A Trip to Sikkim (or, Leeches, Lamas and Sacred Lakes)

In Kathmandu last year, questing around for instruction in the ways of Ayurveda, the venerable and expansive Southasian “knowledge of life,” landed me in some memorable situations. There were the rural health camps, where villagers would come for cheap treatment and where Sarita Shrestha, the mastermind and diminutive head doc, would periodically kick all men off the premises so she could get down to work in her field of expertise (gynaecology). There was the out patientclinic at Naradevi Ayurveda Hospital where, as a fly on the wall, I observed a peculiarly post-modern hybridized medicine being passed on
in the name of both progress and tradition. There was the dispensary and former laboratory of an alchemist-pharmacist, the last of his lineage, who made medicine out of everything from rare herbs and seashells to poisonous minerals. What I was most thirsty for, though, I didn’t have so much luck at finding:
instruction. Of course I learned plenty, but in the way that a participant observer learns, not the way a disciple does. Consciously or otherwise, I wanted a guru. In retrospect, the problem was I hadn’t molded myself into a suitable vessel. Maybe I was too full of the Ayurvedic knowledge gleaned under Dr. Lad at the Ayurvedic Institute in Albuquerque to have room left over for other nuggets; maybe I was unable to recognize those nuggets for gold; or maybe I forgot to remove the stopper from the vessel of myself. In any case, I left Nepal knowing that I wanted to be a carrier of this living tradition but feeling that all the work was still ahead of me.

On this trip, a pilgrimage in its way, I’m focusing less on the contents and more on the forging of the vessel. The molding, smoothing, refining. It’s a big job--endless, I suppose--but a satisfying one, as I find that my cup now overfloweth with a heady mixture of aquae vitae. Not the liquors I’d expected, necessarily, but almost everywhere I turn there seems to be a spring worth drinking from. As I’m peripatetic up to now, there can be no serious thought of a singular guru, a lone fountain. But as I trace out my path in time and space, teachers keep turning up. And naturally, they often turn up where least expected.

* * *

I’ve been travelling in Sikkim on a welcome detour from the itinerary T and I sketched out a couple of months ago. After the long bus ride from Kathmandu to the Indian border we craved some relief from the heat and density of the plains before turning South toward even hotter, denser places, so we made a spur-of-the-moment decision to head up to Darjeeling for a couple days of cool air, Tibetan street food, tea tasting, and other unabashedly touristic pleasures. While there, on a whim I obtained a free 15 day Sikkim permit in case we wanted to visit the tiny Himalayan state, and, one thing leading to the next, it was a no-brainer to take a jeep across the Teesta and explore some of the natural and cultural sites for which this place is justly famous. Well, famous amongst Bengali vacationers, orchid enthusiasts, tantric Buddhists, and mountaineers, at least. (What was the latest state motto according to a road sign we saw? “Sikkim: nature, adventure, agriculture?”) We threw together a week-long itinerary to take in some of the Tibetan Buddhist hot spots, including Pemayangtse monastery, seat of the Nyingma order in Sikkim. T and I have both visited our share of gompas, but neither of us was particularly interested in Buddhism at the time. Nor did our study abroad program, Pitzer in Darjeeling, (for all its strengths!) include anything likely to change that. The monasteries we visited were at the time merely a succession of unintelligible murals, noisy and hypnotic chanting, and general dissonance that, however, managed occasionally to achieve a sublime effect. I thought this time we’d be ready to absorb something substantive, actual teachings. In the event, Pemayangtse was spectacular, managing to feel both ancient and vibrant; besides the layers of Thangka paintings and daily rituals, it houses a one-of-a-kind sculpture a former abbot made over the course of five years of painstaking labor. (The effect is of the world’s largest, craziest doll house.) The gumba was everything we were hoping for, except that we left feeling no deeper connection to Tibetan Buddhism than we’d felt before. The door remained firmly closed--all the more frustrating, given its smoky glass window onto dancing lights and screwing deities beyond.

 The next day, less hopeful for a transcendent experience but still up for a walk, we hiked up to the other really old Nyingma gumba in the neighborhood, Sanga Choeling. Most of the monks in evidence were under 7 years old--these monasteries also serve as schools. We noticed a group of local people sitting outside and struck up a conversation with one of the men, a Gurung from a nearby town, to discover that today was the 49th day after the suicide of his wife. Relatives had gathered for the puja marking the occasion and we were invited in. We sat along one wall with the extended family (seemingly including only relatives
from the bereaved husband's side?) with our hands together in the posture of prayer, listening to the cacophony of young and old voices chanting Tibetan texts at different speeds, in different registers, to
the punctuation of the big drums beating now in 4, now 6, now 10.  The bereaved's head dipped in reverence, then lolled in sleep.  I felt myself drifting off to the glorious clamour, when the chanting came to a close.  We were invited to eat with the family outside the gumba: a full spread of Sikkim-style daal-bhaat, complete with a vat of golden melted butter.  We cleaned our plates and listened to the husband's response to this turn of fortune: he was under fifty and alone, now; ke garnu? what to do? We said our goodbyes, promising to stop and see the man if we were ever in Dentam, and walked back down the hill. We hadn't felt closed off from the life of the monastery this time--on the contrary--but neither did we feel any closer to the kernel, to what it was all about.

***

Buddhism took root in Tibet over a millennium ago when, as legends have it, Padma Sambhava a.k.a. Guru Rimpoche travelled across the Himalaya and subdued the resident demons. The forms that the dharma takes in Tibet even today have texts, imagery, theory, and techniques in common with the Indian Buddhism of the late first millennium A.D. This was a time when a body of mystical, esoteric practices called Tantra came to interpenetrate Buddhism, giving rise to a new path toward Enlightenment. Supposedly these techniques, involving yogic austerities and sexual imagery, were taught secretly by the Buddha to those devotees he felt were ready to hear them, and passed along in a lineage down to the present. More likely, it seems, they are a much later graft onto the original Buddhist stock. Whatever its origins, this approach, which came to be known as Vajrayana (the Diamond vehicle), is radically different from the dry, narrow path of the archetypal Theravada Buddhism. Its greatest novelty lay in the outlook it took towards human desire: instead of working to eradicate mental defilements, such as lust, through meditative practice, why not harness these strong emotions? Tantric practices, which span certain schools of Hinduism as well as Vajrayana Buddhism, have in common this radical turn towards the worldly, the bodily. Necessarily this is a risky path, as it is easy to get side tracked and seek sensory pleasures for their own sake rather than for the spiritual progress they can afford the seeker. It is also considered a remarkably rapid path through which one may attain the goal in as
little as a single lifetime.

In Tibet, Tantric forms and practices mingled further with the native shamanic/animistic beliefs called Bon,and the number of deities multiplied to include fierce “dharma protectors” and other subdued demons alongside
the various Bodhisattvas and Buddhas of past, present and future. Over the centuries, Tibetan Buddhism split into the four major schools that continue into the present (Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Geluk,
often distinguished by the color of their respective Rimpoches' hats), and each evolved elaborate bodies of ritual.  Into the twentieth century, European scholars dismissed the clamor and kaleidoscopic imagery of Tibetan Buddhism as a bastardization of the Buddha’s teaching. Where, in all the noisy, colorful ritual, was there any attempt to follow the path outlined by the Tathagata? What happened to the foundation of sila--morality--that was supposed to lie at the very foundation of Buddhism and was being trounced at every
turn by these meat eating, chang drinking, copulating lamas? In fact the core teachings have never been lost, though they may have been disguised under layer upon layer of ornate drapery. As Buddhism became the primary religion of the Tibetan people, it needed to take on more roles than simply being a method of purifying the mind if it was to cater to the needs of the masses. This is exactly what goes on at most gumbas (Tibetan monasteries) most of the time: religious ritual geared towards quotidian concerns, such as death rites. Of course the religious merit gained by such acts is intended to help the recipient as well as the monks inch closer to liberation, but this is not the mystical core of Tantric Buddhism. That goes on outside the institutional walls of the gumba, in caves and graveyards and other
liminal, inacessible places.

***

After visiting the Nyingma gumbas around Pelling, I was ready to give it a rest. The living tantric traditions I had been so excited about were receding to the level of otherness: another culture’s practices, exotic and opaque. It had been foolish to go grasping at this lead; such things as teachers and signposts on the path come to one by grace, can’t simply be willed or intellectualized into existence. And much as I might prefer a sexier, less ascetic path, I knew that the Theravada practice of Vipassana is a good practice for me, that I should be satisfied with it and leave these lamas alone.

As it happened, our next stop in Sikkim was to be Khecheperi Lake. The footprint-shaped lake itself is believed to have been created by theleft foot of the goddess Tara, while her body and head are constituted by the forested hills above and the cave at the top.  Sacred geography, indeed.  If nothing else, it should be a pretty place to explore for a couple of days, we figured, having more or less given up on gleaning much from the Nyingma (ancient school) Tibetan Buddhism so prevalent in West Sikkim. We followed a little hand painted sign to a plain looking guesthouse by the lake, plunked down our packs and looked around. My heart fell a little at first to see that the proprietor was a smooth-faced, longhaired kid of twenty or
so. Damn upstart, I guess I thought! Practically his first vocal act was to laugh long and hard when we spoke to him in Nepali. It wasn’t a malicious or rude sound, I realized, but a delighted one. A young woman who looked East Asian appeared and joined him in the laughter, like water tumbling down rocks. It was contagious; even we couldn’t help but smile a bit. He was simply surprised and delighted that we spoke as we did, and he was uninhibited in this expression of those sudden emotions.  The peals passed along with the couple’s astonishment and we fell into comfortable chatter: the simple rooms were 150 rupees a night, he was indeed the caretaker and she his Japanese wife, and would we like sweet or salty tea? After settling
in and looking around a bit, we talked more with the young couple. It turned out that he was a sort of plainclothes Lama called a Ngakpa Lama, one who had undergone lengthy and rigorous training but who was now leading a householder’s life. Conversation turned towards meditative techniques, and Sonam was happy to tell us about his experience with different stages of Tantric initiation and about his 3 year, 3 month, 3 week, 3 day, 3 hour, 3 minute, 3 second long retreat. He was a gushing tap of information, and later in our room T and I struggled to recall all that he had told us about his tradition.

The next day saw us heading up the hill and along the densely-forested ridge overlooking the little lake to the Tara Devi meditation cave. Sonam had sent us out with directions and a hand-drawn map, a little bag of leech-repellent medicine made from salt and wild Szechuan pepper, and instructions on how to respond if we saw a bear: if it was a little one, dog-sized, we should drop to the ground face-down and play dead. The bear would paw and nuzzle at us but we shouldn’t move, especially shouldn’t show our eyes, or he’d attack. If it was a big one, we should run like hell downhill or climb a tree. Truthfully, I was more worried about leeches. I’d encountered the little crawling blood-suckers in this region before, and the thought of bushwhacking through dense jungle teeming with them gave me the heebie-jeebies. In meditation the night before, my mind had kept wandering to images of the big green cattle-leeches I’d heard about dropping down on my head from the wet foliage above, swelling up with my blood. I tried to uproot my aversion; wouldn’t it be better to look at it as a little blood donation? What’s a few leeches? It’s not like they hurt, even, and there’s enough blood to go around! Wasn't this like the practice of Chod, in which one envisions methodically tearing oneself apart?  Didn't the Buddha feed himself to a hungry tigress in a former life?  And so on.

Equanimity is easier imagined than achieved, as the next day’s hike proved. From the start I kept looking down at my sneakers to check for the first signs of dark little inch-worm-like squigglers climbing up towards my ankles. Soon enough I started spotting them and bending down to flick them off. My pace quickened up the hill in the dense, grey morning. After a stop for tea in a village house, our halfway point, our path narrowed and the foliage closed in. The leeches were denser here and bigger, and we started finding crawling above our knees and even on our upper bodies. Panic began playing at the edges of my mind, and a surge of adrenaline sent me shooting up the slope. I wanted to clear this sinister tunnel of foliage as soon as I could and reach a point where I might safely stop and pick off the buggers. But stopping meant giving ground-crawlers equal opportunity. I half wanted to turn back, to plunge back down the slope and not stop until
we were back in the village house and out of leech territory. But we were close now, presumably, and thankfully the leeches started to thin out. We saw strings of prayer flags and a few evergreens and soon came to the old wooden house that had served as a solitary retreat for a lama. It was empty but showed signs of recent visitation. The shrine room was still set up for worship but was also occupied by a
swarm of bees. Neraby, the cave itself was outfitted with a simple shrine with a carved black stone image of Tara and a few brass butter lamps and stupa offerings that had been knocked over by an impious
bear, perhaps. Here, finally, was an area devoted to spiritual exploration, as opposed to institutional religious practice. We marveled for a while at the way the root tendrils penetrated the cave walls and fanned out along the floor. in the damp, cool air, a fine white mold grew on them. We sat for a while to meditate on a rock
bench before turning back down the hill to face the leeches again.

We met Sonam on the way down. He had been out foraging wild forest vegetables for the communal evening meal: 3 kinds of fiddlehead ferns, nettles, and watercress. His ankles were bleeding from a few telltale
spots, and he was radiating good cheer to the four directions. We talked long into the evening, the young lama doing his best to answer our many questions about his life and practice, speaking with authority, humility, good will and humor. I wish I could remember half of that conversation, but what shines through is Sonam's powerful presence. Talking later in our room, T and I decided we couldn't remember the last time we had met a 23-year old with such a sense of directedness. His charisma was grounded in wisdom and compassion, the two qualities esteemed above all in tantric Buddhism as the precursor of bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment.

The next morning we payed the unbelievably modest rates for the room and food and walked us down to the jeep that was waiting. We pointed our noses towards Tashiding, site of another gumba, knowing that we had already found what we'd come to Sikkim for. 

As I prepare to post this ramble from steamy Orissa, hundreds of miles South along India's East coast, I think back on cool, quiet, Sikkim, its ancient gumbas, mad lamas and manifest deities.  It's nice to know that the door is unlocked.