The Yarlung Valley

South of the great Tsangpo river, a smaller river comes down out of the mountains through a broad valley of fields and willows. This is Yarlung. Tibetans have long called it the cradle of their civilization: the place where, the old stories say, the first king came down from the sky and the first house was built.

The valley holds many sacred places, but three are counted as its great power places: Yumbu Lagang, the ancient palace; Tradruk, one of Tibet's first temples; and Sheldrak, the Crystal Rock, a crag of caves where Guru Rinpoche is said to have meditated. This story walks gently through all three, as the tradition remembers them.

A king from the sky

The tellings of Tibet's beginning differ. One of the oldest, in manuscripts found at Dunhuang, a cave library on the Silk Road, says the first king was a god of the sky. Seeing the beauty of the land below, he came down onto the sacred mountain Yarlha Shampo, at the head of the valley.

A pilgrim guide by the scholar Gyurme Dorje, summarized on Wikipedia and on Nekhor, an online guide to Guru Rinpoche's sacred places, sets the descent on a smaller hill, Lhabab Ri, the Hill of Divine Descent, at the foot of the Sheldrak crags. There, it says, his sky-cord touched the earth: a rope that the old Bön religion of Tibet held to join heaven and earth.

Either way, the story ends the same. Herders met a stranger whose speech they could not understand. When they asked where he came from, he pointed to the sky. So they lifted him onto their necks and shoulders and made him their king: Nyatri Tsenpo, the Neck-Enthroned King.

Buddhist histories tell it differently again. In them he is an exiled prince from India, in some versions of the Buddha's own Shakya clan. Tradition dates the start of his reign to 127 BCE, the first year of the Tibetan calendar.

The first house

Seeing that people lived in caves, the account goes on, the king built a house. It is Yumbu Lagang, remembered as the first building in Tibet: a tall, narrow palace on a ridge above the valley, near Zorthang, which tradition calls the largest field in Tibet.

Centuries later, in the time of the twenty-eighth king, Lha Thothori Nyentsen, the palace received a strange gift. The tradition says a small golden stupa, a mould for clay offerings and a Buddhist scripture fell from the sky onto its roof. A stupa is a domed shrine for sacred relics. The king could not read the scripture.

Another account says an Indian monk brought these things and asked that they be kept safe. A later telling adds a voice from the sky, promising that in five generations someone would understand them. The king kept them with reverence all the same.

Five generations on, the accounts say, came Songtsen Gampo, the seventh-century king remembered as the first of Tibet's three Dharma Kings, the rulers who welcomed the Dharma, the Buddha's teaching. Yumbu Lagang became his summer palace before he moved his court to Lhasa.

The hawk and the dragon

Songtsen Gampo is remembered for Tradruk too, a temple in the valley about seven kilometres south of the town of Tsetang. Wikipedia calls it the earliest great temple after the Jokhang in Lhasa, adding that some sources make it older still. Rigpa Wiki, a Buddhist reference site, counts it with Samye and the Jokhang among the three most important temples of central Tibet.

Two legends explain it. In one, the land of Tibet was a vast ogress lying on her back, and the king raised temples on her body to hold her still; Tradruk pins her left shoulder. In the other, a lake once filled the site, home to a dragon with five heads. The king, seated in meditation, called a great hawk, which overcame the dragon and drank the lake dry. Tradruk means Hawk and Dragon.

In the next century, under King Trisong Detsen, who invited Guru Rinpoche to Tibet, Tradruk was one of the royal temples. A bell once hung on its verandah, its inscription asking long life for a king of that line.

The white yak of Yarlha Shampo

Guru Rinpoche, Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born master to whom the Seven-Line Prayer is addressed, came into this old royal country in the eighth century, on his way to help build Samye, Tibet's first monastery.

Nekhor quotes a life of the Guru revealed by the twelfth-century treasure revealer Nyangral Nyima Özer, which tells how the mountain god Yarlha Shampo met him. The god rose up as a white yak the size of a mountainside, his breath a blizzard, bringing down lightning and hail.

The account says the Guru subdued him by the gestures of his hands, and the yak became a young boy with white silken braids. The boy offered his life and swore to protect the Dharma. Since then, Nekhor says, Tibetans have called on the mountain as an ally rather than a foe. Wikipedia adds that its god was honoured as the ancestor of the Yarlung kings, and that the peak itself is shaped like a yak.

The Crystal Rock

At the mouth of the valley rises a range of crags called Pema Tsekpa, Heaped Lotuses. High on it are the caves of Sheldrak, the Crystal Rock. The pilgrim guides say Guru Rinpoche's own cave, Sheldrak Drubpuk, faces east, toward the morning.

Gyurme Dorje's guide, as Wikipedia and Nekhor summarize it, calls it his first meditation cave in Tibet, and says that from here the forces of the land were made to swear allegiance to the Dharma.

Nekhor adds its own account of why he came. He chose these caves, it says, to practise Chemchok Heruka, a wrathful form of the primordial buddha, and through that practice blessed the place until it was one with his awakened qualities. Nekhor heads its page on Sheldrak with the words Awakened Quality, as it heads its pages on Samye Chimphu and Lhodrak Kharchu, two more of his great places, with Awakened Speech and Awakened Mind. What such practice involves belongs with a teacher; here it is enough to know that the tradition holds the cave sanctified by his meditation.

Those who stayed

Nekhor says he sent Nyak Jñanakumara, one of his twenty-five close disciples, to practise here and to translate the tantras of that practice, its root scriptures, in the Crystal Cave itself. The first translation, it says, was hidden in the Pema Tsekpa rock.

Yeshe Tsogyal, the Tibetan woman who became his greatest disciple, had a cave of her own, Tsogyal Sangpuk, the Secret Cave, facing north-east. On the Guru's advice, Nekhor says, she and many others went into retreat at Sheldrak, and thirty reached such accomplishment that they were remembered as the thirty tantrikas of Sheldrak. A tantrika is a practitioner of the tantras.

After Guru Rinpoche left Tibet, the same guide says, she stayed here for thirteen months and hid five treasures. A treasure, terma, is a teaching concealed, the tradition says, for people of a later time to find.

The caves went on giving. In the fourteenth century, at a third cave, Pema Shelpuk, which faces west, the treasure revealer Orgyen Lingpa brought out the Pema Kathang, one of the best-loved lives of Guru Rinpoche. His story, and his trouble at Tradruk, are told in "Orgyen Lingpa and the Chronicle of Padma" on this site. Another story here, of the revealer Dorje Lingpa, tells of a treasure found at Tradruk when he was a boy.

The statue that spoke

Tradruk now keeps something from Sheldrak. Wikipedia and Nekhor both say Guru Rinpoche's cave once held a "speaking" statue of him, and that it has since been moved to Tradruk.

The accounts describe it differently. Nekhor says it was made and blessed by Vairotsana, the great translator. Wikipedia's article on Tradruk speaks of a famous talking statue of Padmasambhava at the age of eight. None of the sources I read says when it was moved, or what it is said to have spoken.

In the same upper chapel, Wikipedia says, is a thangka, a sacred scroll painting, embroidered with thousands of pearls and said to be the work of Princess Wencheng, Songtsen Gampo's Chinese queen.

The valley now

Much in Yarlung was damaged in the twentieth century. Wikipedia records that the palace was rebuilt in 1983 and Tradruk reconsecrated in 1988, and the caves above Sheldrak still hold small shrines.

People still come to pray. Wikipedia notes that walking around the Tsechu Bumpa, a stupa near the turning to Sheldrak, usually begins or ends the circuit. Most of those who walk it will never be named in any book, and they do not need to be.

Where a prayer begins

The Seven-Line Prayer begins with a place. Before it says his name, it remembers where he came from, in the north-west of the land of Oddiyana. Places matter in this tradition. They hold memory, the way Yarlung holds the memory of a first king, a first house, and the caves where the Lotus-Born sat.

You do not need to travel to any of them. The prayer can be said wherever you are, and it carries its places with it.