“The campfires glowed, fireflies of the night!”
Nicholas Roerich
At last it’s here, published by Seagull Press. You can get it for a song here.
This book was first published by Pilgrims Books, Varanasi and L.A., 2007. It’s been given a great overhaul for publication by Seagull Press. I’m giving away another free extract, and hope you enjoy these tales and support my work by buying the book and spreading the word… Thank you!
The Time I got Lost looking for Shambhala is the fascinating story of a journey through the Himalaya along the Indo-Tibetan border into the heart of Tibet in Exile. Incredible encounters with oracles, lamas, ex-political prisoners, Tibetan doctors, DJs, nomads, guerilla fighters, painters, poets, spies, missionaries and Himalayan royalty bring the reader into a world of intrigue and, poignantly, to the lost world of Tibet and the hidden world of Shambhala, which lies hidden north of the Himalaya.
Extract from Part Three, Over the Hills:
I could not go wandering through Ladakh looking for campfires with travellers from Kashmir, Tibet, Ladakh, Baltistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan huddled around them, telling their stories under the night sky. Everywhere was under patrol, and the green trucks continued to pour through Leh. Tibetan prophecies predict that Maitreya, the future Buddha, will come after the wars. The Hindu prophecies speak of the end of the Kali Yuga, this age of degeneration, when barbarians will be masters of the banks of the Indus.
Were there still lamas somewhere in Ladakh who climbed the peaks during storms and threw tiny blessed clay horses into the wind to help travellers in distress? This was a custom, when Roerich was in Ladakh. At a time like this, there was all the more need for such acts of compassion. Barbarians were indeed raging along the banks of the Indus, on both sides. Two friends of Dorje's in the S-22 were shot in Dras, on the border with Pakistan, the week after the Drong Club dance. It was at Dras that Roerich found Maitreya carved into the rocks, to bless the pilgrims as they passed. Did he bless the soldiers, I wondered, as they were shot by Pakistani infiltrators, when their amulets had failed them?
Two years before, I had met a monk in Dharamsala from Lamayuru Monastery, which lies on the road to Kargil. He was a monk of the world, and he told me, squinting his eyes at the people on the library steps, that the Indian army had been training Ladakhis as guerrillas since the Sino-Indian war in 1962. I refused to believe it. Yes, he said, and there is an army base beside Lamayuru Monastery, you will see it, when you go there.
Lamayuru monastery had risen out of a lake, according to the legend, when its founder offered chutor, offerings of water, to the spirits of the lake. The lake drained, and the offerings of corn the founder had thrown in appeared, miraculously, in the shape of the swastika, the yung drung in Tibetan, that ancient vedic symbol of power. The yung drung is also one of the symbols of Bon and this site had once been a citadel of Bon, before Lotsawa Rinchen Zangbo brought it into the Buddhist fold in the tenth century. Below the monastery there is an ancient shrine which may have been an old Bon temple with frescos showing Bon priests in blue and black gowns, the ancient colours of the Bon pos. (Today they wear the same burgundy coloured robes like those of the Buddhist monks).
I had spent a day in Lamayuru, some years before the Kargil War, taken in in a snowstorm by two young monks whose rooms were so small I had to bend my whole torso down to enter. They left me to sleep for the afternoon, and I woke up to the sound of snow tapping lightly on the pages of their copy books under the windows that had no glass. As the snowflakes melted, their alphabets blurred over the red lines where they were written.
In the afternoon, they brought me to the kitchens and we sat together on barrels, eating tea and tsampa, and they asked me why I was alone, how I had learned Tibetan, what the airplane that had brought me to their country looked like. Was it green, like the Indian army ones? My Polish friend arrived later that afternoon, wearing a grey woollen hat with a pattern of black swastikas around its rim. He had bought it in the Kullu Valley on his way to Ladakh. What a strange resonance that symbol had, even here in the old citadel of Lamayuru, which had risen out of a swastika of corn. The fact that he taken a lift from Sespol with a German television crew made it even stranger. That symbol had come to represent the brutality of ethnic cleansing in the west, but here it meant nothing of the sort. Most of the village people had not even heard of Hitler. That did not mean they didn't know of war, of course-- I saw the army base on the hill, as the worldly monk in Dharamsala had told me I would. I had laughed at the thought of villagers being trained as guerrillas, and scorned that monk.
Were there still lamas somewhere in Ladakh who climbed the peaks during storms and threw tiny blessed clay horses into the wind to help travellers in distress? This was a custom, when Roerich was in Ladakh. At a time like this, there was all the more need for such acts of compassion. Barbarians were indeed raging along the banks of the Indus, on both sides. Two friends of Dorje's in the S-22 were shot in Dras, on the border with Pakistan, the week after the Drong Club dance. It was at Dras that Roerich found Maitreya carved into the rocks, to bless the pilgrims as they passed. Did he bless the soldiers, I wondered, as they were shot by Pakistani infiltrators, when their amulets had failed them?
Two years before, I had met a monk in Dharamsala from Lamayuru Monastery, which lies on the road to Kargil. He was a monk of the world, and he told me, squinting his eyes at the people on the library steps, that the Indian army had been training Ladakhis as guerrillas since the Sino-Indian war in 1962. I refused to believe it. Yes, he said, and there is an army base beside Lamayuru Monastery, you will see it, when you go there.
Lamayuru monastery had risen out of a lake, according to the legend, when its founder offered chutor, offerings of water, to the spirits of the lake. The lake drained, and the offerings of corn the founder had thrown in appeared, miraculously, in the shape of the swastika, the yung drung in Tibetan, that ancient vedic symbol of power. The yung drung is also one of the symbols of Bon and this site had once been a citadel of Bon, before Lotsawa Rinchen Zangbo brought it into the Buddhist fold in the tenth century. Below the monastery there is an ancient shrine which may have been an old Bon temple with frescos showing Bon priests in blue and black gowns, the ancient colours of the Bon pos. (Today they wear the same burgundy coloured robes like those of the Buddhist monks).
I had spent a day in Lamayuru, some years before the Kargil War, taken in in a snowstorm by two young monks whose rooms were so small I had to bend my whole torso down to enter. They left me to sleep for the afternoon, and I woke up to the sound of snow tapping lightly on the pages of their copy books under the windows that had no glass. As the snowflakes melted, their alphabets blurred over the red lines where they were written.
In the afternoon, they brought me to the kitchens and we sat together on barrels, eating tea and tsampa, and they asked me why I was alone, how I had learned Tibetan, what the airplane that had brought me to their country looked like. Was it green, like the Indian army ones? My Polish friend arrived later that afternoon, wearing a grey woollen hat with a pattern of black swastikas around its rim. He had bought it in the Kullu Valley on his way to Ladakh. What a strange resonance that symbol had, even here in the old citadel of Lamayuru, which had risen out of a swastika of corn. The fact that he taken a lift from Sespol with a German television crew made it even stranger. That symbol had come to represent the brutality of ethnic cleansing in the west, but here it meant nothing of the sort. Most of the village people had not even heard of Hitler. That did not mean they didn't know of war, of course-- I saw the army base on the hill, as the worldly monk in Dharamsala had told me I would. I had laughed at the thought of villagers being trained as guerrillas, and scorned that monk. End of Extract. For more… please buy the book! Here. Thank you! It took years to write this book, living in India, in the states of Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, even during a war! It’s nice to support writers who have not (yet) written bestsellers and this is a unique book, becuase I learned Tibetan to be with the people in the remotest areas of the Himalaya, to collect stories to help preserve the culture that is being eaten alive by the Han Chinese… and of course American culture, as most young Tibetans see the U.S.A. as Shambhala… so buy the book for yourself and your Granny and your children even… here. Enjoy !