Urgyen Dzong: A Power Place in the Himalaya

This ‘opening’ of a sacred site is part of the terma tradition associated with the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. It refers to places, artefacts, teachings and other spiritual matters concealed by Padmasambhava and his consort Yeshe Tsogyal that are later revealed to spiritually advanced practitioners, known as tertons or treasure revealers, at a time when it is historically appropriate and of benefit to mankind. Togden Rimpoche is a recognised terton and has ‘opened’ several caves and hidden lands in Ladakh and written pilgrims’ guides to these places. He was born in 1939 and is currently the senior lama for all the Tibetan Buddhist lineages in Ladakh. The name Urgyen Dzong will be familiar to those who have read John Crook and James Low’s book The Yogins of Ladakh, for it was here, in the summer of 1981, that John was given a Mahamudra text by Khamtag Rimpoche that was subsequently taught for a number of years at Maenllwyed.¹ Khamtag Rimpoche was an incarnate lama from the village of Khamtag near Shigatse, in Tibet. A student of Tipun Padma Chogyal (1887–1958) he escaped from Tibet with Awo Rimpoche in 1959. Arriving in India he wandered through the mountains and eventually reached Ladakh where he joined a gang of Tibetan refugees labouring on the roads. A passing traveller, realising he was an incarnate lama, invited him to stay at his house and subsequently became one of Rimpoche’s main sponsors. Rimpoche spent several years associated with monasteries in Zanskar and later with Hemis monastery, in Ladakh.

Hearing about the cave at Urgyen Dzong he obtained permission from the authorities at Hemis to build a small gompa (monastery) there and minister to the local families in the surrounding villages.² On one occasion the Rimpoche wrote to the Dalai Lama inviting him to visit Urgyen Dzong during his next tour of Ladakh. Perhaps surprisingly, the Dalai Lama accepted the invitation and spent several hours meditating in the cave before staying a night at the gompa: a visit that no doubt caused considerable consternation to the officers responsible for his security. John Crook first met Khamtag Rimpoche when visiting a family near Leh accompanied by Tsering Shakya, a young Tibetan graduate in anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, at London University.    

Tsering went before me and I was surprised to find him prostrating himself before some person in the shadow at the end of the room. I entered and found myself under the alert and curious gaze of a monk dressed in the robes of a high lama. He invited us to sit and take chang, the local barley beer, with him. […] We were questioned extensively about our origins and reasons for being in Ladakh. […] As we were leaving he said “I have a small monastery in the mountains near a little known cave of Guru Rimpoche. it is known as Urgyen Dzong. There is no-one there and, if you come, you will find it peaceful. You will both be most welcome.” Both Tsering and I felt we had been in the presence of an unusual man, ‘one who knew’ was how we put it. 

That night I awoke and sat in the window of our room looking at the full moon over the arid hills. I had the strangest impression that my own face had become that of the lama. The feeling lasted for perhaps half an hour. It was very curious and I wondered what sort of man this could be. John and Tsering decided to take up the invitation but before they could arrange it the Rimpoche had left without giving any directions and no one seemed to know the location of Urgyen Dzong.

They eventually discovered it was somewhere in the hills above Mulbekh, in Western Ladakh, and with the addition of Tashi Rabgyas, a Ladakhi scholar, they set off to find it. The party travelled to the road head near Mulbekh and initially had difficulty locating the Rimpoche until they were introduced to a young nun who was able to show them the way to the gompa. The track led out across a broad valley of fields, streams and trees, where the nun quickly turned off onto a little used path heading straight into the mountain. 

We found ourselves in the shade of a limestone cleft some 400 feet high and quickly narrowing to a width of a few yards, a mere crack in the mountainside. We scrambled up over the rounded boulders of dried-up waterfalls, climbing rickety ladders set at the trickiest places. We were ascending a narrow funnel which slowly widened until we emerged into the evening sunlight of a high pasture set within a deep bowl totally ringed by vast snow-crested mountains. The only way in was up the narrow gorge through which we had scrambled; any rainfall would make the place […] inaccessible except by a frontal assault over the ridges. […] In the centre of the bowl a low ridge, in the middle of which sat a small temple, ran along to a dilapidated farm building with a tiny brand new gompa nearby. A monk was harvesting a small field of barley. No-one else was there, the Rimpoche was somewhere off in the hills. We spent several days exploring the bowl. A path leads to small apertures in a limestone crag, the cave of Guru Rimpoche. You creep in through a narrow tunnel which winds upwards to a chamber opening on the cliff face. There were two small stupas inside and a case for images under construction. Nobody came. A little girl drove her herd of sheep and goats up over the ridge every day for pasture. We sent off messages to the local farms enquiring after the Rimpoche.

They were on the point of departing when the Rimpoche suddenly appeared with his assistant and uncle, Aku-La, and the young nun who had shown them the way. That evening they had a meal together and consumed a quantity of chang (barley beer) and arrack (a strong spirit). The Rimpoche, apparently unaffected by the alcohol, revealed some of the details of his life. They also discussed the importance of accurate translations of texts for the use of western students. He showed them a tattered but carefully preserved hand-written notebook and said: ‘I want you to copy and translate this. […] It is one of the only three copies of the Mahamudra instructions of my master Tipun Padma Chogyl’. 

The notebook was photographed by John the following morning on the roof of the gompa, after which they packed up and descended the narrow gorge together.³ They spent two more days with the Rimpoche travelling through the countryside and visiting various farmhouses.

Rimpoche rarely taught us directly but his presence was somehow inspiring. In his company there was a sort of underground transmission going on for he often made sudden illuminating remarks, answers to unspoken questions or ones that had been raised hours before but not resolved. 

“Whatever you are looking for […] whether in Europe or Ladakh, the question is: where at this very moment is your mind?” “The task is to know the natural unborn mind. You must observe all activity whether good or bad, easy or difficult without judgement at all. Simply to see it as it is is the main point. When you do this there is no intellectual elaboration, attachment, rejection or concern. It becomes easy to experience the ground against which, as it were, all images float. Just rest in that without needing to move or reflect intellectually at all. This will lead you to see the three aspects of Buddhahood – the ultimate, the appearance, and that which is now in your heart – and how they relate to one another.. If you do this you will see what I mean.

As for meditation; if you wish to meditate choose a good place, as remote as possible, peaceful with clean water and wild nature. 

John Crook never met Khamtag Rimpoche again. He died in the Markhor valley sometime in the winter of 1985-6. His age was unknown but photographs suggest that he was perhaps around 50 when John met him. The Yogins of Ladakh is dedicated to his memory. 

In September 2019 I visited Urgyen Dzong with my wife Philippa and friends Juliet, Mike and Sophie. We travelled by jeep from Leh and stayed with a delightful family in the small village of Sergol. A local guide, Palden, and his friend arrived at the house early the next morning. Our driver came along as well, so there were eight in the party. We set off from the house at 7.45 am, crossed a small stream and then climbed steeply upwards for three quarters of an hour to reach a wide barren moorland with a wall of impenetrable-looking cliffs on the far side. A low ridge of loose shale led to the base of the cliffs where we started scrambling up a shallow gully. The terrain became steeper and increasingly exposed as we zig zagged our way upwards. This wasn’t the deep narrow cleft that we had been expecting. Our guide explained that we were doing the kora, a clockwise circumambulation, of Urgyen Dzong, and we realised that we were making the ‘frontal assault over the ridges’. After thirty minutes scrambling we arrived at Drak Lam La or Pass of the Mountain Path (circa 3650m) and enjoyed a stunning view down into valley below, with the little gompa on a low ridge in the centre. 

Encircled by mountains the valley is completely hidden from the surrounding landscape. It had taken around three hours to reach this point. We hung some prayer flags then descended steep shale and limestone slabs to the edge of the valley floor and a cave where two Koreans had recently spent two years in retreat. We continued traversing down and rightwards below steep crags to some juniper trees with prayer flags attached to them. In the cliffs above were a series of caves. Our attention was drawn to some unusual markings on the surrounding rock. This, we were told, was ‘Dakini script’. Recognisable images included the head of an antelope, a camel and the Tibetan letter Om. There was also a small hole in the rock which, when your head was placed inside, the distant pulsing sound of ‘Padmasambhava’s drum’ could be heard. All these, we were informed, were rangjung, self-originating forms and phenomena in the rock.⁴ Some steps led steeply up to a narrow entrance and passageway along which one crawled and groped to access the main cave above. This had a fine balcony view across the valley. There are two parts to the cave, a slightly larger lower section which has a shrine with painted clay statues of Padmasambhava, Avalokiteshvara, Green Tara, Shakyamuni Buddha and Manjushri, each about two foot high. Behind these, half hidden, is a stupa. 

Further back, at a slightly higher level, is the most sacred part of the cave. The floor was covered in mats and we took our shoes off before stepping up into this area. In one corner was another statue or stupa, so covered in khatas (offering scarves) that you couldn’t actually see what was underneath, and a small shrine with a thangka painting on cloth of Padmasambhava. Below the shrine dozens of coins had been pressed onto the rock with butter to hold them in place as offerings. When we arrived in the cave we found a lady, Tsering Drolma, already there lighting butter lamps. She had walked across from the gompa where she had been staying for a few days supporting her sister who was a nun on a one-month retreat. We sat cross legged on the floor of the upper cave and Sophie led a short puja which the locals seemed to appreciate as much as we did. We then descended a narrow passage to a pitch-dark recess deep inside the cliff below the cave, where we were shown the hand and foot prints of Padmasambhava impressed into the rock. 

At the gompa we were introduced to the nun, Tsunma Tsogyel Zangmo, who made us welcome and offered us tea, orange juice and biscuits. I showed her my copy of The Yogins of Ladakh and she and her sister both delighted in recognising Khamtag Rinpoche and some others in the photographs. The gompa has a small shrine room with an unusual statue of Padmasambhava, a separate lama room with a throne and a photograph of Khamtag Rimpoche as a young man, a kitchen and a couple of other rooms which, presumably, are for storage or accommodation. Further along the ridge are two stupas and at the far end, about a hundred yards from the gompa, a small temple containing a wrathful image of Padmasambhava. 

We spent a couple of hours at the gompa, then descended a steep ridge down to the narrow gorge that John Crook had described. A degree of nimbleness and caution was required to negotiate the rounded boulders and rickety ladders safely. After forty minutes or so we emerged abruptly onto the valley floor and walked back to the village, which we reached around 4.00 pm. John Crook was almost certainly the first westerner to reach Urgyen Dzong. I asked our guide, Palden, how many foreign visitors he thought had been to Urgyen Dzong and he replied that in recent times one or two groups a year, which means that since John’s visit in 1981 there have perhaps been, at most, three hundred foreign visitors to Urgyen Dzong. The remote location, difficult access and absence of any organised infrastructure or commercialisation meant, that for me at least, Urgyen Dzong did feel a very special place. One that was still untainted by the modern world and that retained a timeless atmosphere of transcendental power and liminality; a portal into a more visionary realm where the veils that separate us from other worlds and realities are just a little less opaque. 

Regrettably, I never met John Crook but am grateful for his legacy and his fascinating book, The Yogins of Ladakh, that took us all to Urgyen Dzong. Sophie, however, knew him well and had been a student of John’s since 1993 and was requested by him, before he died, to continue leading retreats based on the Mahamudra text given by Khamtag Rimpoche. Juliet and Mike also knew John through attending retreats at Maenllwyd. 

Notes 

All quotes and much of the background information in this article are from: Crook, John & James Low, 1997, The Yogins of Ladakh, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi. 

1. In the main text of The Yogins of Ladakh John says his visit to Urgyen Dzong was in 1981 but in his commentary on the Mahamudra text the year given is 1980. I’m not sure which is correct.
2. Khamtag Rimpoche had a strong connection with Padmasambhava and was allegedly in possession of his phurba (ritual dagger) – John Crook had a copy of a photograph of this ancient artefact.
3. The Mahamudra text was translated by Tashi Rabgyas and James Low and is reproduced in The Yogins of Ladakh along with a commentary by John Crook.
4. When I showed a photograph of the ‘Dakini script’ to a geologist friend back home he thought it was an unusual conglomeration of fossils.