One of my strongest memories is of my family’s smoky kitchen with its clay hearth and a platform hung from the rafters holding the firewood. Here, vegetables were chopped, tea was churned, and our nostrils turned black as we fed the fire with slow-burning knots from pine branches. The knots were also used to make lamps. But most importantly, this is where the family gathered for meals. After dinner, the adults told folk stories and the gomchen scared us with their tales of ghosts and shadows. The same story could be told a hundred times and neither the teller nor the listener would tire. Occasionally, on special days, we might light a kerosene lamp, whose workings fascinated us kids.

I have clear memories of sharing meals with my maternal grandparents, Lama Sonam Zangpo and Dendup Palmo. Lama Sonam Zangpo could tell the best tales. He was known for his photographic memory and he remembered all the histories and legends. His descriptions of the beard of the first king of Bhutan, Sir Ugyen Wangchuck, or how handsome and striking the teenaged Gyaltsab Reting Rinpoche[1] was as the 13th Dalai Lama led him into the Jokhang Monastery, made his stories come alive.

My Grandfather was like a treasury of fairy tales. I am still desperately trying to remember one particular story he told me about a dog that was an emanation of Green Tara rescuing a small boy. I remember vividly that the dog lead the boy by carrying a beautiful flower in its mouth, but I have a distinct feeling I will not remember the rest of the story perhaps until the moment I breathe in or out my last breath.

Almost every day, my grandfather would mutter about a hidden land where he had once lived and which he still longed for. He was so nostalgic for this hidden place: If we were eating fern, it wasn’t as green as it had been at the hidden place. No buttermilk was as delicious as it had been there. Artemisia found anywhere else was nowhere near as fragrant as it had been there. And he was especially nostalgic about the fungus that had grown on the trees.

My only memory of that hidden land is of some strong sunlight, a verandah, and maybe a small vegetable garden.

There are countless unimaginable methods to discover wisdom in Tantric Buddhism — for example, by vanishing completely. One of my own tutors disappeared one day and we never saw him again. There is a method of convincingly pretending to be crazy and abandoning all social norms. Another one of my tutors took that path. There is a method of delicately extracting juniper seeds without disturbing the branches, and then abstaining from all food and drink except the essence of those seeds; through fasting one lets go of the habits of munching, stuffing, and digesting, and through that, wisdom and energy are uncovered, prana and nadis are balanced. My grandfather Lama Sonam Zangpo was well known for this chulan practice; he had the steadiest hands. I remember him in his late 80s almost showing off by painting a seed syllable on a grain of rice using a brush made with two hairs.

But it is the practice of going into hidden lands that my grandfather was best known for. In the Vajrayana it is believed that there are hidden spots everywhere. There could even be one in the Bronx. I believe the Native American shamans also used to know how to access hidden lands and power spots. I vaguely remember reading about something called sitio in a book by one of Don Juan’s disciples.

Going to a hidden land is the ultimate rebellion against the samsaric world, like dropping out of society and joining a commune, but much more than that. Guru Rinpoche described these hidden lands in his teachings. Some are reachable, some not, all are never easy to find. Those that are reachable may have expiration dates. Some shift or migrate or simply stop having the energy of being a hidden land, regardless of whether or not anyone has set foot there. If you manage to unlock a hidden land, you must stay there until its purpose is served, which could be a few days, a few decades, or a few generations. You can’t care about your term.

Guru Rinpoche left coded guides and maps to some hidden lands, including which methods to use to travel there, where to camp along the way, whether or not fires are allowed, how to read the signs, such as whether a certain birdcall is welcoming or not, whether copper or lead is allowed across the boundary, how to read the behavior of the leeches (who are like guardian dakinis), and detailed instructions about what to do once you reach there. He said there are immeasurable benefits to traveling to hidden lands. In addition to the wisdom one may access there, there is the amazing benefit of no longer having to abide in a world limited by rational thought. Deciphering the codes and reading the guides to unlock a hidden land takes a very special practitioner and very special conditions. The primary condition is motivation and attitude. If one is too much of a rational and critical coward, if one doesn’t have the daringness to leave behind every known reference point, chances are one will never find a hidden land. Curiosity is not motivation enough at all.

There will be so many ordeals along the way; even the greatest practitioner can get quite close and still fail. And after much hardship, some have finally set eyes on a hidden land, but when glanced away for a moment, it vanished. This has happened.

My grandfather had all the necessary motivation, one-pointed determination, and strength necessary for a hidden land searcher. In 1951, he bravely decided to take a journey to unlock a hidden land, through ice and storms, through bamboo and slush, along cliffs and through valleys, using the prophecies and a guidebook that was left by Padmasambhava more than 1,200 years ago. About 100 people followed him, abandoning their livelihood, their homes, cattle, farms, everything. Basically they decided to be the ultimate hippies.

The place that my grandfather found, unlocked, and settled, was called Khenpajong, which means Valley of Artemisia or mugwort, and he stayed there for a decade. While he was there, he managed to find a groom with a distinctive nose and mood from Tibet and brought him to marry his quiet and meditative daughter. As a result of that pairing, I was born in the hidden land. People tell me that one child was born to my parents before me but died soon after, so I am perhaps the only child born in Khenpajong who is still going around the world leaving carbon footprints and contributing to the destruction of the world. Soon after I was born, every single human being left Khenpajong. The Valley of Artemisia was totally, utterly abandoned.

 

[1] Jamphel Yeshe Gyaltsen Tibetan: ཐུབ་བསྟན་འཇམ་དཔལ་ཡེ་ཤེས་རྒྱལ་མཚན་, (Dagpo, 1910 – Lhasa, 1947) was a Tibetan tulku and the fifth Reting Rinpoche.

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