A Walk to Taktsang
Taktsang, known as Tiger’s Nest, is Bhutan’s most recognizable religious icon. It is built over a cave where Guru Rinpoche and his consort Yeshe Tsogyel meditated.
I cross the Paro river and start up a gentle trail. The pine forest opens to a little hamlet protected with prayer flags and ringing bells. A tiny earthen temple built over a channel sits just off the trail. A girl stands at the temple door – a blessed, heaven favoured girl carrying food to a hermit living high above Taktsang. I ask her to show me the way which she did. Then I step inside the temple where two prayer wheels turn with the force of the water running under the floor. Painted with the syllables Om Mani Padme Hung, the spinning cylinders repeat he ancient mantra of compassion.
I leave the temple to find the girl has gone. The sound of bells and rushing water fades as the trail rises steeply and I climb through a forest of oak and rhododendron. I begin a walking meditation, marking each round of Om Mani Padme Hung on my beads, matching the rhythm of my breath and step to the vibrating trance of the mantra.
The Bhutanese say that there are eighty-four thousand meanings to this mantra and every one a door to happiness. They believe compassion arise spontaneously as we free ourselves of delusion – Om removes the delusion of prides, Ma jealousy, Ni negative desire, Pad ignorance, Me greed and Hung hatred. The tantric master Padmasambhava, known to the Bhutanese as Guru Rinpoche, taught the practice of compassion and the magic of tantric transformation as the path to enlightenment.
Landscape is sacred to the Bhutanese. Spirits dwell on the earth and trees, in water and sky – the source of life and wealth. To anger these spirits with pollution and defilement brings suffering. All life is sacred, interdependent and guarded by these protective deities.
Taktsang is built over a cave where – it is said Guru Rinpoche and his consort, Yeshe Tsogyel arrived on the back of a flying tigress. Tsogyel – a mystic, ascetic, poet and the most famous of Tibet’s enlightened women, is a female emanation of the Buddha. She is a dakini, magic sky walker and Great Mother.
But I have no sky dancing dakini or flying tigress to ride. My pretty guide has disappeared and I climb the trail to Taktsang alone, one step, one breath at a time. The path becomes steeper and the trees are heavy with moss. Up ahead I see a man in a cowboy hat with his back to me hunched over the trail with a leafy branch in his hand and a long heavy knife sticking out from his belt.
Kuzuzangpo La! I call out to greet him, letting him know I’m coming.
He turns his head, smiles and replies Kuzuzangpo! He’s sweeping a huge beetle, half the size of my fist, off the trail and out of harm’s way. “Have you seen a girl go by?” I ask, recognizing him as Tse Tse, a guide who works for a friend in Thimphu.
“No one’s gone by for sometime,” he answers and goes back to gently sweeping the beetle.
Most Bhutanese will not kill insects. A cockroach found in the house is patiently escorted outside. Guns are banned, hunting and fishing forbidden. But the Bhutanese are not a passive, cowering people. They are fun loving, bawdy, good humoured and fearlessly generous – well-known in the private schools of India as the strongest and most aggressive athletes, good team players; but killing for sport or intentionally taking life is beyond most people in the Dragon Kingdom where all beings are seen as sacred.
I first experienced the Bhutanese in 1974 when the Dalai Lama was about to give his first Kalachakra teaching at Bodh Gaya, India. The Bhutanese began arriving in their colourful kiras and ghos, laughing, chewing doma (betel nut), singing, dancing and drinking. Some of my Tibetan friends were put off and said the Bhutanese were wild and crazy. But there were the views of Tibetans without Tibet; most of them were in exile.
Bhutanese were happy and innocent, confident and secure in their culture and kingdom. They instinctively believed in the truth of the dharma, based on Buddha’s precept that most suffering is unnecessary. The greatest gift to a living being is a precious human body. Wasting this rebirth with unnecessary suffering would be a great sin. So be generous, throw parties, and have fun!
After 18 years, I visited Bhutan and experienced the source of their joyful, carefree confidence. Bhutan’s patron saint is Drukpa Kinley, a 15th century ‘divine madman’ who taught the dharma with wine, women and song – mocking clergy and noblemen alike and almost everyone who thought too much of themselves. Tantric Buddhism doesn’t deny desire and suffering, but accepts them as manifestations of mind and aspects of reality that can be transformed into enlightenment.
By thirty, Tsogyel had performed miracles and raised the dead; suffered assaults, was tormented, and accused of being a whore. She had spent three years meditating in high frozen wastes, wearing only cotton, then going by naked and coming close to death. She had mastered both physical and mystic yoga, perfected her healing arts and was attacked for being a witch. Walking across the Himalayas she was robbed and raped by seven bandits. They became her disciples when she sang them a song and initiated them into mahamudra, the insight of emptiness and wisdom, mind with no object, pleasure without lust. Tsogyel had transformed all into awareness and let whatever happened be the path to enlightenment.
I stand on the wall of the temple’s stone terrace, looking straight down a thousand metres to the valley floor. Gazing at the patterns of tidy villages marked with shrines and prayer flags, I raise my eyes to the sun sinking behind forested mountains and imagine that this is what Tsogyel and Guru saw 1200 years ago.
Excerpts from John Wehrheim’s book ‘BHUTAN: Hidden Land of Happiness’ to be published by Serindia.