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AHP 51: Review: A Step Away from Paradise: The True Story of a Tibetan Lama's Journey to a Land of Immortality (book by Thomas Shor)

Konchok Gelek. 2018. Review: A Step Away from Paradise. Asian Highlands Perspectives 51:346-350. In the early twentieth century in a remote region of Golok, Tibet, Tulshuk Lingpa demonstrated this quality while very young. He grabbed a phurba, a ritual dagger with a pointed three-edge blade, from the empty space of air above him in front of monk novices and his teacher. Tulshuk Lingpa's father was also a terton with two wives, a common practice among lingpa. The second wife was a dakini 'sky goer', a female embodiment of enlightened energy, intermediaries between the hidden land and lingpa. In the 1930s, when Tulshuk Lingpa was teaching at a monastery adjacent to Chongay Town in Central Tibet, he met Phuntsok Choeden from a nearby household. They fell in love and ran away together to India. While on pilgrimage to places that Padmasambhava had once visited, they found themselves in a Himalayan region of India. Tulshuk Lingpa used his knowledge of herbal medicine in tandem with ritual and magic to treat the local people. He was then invited to a monastery in the Pangi Valley in the Chamba District in India, where he lived for fifteen years. At times Tulshuk acted insanely, was unpred

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