Lord of the Dance: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Lama by Chagdud Tulku

Author:Chagdud Tulku [Tulku, Chagdud]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Padma Publishing
Published: 2015-03-30T03:00:00+00:00

9

Flight

OUR ESCAPE FROM TIBET CONSISTED of a series of fortunate events and mishaps spanned by unrelieved, grinding endurance. My teacher and his brother were both elderly men, I was a poor walker and Khanpo Dorje’s nephew was a headstrong young man with a good heart but unreliable judgment. This nephew, in fact, caused our first mischance.

After the Vajrakilaya ceremony concluded with a full-fledged flight from the Chinese, the mass of Tibetans were headed toward the monastery of Sang-ngag Chhöling across the Dagpo pass, protected by the rearguard action of the Khampa military. On the way we came to a place where the trail branched. The four of us stopped to do divinations, which were very good for splitting off from the group and going separately on this secondary route. However, Khanpo Dorje’s nephew strongly opposed this plan.

“How could it be safer to go without the military!” he exclaimed. “We will be unprotected in a long valley with the Chinese at our backs.”

Khanpo Dorje replied that the divinations had been very good.

“Many lamas do divinations these days and many lamas have been killed,” the nephew countered stubbornly.

His father quickly reprimanded him. “Don’t talk that way! Khanpo Dorje is a great lama and he is the elder among us. You are not in a position to question the wisdom of his choice.”

The nephew refused to give up because he was convinced his father and his uncle would be killed if they left the protection of the military. Tears in his eyes, he pleaded, “Please don’t make this decision.”

Finally, Khanpo Dorje conceded, saying, “If you insist and will be miserable otherwise, we will follow the military.” Later we would learn that those who escaped by the secondary route through the valley were able to keep their possessions intact and to walk directly toward the protection of the Indian army across the Himalayas. We, however, had to begin discarding things immediately and fled by a dangerous, circuitous route that would delay our reaching India for months.

We traveled on horseback without stopping for four days and reached the Dagpo pass in the dark hours of predawn on the fifth. With no tea, no food and no sleep, strange images floated into my field of vision. The path across the pass was firm, but on either side stood deep snow. We would move forward a short distance, then everyone—a thousand people and hundreds of animals—would halt because a person or a pack animal had tumbled into the snow. Regrouping on the other side of the mountain, we pushed forward to the monastery of Sang-ngag Chhöling at dawn.

For days we had held Sang-ngag Chhöling as our destination, a place where we could stop at last. But suddenly the Khampa military sounded an alarm, saying the Chinese were forging toward the Dagpo pass and urging us to continue our flight immediately. We heeded this advice and fled, but at least half the people were too exhausted to go on until they at least had eaten something. Five hundred were captured and taken back by the Chinese.

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