LITMIR.BIZ

      Tsewang Norbu was a monk during the first half of his life, but that didn’t last. At one point Old Khyentse told him, “You must go to Mindrolling and stay there.” So off he went, staying for eight years in one of the most important centers for learning in Central Tibet.

      Despite his standing as the only living son of the great tertön, Tsewang Norbu’s style was to arrive unannounced, without the slightest pomp. So he enrolled at Mindrolling as a common monk to pursue his studies. But he must have made himself count somehow, since we find his name in the records of lineage masters who transmitted important teachings at Mindrolling. Without him, those teachings might have been lost.

      Tsewang Norbu was not pushy, and he was a monk at heart—so during those eight years at Mindrolling the thought of marrying the head lama’s daughter never even entered his mind. So despite the terma prophecy, after eight years he returned to Kham, still a monk.

      But when he returned to Kham, he was scolded by Khyentse: “You useless good-for-nothing, you didn’t do your job!”

      “What do you mean I didn’t do my job?”

      “A descendant of Chokgyur Lingpa was supposed to replenish the bloodline at Mindrolling. That’s why I sent you! But you’re useless!”⁷⁷

      “How am I supposed to replenish their bloodline? They are humans, but I am just a dog. It never occurred to me that humans and dogs marry.”

      Still, Old Khyentse was set on Chokgyur Lingpa’s son having descendants one way or another. So he forced Tsewang Norbu to give back his monk’s vows and become a ngakpa. Moreover, Khyentse arranged for him to have a consort from a devoted family, but they didn’t have any children.

      After that, another consort from a family in Derge was arranged, still with the same lack of results.

      Sometimes Tsewang Norbu would complain with his wry sense of humor, “Darn! I’m totally useless. I didn’t keep the monastic precepts and so I’m a fallen monk. But I also haven’t produced any children. My life has been wasted—I’m a total failure!”

      Some lamas, hearing this, would become quite unsettled by his deadpan humor. And in Nangchen there is now a saying about being “as useless as Tsewang Norbu” and not accomplishing any worldly or spiritual achievements.

      In the later part of his life, Tsewang Norbu went to live in Central Tibet, where he became known for his strange behavior. While he was there, it happened that the thirteenth Dalai Lama went to India.⁷⁸ One sign of Tsewang Norbu’s status was that the Tibetan government in Lhasa requested him to perform a ritual for repelling foreign invasions. He performed it meticulously at the Ramoche temple in Lhasa, which contains one of the two most famous Jowo statues in all of Tibet.

      Although Tsewang Norbu had held the position of a very high lama in Kham, after going to Central Tibet he changed his ways radically. He would often invite beggars in for tea, long conversations and a few laughs—he was that kind of master. And in other ways he was known to act contrary; as the saying goes, “If they said HUNG, he would say PHAT.”

      He usually wore a very simple sheepskin coat. But one day he put on a fine brocade robe. “Rinpoche, why are you dressing up like that?” his servant asked. “You never dress up.”

      “Quiet!” Tsewang Norbu said. “Today we are going to meet the king of all tantric yogis in this world.”

      “And who might that be?” the servant asked.

      “Khakyab Dorje, the Karmapa,” was the reply. “I’m supposed to be a ngakpa, so today is a good day to dress the part.”

      And he rode off to Tsurphu with great dignity. But the moment they got back to Lhasa, he immediately put his sheepskin coat back on.

      When he was quite old, head chanter Trinley, who had been one of Tsewang Norbu’s disciples, told me the following story:

      “Sometimes I just couldn’t understand what Tsewang Norbu was up to—I even wondered whether my teacher had gone crazy or something. Early one morning, Tsewang Norbu declared, ‘Today we are going to hold a great feast! Go to the meat market and invite as many slaughterhouse shepherds as you can.’

      “These particular slaughterhouse shepherds were a motley crew; they were very poor and quite grimy. Their only job was to lead animals to the chopping block. After a while, fifty or sixty of them were standing in the courtyard. In the meantime, Tsewang Norbu’s disciples had set up a large table for food.

      “Tsewang Norbu came out and told them all to sit down in lines, as if they were monks in a temple. First they were served a lavish meal, with Tsewang Norbu sitting right there among them, at the head of the row. He then asked for a text and, while they were all sitting in line eating, he started chanting the liturgy for the terma Embodiment of Realization.⁷⁹

      “These shepherds, to say the least, were unused to sitting in an organized group practice like a bunch of monks. They were trapped there, fidgeting a lot—but nevertheless enjoying the food.

      “At the end, after the guests had left, I asked, ‘What are you up to, Rinpoche? In all of Lhasa, there are no worse people than those guys—they are the ones who lead the animals to slaughter. They push the poor animals the last few steps and afterwards help chop up the wretched animals’ carcasses. Why are you spending so much money on people like that?’

      “‘Hey! Don’t talk like that,’ Tsewang Norbu replied. ‘Today I performed the feast offering in the company of several perfect bodhisattvas. Besides me, who has the merit to do so these days? I don’t have a flicker of doubt about this. Today was an auspicious day.’”

      That’s just one example of the strange kinds of things Tsewang Norbu would do.

      Tsewang Norbu also had amazing clairvoyant powers—to such an extent that he frightened people. Trinley, the head chanter, also told me this story:

      One day, Tsewang Norbu went to perform a big smoke offering ritual for the longevity of a household in Lhasa. The father of the house had great faith in Tsewang Norbu; at the end of the ceremony he approached and asked, “I wonder how our luck and health will be next year.”

      “Oh, yeah! Your luck and health?” Tsewang Norbu proclaimed, “You’ll be dead next year and not one month will pass before your wife will be dead too.”

      “But what about our son? What will he do?” the man gasped.

      “He won’t stay here without you; he’ll be distraught and leave. Next year your house will be empty,” Tsewang Norbu declared.

      “Oh, no, here he goes again!” Trinley thought to himself, “Why did he have to go and do that? This is so inauspicious.”

      The following year, Trinley heard that the man had died, then about a month later that the wife had died and, finally, that the son had left, leaving the house empty.

      Though I never met him when I was young I saw a photograph of Tsewang Norbu that had been taken in Bhutan; it hung in Samten Gyatso’s private room at Fortress Peak. He was tall and stout like Dilgo Khyentse, and he was strikingly handsome.

      At Tsikey monastery, Tsewang Norbu would often go for a walk outside by himself; in the afternoon he could be seen sitting for long stretches of time near the bank of the Kechu River.⁸⁰

      As a young

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