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

Author:Thomas Shor [Shor, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Merri Hill Press
Published: 2012-01-03T13:00:00+00:00

Saul Mullard, Wolfson College, Oxford.

My quest for a wider understanding of the history of Sikkim and the historical background of the Hidden Land found me on a bicycle pedaling past the august stone buildings of Oxford University on a typically cold and rainy autumn afternoon. I was dodging puddles and spray to see a scholar just back from two and a half years of research in Sikkim. His name was Saul Mullard, and he had been searching out documents pertaining to the founding of the kingdom in the homes and private libraries of the elite families of Sikkim. He’d also been travelling to remote, vegetation-covered historical ruins: some dating to the first Tibetans who settled there over 200 years prior to the kingdom’s founding in 1646. Being the first serious scholar to search out and study these old documents and make the connections with ancient foundations and fortified walls in the steep jungles, Saul had thought a lot about Sikkim’s early history and had a unique understanding.

With my shoes by his door both in deference to their waterlogged state and the long time we’d both spent in the East, we sat by the window in his flat on the third floor of a sprawling Victorian-style house that had probably once belonged to a single Oxford don and now housed students and visiting scholars. The window next to him was open to the gusting rain and the ancient spires of the university so his cigarette smoke would curl out, and not into my lungs. He listened carefully to my synopsis of the story of Tulshuk Lingpa and his quest for Beyul Demoshong.

When I was through, Saul’s comment was swift and pointed, ‘You must understand that the Hidden Land is not external to this world. I’ve read the texts, and it doesn’t sound like what your lama was saying—that you’d pass through a portal to a land off the map. The Hidden Land is in this world. It is like the Kingdom of Shambhala, which is located somewhere behind a ring of mountains. No one’s found it but it’s there. It would be possible to get there, physically, without going through a “crack in the world”. Even more importantly, you’d be able to come back. While Shambhala has never been definitively located, Beyul Demoshong has been found. It has already been opened—over 500 years ago. It was opened by Rigzin Godemchen in 1373. He lived there for eleven years, before going back to Tibet. He even returned to the beyul and died there in 1409.’

Saul paused a moment to light another cigarette.

‘And by the way,’ he said, ‘I’ve been to the beyul.’

‘You’ve been to Beyul Demoshong?’ I was incredulous.

‘So have you,’ he replied dryly, pausing for effect. ‘Beyul Demoshong is congruous with Sikkim, superimposed upon its physical geography. It exists in a kind of parallel dimension. Physically it is Sikkim but it has all these other qualities. Beyul is in the physical landscape of Sikkim. You can physically go there—we’ve both been to Tashiding, so we’ve both been to the center of the Hidden Land.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.