Chapter 50 - The Discovery of the Secret Path and the Temple of the Great Maṇḍala

After the temples had been sealed, we had for the first time sufficient leisure to wander about among the ruins and in the surroundings and so we utilised this opportunity for sketching and taking photos. There was no dearth of beautiful motifs, and since our main work was accomplished, we felt free to devote ourselves to our own creative impulses with a good conscience. It was the only positive way to get over the sadness of leave-taking and to fill the emptiness that suddenly yawned before us.

While Li was busy sketching near the chortens at the back of the hill, I was exploring again the ruins which rose above the temples towards the foot of the isolated perpendicular rock, on which the castles of the kings were silhouetted against the sky, inaccessible and proud like the Castle of the Holy Grail. Again and again, I could not help feeling that one last unsolved mystery was hidden among the ruins of the king's palaces and that this was the reason why the Dzongpön tried to prevent us from staying longer at Tsaparang, fearing that one day we might find ways and means to get to the summit or to discover the secret path, if there was one.

These were the thoughts that went through my head while I was roaming about in a maze of ruined buildings, when finally I came to a halt at a steep rock and decided to give up the search. I was just about to turn back when I noticed three boulders, resting one upon the other at the foot of the rock, and suddenly it occurred to me that they could not have fallen like that by chance. Surely they could only have been placed in this way by human hands. But for what purpose? Was it merely to mark a certain spot or to indicate a certain direction to be followed, or did it serve a more immediate, tangible purpose, namely to reach something that otherwise would have been out of reach? I stepped on the boulders and stretched my hand upwards. And lo! My searching hand suddenly fitted into a small cavity, which I had not been able to detect from below. And now, while I drew myself up with one hand, my foot found a similar hold on the rock and my other hand reached a ledge, so that I could pull myself farther up, until I found myself at the lower end of a steeply rising gully, that seemed to have been eroded by rain-water. Scrambling up over the rubble that covered the ground, I soon came upon a flight of steps, which convinced me that I had found the beginning of the ancient stairway leading up to the palaces of the kings.

However, my joy was short-lived, since I soon lost myself again in a labyrinth of ruins, so that I finally had to return to my starting-point. There was only one alternative left, namely to follow a steep ravine, half filled with fallen masonry. This proved to be a success, because now I found another flight of steps, better preserved than the previous one. It led to a spacious plateau and from it rose the perpendicular rock-wall of the summit of Tsaparang, towering several hundred feet above me. I searched in vain for a continuation of the staircase. So, probably, the Dzongpön had been right, when he told us that the way that once had led up to the cascades had been completely destroyed.

But having come as far as this, I wanted at least to investigate the numerous caves which yawned at the base of the rock-wall, for I hoped to find remnants of frescoes or at least some ancient clay seals which were often deposited in such caves. But there was nothing of the kind. Instead of that I found what I had least expected: one of the caves proved to be the entrance to a tunnel that led upwards in a wide curve inside the rock, from time to time lit up by narrow openings in the outer rock-wall. With a beating heart, I followed the tunnel, climbing higher and higher, filled with the greatest expectations and at the same time with a lurking fear to come again to a dead end or to be faced with some unsurmountable obstacle.

How great was, therefore, my joy, when I stepped into the light of the sun again and realised that I was standing on the very summit of Tsaparang, which for so long we had believed to be inaccessible. The view was in itself worth all the trouble of the climb. I could see now that the rocky spur, on which Tsaparang was built, had been carved out by two deep canyons leading into the main canyon of the LangqhenKhambab, above which a wildly serrated range of rocky mountains rose into the clear blue sky like a non-ending procession of gothic cathedrals with innumerable towers and needle-sharp spires. Behind them appeared here and there snow-covered peaks, and in the bright sunlight the whole landscape scintillated in the most transparent colours.

I felt as if I was standing in the centre of an immense Maṇḍala composed of unearthly colours and forms: a centre towards which all those forms and colours seemed to stand in a significant inner relationship, so that it became a focus of all those forces of heaven and earth that had shaped its surroundings. It is this geomantic principle according to which all great sanctuaries of Tibet have been built, in fact all seats of power, in which the spiritual element was always given predominance and was sought in perfect harmony with nature. Thus the castles of kings or other sovereign rulers were simultaneously strongholds of religion and sanctuaries of the Great Protectors and their secret cults. (They were secret in the sense that they could only be performed within the circle of those who were trained through years of Sādhanā and qualified by initiation, from which nobody was barred who was willing to fulfil the necessary preconditions and to abide by its rules.)

Conscious of all these facts, I wandered through the ruins of palaces and temples, silent witnesses of a great past, of great triumphs and tragedies, of human ambitions and passions, of worldly power and religious devotion. There was an eerie stillness in this place suspended, as it seemed, between heaven and earth—and perhaps, therefore, partaking of both: of the ecstasies of divine inspirations and the cruel sufferings of human greed and lust for power. Moving about as in a dream, in which past and present were interwoven into a fabric of four-dimensional reality, I suddenly stood before the half-open door of an almost completely preserved building, which by some miracle had escaped the general destruction.

With a strange feeling of expectancy, I entered into the death-like stillness of a halfdark room, in which the secrets of centuries seemed to be present and to weigh upon me like the fate of an unfulfilled past. When finally my eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, my premonitions became certainty: I stood in the Holy of Holies of a mystery temple, the chamber of initiation, in which the great Maṇḍala, the Sacred Circle of Highest Bliss, (dPal hKhor-lo bDem-chog) is revealed before the eyes of the initiate, in all its manifold forms of celestial splendour, divine figures and cosmic symbols.

It was Tomo Géshé Rimpoché who had brought me in touch for the first time with the mysterious world of this Maṇḍala, and under his guidance it had become for me a living experience. For almost a year, it formed the centre of my religious life -- and even then I realised that I had only lifted a tiny corner of the veil that hides the supreme realisation of this profoundest of all profound tantras, one of the earliest introduced in Tibet at the time of Padmasambhava and held in the highest esteem by Gelugpas as much as by the older sects of Tibetan Buddhism.

It contains the complete process of a world creation from the deepest centre of consciousness -- the unfoldment of forms from the formless state of undifferentiated emptiness (śūnyatā) and unlimited potentiality —through the germ-syllables of the subtle elementary principles and the crystallisation of their essential forms and colours into a concentric image of the universe, spread out in ever widening rings of materialising worlds. Their essential and timeless centre is represented by the symbol of Mount Meru, the stable axis and the ideal cross-section of the universe, in which the hierarchy of divine beings and realms of existence -- the increasingly intensified and purified manifestations, or higher dimensions of consciousness -- are present. `A miniature world is evolved, seething with elemental forces working in the universe as cosmic forces and in man as forces of body and spirit. Most of the quantities in this elaborate notation are taken from the body of indigenous religious teaching and mythology. Some are so universal and transparent that it reveals something, even to the outsider, of the force of this symbolical structure, and makes him intuitively feel that here we are assisting in the unfolding of a great spiritual drama, sweeping the mind up to heights of exaltation and nobility'.^[1]

The realm of these higher dimensions is symbolised by a celestial temple, composed of the purest and most precious materials and containing the Maṇḍala of highest bliss and supreme realisation, in which the spiritual hierarchies are arranged in concentric steps, rising towards the centre, in which the ultimate reality becomes conscious in the union of the divine figure of Demchog ('Highest Bliss') and his consort or Prajñā (transcendental knowledge) in the form of Dorjé Phagmo.

With the upper pair of his twelve arms, signifying the knowledge of the twelvefold formula of interdependent Origination, Demchog tears apart the elephant-hide of ignorance, with his four faces, shining in the colours of the four basic elements (mahānhūta) of the universe, he permeates and encompasses the four directions of space with the four divine qualities of love, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. Each face has three eyes, because his vision penetrates the three worlds (the world of sensedesire, the world of Pure Form, and the world of Non-Form) and the three times (past, present, and future). The colour of his body is blue, because it represents the infinity, changelessness, and all-inclusiveness of space, as well as the ultimate principle of the metaphysical Emptiness, the Plenum Void of śūnyatā.

Dorjé Phagmo's body is red, to signify her passionate devotion to the good of all beings. She has only one face, which expresses the oneness of all things, and only two arms, which signify the two aspects of truth, the ultimate and the relative. She is naked because she is free from obscuring illusions. Her legs encircle the divine body of Demchog, who holds her in close embrace, indicating their complete and inseparable union in body and spirit, the oneness of supreme bliss and wisdom.

And all the divine figures, assembled around them in ascending steps, are likewise embraced by their wisdom-holding consorts, so that they appear like reflections of the central and highest truth on different levels of reality, and all of them are engaged in the same cosmic dance in the ecstatic experience of highest bliss, which flows from the union of prajñā and upāya: Wisdom and the means towards its realisation through active compassion and unselfish love. In fact, each of the figures embodies a certain quality or stage on the path of perfection which is traced step by step in this profound and universal meditation.

What must be done to make this meditation into a reality? Every concept in it must be vivified and drenched with life and power. Every god in it must be made into a living god, every power manipulated in it made into a potency. The whole structure must be made vibrant with forces capable of entering into sympathetic relation with the greater cosmic forces in the universe, created in imitation on a lower scale within the individual meditator himself. To the religious mind the universe is filled with the thoughts of the gods, with the powers of great intelligences and consciousnesses, radiating eternally through space and really constituting the world that is. The world is only a thought in the mind of God. It must take years of strenuous practice even to build up the power to visualise and correctly produce this meditation as an internal drama.^[2] It is for this purpose that elaborate models of the mandala are built up, in which the whole spiritual universe is minutely modelled with every detail and hundreds of divine and demonic figures, from the jewel-studded temple on the summit of Mount Meru down to the eight great cemeteries, the places of death and of initiation, in which Yogis and Siddhas underwent spiritual rebirth and transformation by experiencing the process of dying and overcoming the illusion of death. Because in order to be reborn the initiate has to go through the portals of death.

Remembering all this I stood upon the threshold of the temple, gazing with trepidation and expectancy into its dark interior. Slowly bit by bit the details of the Maṇḍala stepped out of the darkness -- But what had happened? The innumerable figures of divine beings, which had inhabited Maṇḍala, lay scattered in a wild heap all over the half-crumbled structure. The sanctuary had obviously been desecrated by pillaging hordes after the fall of Tsaparang at the collapse of the Gugé Dynasty. Yet the crude forces of violence had not been able to destroy the atmosphere of sanctity in this ancient place of initiation. The walls were still covered with frescoes of great beauty and depth of colour. They revealed a mystic dance of many-armed many headed deities, ecstatically embracing their consorts, terrible and awe-inspiring, beautiful and frightening at the same time: a revelation to the initiate, a honor to the ignorant intruder. Here life and death, creation and destruction, the forces of light and darkness, seemed to be inextricably interwoven in a cyclonic movement of transmutation and liberation.

I opened the door of the temple as wide as possible, but the light was not sufficient to take photographs of the frescoes, though I had my camera with me. But among the figures scattered over the mandala, there was a Heruka (a heroic, four-armed form of Demchog), embraced by his knowledge-inspired Khadoma, and in these figures the moment, or, better, the timeless state of ecstasy in perfect union of Love and Wisdom, which results in Highest Bliss, was expressed with such consummate beauty, that I felt moved to lift the divine pair out of this chaos of destruction and carried it outside the temple, where I could take a photograph. I felt sorry to put the figures back into the temple, where surely they would perish with the rest of the doomed sanctuary, but I was glad to preserve at least a fraction of their beauty on my film for others to see and for myself as a lasting remembrance.

Before I closed the door of the temple behind me, I cast a last glance into the sanctuary and repeated the mantras with which the reality of the great Maṇḍala of Demchog are invoked, mantras that a millennium ago were recited in this very place and brought to life the great visions that were enshrined in this temple. In the certainty that soon even the last traces of this Maṇḍala would disappear, I was glad that I had been allowed this last glimpse and enabled to relive something of the spirit to which this place had been dedicated. The sanctity of such a place cannot be revived by outer renovation, but only through the inner action of devotion and the power of the mind through which the creative faculty of mantras is realised.

I stepped again into the light of the sun, filled with grateful joy that even my last wish in Tsaparang had been fulfilled and that the mission I had set out to accomplish had been successfully completed. Before entering again the rock-tunnel on my way down, I surveyed for the last time the immense landscape and the ruins and canyons below me. And there, deep down, I saw a small human figure moving about and recognised Li sketching near the chortens at the foot of the hill. I called out to her -- oblivious of the risk I took -- and after looking about her in surprise, not knowing from where the sound of my voice came, she finally looked up and discovered me standing at the edge of the rock, on the very top of Tsaparang. She gave me a sign not to reveal my presence, since the Dzongpn̈'s men might be lurking around, and I could only hope that my voice had not given me away I dived at once into the rock-tunnel and hurried down as quickly as possible.

Since Li too wanted to see the Demchog Lhakhang, we both climbed up again the next morning, and though we had tried to avoid attention, by first starting in a different direction, the Dzongpön s men apparently had become suspicious, wondering where we had disappeared, and sent Wangdu in search of us. Hardly had we left the Demchog Lhakhang after a short pūjā and after Li had hurriedly taken some photos, when Wangdu emerged from the rock-tunnel, visibly agitated, because in all probability he had been instructed by the Dzongpön to prevent us from getting to the palaces of the kings and the hidden sanctuary. The fact that also he had denied more than once that there was any access to the summit of Tsaparang was sufficient proof for us.

However, we could not blame him for this, and we assured him that the Dzongpön would never come to know about it, if he would keep it from the Dzongpön's servants. This reassured him greatly, and in the afternoon he even consented to open for us the small Dorjé-iigjé Lhakhang (the temple of Vajra-bhairava [Tib.: rDorje hJigsbyed], a synonym for Yamāntaka), which we had avoided so far, since we had assured the Dzongpön that we only wished to work in the main temples, dedicated to the peaceful deities. After our experience in Tholing, we knew only too well the Dzongpön's fear of arousing the wrath of the fierce deities if he would allow us to work in their sanctuary, which was just above the Red Temple. It was always locked, not only because it housed the powerful Protectors, but also because it served as a kind of store-room for all the most valuable metal images, which had been salvaged from various sanctuaries in the ruins of Tsaparang. The place really was a treasure-trove of the most exquisite metal statues we had ever seen. The execution of the many-armed fierce deities, many of them joined by their consorts (yum), was of the highest quality and showed a perfection in the treatment of metal that has never been surpassed anywhere in the world. But these priceless works of art were so crowded together in the small dark room that Li could take only very few photographs. Yet we were grateful even for this glimpse of these rare treasures.

Now nothing more remained for us but to start packing our things and to prepare for the long journey back to India. Though we felt sad, we knew that we had done all that was in our power and that our efforts had been richly rewarded.

(missing pages 352 and 353)

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

From an article on the 'Srichakra-Sambhara-Tantra' by Johan van Manen, reprinted in Shakti and Shakta by Sir John Woodroffe (Luzac, London. 1929).

[2]:

johan van Manen, in his aforementioned essay.