Visiting the 6th Dalai Lama's Final Resting Place
in the Deserts of Mongolia.
I’ve just returned from China and then Inner Mongolia visiting the Tenggeli desert. This is the first time I’ve been in the deserts of Mongolia. There’s nothing but sand, sand, and more sand for hundreds of miles around you. I was there to help see if this sandy area, which was once 100% grassland pasture, could be turned back to its former state.
In our initial tests we were able to make it rain in the region after two days of work but the methods we used only produced a few drops of rain because the region is so arid and gets about 200 mm per year. I guess that means we produced a downpour, but more research has to be done if we want to help this region, which is the origination point of most of the sandstorms in China.
What was interesting is that our caravan took seven 4-wheel drive sand buggy jeeps and traveled six hours into the desert, up and down gigantic flowing sand dunes, to visit the temple of the 6th Dalai Lama, where we slept for the night. The temple is actually built upon a spring outlet of chi, which is the only one in the region that comes up from deep within the earth.
Hardly anyone knows this temple exists and I was the first “foreigner” (white guy) to ever visit it. The story behind the temple is that the 6th Dalai Lama disappeared one day while visiting the Emperor of China, and most people think he was killed. However, he simply used a fortuitous storm to leave Beijing under cover and traveled to this region.
The 6th Dalai Lama finally settled in a temple and worked on completing the cultivation of his sambhogakaya, or Reward Body. He never told anyone who he was because a new Dalai was elected into power, but nevertheless his old students discovered him as he lived the secret life of a shepherd. When he died, a temple was built in that location, which is what we visited.
Was the 6th Dalai lama the reincarnation of the 5th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st Dalai?
The Esoteric school of Buddhism says yes, which is true. As to the others after him, most of whom died around 20 years old, they’ve all been different individuals – a fact which few people know. If you're really advanced, you're not going to be born into a life that lasts only 20 years or so because then you have no time at all to complete anything substantial in terms of spiritual cultivation. The 6th Dalai was famous for his love poems and sexual cultivation, which he used to try to complete the transformation of his body, but the methods he used are largely lost today. Today, anything people propose about sexual cultivation is usually just plain nonsense that will lead you astray or get you into trouble. Yes, you can get kung-fu with sexual cultivation, but not how people teach it, and not by following what you find in pornography movies. In those movies you just see sexual massage or sexual yoga; there is no chi communication between the partners at all, and nothing that would open up your chi channels.
What’s striking about this area in Inner Mongolia is the arid nature of the region, despite the presence of many lakes, and it’s in dry regions like this that most people succeed in their cultivation.
Why?
Because that’s where it’s easiest to balance the water and wind elements of the body. If these two elements are out of balance, cultivation success is very difficult. It’s very hard to succeed in cultivation if your body is too wet, or humid inside, but much easier if it’s on the dry side. That’s why many in the yoga schools travel to Northern regions in India near the Himalayas or Tibet to cultivate.
In these arid regions it’s much easier to cultivate and produce the “rainbow bodies” you often read about in Tibetan literature, though of course these are just instances of gong-fu rather than enlightenment. Most of the sadhus who “succeed” here can demonstrate gong-fu, but only a few ever achieve samadhi and hardly any ever achieve the Tao, or true mind dharma.
By the way, this is a great area in which to practice the absorption of light from the sun, and I was lucky enough while there to get a mini-lesson on this topic.
In the southern cultivation schools of China, the emphasis is on mind cultivation which is why so many succeed in real enlightenment (since they consider achievements like the rainbow body as only form realm kung-fu), but it’s in the northern regions where you usually find the adepts who can fly through the air and demonstrate all sorts of miraculous body superpowers. That’s simply because it’s easier to cultivate body gong-fu in those regions. It all has to do with feng shui and whether the emphasis is on transforming the body or transforming the mind.
Even if you transform the body you still need to cultivate enlightenment, and even if you achieve enlightenment your job isn’t done until you can transform your body into a Reward body, or sambhogakaya, which the 6th Dalai was doing.
Ever since Shakyamuni Buddha, perhaps only a half dozen people or more have totally succeeded in cultivating all three enlightenment bodies catalogued by Buddhism. The universe is such a large place with infinite places you can go, but this world of ours is a good one for people to cultivate toward enlightenment, so don't lose your chance.
And if you didn't now you had to cultivate three bodies for complete enlightenment, you better check out our books or article on the topic. Frankly, this is the REAL cultivation you have to know about, and not the fluff fluff New Age nonsense stuff.
Naturally this short discussion involves very high stage teachings that you don’t normally find in the popular books on meditation, but this is what it’s all about. If you want liberation in the universe, you have to cultivate the dharmakaya or enlightenment body, the Reward body or sambhogakaya, and the nirmanakaya or transformation body. You have to complete your cultivation of all three "bodies."
You can find more information on the fight between the water and earth elements in the body in our ALCHEMY tapes, and more about cultivating the dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, and nirmanakaya in MEASURING MEDITATION. It's a complicated topic, but the visit to the 6th Dalai Lama's cultivation spot lead me to introduce it even if you've never heard it before. For more info, just type those words into google and you'll find out more, too.
And one last note -- the desert is a great place to find special herbs. For instance, hoodia, the cactus that helps with appetite suppression and weight loss, grows in the desert. Most desert herbs are bitter to help get rid of the internal heat that builds up in the region, and if you can't balance your body this way the desert is NOT a great place to visit.
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