Towering mountain clad in virgin forests,
Your peak, majestic in its snowy turban,
stretches to the skies,
Your chest is draped with silvery scarves of mist:
How happy the carefree yogins who let go
of this life's affairs!

Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the winter of 1983 I completed a lengthy retreat at Asura Cave, my primary hermitage in Nepal. This had been what in Tibetan tradition is called, "lo.sum da.sum shak.sum," which means three years, three months and three days. As that period came to a close, my Lama--Chatral Rinpoche--came to visit. He was pleased with my development [during the retreat I had stayed in the hermitage and saw only the people who supplied me with food, so wasn't distracted by worldly stuff and had really focused on my practice] and told me he thought it best if I went to live in the Snow Mountains of Yolmo [Helambu]. This is an area very near Tibet where the people are all Tibetan ethnics and the language they speak is nearly the same, not at all similar to Nepalese. Rinpoche's eldest daughter, Saraswati, then 18 and a very close friend of mine, was herself in a three year retreat there. I had been to Yolmo before and loved it, though the climate is one of the most severe and the terrain as rugged as you can imagine.
Come spring of 1984 I put all the things that I could carry on my back and took off. Now Yolmo is very high and the mountains are steep with sharp river valleys far below. Most of the villages and hamlets are above 9,000 feet; the diet is Spartan as only potatoes, barley, corn and rather large white radishes grow there. Most people supplement their lives as traders in the winter [A good example could be seen by going to the movie "Himalaya: Rearing of a Chief". It's fantastic and by a French friend of mine] others are semi-nomad herdsmen but everyone keeps fields and some animals.
After staying a few weeks near to Sara's retreat cabin, waiting for the winter weather to break, I took off with a nomad and one Yolmo buddy, to help carry a supply of food. We went way up, two days beyond settlements, to a famous cave at 14,000 feet, called "Yang.dak Chok gi Trak.puk" [the Completely Pure, Supreme Rock Cave]. This is a place that Guru Rinpoche [also called Padmasambhava], the great spiritual master who was so instrumental in transmitting Vajrayana Buddhism to Tibet, stayed while journeying from India in the 8th Century.
The Yolmo people simple call this Drub Phug or Cave of Accomplishment. It is fair-sized, very dry [Yolmo is drenched in rain throughout the summer] and in the center I could stand up easily. There were some hand hewed wooden boards for a bed, a little rustic log/table, a ramshackle door and a stone altar. We covered the floor with bunches of cedar sprigs to make a carpet and my Yolmo pal showed me the best place to collect dripping rain water (the nearest stream was over a mile away). Before leaving, the nomad assured me that he would be back as soon as the grass grew tall enough for his herd to come graze. With sufficient food to last a couple of months I bid my friends good-bye and happily settled in.
The next day rain let up and I got a chance to survey my new home. It was awesome beyond description. A moraine of huge boulders, no trees and an altitude so high you could actually see the sky by looking out and downward! A bit like being on the moon it was transcendent beyond description. How might we speak of states for which there are no words? Imagine the greatest aloneness, expansiveness, pleasure and fear all wound up together. Like being on another planet or jumping out of a plane and just soaring in extreme spaciousness. At the same time, the massive rocks and towering snow peaks--close enough to reach out and touch--provided an overwhelmingly grounded earthiness. The extremes of experience and purity of the elements was just beyond imagination. And accentuating each perception and every moment was the combined intensification of twelve hours of meditation daily and near constantly pouring rain & fog. 
When you say "rain", that doesn't really mean the same thing. This was being inside the cloud with sheets of precipitation like drawn curtains across the window of reality. Cocooned in the cave I rapped all my bedding around me and just sat. Day and night, morning and evening the same. For three or four hours I'd lay down--quite a luxury after having spent five and a half years just sitting up in a 3 x 2 1/2 foot box at Asura. But here, the all encompassing nowness was just way, way beyond anything I had experienced or could describe. It was like a different pressure zone and reality fabric altogether. And each time the rain let up--perhaps once or twice a week--I would journey out, usually climbing higher up the rocks towards the mountain top. About a hundred yards up from Drub Phug was another, smaller cave called "Khandro Sang Phug"--The Dakini's Secret Nook. This is where Guru Rinpoche's consort, Shakya Devi, stayed. It was incredible. The little cave was exactly like a female's internal organs. From the tiny main chamber, which one entered through two lipped boulders, there was a narrow passageway leading up into a womb-like sphere. Trying to write this is weird. The words and the memory are so far from the reality; it was like a magical dream. The actuality was so vibrant, brilliant and naked but the recollection is just a dim light, like a fairy tale.
After about seven weeks, the weather was warming a bit [it's _always_ cold but sometimes it is somewhat less cold] and as the grass over on the meadows was getting taller, I began listening for my nomad friend to return. One day I heard bells and great commotion around mid-day. It began with some goats, sheep and kids herding them [the nomads all have huge families; seven or eight is about the minimum number of children] then a long dark chain of Dzo.mo--the crossbred of a Yak and an ordinary cow which is the main cash crop animal of the herders. But this crew didn't stop at the encampment in the area near Drub Phug; they climbed the high trail above the cave and continued on into the upper pastures about three or four miles beyond. It was funny to see something human again, even if only from a distance. There were no airplanes up there, neither sound nor any sight of human habitation. Several days later, in the late afternoon, the carnival began again and sure enough, it was a large herd coming to the nearby meadows half mile away. I sat and waited.
Early the next morning my nomad friend showed up, but rather than his normal cheery demeanor he was looking very tired and beat. After some small talk and unloading of provisions he'd brought me--with plenty of butter, curds, dried cheese and whey--I asked what was wrong. He didn't answer directly but it was obvious that he was spent beyond any normal state. I inquired about his wife, who had been very pregnant when I had seen her two days before I departed. "Did she have her baby?" I quizzed. "Yes," he said sheepishly. "Is she okay?" I quickly interjected. "What's wrong?"  "Well," he slowly said, "early yesterday morning we started out with all the animals and everyone carrying some of our food, cooking and household stuff. After four hours or so we stopped for a break; my wife went into full labor and began having her baby."  "Was the baby alright?" I interrupted. "Yes, both the baby and my wife are fine. But after she gave birth she had to carry the baby so I was forced to carry both her load and mine the rest of the way here!"
I quickly went with him over to the encampment and there, 24 hours after having given birth, sat his wife, poking up the fire while her new baby boy sat on her lap. She hadn't stopped for a beat but just got right up after giving birth and, like the animals, continued the march and kept up with her chores!"

I had infrequent contact with the nomads. They are a hard working, raw bunch. Surviving mostly on dairy, meat and grain, they are on the move from earliest day break. Everyone in the family has jobs. The kids carry water, herd the goats & sheep, care for the younger children and chop wood. All the males have a long curved knife--called a Kukri--stuck in their belt across their navel. It takes a lot of wood to keep the fire going; each day two milkings of the herd need to be boiled up. And there is churning, drying of the cheese, wrapping up the large chunks of butter in big leaves, etc. The father takes the butter down to the villages to sell and brings back loads of rice and tsampa (roasted, ground barley flour: the main staple food for Tibetans). And as the animals eat all the grass the nomads must keep moving on, following the pasture ever higher as the summer progresses. Sometimes the kids would come by to rap or go out on an adventure with me. But for the most part they were too busy and just left me alone out of respect.

After a couple of weeks there came a man from the village, down near where Rinpoche has his cabin. He brought me some provisions and a letter from my teacher. Chatral Rinpoche had arrive in Yolmo, but he wrote that I was not to come down to see him. Instead, he was planning on coming up to Drub Phug on pilgrimage. There was no further explanation. I was both excited and puzzled. It was strange that such a great old sage--he was 71 at that time--would undertake the extremely difficult journey up to Yang.dak Chok gi Trak.phug. My messenger offered no further insight but left to spend the night over at the nomad encampment.

After about a weeks time I was outside the cave one nice afternoon and noticed a lot of people coming down the mountain path from the pass which leads into the area of the cave. They were still two hours away, but it was not some small group. Early evening some Yolmo villagers I knew arrived and told me that Rinpoche had come, on horseback, and that he had an entourage of about 40 local folks plus a bunch of monks, nuns and lay practitioners. [added note: Pema Lhatso and Angyur were in this party] "What's the story?" I asked. They were too excited to explain in detail, but by the time my Lama had arrived I was able to piece together the facts.

Chatral Rinpoche is the world's greatest vagabond ascetic. Since the time he was about 18, he began traveling around with no home of his own. He continued this constantly until around the time he was 50, when someone gave him a little monastery that he converted into a retreat center. Still to this day--he is about 90 now (2002)--he continues going from place to place, rarely staying anywhere for long. When younger, he would take only the few things that he could carry on his back in a hide sack: a small pot, block of tea, some salt, butter, tsampa and a couple of Tibetan Dharma books. He wore a robe called a "chuba" in Tibetan, kind of like our sheepskin jackets but longer and belted at the waist. This he would wear during the day and use for his "sleeping bag" at night. His sack had a little hole in one corner and he kept a small piece of pipe with him. Each time he stopped, he'd empty out the bag, build a fire then, putting the little pipe in the hole, he'd knead his knapsack in order to use it as a bellows to blow up the fire. His style was terribly austere. He would set aside two days to go begging for provisions in a village. No matter what amount of food he got, he would take off into the mountains and spent a fixed time--perhaps two months--in solitary retreat. If his food didn't last, he'd just do without. He kept up that tradition his entire life. Finally, when he got lots of people wanting to learn from him, he began establishing retreat centers in India, Sikkim, Nepal, and Bhutan. He still moves like the wind, rarely remaining anywhere for long. As a result, Chatral Rinpoche is what you might call the world's foremost authority on pilgrimage and Buddhist sanctuaries. He has not only visited almost every place of importance, but he constantly revisits all these places.

Now there exists in the Tibetan tradition a genre of writing called "ney yig" or sanctuary guides. These give detailed information about power places where great saints have practiced and all the holy sites throughout India, Tibet and the Himalayas. Guru Rinpoche, during the 8th and 9th centuries, went to a huge number of places during his life. His chief disciple, a woman named Yeshe Tsogyal, compiled many ney yig to tell about all the sites so future generations could go to practice there. Chatral Rinpoche had been reading one such ney yig about Yolmo and it told of a cave called Yangleshö. [note: this is a second cave, not the one where Rinpoche has his monastery] This place interested him and he wanted to visit it but no one in Yolmo had ever heard of a cave like the one described. Rinpoche asked everyone but still got nowhere with the search. Finally, one Yolmo man, the father of a monk who is a student of Chatral Rinpoche, spoke about the Yangleshö cave with many of the nomad herdsmen. One old nomad, 85 years old, said that he knew this cave. Everyone thought that he was just fibbing but they urged him to go and talk with Rinpoche. The next morning he showed up at Rinpoche's cabin with a pail of yogurt, some cheese and a big chunk of butter. He and Rinpoche really hit it off. They went over the ney yig and all the items in it corresponded with the old nomad's story. There was a huge grotto near a river, a large white stone throne inside, some Tibetan syllables were present in the cave wall and it was not too far from Yang.dak Chok gi Trak.phug. The nomad said that when he was 15 years old, he had been herding the family sheep and some of them wandered across the river and got lost. He followed them and found them in this large cave, just like the one described. When Rinpoche asked if he could find it again (it had been 70 years earlier that he was there!) he said that for sure he could.
As a result of this, Chatral Rinpoche (on horseback), accompanied by the old nomad, 40 villagers and lots of his disciples showed up at the cave that I was staying at. Rinpoche and I stayed in the cave and all the other people pitched tents or found smaller caves in the area for their accommodation. Early the next day Rinpoche sent off a task force of about 30 guys and the old nomad to build a bridge across the river then scout out the new Yangleshö cave. The rest of us spent the day doing puja and various auspicious practices. The entire affair was just becoming increasingly magical and surreal.
That night the crew returned. Their eyes were as big as saucers and everyone was trying to talk at the same time. It was something like seeing a bunch of grown guys all zonked out of their gourd on psychedelics. They had built the bridge and then journeyed to the place where the cave was supposed to be. Sure enough, it was there. But everything they were saying was like people who had just returned from an alien planet. Yes, there was a flowering tree, but the blossoms were huge--they brought some--about the size of basketballs. The cavern was enormous, they said, it could hold perhaps 300 people. They also brought some of the leaves which nomads use to wrap butter. Normally they were about a foot across (having a single stem from which each single leaf grows) but the ones that they brought back were easily the size of umbrellas! And sure enough there was a tall throne of white stone and Tibetan characters which had emerged out of the rock (actually Om, Ah and Hung, three syllables signifying enlightened body, speech and mind). But the most amazing thing was to see how these guys had been transformed. Here they had just trudged for eight hours--four each way--done hours of back-breaking log work, and they were more energized than young kids scrambling around. Rinpoche decided that everyone would go there together the following morning.
Suffice it to say that this day was one that I will never, ever forget. Even trying to straight-jacket it into language is a ridiculously ignorant exercise in futility. Like a magical mystery tour everyone walked to the cave (the terrain was too steep for Rinpoche to go on horseback) and spent the night chanting and listening to stories around campfires at the entrance to the grotto. It was even much more awesome than any verbal description. The views--it was way up a cliff side, on a steep ledge overlooking the river and with numerous soaring snow mountains standing sentry. Like being on another planet, how do you talk about it. It wasn't a journey in time, but like falling off the edge of temporal reality into a realm of pure present wakefulness. Each moment was so sharp and lucid, nothing was sticking or obstructing the free-flowing nakedness. Just too clear, like seeing changing scenes of beautiful places without all the overlay of heavy thought clogging up the immediacy of the experience.
The next day everyone returned and spent two nights again at Drub Phug. There were pilgrimages to the other nearby sanctuaries--like one gem of a little turquoise dakini lake and another tiny cave high up the mountain--then, as if the entire trip had been a dream, Rinpoche and everyone left. Once again I was faced with the aloneness of that unending spaciousness. And where would I ever find anyone who could even begin to believe that such vivid, dream-like memories had actually occurred?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; as though there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, all realities fall apart."
Eugène Ionesco (1912-94) "Notes and Counter-Notes"