Dialogue
Paradise and the White Sky
Emmanuel/Adobe Stock Photo
By Jordan L. Borgman
In 1962, on the high slopes of earth’s third-tallest mountain, Kangchenjunga, a Tibetan lama named Tulshuk Lingpa attempted to open a crack in the world. It had been 11 years since the Chinese takeover of Tibet, three since the Dalai Lama had spirited himself away to India, and nearly a decade since Tulshuk Lingpa—whose name, roughly translated, means “crazy treasure-revealer”—had started having visions of the way to Beyul Demoshong. This was one of the paradisiacal hidden valleys that, in the words of author Thomas Shor, “can be opened only at a time of the most dire need, when cataclysm racks the earth and there is nowhere else to run.”1
Lama Tulshuk Lingpa arrived at Kangchenjunga with some 300 monks and lay followers and a series of divinely revealed instructions. Across the dizzying dreamscape of the glaciers, Tulshuk Lingpa and a dozen select companions went ahead to open Beyul Demoshong. Glittering lights beckoned them forward: there, on the heights of the ice, they felt a warm breeze scented with saffron. Beyond the glacier there was green and warmth and rainbows and the gyaling music of the monasteries. The group turned from heat and paradise to gather the remaining followers, and then the crack in the world opened and out came the avalanche, and Tulshuk Lingpa and his companions were vanished into snow.
Sometime during the eighth century, the great Vajra master Padmasambhāva—also known as Guru Rinpoche—consecrated and closed the world in 108 places scattered across the Himalaya. Padmasambhāva is widely credited for spreading Buddhism in Tibet, and his proselytizing efforts included subduing local indigenous deities and reforming them, sometimes forcefully, into guardians of Buddhism. Yet in spite of these efforts, Padmasambhāva foresaw calamity in Buddhism’s future:
The time will come for Tibet when the temples will be destroyed, the laws will no longer be respected, and the servants will become masters. These will be times of terrible calamity, when people will sacrifice their own animals, drink blood and eat flesh of their own fathers. The followers of Buddha will suffer great hardship, and the reign of peace will be at an end, while hatred and disorder will dominate everywhere. These signs will indicate that the time has come to escape to one of the hidden lands.2
These hidden lands were said to be valleys of eternal paradise whose physical beauty were matched only by the bliss of all who resided there—and it was to these shelters, a network puckering some of the most inaccessible terrain on Earth, to which Buddhists were to flee. To ensure that the valleys remained safe, Padmasambhāva decreed that entering the hidden lands at the wrong time, or with a less-than-pure heart, would result in a horrifying death.
He followed up by hiding the secret to finding and opening the secret valleys in a scavenger hunt across the natural landscape of the Himalaya, including in rivers, rocks, the sky, trees, caves—and, most importantly, in the minds of the reincarnations of his first 25 Tibetan disciples. These lamas would be known as tertöns, or treasure-revealers. The “lingpa,” in Tulshuk Lingpa’s name, simply refers to an exceptionally realized tertön, a name that he was given while still a boy monk at the Domang Monastery in eastern Tibet. These places, these cracks in the soul of the world, Padmasambhāva called beyuls. It would be the calling of certain Buddhist monastics to guide the faithful to these beyuls, from calamity to paradise. In other words, it was up to the tertön monks to help their followers home just as, it seemed, home was forever lost.
Skellig Michael, home to the ruined remains of a Christian monastery in Ireland and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. MNStudio/Adobe Stock
Around the same time that Padma- Sambhāva was creating his beyuls, another group of monks was touching another edge of the world. These monks were Christian, not Buddhist, and they were building a monastery on a small, craggy island that jutted into the waters of the dead. Skellig Michael (Sceilg Mhichíl in Irish) strains into the Atlantic off the western coast of what is now known as County Kerry in Ireland. When these Irish monks were first building their monastery on the island, Skellig Michael was quite literally the westernmost limit of known Christiandom, and pre-Christian Irish lore placed Skellig Michael as the seat of Donn, the Lord of the Dead, and the border to the Otherworld.3
Lashed by rain and fog, accessible by boat only on the clearest of days during a few fleeting months of the year (but somehow still prone to Viking raids), Skellig Michael—the Lord of the Dead crowned with thousands of birds, including puffins, gannets, gulls, and fulmars—was and remains far kinder to its avian inhabitants than its human ones. The island has few horizontal surfaces and precious little soil for crops, yet here they were, these monks, building a monastery that was essentially a deathtrap.
These monks were so-called green martyrs, setting out in the spirit of Saint Brendan, with no expectation of return.4 Their decision was borne of a peculiar spiritual crisis. In 312 CE, the Roman emperor Constantine had a vision during the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and converted to Christianity, which had—until that point—been viewed by many Romans a fringe religion of death-seeking fanatics. Constantine’s conversion also brought to an end the state-sponsored violence against Christianity that had defined the religion since its very inception when Jesus was executed on the cross.
The emperor’s conversion brought celebration, but with the regular persecution that defined Christianity and whose threat informed the daily lives of its adherents now suddenly lifted, the religion was adrift. During its infant three centuries, veneration of those martyrs executed with spectacular gore on the sands of the Roman games arenas, along with frequent retellings of martyr narratives, had served as a cornerstone to the faith. And it so enflamed the pious that annoyed Roman bureaucrats occasionally outright refused to order the deaths of Christians eager for glorious martyrdom; at the end of his patience, the second-century proconsul Arrius Antoninus stymied the efforts of would-be martyrs by saying, “You miserable wretches, if you want to die, you have cliffs to leap from and ropes to hang by.”5 With Christianity’s abrupt installation as the state religion, martyrdom was off the table entirely. What was Christianity without its martyrs?
This sense of unmoored purpose was felt especially strongly in Ireland, which had been Christianized in the fifth century with almost no bloodshed. The Romans, at least, had the glories of their past martyrs to look toward—but Celtic Ireland had nothing, and Christian doctrine prevented suicide. How could one give one’s life for the faith when there was no one interested in taking it?
Responding to this existential agony, early Irish monastics invented two other types of martyrdom to hold up against the bloody “red martyrdom” of persecution.
Responding to this existential agony, early Irish monastics invented two other types of martyrdom to hold up against the bloody “red martyrdom” of persecution. There would be “white martyrdom,” where voyager monks sailed into the “white sky” of morning—never to return—to spread the Gospel of Christ, and “green martyrdom,” where believers would exile themselves to those distant “green” places far from human civilization, to live lonely, ascetic lives in the tradition of the desert fathers of Egypt. In both cases, these were martyrdoms that involved excruciating life sentences rather than blood-filled executions. With unexpected poignancy, the Brewer’s Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable defines such a martyrdom as “The renunciation by the early Irish monks of everything they loved for God. The most cruel relinquishing possible was that of their homeland.”6
The monks were rowing into the waters of the Otherworld because they had offered the most painful sacrifice they could: home.
In spite of the obvious differences—temperate island versus landlocked mountain extremis—and their separation by great swaths of land with different empires, history, and culture, Ireland and Tibet fall across curious parallels. Buddhism and Christianity swept into Tibet and Ireland, respectively, and commingled with indigenous, highly organized animist religions—Bon in Tibet, which is still practiced today, and the more obscure Druid practices in Ireland and across the Celtic world. Both Ireland and Tibet languished across relatively far-flung areas, secluded by geography for hundreds of years from the graspings of empire.
This allowed syncretic, highly distinct versions of Christianity and Buddhism to bloom in each place, since they were separated by hardship and language—and quite possibly preference—from the increasingly cohesive, centralized interpretations of each religion. In Tibet, this localized, distinct variant of Buddhism has continued to develop to the present day as the highly systematized and influential Vajrayana school of Buddhism. The syncretic early Irish church, however, was largely diluted by Norman and later British colonialism, even if a few distinct quirks continue to characterize Irish Catholicism today.
While not all tertöns remain monks for life, both the beyuls of the Himalaya and the monastery of Skellig Michael are ontologically linked to monasticism: no monks would have meant no hidden valleys or island monastery. Both, too, are inseparable from the religions that gave rise to them. Both are also mapped onto the spiritual geographies of pre-Christian and pre-Buddhist traditions.
While not all tertöns remain monks for life, both the beyuls of the Himalaya and the monastery of Skellig Michael are ontologically linked to monasticism: no monks would have meant no hidden valleys or island monastery.
Anthropologist Davide Torri, in his chapter “Notes Towards a Theory of Landscape: From the Animist Landscape to the Buddhist Beyul,” has demonstrated how much of the Buddhist Himalaya is laid directly onto pre-Buddhist sacred elements, in ways that range from generative to tense. He writes that “taming . . . the wild, reluctant and riotous local deities to Buddhism” certainly altered the landscape, but in ways that were far more nuanced than replacement, such that “transformation is woven into an ancestral, unchanging structure: the old power-places are not erased but given a new meaning and purpose.”7 Similarly, Skellig Michael already commanded respect in Celtic lore as a gate to the Otherworld and burial site of would-be invading marauder Donn, who after being drowned with Druid magic returned to the iron waters as Ireland’s immortal protector and Lord of the Dead.
However, sociologist Corey Lee Wrenn has suggested that Skellig Michael’s close-knit association with animism led to its abandonment in the thirteenth century, with Ireland’s Norman colonizers looking askance at the many pre-Christian beliefs infusing the space, especially the complete indifference of the early Irish to distinguishing between humans and nonhuman animals.8
Tulshuk Lingpa may or may not have located Beyul Demoshong in 1962, but he did not succeed in opening it. The beyul remains closed and unmapped. There are 107 other beyuls, however, many of which are not only known but house entire villages. Some can even be reached by car. The landscape is described as magical and mystical, and suddenly a beyul is there.
Shangri-La, the ageless paradise of James Hilton’s 1933 utopian novel Lost Horizon, was inspired by the idea of the beyuls: it is a place that may or may not exist, that may or may not be found. The difference between Shangri-La and the beyuls, however, is that the beyuls are not only spiritually present, they are tangible, physical facts of the landscape. Some savvy ecologists have even made use of an area’s sacred beyul status to encourage conservation efforts. In one of Padmasambhāva’s more surprising twists, some of the hidden valleys are, in fact, common knowledge.
The difference between Shangri-La and the beyuls, however, is that the beyuls are not only spiritually present, they are tangible, physical facts of the landscape.
Even those beyuls outside of the realm of the quotidian seem to be firmly based in physical presence. The beyul of Pemako, located behind a waterfall of unearthly height in the Tsangpo Gorge—the planet’s deepest—was derided in 1924 by a Royal Geographic Society finding expedition as a “romance of geography.” But lo and behold, in 1998, historian and explorer (and, perhaps most saliently, long-time Kathmandu beatnik) Ian Baker found the beyul on a National Geographic Society–funded expedition. Tellingly, Baker learned about the waterfall from locals who hunted in the area; they needed no assurance from an American that their beyul existed.
There is the beyul that can be reached with a decent four-wheel drive vehicle—but then there is the beyul whose access, as Tulshuk Lingpa was warned, is “akin to opening a crack in the very fabric of reality and passing into another world, a world from which one could never return.”9 Tibetan lamas explain this by noting that there are three levels to any given beyul: a prosaic external level; an internal one where the seeker’s discovery of a tangible paradise matches their finding of a spiritual one; and an esoteric secret level, accessible by only the most attained of searchers, where the boundary between the valley and the self is collapsed entirely.
Similarly, to reach the physical threshold of the Otherworld at Skellig Michael is not the same thing as having the wisdom—or foolhardiness—to cross it. One must brave the seas and resign oneself to nausea to travel by boat to the monastery at Skellig Michael, though plenty of visitors do it.10 Both the beyuls and Skellig Michael exist in brooding liminality; a layperson can set foot on their lands, but only a monk has access to the full breadth of the reality. One can walk into a beyul, but not necessarily open it. To strain for heaven at the high south peak of an Irish monastic island is not the same as touching it.
Because the success of opening the beyul is based on faith, the followers of Tulshuk Lingpa were required to sacrifice everything, not least any notions of return. Gone were possessions, houses, even the hope of return that would come with crops planted for the following season. Followers left these homes on the edge of destruction—by the Chinese, by the nuclear threats of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by a world and culture under siege—for the true home of the beyul.
The Irish Christian monks who sailed to Skellig Michael did the precise opposite. They gave up home and human companionship (except for the not-insignificant company of a dozen brothers in the faith clinging to a mist-drenched rock in a grey sea) for a hermitage at the edge of the world. Both sets of monks were moving to para-homes: for the Tibetan tertöns, these were the true homes of paradise and true homes of the spirit, physical embodiments of safety in a shifting landscape, while for the Irish monks, Skellig Michael was the physical deprivation of home and creature comforts that allowed for spiritual sacrifice—and thus for transcendence. In both cases, these were extreme places that called for extreme faith.
Where do we find home? What does it mean to give it up, and to find it again? What does it mean to set out to the sea or to the snow, to look up, up, up—to the peaks of the Himalaya, to heaven, to the paradise beyond the white sky of morning?
Tsum Valley, Nepal. Courtesy Jordan Borgman
Tsum Valley, Nepal. Courtesy Jordan Borgman
Tsum Valley, Nepal. Courtesy Jordan Borgman
Tsum Valley, Nepal. Courtesy Jordan Borgman
Notes:
- Thomas K. Shor, A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama’s Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality (Penguin Books, 2011), xiii.
- Giacomella Orofino, “The Tibetan Myth of the Hidden Valley in the Visionary Geography of Nepal,” East and West 41, no. 1/4 (December 1991):240.
- Corey Lee Wrenn, “Beehives on the Border: Liminal Humans and Other Animals at Skellig Michael,” Irish Journal of Sociology 29, no. 2 (August 2021):144–45.
- St. Brendan was one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland and one of the country’s earliest monastics, who sailed with a motley crew of other monks in a cow-skin boat to find the Garden of Eden.
- Gervase Phillips, “The Violent Birth of ‘Martyrdom’—How the Ancient Concept Informs Modern Religious Violence,” The Conversation, July 18, 2017, theconversation.com.
- Seán McMahon and Jo O’Donoghue, “White Martyrdom,” in Brewer’s Dictionary of Irish Phrase & Fable (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004), 849.
- Davide Torri, Landscape, Ritual and Identity among the Hyolmo of Nepal (Routledge, 2020), 47–49.
- Wrenn, “Beehives on the Border,” 140.
- Thomas K. Shor, “A Crack in the World,” Parabola 34, no. 1 (2009):94.
- Tourist visits to the island swelled to far above the 11,000 per year cap after its appearance in two Star Wars movies, The Force Awakens (2015) and The Last Jedi (2017), prompting UNESCO to threaten to put the site on its list of world heritage sites in danger. Heritage protection groups warn that too many visitors will have a detrimental impact on the monastic remains and on the world-famous bird population.
Jordan L. Borgman is a second-year MDiv student at HDS focusing on comparative religion and sacred landscapes. She is originally from Bangor, Maine.
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