The Caves and Temple of Trakar Rinpoche

The Caves and Temple of Trakar Rinpoche
Oct 11, 2000

Dear Friends of the Kham Aid Foundation,

Driving south from Litang five days ago, we came upon a pair of chorten on either side of the highway with prayer flags strung between their pinnacles, and a litter of paper lungta (prayers) on the ground indicating that we had arrived somewhere. On the south side of the road was a large newly built temple which was, upon close inspection, still under construction.

In the temple we found a workman who told us that it belongs to Trakar Rinpoche, a 66-year-old incarnate lama of Litang Monastery. Funds for construction were obtained by sale of animals--yaks, sheep, goats, and horses--that local people donated to the Rinpoche. The temple will cost more than 500,000 yuan to complete.

We looked around inside, and found a lot of fresh timber going into the building. This struck me as odd, because it has been illegal to fell trees in the prefecture since September, 1998. I asked one of the carpenters, and he said the trees came from nearby. (Litang county has a remarkable amount of old growth forest, which has not been harvested probably because it would be prohibitively expensive to extract) The man also said that the local government had issued a special exception to the logging ban, so that Trakar Rinpoche's temple could be built.

Next to the temple was a massif of stone, about 50 meters high and 200 meters wide, its wrinkled face indented with many small caves. This, we were to learn, was the holy mountain of Avalokitesvara. A monk named Shulu, who is in charge of the construction, showed us around Avalokitesvara's mountain. He said, "The previous incarnation of Trakar Rinpoche meditated in a cave here, from the age of 22 to 43. Below the cave, he built a house where guests and family members could stay, and where he studied and taught."

Shulu pointed to the ruins of the old house, saying that it was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. "People staying in the house provided food to Trakar Rinpoche, but as the years went by, he ate less and less. After five years of meditation, he was living on almost nothing. His body was just skin and bones, nevertheless he maintained a powerful spirit."

Many of the caves in the holy mountain seemed inaccessible, high up on the rock face. Shulu led us around to the left side where there was an opening at ground level. Inside the cave were piled tsa-tsa (clay figurines). Beyond, scary-looking black tunnels led into the mountain. Squeezing into a crouch, we entered one passage. The walls of the cave were smooth from the generations of visitors who had come before us. After slithering through about eight meters of narrow tunnel, we emerged into daylight, and found ourselves high on the mountain's front face.

Shulu pointed to another passageway, one that led upward from where we were now perched. It was even narrower than the one we had just traversed. He said, "In the fourth month of a sheep year, people come here especially to crawl through this tunnel. It takes one to two hours to get through. If you are a good person, the mountain will allow you to emerge faster. If you are a bad person, it takes longer. "Once, three generations ago, a nun climbed into the passage, and caught her waist so that she couldn't move. She never did get out; the mountain crushed her to death."

Shulu was asked by the county government to sell tickets to the caves, to make the Avalokitesvara Mountain into a tourist site. But he declined. He said, "a holy place should not be this way. If you want to donate some money, that's good. But we shouldn't sell tickets."