extract from Kyoto Journal, Issue 78: Time Out On The Inward Journey
by Matteo Pistono
Winter 2004, Year of the Wood Monkey
Cave That Delights the Senses, Near the Jewel Cliff of Tsadra, Eastern Tibet
When Padmasambhava began to give the vajrayana teachings in Tibet in the eighth century, one of the first instructions to his “heart disciples” was the phurba-dagger practice of the deity Vajrakilaya. One cycle of the Vajrakilaya teach¬ings that was hidden at that time is known as The Razor of the Innermost Essence. Nearly two volumes of Padmasambhava’s instructions are found in The Razor treasure, which include complex rituals believed to remove obstacles to one’s spiritual development, to thwart attack by enemy invaders, and importantly, to protect the Dalai Lama. In the autumn of 1895, Tertön Sogyal received the mnemonic key to The Razor treasure at a remote cave in eastern Tibet. Within a decade after being written in liturgies, the rituals found within The Razor were em¬ployed in the nation’s spiritual defense.
In the first months of 2004, Antonio, an Italian scholar with whom I had traveled across Tibet on numerous occasions, and I were in the vicinity where Tertön Sogyal had received the key for The Razor. Antonio and I had met years before while we both were traveling near Serthar, and after a month of grueling travel from Golok to Lhasa—where on two occasions, we had to get out of our transport and hike a wide detour around the police check posts undetected, before returning to the main road to hitch another ride—we became close friends. His pensive personality checked my emotional flares. My gregarious manner brought him out of his sometimes somber moods. We both thrived on trekking to remote hermitages in the deep of winter, as much as we took pleasure in making coffee before dawn. And in the evening, wrapped in our sleeping bags with woolly hats pulled low, we would take out our pens to journal both the sadness of political injustices in Tibet and the joy of our pilgrimages. We each understood the other’s needs, and we relied on each other, which is essential as travel partners on the Tibetan Plateau.
Antonio and I met up with Wangchen, the contemporary treasure revealer from Golok whom I had traveled with earlier in Dzachukha. We planned a pilgrimage to Tertön Sogyal’s treasure site of The Razor near the Jewel Cliff of Tsadra. The evening before we departed on horseback, Wangchen spoke to us about pilgrimage and the mind.
Sitting in a Sichuanese spicy noodle café, Wangchen explained that the Tibetan term for pilgrimage is nekor ; ne meaning “abode” or “sacred place” and kor meaning “to encircle” or “circumambulate.” Outwardly, nekor may be a journey to a frozen crag, across windswept plains to solitary hermitages, or around mountain peaks, the home of enlightened deities and past saints. It pushes the limits of one’s endurance, strains the physical senses, and tests one’s resolve to walk on sacred ground. But that is only the outer journey.
Wangchen had literally walked the talk. He’d prostrated himself to Lhasa from Nangchen in eastern Tibet—a journey of a thousand miles, which is roughly equal in distance and similar in mountain terrain from the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming to the coast of California. Facing west toward the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Wangchen placed his hands together in prayer, touched his forehead, neck, and heart area, and then bent forward and lay prone on the ground with his hands outstretched and his forehead touching the earth. Standing upright, he would take three steps forward, the length of his body, and then drop down again for another prostration. During each prostration, Wangchen brought his teacher to mind, recited the mantra his master had empowered him to recite, and rested in the pure awareness of his actions. Mud-covered, enacting this repetitive gesture of pure devotion of body, speech, and mind thousands of times a day, for more than nine months, straight to Lhasa—Wangchen accomplished this feat on two different occasions, leaving a callus on his forehead the size of a quarter.
“When you truly experience the meaning of pilgrimage, you will see the dirt you are treading on as a sacred abode,” Wangchen told us. “The outer, physical pilgrimage is but a support, a container, for the spiritual prac¬titioner who journeys to the innermost essence of their own mind. This is the pilgrimage mind without concepts, without thinking—a mind that is indeed resting in the open spaciousness of wisdom.”
Sitting back in the noodle café’s plastic chair as a Jackie Chan kung fu movie blared on the television, Wangchen might as well have been on a teaching throne.
“Free from distraction, each step around the mountain leaves the grasping mind in the dust; each prostration on the ground keeps us pointed toward our inner wisdom; each icy breath is another concept that is frozen in midair and dissolves into the day; and each prayer is a proclamation of the all-pervasive truth of interdependence.”
We traveled on horseback and by foot south from Dergé, heading toward Palpung Monastery and on to The Razor treasure site at the Jewel Cliff of Tsadra. We crossed four inhospitable sixteen-thousand-foot mountain passes, navigated pine-dense valleys, and traversed high-altitude glens. Local herders let us camp next to their yak-dung-pasted huts, and we offered al-monds and cashews in exchange for hops porridge thickened with yak butter. Nearly every day, the high cirrus clouds whisking into the shape of mare’s tail suggested snow later in the afternoon. By evening, hunkering down in our sleeping bags with a hot drink in hand, I consistently found a sense of exhausted satisfaction. Free from distraction, each step around the mountain leaves the grasping mind in the dust, I recalled as I went to sleep.
As we walked the Tsadra pilgrimage circuit an hour from the monastery, we found wooden panels staked in the ground with written instructions for the pilgrim to recite specific prayers or mantras, invoke particular dei¬ties, or make offerings meant to be effective—an interactive booklet, carved with devotion, to assist the pilgrim’s transformation. With muddy boots, we stepped over orange and green moss-covered scree and around willow trees, then, at an exposed rock face, Wangchen stopped us to offer a glimpse of his blissful reality.
“See those five rivers flowing below us,” Wangchen pointed out. “And look how these five ridgelines surround us—we are standing in the heart center of a massive lotus flower.”
On the south side of Jewel Cliff, Tertön Sogyal’s biography told us, was the Cave That Delights the Senses—the cave where Tertön Sogyal received the key for The Razor treasure. I had brought a few pages of the biography, which held cryptic suggestions and descriptions of the cave for which we were searching. Wangchen kept the pages securely at his chest under his thick sheepskin coat, pulling them out to consult occasionally as a kind of esoteric Lonely Planet guidebook.
We found a fifty-year-old hermit on the mountainside who showed lit¬tle interest in our arrival and even less when Antonio asked him to take us to the cave somewhere along the Jewel Cliff. It seemed impossible to find the cave through the thick juniper and rhododendron shrubs and granite crags. Pulling his skirt up to reveal his swelled ankles and bulging veins, a result of having sat still in his meditation box for decades, he could hardly walk. But, he said, if we had accumulated enough positive karma in our past lives, we would find what we were looking for regardless of his directions. A smiling Wangchen nodded. Antonio and I were not so convinced. We urged the her-mit to at least send us in the right direction.
“Below the last cabin, go into the steep ravine, across the protectors’ stream near the large boulder with one hundred and eights cracks; up past the Lady Yeshe Tsogyal’s Cavern with the large thorny bush, you will see a row of tall pine trees that recite mantra in the wind. Walk in the direction in which the sound of mantra begins in the trees and you will come upon a greenish boulder with a self-emanating image of the protectress Drolma. Once you are at the rock, look up and you will see the Cave That Delights the Senses above you.”
“Topography, botany, and a bit of pure vision.” Antonio chuckled. “Classic Tibetan directions.”
As we trekked down the ravine, heeding the inspired directions of the hermit, it seemed as though only marmots and hares had used the so-called route we were following. In the shadows of the narrow gorge, we came across two etched wood panels set among the birch trees:
Descend to what is known as Raven Valley. Wash in the nectar of the stream while reciting wrathful mantra. Walk along the precipice to distinguish Virtue and Nonvirtue until Tiger’s Lair Gorge. It is here that a dakini manifests in the form of a leopard and devours people of ill will. To other pilgrims, she growls or shows frightening fangs; maintain awareness of the rising fear and this will cleanse the obscur¬ing effects of your past negative deeds.
We followed Wangchen in rinsing our mouths to purify our speech and rubbed our eyes with the blessed water. He instructed us in the appropriate mantra to recite.
The second faded sign farther on told us:
. . . don’t be intimidated by terrifying things such as narrow passages, rain, wind, densely forested gorges, hungry animals, lightning, or hail: Pray to your teacher, chosen deity, and dakinis and offer ritual cakes and libations to the mountain’s lords of the land and command their protection. Regard any fear and anguish that arise in you just as you will the period between your eventual death and rebirth; pray one-pointedly to be liberated at the moment between death and rebirth.
“Let your own fear of death sharply spur you to grasp the need to real¬ize here and now the absolute state—the nature of mind. Don’t try to un¬derstand this with your intellectual mind, but realize deeply in your heart!” Wangchen blissfully said while staring into the sky.
I kept the instructions in my mind as we continued bushwhacking. After passing the cracked rock, the speaking pine trees where Wangchen heard the recitation of mantra, the wrathful bushes, and the rock that indeed had an image of the deity Drolma seemingly growing out of it, we saw the cave above us. Clinging to mossy bushes and short grass to pull ourselves up the fifty-foot incline to the cliff wall, Wangchen said, “Padmasambhava will not allow us to fall.”
An old hemp rope hung down from the last pilgrim who had dared to scale the cliff wall. We used the tattered rope for balance as we climbed the last twenty feet of nearly vertical rock.
The Cave That Delights the Senses turned out to be a ledge that was just large enough for three people, jutting precariously from the southerly end of the Jewel Cliff. Two griffon vultures circled by, wind whistling off their wings, as we caught our breath on the ledge. A slight overhang of gray-white rock arched above our heads. Wangchen pointed at thigh level to the door from which the treasure The Razor had been taken. An upside-down U-shaped portal, fif¬teen inches in height, was clearly visible, with silky vermilion dust seeping out around its edges. The portal was warm to the touch. Concentric circles of the dust spiraled into the center of the entrance, which Wangchen said was indica¬tion that more than one treasure had been taken from this location in the past. The vermilion powder was a blessing substance that still remained in the rock.
Tertön Sogyal and Jamgön Kongtrul had come to this ledge in the autumn of 1895. As they approached the location, red dust began flowing profusely from the edge of the door. It was the sign Tertön Sogyal needed. He raised his phurba-dagger in a threatening gesture, reminding the local spirits that he was a representative of Padmasambhava, then hurled a stone at the red-dust door. The earth shook as if the whole mountain were crumbling beneath their feet. A small aperture where the rock had hit opened and a fragrant smell burst forth like a rain of perfume. Tertön Sogyal plunged his hand into the open¬ing of the granite rock and withdrew a statue of Padmasambhava, in a strid¬ing posture holding a phurba-dagger and dorje scepter. With the treasure door open, Jamgön Kongtrul stepped forward and took a golden scroll with a string of syllables, the mnemonic key to The Razor. It was from this scroll that Tertön Sogyal eventually decoded the Vajrakilaya rites and practices of The Razor.
The significance of The Razor treasure discovery for the Dalai Lama and Tibetan state cannot be overemphasized. In addition to guaranteeing the health and longevity of the XIII Dalai Lama, its practice would quell the internal strife in the Dalai Lama’s court, as well as within the influential monasteries in Lhasa. If The Razor rituals were carried out in the specified manner, including strategically protecting Lhasa by placing a phurba-dagger before the sacred Jowo Buddha statue in Jokhang Cathedral, it was believed that Tibet could be protected from invasion.
Wangchen began reciting prayers to Padmasambhava and Vajrakilaya on the cave ledge. Antonio fanned the embers below a burnt food offering of bar¬ley flower and Milky Way chocolate bar, sending smoke into the late after¬noon air for the local spirits who sustain themselves on such smells. We had bought two bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer from a farmer the previous day to offer to the protectors of this area. As Wangchen chanted supplication prayers to the mountain spirits living in the trees and rocks, the rattling of his hand drum resounded down the valley, calling the ethereal beings to the cave. I filled a golden libation cup from the twenty-ounce beer bottle and tossed the fizzing alcohol into the air, and then filled and tossed again, and again, with each of Wangchen’s offering prayers. As we continued offering and chanting in front of the treasure door, clouds rolled in on either side of us. With our concluding prayers came heavy snowflakes, as ravens took cover under wide pine branches.
“Frozen flowers falling from the sky; an auspicious sign that the pro¬tectors of Tertön Sogyal’s treasures are pleased with our offering today.” Wangchen nodded.
“This is the exact place your teacher told you to come,” Wangchen reminded me. “That was over five years ago when you were with him at his Larung Monastery. Feel extremely pleased that you have finally accomplished your teacher’s instruction. Never, never leave your guru’s instructions unfinished or incomplete.”
by Matteo Pistono
Winter 2004, Year of the Wood Monkey
Cave That Delights the Senses, Near the Jewel Cliff of Tsadra, Eastern Tibet
When Padmasambhava began to give the vajrayana teachings in Tibet in the eighth century, one of the first instructions to his “heart disciples” was the phurba-dagger practice of the deity Vajrakilaya. One cycle of the Vajrakilaya teach¬ings that was hidden at that time is known as The Razor of the Innermost Essence. Nearly two volumes of Padmasambhava’s instructions are found in The Razor treasure, which include complex rituals believed to remove obstacles to one’s spiritual development, to thwart attack by enemy invaders, and importantly, to protect the Dalai Lama. In the autumn of 1895, Tertön Sogyal received the mnemonic key to The Razor treasure at a remote cave in eastern Tibet. Within a decade after being written in liturgies, the rituals found within The Razor were em¬ployed in the nation’s spiritual defense.
In the first months of 2004, Antonio, an Italian scholar with whom I had traveled across Tibet on numerous occasions, and I were in the vicinity where Tertön Sogyal had received the key for The Razor. Antonio and I had met years before while we both were traveling near Serthar, and after a month of grueling travel from Golok to Lhasa—where on two occasions, we had to get out of our transport and hike a wide detour around the police check posts undetected, before returning to the main road to hitch another ride—we became close friends. His pensive personality checked my emotional flares. My gregarious manner brought him out of his sometimes somber moods. We both thrived on trekking to remote hermitages in the deep of winter, as much as we took pleasure in making coffee before dawn. And in the evening, wrapped in our sleeping bags with woolly hats pulled low, we would take out our pens to journal both the sadness of political injustices in Tibet and the joy of our pilgrimages. We each understood the other’s needs, and we relied on each other, which is essential as travel partners on the Tibetan Plateau.
Antonio and I met up with Wangchen, the contemporary treasure revealer from Golok whom I had traveled with earlier in Dzachukha. We planned a pilgrimage to Tertön Sogyal’s treasure site of The Razor near the Jewel Cliff of Tsadra. The evening before we departed on horseback, Wangchen spoke to us about pilgrimage and the mind.
Sitting in a Sichuanese spicy noodle café, Wangchen explained that the Tibetan term for pilgrimage is nekor ; ne meaning “abode” or “sacred place” and kor meaning “to encircle” or “circumambulate.” Outwardly, nekor may be a journey to a frozen crag, across windswept plains to solitary hermitages, or around mountain peaks, the home of enlightened deities and past saints. It pushes the limits of one’s endurance, strains the physical senses, and tests one’s resolve to walk on sacred ground. But that is only the outer journey.
Wangchen had literally walked the talk. He’d prostrated himself to Lhasa from Nangchen in eastern Tibet—a journey of a thousand miles, which is roughly equal in distance and similar in mountain terrain from the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming to the coast of California. Facing west toward the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Wangchen placed his hands together in prayer, touched his forehead, neck, and heart area, and then bent forward and lay prone on the ground with his hands outstretched and his forehead touching the earth. Standing upright, he would take three steps forward, the length of his body, and then drop down again for another prostration. During each prostration, Wangchen brought his teacher to mind, recited the mantra his master had empowered him to recite, and rested in the pure awareness of his actions. Mud-covered, enacting this repetitive gesture of pure devotion of body, speech, and mind thousands of times a day, for more than nine months, straight to Lhasa—Wangchen accomplished this feat on two different occasions, leaving a callus on his forehead the size of a quarter.
“When you truly experience the meaning of pilgrimage, you will see the dirt you are treading on as a sacred abode,” Wangchen told us. “The outer, physical pilgrimage is but a support, a container, for the spiritual prac¬titioner who journeys to the innermost essence of their own mind. This is the pilgrimage mind without concepts, without thinking—a mind that is indeed resting in the open spaciousness of wisdom.”
Sitting back in the noodle café’s plastic chair as a Jackie Chan kung fu movie blared on the television, Wangchen might as well have been on a teaching throne.
“Free from distraction, each step around the mountain leaves the grasping mind in the dust; each prostration on the ground keeps us pointed toward our inner wisdom; each icy breath is another concept that is frozen in midair and dissolves into the day; and each prayer is a proclamation of the all-pervasive truth of interdependence.”
We traveled on horseback and by foot south from Dergé, heading toward Palpung Monastery and on to The Razor treasure site at the Jewel Cliff of Tsadra. We crossed four inhospitable sixteen-thousand-foot mountain passes, navigated pine-dense valleys, and traversed high-altitude glens. Local herders let us camp next to their yak-dung-pasted huts, and we offered al-monds and cashews in exchange for hops porridge thickened with yak butter. Nearly every day, the high cirrus clouds whisking into the shape of mare’s tail suggested snow later in the afternoon. By evening, hunkering down in our sleeping bags with a hot drink in hand, I consistently found a sense of exhausted satisfaction. Free from distraction, each step around the mountain leaves the grasping mind in the dust, I recalled as I went to sleep.
As we walked the Tsadra pilgrimage circuit an hour from the monastery, we found wooden panels staked in the ground with written instructions for the pilgrim to recite specific prayers or mantras, invoke particular dei¬ties, or make offerings meant to be effective—an interactive booklet, carved with devotion, to assist the pilgrim’s transformation. With muddy boots, we stepped over orange and green moss-covered scree and around willow trees, then, at an exposed rock face, Wangchen stopped us to offer a glimpse of his blissful reality.
“See those five rivers flowing below us,” Wangchen pointed out. “And look how these five ridgelines surround us—we are standing in the heart center of a massive lotus flower.”
On the south side of Jewel Cliff, Tertön Sogyal’s biography told us, was the Cave That Delights the Senses—the cave where Tertön Sogyal received the key for The Razor treasure. I had brought a few pages of the biography, which held cryptic suggestions and descriptions of the cave for which we were searching. Wangchen kept the pages securely at his chest under his thick sheepskin coat, pulling them out to consult occasionally as a kind of esoteric Lonely Planet guidebook.
We found a fifty-year-old hermit on the mountainside who showed lit¬tle interest in our arrival and even less when Antonio asked him to take us to the cave somewhere along the Jewel Cliff. It seemed impossible to find the cave through the thick juniper and rhododendron shrubs and granite crags. Pulling his skirt up to reveal his swelled ankles and bulging veins, a result of having sat still in his meditation box for decades, he could hardly walk. But, he said, if we had accumulated enough positive karma in our past lives, we would find what we were looking for regardless of his directions. A smiling Wangchen nodded. Antonio and I were not so convinced. We urged the her-mit to at least send us in the right direction.
“Below the last cabin, go into the steep ravine, across the protectors’ stream near the large boulder with one hundred and eights cracks; up past the Lady Yeshe Tsogyal’s Cavern with the large thorny bush, you will see a row of tall pine trees that recite mantra in the wind. Walk in the direction in which the sound of mantra begins in the trees and you will come upon a greenish boulder with a self-emanating image of the protectress Drolma. Once you are at the rock, look up and you will see the Cave That Delights the Senses above you.”
“Topography, botany, and a bit of pure vision.” Antonio chuckled. “Classic Tibetan directions.”
As we trekked down the ravine, heeding the inspired directions of the hermit, it seemed as though only marmots and hares had used the so-called route we were following. In the shadows of the narrow gorge, we came across two etched wood panels set among the birch trees:
Descend to what is known as Raven Valley. Wash in the nectar of the stream while reciting wrathful mantra. Walk along the precipice to distinguish Virtue and Nonvirtue until Tiger’s Lair Gorge. It is here that a dakini manifests in the form of a leopard and devours people of ill will. To other pilgrims, she growls or shows frightening fangs; maintain awareness of the rising fear and this will cleanse the obscur¬ing effects of your past negative deeds.
We followed Wangchen in rinsing our mouths to purify our speech and rubbed our eyes with the blessed water. He instructed us in the appropriate mantra to recite.
The second faded sign farther on told us:
. . . don’t be intimidated by terrifying things such as narrow passages, rain, wind, densely forested gorges, hungry animals, lightning, or hail: Pray to your teacher, chosen deity, and dakinis and offer ritual cakes and libations to the mountain’s lords of the land and command their protection. Regard any fear and anguish that arise in you just as you will the period between your eventual death and rebirth; pray one-pointedly to be liberated at the moment between death and rebirth.
“Let your own fear of death sharply spur you to grasp the need to real¬ize here and now the absolute state—the nature of mind. Don’t try to un¬derstand this with your intellectual mind, but realize deeply in your heart!” Wangchen blissfully said while staring into the sky.
I kept the instructions in my mind as we continued bushwhacking. After passing the cracked rock, the speaking pine trees where Wangchen heard the recitation of mantra, the wrathful bushes, and the rock that indeed had an image of the deity Drolma seemingly growing out of it, we saw the cave above us. Clinging to mossy bushes and short grass to pull ourselves up the fifty-foot incline to the cliff wall, Wangchen said, “Padmasambhava will not allow us to fall.”
An old hemp rope hung down from the last pilgrim who had dared to scale the cliff wall. We used the tattered rope for balance as we climbed the last twenty feet of nearly vertical rock.
The Cave That Delights the Senses turned out to be a ledge that was just large enough for three people, jutting precariously from the southerly end of the Jewel Cliff. Two griffon vultures circled by, wind whistling off their wings, as we caught our breath on the ledge. A slight overhang of gray-white rock arched above our heads. Wangchen pointed at thigh level to the door from which the treasure The Razor had been taken. An upside-down U-shaped portal, fif¬teen inches in height, was clearly visible, with silky vermilion dust seeping out around its edges. The portal was warm to the touch. Concentric circles of the dust spiraled into the center of the entrance, which Wangchen said was indica¬tion that more than one treasure had been taken from this location in the past. The vermilion powder was a blessing substance that still remained in the rock.
Tertön Sogyal and Jamgön Kongtrul had come to this ledge in the autumn of 1895. As they approached the location, red dust began flowing profusely from the edge of the door. It was the sign Tertön Sogyal needed. He raised his phurba-dagger in a threatening gesture, reminding the local spirits that he was a representative of Padmasambhava, then hurled a stone at the red-dust door. The earth shook as if the whole mountain were crumbling beneath their feet. A small aperture where the rock had hit opened and a fragrant smell burst forth like a rain of perfume. Tertön Sogyal plunged his hand into the open¬ing of the granite rock and withdrew a statue of Padmasambhava, in a strid¬ing posture holding a phurba-dagger and dorje scepter. With the treasure door open, Jamgön Kongtrul stepped forward and took a golden scroll with a string of syllables, the mnemonic key to The Razor. It was from this scroll that Tertön Sogyal eventually decoded the Vajrakilaya rites and practices of The Razor.
The significance of The Razor treasure discovery for the Dalai Lama and Tibetan state cannot be overemphasized. In addition to guaranteeing the health and longevity of the XIII Dalai Lama, its practice would quell the internal strife in the Dalai Lama’s court, as well as within the influential monasteries in Lhasa. If The Razor rituals were carried out in the specified manner, including strategically protecting Lhasa by placing a phurba-dagger before the sacred Jowo Buddha statue in Jokhang Cathedral, it was believed that Tibet could be protected from invasion.
Wangchen began reciting prayers to Padmasambhava and Vajrakilaya on the cave ledge. Antonio fanned the embers below a burnt food offering of bar¬ley flower and Milky Way chocolate bar, sending smoke into the late after¬noon air for the local spirits who sustain themselves on such smells. We had bought two bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer from a farmer the previous day to offer to the protectors of this area. As Wangchen chanted supplication prayers to the mountain spirits living in the trees and rocks, the rattling of his hand drum resounded down the valley, calling the ethereal beings to the cave. I filled a golden libation cup from the twenty-ounce beer bottle and tossed the fizzing alcohol into the air, and then filled and tossed again, and again, with each of Wangchen’s offering prayers. As we continued offering and chanting in front of the treasure door, clouds rolled in on either side of us. With our concluding prayers came heavy snowflakes, as ravens took cover under wide pine branches.
“Frozen flowers falling from the sky; an auspicious sign that the pro¬tectors of Tertön Sogyal’s treasures are pleased with our offering today.” Wangchen nodded.
“This is the exact place your teacher told you to come,” Wangchen reminded me. “That was over five years ago when you were with him at his Larung Monastery. Feel extremely pleased that you have finally accomplished your teacher’s instruction. Never, never leave your guru’s instructions unfinished or incomplete.”