Studying Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö : i

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 Tashiding Monastery: A sacred Guru Rimpoche blessed –II

Studying Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö :  i

 Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö in Gangtok (approx. 1959)

As we entered Tashiding, different thoughts were visiting me. I was talking to myself and was wondering about the early scenario that might have occurred out there. After the newly constructed road ended, we suddenly walked for a few minutes when we reached the monastery gate. The old monastery was the first that we came across, and a few steps ahead, the giant-looking Tashiding monastery was standing in front of us. I had peace of mind when I was at the monastery premises. I looked at those old relics inside the monastery but was not allowed to click, nevertheless I inquired about the chorten of the learned Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö but nothing pleasing to me happened.

I was told by Volker Dencks, who first introduced me to Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö’s visit to Sikkim. Dencks wanted information about him, who passed away in Sikkim in 1959. He was looking for information on Jamyang Khyentse’s last years in Sikkim since very little is known about it to the Western world. I had never before heard about the person, and to my little understanding, through an exchange of emails, Dencks was informing me about the great Tibetan teacher. He said Jamyang Khyentse was supposed to be an incarnation of Lhatsun Namkha Jikme and destined to open the secret hidden land - Demojong- at Tashi Ding. He said that he could not do so because the road built to China (Dencks believes this is the Nathula Pass) impaired the access. These words I repeated more than once, and I think I have heard about similar stories of some hidden secret land elsewhere too, but I was a bit confused about the Tashiding and Nathula connections; these places are at different distances…one is on the eastern side, and other in western side!

I have read on one of the websites about the story of a rock at Tashiding that was supposed to be the door to that mysterious eternal land. The website writes, “The white rock of Tashiding’s name is rough rocks face not twenty paces from where Garpa (the person behind all those laborious stone carving around Tashiding Monastery) has spent the last half-century carving stones. In it, one can make out the faint outline of a doorway. It is said this is a doorway to the kingdom of Shambhala, and at least one monk is known to have passed through that door in a trance and to have returned clutching the flowering branches of a plant that is reputed to grow in that hidden kingdom and nowhere else. The story goes that he then went to the river to wash himself. He put the branches down. The river rose and swept them away.”

Nothing more is known about the lama, but such stories do make a presence of the mystical land the people called Shambhala. As far as my little knowledge goes, I read somewhere that it was in the late 50s. A few lamas tried to search for that hidden secret land of Shambhala in Yoksom, but they died on the very spot. It is said that the hidden door of the Shangrila shall only open if three lamas from three directions meet. That was the last time someone tried to open the secret door of that spiritual heaven. This information is less told or heard by the people of Sikkim.

Volker Dencks runs a blog on Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö that gives information about the person. The blogger writes, “Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö was most important in spreading Tibetan Buddhist teachings over the Western hemisphere. At that time in Tibet, no other master received respect from followers of all traditions. Since he, following in the footsteps of his predecessor Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, had gathered, studied, practiced, and taught all the different lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, everyone claimed him as a great teacher of their very own tradition.”

Wikipedia adds, “Behind the temple is a stupa cluster. It was in Tashiding that the cremation of Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö was performed and that a stupa was built by his own disciples, including Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, to house his relics. It was later gold-leafed by Orgyen Tobgyal Rinpoche in the 1990s.”(PIC: Remembering The Masters/Wikipedia)