress them.
After a thousand years of this terror, or maybe even a thousand such thousand years, the sage Padmasambhava, also called Guru Rinpoche, found himself in Barkhang. He carried his phurva dagger with which he had destroyed ignorance and expelled darkness from many other settlements on his journey towards Tibet. The enlightened mystic had already seen himself in Barkhang in an earlier vision, standing exactly at the spot where he stood now. He knew what would happen in the next moment, and in the next hour and the next day. So he let the question form itself and be expressed through him:
‘Grandma! I am thirsty. May I have water?’
From inside the house came an old grandmother’s feeble reply, ‘Grandson! Pour yourself some water from the chuzum bucket by the door. My human shape has been taken away by an ogre, and I am too ashamed to show myself to anybody.’
But Padmasambhava had also seen this in his vision, so he smiled and said gently, ‘No matter, grandma! Let me come inside and see if I can help.’ And, although the old grandmother protested, the mystic convinced her to invite him inside.
In the gloom of the house the grandmother lay on a sheepskin rug by a hearth that had gone cold. Her hair was long and matted and alive, like a coil of serpents. When Padmasambhava looked closely, he saw that the hair belonged to another creature. The hair strangled the grandmother, and swept away into the darkness. Padmasambhava caught hold of one strand of hair and started rolling it into a ball.
Or, at that very moment, Padmasambhava was standing in a dozen different houses in the three villages of Barkhyang, Nyiondrang and Drangshod, and from each house he was rolling the magical hair that strangled people and took away their human forms. Following the hair from each house, Padmasambhava crossed rivers and climbed over cliffs, scraped his shins on thorny scrubs and flew over deep gorges. He saw the ground shake subtly with deep snores and followed the sound to finally reach Lungphung, a small valley in the inner mountains where he saw the giant ogre Shabdag. He lay on a large mat of his own coiled and matted hair, and he slept under a blanket of his own coiled and matted hair, and dreamed of more blood and flesh, more screams of terror to bring him joy.
Padmasambhava leapt onto Shabdag’s head, brought down his dagger on the ogre’s head and shouted, ‘Wake up, you cursed creature! Wake up to the light!’
The force and brilliance of the dagger made Shabdag jump up in anger. He opened his jaws wide and swallowed Padmasambhava.
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
Padmasambhava tore through Shabdag’s stomach and climbed to his chest where a heart as large as two fighting bulls was beating angrily. He grabbed the heart and twisted it. Shabdag breathed through a pair of lungs larger than a monastery with three hundred students. Padmasambhava first squeezed one lung, then the other. He twisted the kidneys and spleen, the blameless liver and the hungry intestines.
Shabdag roared in pain. He knelt and drank first a stream, then a lake, and then a large river to take away the pain. But Padmasambhava kept jabbing at the ogre’s organs with his dagger. Shabdag desperately scratched at a high meadow, making the mountainside crumble. Boulders and rocks rained into the valley below. He tried to crunch Padmasambhava in his belly. He writhed in pain and destroyed a forest. But the mystic in his stomach only laughed louder and louder.
Shabdag swallowed a forest of pines to knock Padmasambhava unconscious, and he swallowed large boulders to crush his enemy. Padmasambhava arranged the boulders into a stove and lit pine logs to build a large fire.
‘Who are you?’ Shabdag roared. ‘What do you want?’ ‘I am Padmasambhava, the bringer of light and expeller of darkness. I will take your pain away if you promise to stop eating innocent children and stop troubling the people of these villages.’
‘No, no, no!’ Shabdag whined. ‘This is my land, and these are our traditions. I am nothing without the offerings and terrified praises from my people.’
‘Let them offer you milk instead of blood, and grains instead of flesh. Let them live with compassion and respect for you instead of fear,’ Padmasambhava said. Defeated and suffering unimaginable pain, Shabdag finally agreed. Padmasambhava flew out from his mouth and healed him from the inside, so that the pain disappeared. The hair that had strangled the villagers and kept them enslaved also disappeared and the villagers were liberated.
‘I promise to never bring suffering to my people and forever protect them, their children and cattle, and their crops,’ Shabdag promised.
In exchange, Padmasambhava blessed him, ‘Bring rain to end droughts, bless the fields with plentiful harvests, and grant children to the childless. Live as the protector of these lands!’
In this manner, the ferocious ogre Shabdag was tamed by the mystic Padmasambhava. Because even a demon can attain enlightenment, the Shabdag began to accept milk instead of blood and a figure of dough, called the Drangya, instead of the flesh of an eight-year-old boy. Pain and misery ended and prosperity and joy began. After many centuries, the Shabdag – the lord of the land – was respectfully called the Zhibdag Rinpoche, the precious deity of the land where he is still worshipped and respected.
About the Story
Narrated by Phuntsok Dorjee, Nyimatang, Humla, Nepal. Collected and translated into English by Sagar Lama.
Puchawa Selzong
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
In the age of magic, a young woman lived in a remote village in Ngari Prefecture of Tibet. Her poor village was in the shadows of Mount Kailas. Although she lived far from the king’s fort, she was famous throughout Tibet. She possessed the skin of a magical bird. When she wore the skin, she became a heavenly bird that could fight evil spirits. She was known as Puchawa Selzong, or, the girl who wore the skin of a bird.
The king who ruled over Puchawa Selzong’s village was fond of holding horse races. Every year, he invited brave men and powerful kings from as far away as Samarkand and Bhutan to race against his horses. Spies from empires in Afghanistan and India also attended to see who raised the best warhorses.
In those days, rival kings and merchants sought the help of witches and evil spirits to harm their enemies. To protect the festivals and the races, the king sent a messenger to Puchawa Selzong.
‘The king wants you at his fort,’ the messenger said. After consulting with the village elders, Puchawa Selzong agreed to travel to the king’s fort. She put on the shimmering skin of the heavenly bird. Her feet grew talons, her neck became slender and sleek, and her arms changed into broad wings. With a mighty leap and flapping of her wings she reached the sky and blocked out the sun. She reached the king’s fort four days before the messenger returned.
‘You can fight witches and demons, so you will watch over the races and keep away evil forces,’ the king commanded. Puchawa Selzong bowed obediently.
On the day of the race, a hundred kings and thousands of soldiers gathered with villagers, monks and children to watch the races. Bets were made and liquor was drunk. At such times, when greed, anger and cunning thoughts multiply in a crowd of men and women, evil creeps out from every corner and enters the hearts of men and women. When evil triumphs, friends fight, brothers steal from brothers, children disobey their mothers, and lovers think of betraying each other.
But the king had asked Puchawa Selzong to watch over the crowds. When evil spirits tried to enter, Puchawa Selzong saw them from her place on top of the roof of the king’s fort. She would quickly don the magical bird-skin and swoop down from the sky. She would pick up an evil spirit and fly so high that the brightness of the sun would chase it away. Or, she would tear it apart with her talons. The kings, soldiers, men and women in the audience would cheer for Puchawa Selzong.
The king’s races became very successful because of Puchawa Selzong’s presence. Year after year, the king’s treasury grew richer and richer, until his fort bulged outward at the walls from the weight of the precious stones, gold and ivory in his stores. But a new worry ate away at the king’s heart: Puchawa Selzong was more famous now than the king or his races. Emperors and brave men traveled across frozen grasslands and cold deserts to catch a glimpse of the quiet maiden who wore the bird-skin to battle demons. Amazed young children in the farthest corners of the earth heard stories about the beautiful Puchawa Selzong.
As the king dozed off after a large meal a few days before the annual race, a witch appeared to him in his dreams. ‘What do you want?’ the king asked her.
‘I want the same thing that you want,’ the witch said. ‘Help me destroy the arrogant Puchawa Selzong, and I promise to protect your races from other witches and evil spirits.’
When the king awoke, he found a flint-stone and steel in his left fist. He understood that the witch had really visited him.
On the day of the race, Puchawa Selzong climbed to the roof of the king’s fort and reached into her bag for the bird-skin. But she found only ashes in the bag. Someone had burned her bird-skin and, with it, taken away her magic. She looked around puzzled and afraid until she saw the king smile. From the shadows under the feet of the crowd a foul murmur rose as a sound and solidified midair as the outlines of an ugly witch. A strong, rotten smell filled the air. Puchawa Selzong tried to escape into the fort, but the witch plucked her off the roof of the fort, tore out her beating heart, and cast her down to the ground.
‘I will not let you die yet, Puchawa Selzong!’ the witch cackled as she flew round and round above the terrified crowd. ‘For three years you have hunted my people. I will eat your heart on the third year. But, until then, you will suffer in unimaginable pain,’ the witch said before flying away.
When the sun set and everybody went away to feast with their friends, Puchawa Selzong cried in pain and asked the gods for help. A young archer who had watched her fight evil year after year couldn’t ignore her cries of pain and helplessness.
‘Princess of the skies,’ he knelt before Puchawa Selzong with respect. ‘Please tell me how I can take your pain away!’ ‘The witch has my heart, yet she won’t let me die. The
king burned my bird-skin, and with it my magic. Unless my heart is returned from the witch, I will die.’ She brought the young archer’s ear close to her mouth and told him the secret about where the witch’s heart was hidden.
The young archer memorized the year, month, day and hour that the witch had taken Puchawa Selzong’s heart and ran towards the towering mountain to the south of Kang Rinpoche. He walked for a week, climbing walls of ice and wading through frozen lakes. At night, snow leopards sniffed his face to see if they could eat him. But the brave archer’s heartbeat was strong with purpose, and that scared away all misfortune.
A week later, in an opening in a pine forest, the archer saw a tent of yak wool. He remembered the smell from the day of the race and realized that he was before the witch’s tent. ‘Mother!’ the archer shouted from where he stood.
‘Mother! I am your son! I have returned home!’
Original illustrations by Bharat Rai.
A woman came out from the tent. She looked puzzled for a minute. It seemed she couldn’t remember if she had a son or not.
‘I have never given birth!’ she said suddenly, taking a long stride towards the archer.
‘Mother!’ the archer repeated, ‘I am your son!’
The witch hovered an inch away from his face and looked into his eyes. She couldn’t remember if she had always been an evil spirit that killed and drank blood, or if she had once been a mother.
‘If you are my son, come and drink my milk until your heart and lungs burst in your chest!’ she challenged.
‘Yes, mother!’ the archer said. He took the witch’s bared breast and closed his eyes like a baby with its mother. The witch first thought of how much fun she would have skewering the archer’s heart and roasting it over a low fire, rubbing rock-salt on the cooked flesh, and eating it in the evening, picking meat from her teeth as she watched the sun set over the mountains.
When the archer kept suckling like a satisfied child first for an entire day, then for a whole week, then for a month and a year, the witch’s eyes became wet with tears and she became convinced that she was indeed the archer’s mother, and the archer indeed her son.
The archer collected firewood and fetched water for the witch, and the witch cooked for her son and fed him lovingly. When he went out to hunt, the witch watched over him, making sure that no harm came to him. He carried his bow and arrows everywhere, and the witch helped him keep his arrows sharp and straight. They sat together in their tent through the long winters, and when the first butterflies appeared in the spring, they sat out in the sun and chatted. The happiness of motherhood and human company made the witch bearable to look at. The second and third winters passed, and the third spring approached. ‘The king will hold his race in two days,’ the archer told himself.
He searched the forest around the witch’s tent and found a pouch made of sheep-stomach hanging from a high branch on a pine tree. It was beating from within. He remembered what Puchawa Selzong had told him: the bag had the witch’s heart!
The archer pretend to sleep soundly that night, but his mind was in turmoil.
‘Wake up, son!’ the witch said the next morning. She gave him a bucket. ‘Fetch some clean water,’ she said. ‘I will clean this before cooking it!’ In a pretty ceramic bowl a heart was beating steadily. The archer knew from the soft light around the heart that it belonged to Puchawa Selzong.
‘Yes, mother!’ the archer said obediently, took the bucket and ran towards the spring. The pine tree with the sheep-stomach bag was between the tent and the spring. Without breaking his stride, the archer shot an arrow through the beating heart inside the sheep-stomach bag. He turned right around, shot two more arrows into the heart, and raced towards the tent.
In the middle of the tent, with a sharp knife, the witch was crawling towards Puchawa Selzong’s heart. She twisted with pain to turn to look at him with hatred.
‘You are not my son!’ she growled. The knife in her hand shook. The archer quickly pulled Puchawa Selzong’s heart away from her reach. The witch’s teeth fell from her mouth; her hair fell on the ground where she crawled. Her skin wrinkled and her breasts ran dry of milk.
‘And you are no mother of mine!’ the archer said quietly. Just before noon, the witch’s heart bled dry in the sheep- stomach bag and stopped beating. The witch died with a horrifying grunt as the breath of life escaped. The archer grabbed Puchawa Selzong’s heart and raced away from the mountains towards Ngari.
Far away, in the king’s court, the cries of pain that had been ringing out for the past three years suddenly stopped. With the witch’s death, Puchawa Selzong’s pain had ended, and her magic had been restored. She appeared before the king, who was entertaining his guests. The king trembled when he saw the fierce look on Puchawa Selzong’s face. The beautiful maiden once again reached into her bag, and there, instead of ashes, was her shimmering, magical bird-skin.
After tearing the ungrateful king into little pieces, and after ripping out the roofs of the king’s treasury and scattering his wealth all over Tibet, the magical bird that was Puchawa Selzong raced away towards the mountains. She knew that a young archer was hurrying towards her, carrying her heart.
About the Story
Narrated by Dawa Sangbu, Chugyang Village, Tibet Autonomous Region, China. Collected and translated into English by Kelsang Chimee.
The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) is a regional knowledge development and learning centre serving the eight member countries of the Hindu Kush Himalayas – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan – and based in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Globalisation and climate change have an increasing influence on the stability of fragile mountain ecosystems and the livelihoods of mountain people.
ICIMOD aims to assist mountain people to understand these changes, adapt to them, and make the most of new opportunities, while addressing upstream-downstream issues. We support regional transboundary programmes through partnership with regional partner institutions, facilitate the exchange of experience, and serve as a regional knowledge hub. We strengthen networking among regional and global centres of excellence.
Overall, we are working to develop an economically and environmentally sound mountain ecosystem to improve the living standards of mountain populations and to sustain vital ecosystem services for the billions of people living downstream now, and for the future.
Within its Transboundary Landscapes Programme, Kailash Sacred Landscape Conservation and Development Initiative (KSLCDI) is a flagship transboundary collaborative initiative between China, India, and Nepal that has evolved through a participatory, iterative process among various local and national research and development institutions within these countries. The Kailash Sacred Landscape represents a diverse, multi-cultural, and fragile landscape. The programme aims to achieve long-term conservation of ecosystems, habitats, and biodiversity while encouraging sustainable development, enhancing the resilience of communities in the landscape, and safeguarding and adding value to the existing cultural linkages between local populations across boundaries. The Kailash Sacred Landscape Conservation and Development Initiative (KSLCDI) is supported by partner organizations: Department for International Development (DFID) – UK Aid, and Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft liche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung/Deutsche Gesellschaft for Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.
