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

village spring and used them to construct houses. It was true. Shortly before the first of us had a sore that didn’t heal and the disease started eating our bodies, greed had come over us and we had cut the trees at the spring.
    ‘“Cutting trees at a spring,” Tulshuk Lingpa explained, “puts the earth out of balance and causes disturbances in the spirit world. Your disappearing flesh is the result of the nagas ’ anger. It is because of that we now have the demon himself, Nagaraksha, before us.”
     
    The Nagaraksha
    ‘The sculpture was every bit as horrific as the disease itself. When I saw it,’ Chokshi said, ‘I shuddered. The demon sat on a lotus pedestal resting on a seething mass of serpents. Instead of legs, he had a coiled snake’s tail over which he wore a tiger skin. His skin was blue, and he had snakes draped over his neck and wrapped around his arms. Nine out of his eighteen hands held snakes; the others held knives. A flayed human being was slung over his shoulders. All you could see were the feet and the legs’ empty skin slit down the side. He had three tiers of heads adorned with human skulls, and the heads of snakes poked out everywhere.
    ‘“Until now,” Tulshuk Lingpa said, “the leprosy has been eradicating you. Now we will eradicate the leprosy!” So saying, the lamas started a ritual—the intensity and length of which the people of Simoling had never experienced. The chanting went on day and night as the lamas called on and mollified the angry spirits. Drums pounded, cymbals crashed, and the clarinet-like gyalings sounded through the night. They constructed a huge kyilkhor , or sand mandala, on a platform that took four people to carry. Tulshuk Lingpa drew the design on the platform and the other lamas constructed it, “painting” it with different-colored sands. Huge caldrons of food boiled on wood fires to feed the lamas and the assembled villagers.
    ‘The ritual lasted ten days, and when it was through, Tulshuk Lingpa called for all of us villagers to gather. He told us to bring whatever hunting rifles we had, and together we marched down to the river. The lamas brought with them the sand mandala.
    ‘They placed dried grass on the mandala to set it aflame but before anyone could light it, it burst into flame by itself. The people were amazed and deeply moved, and they were saying, “Our lama is not crazy. This is not a drunken man! He is very powerful, most powerful!”
    ‘Then the lamas tilted the platform and poured the sand mandala into the mountain torrent, shooting their rifles into the air and whistling shrilly as they did so to send the demons off that had been eating our flesh.
    ‘“From this day on,” Tulshuk Lingpa told us, “no leprosy will come to this village. There is nothing to fear!”
    ‘Then the people said to him, “You have sent the demon away. Where have you sent it?”
    ‘“I have sent it to Afghanistan,” he said. In Afghanistan there is a place called Simoling connected to the life of Padmasambhava.”’
    So it was that the flesh-eating spirit was eradicated in Simoling, and the leprosy that had been slowly eating their limbs disappeared. Their wounds healed, and no one else was affected. When I went to Simoling and surrounding villages to do research for this book, I was frankly skeptical that ritual could eradicate leprosy. All the older people remembered the incident. Every one of them attested to its truth.
    The people of Simoling were so grateful that they all gathered at the monastery to show Tulshuk Lingpa their respect. The representative of the village’s thirty households got up.
    ‘We used to have sixty or seventy households,’ he told the lama, ‘but entire families have died of the dreaded disease you just cast out from our land—others fled. Now there are only thirty households left. With you here, we feel confident the demon will never come back. Without you, we are afraid. Therefore we would like to give you our