1 THE SNOWDANCER A Modern Tibetan Love Story in Three Tantric Parables Rolf Gross Pacific Palisades 2011 2 Table of Contents Richard – Active Compassion 1. Richard meets Asya in Lhasa. Ganden Ling. He persuades her to a hike to the Rongshar Valley 2. They hire a yak and cross the mountains to the Tsangpo River 3. A day of rest at Chung Riwoche Gompa. Asya's dreams, New yaks, The old abbot 4. Tsyögyel and the abbot's tulku. Fording a river. 5. Dingri and the Himalayas. Ali the photographer. The sheep must die. 6. Tsultim Lama takes them into Milarepa's Rongshar Beyul. 7. Drintang. Phurbu Lama from Ojai, CA. Guru Setchu Mystery Play. 8. The Snowdancer. Phurbu holds forth on Dzogchen. Lapchi Gompa. Phurbu disappears 9. They survive a disasterous snowstorm in a cave. Asya's dance. Rescued they reach Kathmandu. Asya – The Unification of Opposites 1. Asya returns to Kathmandu. A house for Asya. The Dharma Bums and an moon ecclipse 2. Christian and his airplane. Dakini Airlines. Asya flies to Pokhara. 3. Flying to Mustang. Making the blind of Lo Mantang see. Drölma. 4. Asya and Drölma in Lo. Lhosar Cham dances. The Dalai Lama disappears 5. Drölma teaches Vajra dances at Nagi Gompa. Richard appears 6. Wangchuk. Planning to go to Pemakö. Drölma and Asya explore Vajrayogini shrines 7. The Pemakö. A mysterious njalorpa. Lake Gondu Dorsem Podrang. Asya gives birth to Leah. Leah - All Perceptions are but Delusions of your Mind 1. At a Fasshingball in Munich Leah meets Fritz Lama. Blind Morby in the fog. 2. Dittramszell with Fritz. The frozen oracle lake. Fritz guesses Leah's potential tulkana status. 3. Kathmandu. Asya confesses Fritz's identity and Leah's conception. Fritz's grand scheme. 4. Leah researches for her doctorate in China. Her female sanity prevails. 5. Fritz and Leah get married in Dietramszell. Leah pregnant 6. Dharamsala. Frank Gehry's last building. Leah faces the effigy of H.H. the 14 th Dalai Lama . 7. Lhasa in turmoil. Leah's inauguration as reincarnation of the 14 th Dalay Lama. Leah's entry in Lhasa. Glossary The book cover shows a thangka of a benevolent two-armed Heruka with his consort, Vajrayogini, in yab- yum, aquired in Kathmandu in 1999. This thangka (Nyingma tradition) is an exceptional depiction of the anuyoga meditational yidam, who normally has four faces and twelve arms and appears as a wrathful protector. Here he represents the Highest Bliss obtainable in anuyoga ---Heruka and his consort are perceived by the practitioner as one person. The pair is surrounded by four dancing dakinis – notice their leg wrappings – and four wrathful Herukas in the colors of the Tantric mandala. Above them floats the highest Adhibuddha, blue with a naked, white consort, the supreme Buddha of the Tantra. This personal meditational deity (yidam) is part of the Chakrasamvara common to all the New Schools (Sarma) of Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhism (Nyingma, Sakya, Kagyu ,and Gelug). The form with one face and two hands entered Tibet with the great translator Rinchen Zangpo in the 11th century. 3 Richard Active Compassion 1 Exhausted he collapsed into the dirt by the roadside. The truck with the pilgrims vanished in a brown dust cloud over the horizon. Since before dawn they had stood caged in among this cheerful, motley crowd of people while the truck had rattled on shaking them all mercilessly over the potholes of the road west. There had been no room to sit, apart from sitting on the hard floor of the truck bed would have been worse; if one stood with bent knees as far forward as possible, one could at least cushion the worst bumps. Two days ago the truck had picked them up for a small fee at the Tsangpo Ferry outside of Lhatse. The pilgrims were headed for Holy Mount Kailash, another three days west. Somewhere in the mountains they had camped for the night. The pilgrims had huddled together in the open and had got comfortably drunk on a seemingly limitless supply of Chinese beer. They felt glad to have their small tent to themselves although it had offered little privacy. All the young girls and a few adults had crowded around them, watching the foreigners eat and go to sleep, trying to guess at their relationship. Were they married? Was his companion his girlfriend, or his daughter? Asya had got very irritated by this teasing audience observing every of her movements. "Smile!" He had told her, "if you get angry or wrinkle your brow, they will close in on you and tease you mercilessly until you cry." She complained that her face felt stuck in this grimace. To put an end to this game he had told them that Asya was his daughter, which did not help much, and made Asya wince. He argued with a laugh, "Our age difference is large enough, it could easily be true!" They finally zipped their tent closed, and tried to find sleep despite the singing in the darkness. Actually these people had been very kind to them. On the second day, as the novelty of their presence on the truck had worn off, and they had found that Richard spoke a funny smattering of Tibetan, they had shared their food with them and even tried to teach them their songs. Again and again the entire truck load broke into song. The songs were not rousing, rather a chanting of a short melody, stanza after stanza. Ballads he guessed, his Tibetan was too poor. One of the men apparently improvised the text or knew it by heart, he sang the stanza first and then everyone joined in its repeat. The pilgrims came from Kham, eastern Tibet, and had been on the road for over a week. The men, good-looking, statuesque, tall, with strong faces, a thick strand of red wool wound into their long, dark hair, were a colorful, boisterous crowd. Each wore a short dagger with an intricate silver handle on his belt over a rough woolen jacket. The women looked splendid under their wide-brimmed, bowler hats like those Peruvian Indians wore only taller. They were adorned with all the family finery, silver coins sewn into their dresses, coral and necklaces of turquoise. Richard had found that as a man one had to be careful with the Kham women, they were not at all shy and thought nothing of grabbing one by the beard or between the legs. Everybody had laughed hilariously when this had happened to him. He had grabbed the woman's hand, but in ignorance of their customs had let her go at once. He smiled to himself and sat up. Asya had vanished. She must be hiding behind a rock. Her backpack was lying next to his. He looked around, but despite the complete openness of the land he could not see her anywhere. He shook his head and reminded himself that they had agreed not to worry. They would always find each other again. He was surrounded by a vast desert. Not a bush, not a tree, no grass just brown dirt strewn with small rocks extending for miles. To the north rose a chain of featureless, low, brown hills worn by wind and snow. A rutted track branched off the Kailas road and vanished up a broad valley between the hills. It led into the Chang Tang, the forbidding, empty spaces of Inner Tibet. 4 It was perfectly still. No wind. No birds. The earth was overwhelmed by an immaculate blue sky, from which the sun beat down, not hot but relentless. He had spent many days and nights in the deserts of Nevada, California, Arizona. The North American deserts were gardens by comparison with Tibet. It was so high here that nothing grew except short yak-grass along the ice-cold rivers. Water was not in short supply, the rivers drained the snow run-off from the higher Chang Tang. In fact, these hills were well over 6000 meters high, only because the place where he was sitting was itself over 4500 meters, did they look so timid. He felt utterly alone, alone on the moon. He shouted at the top of his lungs "As-yaaa!", but the sound trailed off into space, it vanished into the empty sky without an echo. You could die here and nobody would ever find you, he thought, yes, but the land was so open that it seemed that you could not get lost, except in a snow storm. Where was she? She still had not come back. Had she fallen off the edge of the world? Well, he thought, all he can do is to stay here and wait. He lay down again in the dirt and closed his eyes. He must have fallen asleep, because he was awoken by the snorting of an animal. Startled he opened his eyes and found himself in the shadow of a man, standing above him, who silently contemplated the strange foreigner while holding a horse by a rope. Richard sat up with a jerk. The horse spooked, dragging the man almost into the dirt. Cussing and shouting at the rearing and whinnying creature, holding onto the rope with all his might, the man ran after his horse. When he had struggled it down, he jumped into the saddle and rode off, soon only a speck in the field to the east. And then he noticed Asya slowly walking across the expanse towards him. "I had to be alone for a while," she said apologetically when she reached him.