Blazing Splendor. Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
That was all it took to create a big rift. But we shouldn’t be surprised that jealous rivalry abounds in the world of humans.
In the end, the high Sakya lama who had succeeded Chögyal Pakpa on the throne in Central Tibet was asked to mediate by the manager of the new castle. This manager must have been quite politically astute, because when he came back he brought a royal decree granting equal status to the two castles, which meant that the kingdom would have to be divided. Jangchub Shönnu didn’t mind and said it was fine with him.23
From then on, there were two castles: one called Nangso Chenmo and the other Tsangsar. In time, each was to have its own king. In those days, the throne holders of the Dharma were simultaneously the ruler of a major region and oversaw both secular and spiritual affairs. Over the centuries, the surrounding areas were consolidated into the two kingdoms, which eventually comprised ten thousand family estates scattered over a sparsely populated area. In the following generations, many of these masters held high ranks bestowed by Chinese emperors: tishi once, pakshi twice, and goshir thirteen times.
As the Mongols came into power in China, they also gave the Nangchen kings official titles and positions. The title conferred upon the Nangchen kings was the position of chinghu, which is one rank below goshir but still higher than a wang. The whole western continent was divided under the power of four chinghu and eight wang. In our terms, we can equate the chinghu with an affiliated but independent ruler, while the position of wang is closer to that of a district governor. But the kings in the Tsangsar family—my ancestors—never received any such position and remained lamas.24 In later centuries, the custom of the imperial court was to station its own representative in the various districts of Tibet. Just like the high-ranking Chinese official in Lhasa called an amban, there was a similar Chinese delegate in Nangchen and the neighboring kingdom of Derge.
Chinese from Ziling in the north had forced Tsangsar to relinquish most of its political power to Nangchen twelve or thirteen generations before mine, during the time of the master-poet Karma Chagmey. Then, about three generations ago, an important minister from the Nangchen court succeeded in forcing Tsangsar under the rule of the Nangchen king and imposed obligatory taxes. So, in the end, we lost our independence completely.
When I grew up in the Tsangsar mansion, our family line was no longer involved in politics, although we had a continuing spiritual lineage. There had been one ngakpa lama after another in my paternal line. The Tsangsar family line continued as lineage holders of the Barom Kagyu, while all the country’s political affairs were handled by the Nangchen palace.
This state of affairs—Nangchen as rulers and Tsangsar as lamas—went on harmoniously over the centuries, except for the reign of one king.
Sometimes worldly power goes to a person’s head, and, one fine morning, the king of Nangchen looked toward the east and saw that the sun’s warm rays were prevented from touching his palace by a mountaintop nearby.
He exclaimed, “I am the king! I want sunlight in the morning, so lop off the top of that mountain!” A huge labor force was mobilized and they began chipping away at the rock.
This was no small mountain, but they managed to take a fair chunk off the peak. Even today, if you climb that mountain, you can see the results of their labors.
But the work was overwhelming. Eventually, one of the workers said, “This is no good. We’re dealing with this in the wrong way.”
“What do you mean?” a coworker inquired.
“It’s easier to chop off the ruler’s head than to cut off the head of a mountain,” the first replied.
“What are you saying?”
“Even if we continue for ten thousand years, we will still not finish this work. We have been given a horrible, endless task. Let’s mobilize everyone and put an end to this senseless king!”
So that’s exactly what they did: They cut off the king’s head.
Nangchen was divided into eighteen districts, each with a major monastery.25 In the early days, all eighteen were Barom Kagyu, but the lineage waned in influence as the Karmapa’s influence grew over the centuries and many of these monasteries began to follow his branch of the Kagyu. By the time I left Tibet, only a few small monasteries remained Barom Kagyu; one was my guru’s monastery at Lachab.26
A bit more about my paternal line of ancestors, with its famous (and perhaps a bit pretentious) name, Divine Bloodline of Tsangsar. Ours was a family lineage of married Vajrayana masters who for many generations were politically independent of the Nangchen king. Over the generations, their estate and mansion were no longer vast, but they were not small either.
As I noted, my ancestors focused on spiritual works, not politics. At one point, there were eighteen Tsangsar brothers who together made eighteen sets of the Kangyur, the translated words of the Buddha, each written in pure gold. One set was offered to the head lama of the Sakya lineage, one to the Karmapa and another to Karma Gön, the Karmapa’s main seat in Kham. When I was at Lachab, we still had one set and there was also one at a small temple under Tsangsar patronage. The pages were handmade of thick black paper and the script was a beautiful calligraphy in pure gold.
The wives and sisters of those eighteen brothers, a group of twenty-five, decided to create the merit of making twenty-five sets of the many Prajnaparamita sutras on transcendent knowledge, each written in pure gold on deep blue paper made from powdered azurite. During my time, one of these was still kept at the Tsangsar temple. Over the centuries, many people have seen the female protector Dusölma circumambulating and paying respect to these scriptures. There was also a profusion of artists connected with my family. Once when the Karmapa passed through between Tibet and China, he was given one thousand tangka paintings as an offering.
These Tsangsar ancestors all the way down to my great-great-grandfather were realized masters. There is almost no one, including my father, who didn’t show some miracle or sign of great realization.27 I heard that one of them was the leader of the army from Nangchen and was attacked by a gang of soldiers from Derge, but their muskets couldn’t kill him.28
A more recent and very important link in this Tsangsar family line was Orgyen Chöpel, my paternal grandfather. Being a married Vajrayana master, he dressed as an ordinary layperson. He married Könchok Paldrön—my grandmother and the only daughter of my illustrious ancestor, the great treasure revealer Chokgyur Lingpa—with whom he had four sons, all lamas, and two daughters.29 These are all major figures in my family story. Remember, I was born on the journey when my grandmother went in search of Tersey Tulku.
When my grandmother was given in marriage to Orgyen Chöpel, his family’s basic Dharma lineage was Barom Kagyu—but in name only. By that point, they were all following the Nyingma practices found in Chokgyur Lingpa’s New Treasures, the forty volumes of teachings he revealed for these times. So, it seems the Barom seat had turned predominantly Nyingma.
That didn’t mean they had completely abandoned the Barom teachings. The once-flourishing practice of the Six Doctrines from the Indian master Naropa had weakened long ago and was now maintained in only a few places. But by unifying Naropa’s Six Doctrines with the liberating instructions of Mahamudra meditation, many early Barom Kagyu practitioners attained accomplishment—thirteen could run as fast as horses, another thirteen could run like the wind and there were many, many others. Their disciples spread far and wide, all over Nangchen.
The training in Mahamudra, on the other hand, had for the most part taken on the flavor of Dzogchen, the teachings of the Great Perfection. All that was left of pure Barom practice was a very particular ritual involving a way to invoke the guardian of the Buddha’s teachings. This ritual was continued with very high regard—so much so that some