The Rakshasa Land

Children who hear the stories of Guru Rinpoche often ask a simple question at the end. Where did he go?

The traditional accounts give an answer that sounds like a fairy tale: south-west, across the sea, to the land of the rakshasas. Yet the old texts linger less on where he went than on something he is remembered as saying before he went. He would not really be gone.

The land in the south-west

Guru Rinpoche, the "Precious Teacher" Padmasambhava, is the eighth-century master Tibetans remember for helping to bring the Buddha's teaching to their country. The tradition says that after many years there, he told them his work among them in that body was done.

In The Wish-Fulfilling Tree, a treasure text revealed by Chokgyur Lingpa in the nineteenth century, he recalls a prophecy of the Buddha: one day the rakshasas would pour out of the south-west. A treasure text, or terma, is a teaching the tradition says he hid, to be found by a later master. So, the account says, he had to go and tame them.

Rakshasas are fierce beings of old Indian and Tibetan tales, rather like the ogres of other people's stories. Rigpa Wiki places their land, Ngayab Ling, called Chamara in Sanskrit, on one of the small continents that the old Buddhist picture of the world sets beside our own, to its south-west.

In that picture they are a danger to the human world, like a storm gathering far away. The retellings say little more about them. They tell instead that he calmed them and made his home there, on the Copper-Coloured Mountain. That mountain has its own story on this site, "The Copper-Coloured Mountain."

A prayer for afterwards

Long before the day he left, the tradition says, his disciples were already thinking about afterwards. The Prayer in Seven Chapters, or Le'u Dünma, a treasure revealed in the fourteenth century by Tulku Zangpo Drakpa, opens at Samye, Tibet's first monastery, in the year 766.

Five disciples gathered around him there, it says, among them King Trisong Detsen, his son the prince Mutri Tsenpo, and the lady Yeshe Tsogyal. They asked for a prayer short enough for ordinary people to say morning and evening, for themselves and for all who would come later.

The king asked for a prayer for himself and for people of the future who had devotion. Yeshe Tsogyal, his closest disciple, asked for something more tender still.

Let it be a prayer so strong, she said, that even after he had gone back to the realm of the dakinis, the sky-dancers who embody awakened wisdom, he would come to any Tibetan who said it with devotion, wherever they might be.

The first chapter answered them all, and each of the five was given a chapter of their own. The seventh, as we will see, came at the very end.

At the pass

Then came the leaving. The accounts say a great crowd walked with him to the Gungthang pass in Mangyul, on Tibet's border with Nepal. The pilgrimage guide Nekhor adds that tents were pitched and he went on teaching for three more days. Rigpa Wiki says he gave final teachings to each of them.

The last chapter of the Le'u Dünma keeps one of these farewells. King Trisong Detsen had died. His son the prince bowed to the ground, held the edge of the Guru's robe and wept. Who will we turn to, he asked, when hard times come? Then, the text says, grief overcame him and he fainted.

Guru Rinpoche revived him and gently laid the prince's head in his lap. When he spoke, his first words were about coming, not going. "Still I shall come for the benefit of Tibet," he says in the Rigpa Translations version, and to those with devotion he would appear in person.

Verse after verse, he asks the prince not to despair. They will meet again and again, he says, in this life and beyond it. He will keep the prince's family and people in his care.

What he left behind

The Wish-Fulfilling Tree tells the moment differently. There, the prince's sadness lifts when Guru Rinpoche explains what he will leave: likenesses to stand for his body, hidden treasures for his speech, and the realisation of his heart entrusted to disciples destined to carry it.

The Testament Prayer, drawn from that book, calls all this his "loving testament" to the Tibetan people (Rigpa Translations). The tradition keeps both tellings side by side.

A prayer for every hour

Before the Le'u Dünma closes, the prince turns to his own people. Say the first chapter whenever you remember him, he tells them, this one in the evening, this one before first light, this at dawn, this in the afternoon, this at midnight and this at midday. And say any of them whenever suffering comes near.

It is a quiet, practical gift. The whole day, from dark to dark, is given a prayer to hold.

Then he went. The Le'u Dünma has him ride away on a ray of sunlight. Rigpa Wiki recalls an older life story in which he turned his face back from the south-west and sent his disciples a ray of loving kindness. The farewell itself is told on this site in "The Hiding of the Treasures."

No coming and no going

Other treasure texts carry the same promise in other words, and the day they name most often is the tenth of each lunar month. In Jigme Lingpa's prayer for the tenth day, Guru Rinpoche says he will come to Tibet on every tenth day. How that day is kept is told in "Why the Tenth Day Belongs to Guru Rinpoche."

The most striking words come from a short treasure revealed by Ratna Lingpa, The Invocation of Uddiyana on the Tenth Day. In it he says that after he has gone to the land of the rakshasas, he will return on the tenth day of every month. Then he says something gentler, and deeper.

In truth, he says, for him there is "no traveling and no remaining" (Samye Translations). People think of him as living in the rakshasa land, and in one sense he does. Yet because his compassion never breaks off, he is beside everyone who has faith in him.

He even says what a meeting is. Kindness rising in the mind, compassion suddenly welling up, remembering him for a split second: that too, he says, is meeting him. Earlier in the same text he asks only to be remembered for an instant, even in the middle of eating, drinking and going about the day.

How to hear it

These are words the tradition places in his mouth, and many people treasure them as a promise of presence, of someone who answers when called. Himalayan Art Resources, describing paintings of the mountain, puts the belief plainly: he still lives there, and makes himself available to those devoted to him. This page passes all of it on as the tradition's words, not as a promise of any particular result.

Historians look from another side. Jacob Dalton, writing for the Treasury of Lives, notes how little is known of Padmasambhava as a person of history, and how richly his legend grew over the centuries. The tradition dates his leaving to 864, long after King Trisong Detsen's reign. Even the prince's name varies: Rigpa Wiki calls the young king at the pass Mutik Tsenpo.

None of this changes the simple thing the farewell stories share. They are about a teacher who, at the very moment of leaving, spoke mostly about coming back.