Source Text
‘Don’t listen to anybody. Decide by yourself and practice madness. Develop courage for the benefit of all sentient beings. Then you will automatically be free from the knot of attachment. Then you will continually have the confidence of fearlessness and you can then try to open the Great Door of the Hidden Place.’ ~from Tulshuk Lingpa’s Guidebook to the Hidden Land
‘Don’t listen to anybody. Decide by yourself and practise madness. Develop courage for the benefit of all sentient beings. Then you will automatically be free from the knot of attachment. Then you will continually have the confidence of fearlessness and you can then try to open the Great Door of the Hidden Place.’ —Tulshuk Lingpa, from his Guidebook to the Hidden Land
CHAPTER ONE A Crack in the World
‘How can her journey into the mountains make me question my sense of reality?’ I asked Tinley. He laughed. ‘It’s better she tells you herself,’ he said. ‘But—’ ‘Trust me,’ Tinley said, looking up from the powder in his mortar and pestle, which was as blue as the empty Tibetan sky. He looked me in the eye: ‘I tell you—it will stretch your sense of what’s possible. You’ll think she’s spun the tale in her head. But it’s entirely true.’
She walked into the room dressed in her nun’s robes. One hand was working the beads of her mala, a Tibetan rosary, and the other she ran across the stubble of her shaved head and smiled when she saw me. I had been away from Sikkim and hadn’t seen her in almost a year. She said something in Tibetan and Tinley interpreted: ‘She said that since you are meeting again after such a long time, it means you still have karma together. Otherwise you wouldn’t be meeting again.’ ‘It must be that story,’ I said, laughing. ‘It is a story that has changed many people’s fates,’ Tinley said, with an enigmatic twinkle in his eye. ‘We’ll see what happens to you.’
Even as a child she had heard that there was a place called Beyul Demoshong, a hidden valley in Sikkim she described as a heaven you enter through a cave, a place where you would live forever.
‘Why do you think it is so peaceful here in Sikkim and there is so much happiness?’ she asked, her eyes clear and penetrating. ‘It is because we are living so close to Mount Kanchenjunga.’
CHAPTER TWO Into the Rabbit Hole
‘Only if you are willing to give up everything and leave forever,’ she had told me, ‘only then can you go to the beyul.’ Dorje Wangmo left her native Bhutan and never returned. She gladly gave up not only her possessions but was quite willing to say goodbye to everyone she had ever known, so infinitely greater was the place to which she was going.
Terma remains hidden from the world until time itself ripens, until a particular terton takes incarnation and ‘opens’ it.
AI Summary
A Step Away From Paradise by Thomas Shor presents key insights from the Tibetan Buddhism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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