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They left together telling neither of their families, travelling by foot over the high passes into India. Years later in India when they met some lamas from the Dalai Lama’s monastery in Lhasa and asked about my mother’s brothers living there and if they were still OK, the lamas exclaimed, “You’re their sister? They thought you died years ago.”’
    The young couple walked south over the high Himalayan passes into the hot plains of British India. This would have been in the late 1930s. They moved east to west visiting the principal Buddhist pilgrimage sites such as Bodh Gaya, where Buddha stopped his search for a teacher and a teaching in order to sit under a tree and examine his own mind until he reached the awareness of enlightenment. They went to Sarnath, where Buddha gave his first teachings in a deer park. Then they went to the place in the western Himalayas that at the time was probably the most important place specifically for Tibetan Buddhists in India, a sacred lake called Rewalsar and known to Tibetans as Tso Pema, in what is now the state of Himachal Pradesh but was then part of the Punjab.
     
    Tulshuk Lingpa during his early times in India
    Tso Pema is sacred because of Padmasambhava. Before Padmasambhava went to Tibet he went to Mandi, which isn’t far from Tso Pema, then known as the kingdom of Zahor. The king of Zahor had a daughter so beautiful that maharajas from near and far wanted her as their son’s bride. Her name was Princess Mandarava. Though the king was looking out for the best suitor, she was drawn to the spiritual life and a life of asceticism. She was not interested in any of the suitors her father presented to her. Padmasambhava was a wandering ascetic—decidedly not a suitable suitor for a princess. While passing through the kingdom, he met Princess Mandarava and they fell in love. She became one of his two main consorts. When the king caught wind of it, he was not happy. He had his daughter stripped and wrapped in thorns and put into a pit by the river. He had Padmasambhava brought to a flat open place where he was put atop a pile of wood, which was then set aflame. Instead of perishing in the fire, Padmasambhava transformed the fire into a lake in the middle of which he appeared with his consort—the Princess Mandarava—sitting in a lotus blossom. The king was so impressed that he not only approved of their union but allowed his kingdom to be converted to the Buddhist dharma. It was after this that Padmasambhava went off to Tibet.
    Tulshuk Lingpa must have been about twenty years old when they reached Tso Pema. Though he was young, he had already started to attract attention. At the monasteries clustered around the sacred lake and in the community of those who came there on pilgrimage—Tibetans and those of Tibetan origin from higher up in the mountains towards Ladakh—his spark was universally recognized. Wherever he went, people gathered who wanted to learn from him.
    With thorough knowledge of the deities and all their aspects and a steady, artistic hand, it was natural that he became an accomplished thangka painter. Soon he had disciples to whom he imparted his prodigious painting skills. He was asked by the lamas of the old Nyingma monastery at Tso Pema to paint the life of Padmasambhava on the walls of the temple, an undertaking he devoted two years to.
    He knew Tibetan medicine—the reading of the pulses, the use of herbs. He would perform rituals using a convex mirror made of brass and shined to a luster in which he would see things no one else could see, and through this means he could heal people. People with epilepsy came to him, and he cured them. Wherever he went his reputation as a healer preceded him, and people came to be healed. While other tertons and high lamas would have to perform pujas many times to effect a cure, Tulshuk Lingpa would only have to perform one. It was believed that when Tulshuk Lingpa performed certain rituals many—even those in the