Free A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality by Thomas Shor Page A

put his brushes into a glass of murky water and brought me to his “home”. At that time he had two young children, Kamala and Kunsang. I’d never seen anything like it: he lived with his wife and children in a cave on the sharp slope above the lake. I had heard of lamas and yogis living in caves but never with their families! I was a little afraid of this man with burning eyes, the air of a great yogi and clothes of an ordinary man. One always had the feeling with him that there was more to him than he revealed.
    ‘Phuntsok Choeden, his wife, brought us tea. Sitting on the stone floor of his cave, his kids climbing on his lap, he asked why I had come. I told him about the dire situation of my village and how Kunga Rinpoche had performed the mo and declared that only he could help us. He listened carefully, and I sensed in him a compassion that would bridge the fear that everyone else felt of even stepping foot into my village. Though his monastery in Pangi was down a side valley from Simoling three or four days’ walk away, he had heard of my village and knew well why people feared setting foot within its precinct. Without hesitation, he agreed to come. In his wife’s silence I felt her fear. I knew that silence well, the silence of those who feared the dreaded disease but were too polite to voice it. It was quite natural: we felt it ourselves.
    ‘I started the return journey to my village that day. Tulshuk Lingpa waited a few days, then took his family over the Rohtang Pass and sent them on to Pangi.
    ‘After having been shunned and isolated and having helplessly watched the limbs of our parents, our uncles and aunts, brothers, sisters and—finally—ourselves slowly vanishing into festering wounds, Tulshuk Lingpa’s arrival gave us the hope we’d lost when this malady first arrived. His compassion enabled us to have compassion for ourselves.
    ‘The disfigured despise themselves; the horror of someone else’s leprosy gets turned on oneself when one wakes up one day and it is one’s own nose that is vanishing in an open wound. A face without a nose is no less horrific if it is one’s neighbor’s than if it is one’s own face in the mirror. We had forgotten how to love ourselves.
    ‘And then this lama did what no one else had dared: he actually came to our village. We knew we were grotesque. We knew, when we gathered around him—fingers, hands, forearms, elbows, feet, knees and legs, noses, ears and lips in various stages of decay and disappearance, slowly eaten by festering wounds—we knew and felt for ourselves the horror of the sight. Like a doctor arriving at an accident scene, he showed not the slightest horror at our disfigurement, handling our wounds and trying to heal them with Tibetan medicine. He climbed the mountain behind the village to the monastery and moved in. We could hear the drum and human thighbone horn at all hours of the day and night. At first the rituals he performed didn’t stop the course of the disease. So he went into a meditational retreat and he came out some days later having had a vision of Nagaraksha, the king of the nagas , or serpent gods.
    ‘He sent someone to get his close disciples from his monastery in Pangi, Lama Namdrol, Lama Lobsang and Lama Mipham. They were very learned men. They collected the materials needed to make a sculpture, and for the next few days nobody saw them as Tulshuk Lingpa sculpted this demon king and Lama Lobsang painted it.
    ‘When they were through, word spread through the village that we were to gather at the monastery. Tulshuk Lingpa told us the cause of our disease. Nagas , the serpent gods, are found—like serpents themselves—at springs and wet places, where trees and grasses and wildflowers grow. In Lahaul, you can tell a spring from a long way off; springs are the only naturally green places in our otherwise barren landscape. He told us that the nagas were angry at the village because the villagers had cut all the trees at the