A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality Read Free

went back to see Dorje Wangmo the next morning to ask if she knew of others who had gone with Tulshuk Lingpa on his journey to Beyul. She told me of two people who, in turn, told me of others, and eventually the search for those who set out for Beyul brought me to villages, monasteries and mountain retreats from Darjeeling and Sikkim in the eastern Himalayas to the western Himalayas and to Nepal. I met and spent time with most of the surviving members of the expedition, now mostly quite aged, as well as the lama’s family. These extraordinary people, who gave up everything to follow their dreams, also gave freely of their time to tell me about what was for most of them the most extraordinary events of their lives.
     
    The most important person with whom I spoke was Kunsang, Tulshuk Lingpa’s only son. He provided the thread that wove together the story of Tulshuk Lingpa and his visionary expedition. Eighteen years old at the time his father departed for Beyul, Kunsang was able to offer a first¬hand account of what others knew only from hearsay. Kunsang heard the stories of Tulshuk Lingpa’s early life directly from him. One might expect—and even forgive—a son to exaggerate his father’s deeds. But the details of his stories, no matter how fantastic, astonished me all the more by checking out when I asked others who were in a position to know. Kunsang’s respect and admiration for his father was matched by his profound knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism. Deep respect did not preclude his seeing the humor and divinely inspired madness at the core of so many of the stories. With Kunsang alone I had almost fifty hours of taped interviews. When I transcribed these interviews, I was struck by the amount of time speech was rendered impossible by laughter.
     
    Kunsang, Tulshuk Lingpa’s only son
    I used to wonder just where to draw the line when Kunsang told his tales. Often I had the feeling he was leading me down a narrow plank over deepening water, drawing me further than I felt comfortable to a place where logic failed. His stories often started out on firm enough ground but as the incidents built up and became increasingly fantastic, I’d suddenly find myself following with my credulity intact further than I would normally go. I would end up believing things that if told outright would sound just too fantastic to have occurred. Every time I thought Kunsang had gone too far, I’d find a corroborating detail in something someone else said. Or I’d check details of what others told me with him, and find an uncanny concurrence of facts even in the most outlandish stories.
    With Kunsang, one got a taste of what his father was like, making reality of things usually relegated to the realm of fiction and imagination. He wasn’t confounding fact and fiction as much as forging a new synthesis of the two.
    We have been taught from the earliest age to separate fact from fiction. We can read Alice in Wonderland and get transported to a land of marvels. Yet while we are there, we know Wonderland doesn’t really exist. By imagining it, we partake in the hidden realm of wonders the author imagined but we retain our sense of propriety. We don’t redraw the line between fact and fiction; we suspend it, and we are entertained. That is certainly the prudent thing to do. We can assume it is what Lewis Carroll himself did. He could write his books about Wonderland and still maintain his position as a respected Oxford don.
    Imagine what would have happened if Lewis Carroll had proclaimed the reality of Wonderland and launched an expedition? Surely he would have been thought mad as a hatter in the Oxford of his day as he would be today. The line separating fact from fiction is certainly tightly drawn and enduring—as tightly drawn as that which separates sane from insane. Cross one, and you cross the other.
     
    The first time I met Kunsang, I asked him the meaning of his father’s name.
    Kunsang told me that to understand the name