Himalayas … This amazing place on planet Earth is forever connected in our minds with something incredible, supernatural, beyond …
Address on rice paper
In the evening, the central square of old Kathmandu was, as always, crowded and noisy. From the doors of the brightly lit temples, songs of monks, unusual for a European ear, poured; street musicians desperately "sawed" on their sarangs (bowed instruments), at the same time trying to sell them to tourists; drivers of every conceivable vehicle pressed horns, clearing traffic jams; the ubiquitous cycle rickshaws tried to occupy, even for a second, the free space on the road.
I sat down to rest near a small shop. A bluish smoke of incense streamed from the open doors. The owner sprinkled the threshold with water, waving a large wet broom. My attention was drawn to a white cow walking between the fruit stalls. The sacred animal was clearly up to something. Expressive cow eyes - well, just like the eyes of a good man - as if saying: "I have nothing to do with it." The owner of the shop waved a broom right at my nose, spraying me with water dust, and I missed the moment when the cow pulled a papaya fruit from the box and rushed away from all her hooves under the cheerful hooting of pedicabs. Almost knocking down some blond tourist, the thieving cow dived safely into the courtyard. And I peered at this blond and tried to remember … Our eyes met.
He, too, seemed to be trying to remember something. We moved towards each other. Oh yes! Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, the Commandant's House, where our mutual friends live! We met there! After the usual exclamations in such cases, Vladimir (that was the name of his compatriot) looked at me intently and asked: "Have you already seen Lhamo?" I shook my head. "Not?! - Vladimir was surprised. - You must see her! This is incomprehensible, incomparable! " And he wrote down the address for me on a piece of rice paper.
Turquoise Goddess
Promotional video:
A wooden staircase led to the second floor. I pushed open the door. There is no one in the room. Looking around, I noticed on the wall some texts in Nepali and English. I read: "Lhamo Dolkar is a recognized and dedicated oracle, the medium of the goddess Dorje Yudonma - the Lady of the Turquoise Lamp, who healed many people from thousands of diseases." And then there is a certificate that certifies that Lhamo owns Tantric magical rituals that rid people of mental and physical illnesses. And there is also an inscription at the door: "All you need is your unshakable faith!" The door creaked and a short man entered the room, the husband of Lhamo Dolkar. Tenba. He said that I was late, the appointment was over, but I can sit and have tea and see Lhamo - she will be out soon. However, next Tuesday I have to be here in the early morning.
Lhamo was a tall woman of about sixty-five, with kind eyes and a slightly shy smile. She fingered the rosary and nodded to me. Everything was simple and ordinary, I did not notice anything supernatural then.
For the benefit of all living beings
The next Tuesday I arrived on time. Fifteen people were half-sitting in the room, mostly Europeans. There seemed to be a tense expectation in the air. Lhamo appeared unexpectedly. She was accompanied by her husband. She sat down opposite the patients next to a small altar, near which were objects for healing and fortune-telling - a copper pipe, a flat sword, a drum, a mirror, flowers, a bell, a bowl of rice and other items for healing and fortune-telling.
While Tenba was sprinkling consecrated water around the room and distributing incense, Lhamo plunged into deep meditation. After a while, she got up, her breathing became intermittent, she seemed to be sobbing, her eyes closed, and her body began to sway from side to side. Lhamo's lips were moving, she seemed to be whispering some kind of spell. After a few minutes, she exhaled powerfully and shivered. At that moment, as Tenba later explained to me, she was possessed by the goddess Dorje Yudonma. Lhamo went into a trance. Her face lost its shape, became blurry. Before us was not a Tibetan healer, but a great goddess.
The tension was building. Lhamo was convulsing, laughing hysterically and shouting something, or as if choking on air. To be honest, I felt uncomfortable. And I was glad that I was one of the last in line. After a while, Lhamo raised her hands above her head with palms pressed against one another, then lowered them to her heart and suddenly sang a beautiful, piercing song. This song enchanted the audience. Lhamo took the sword from the altar and struck herself in the chest. After that, she put on her ritual clothes, placed a crown with the image of Buddha on her head. In her hand was a bell, silver sounds filled the space. Lhamo threw a few handfuls of rice on the floor and knocked on a small drum … After that, there was silence for a few minutes. Lhamo raised her eyes and nodded her first visitor to her room.
In a trance state, Lhamo sees right through the person, finds the cause of the disease. She checked the pulse of the first patient, then asked him to bare his back and, piercing the skin over the spine with a copper tube, began to suck something out, from time to time spitting some dark substance into the pelvis. By the end of the procedure, at least two handfuls of, I would say, dirt had accumulated in the basin. Like this! Materialization of an invisible disease! Miracle!
Lhamo rinsed out her mouth and nodded to the next one …
It was my turn too. The healer, without asking about anything, bent my head and, it seems, “saw - the reasons for my insomnia, which had tormented me for several years. Then she took her flat sword and began to tingle slightly with the tip of the crown and the back of her head. After some time, the scalp lost sensitivity. Then Lhamo began to massage my neck, saying something cheerfully, and then blew a couple of times in my face. Then she lifted my shirt and began to push something out of my spine through a tube … When it was all over, I looked into the basin, where Lhamo was spitting out the substance that had been sucked from my back. Oh God! How much rubbish there was in me! …
When I went to my hotel, I felt weightlessness in my whole body. The thoughts in my head were light and bright, like cirrus clouds! In the evening, standing under a warm shower, I felt a slight burning sensation from wounds on my back. The reality of what happened did not cause me any doubts. It was in Nepal, in Kathmandu, in December 1996.
Cleansing Madness
Dolkar was born in Sakya province in Tibet. Fellow villagers remember her as a sensitive, warm-hearted girl. She often shared her clothes with the beggars. But there was something strange about her: sometimes she seemed to lose her memory, became distracted, her gaze became motionless. She was considered slightly deranged. No one could have imagined that this little girl would become the oracle of the great Dorje Yudonma and the word "lhamo" would be added to her name Dolkar, which means "goddess" in Tibetan.
It was a time of hardship and suffering. Sometimes the girl managed to earn money as a dishwasher. But not for long. During periods of aggravation of the "disease" Lhamo became violent, destroyed everything in its path. It seemed that light and dark forces were fighting for possession of her body.
Lhamo traveled extensively to holy sites in India and Nepal. One night in Nepal, in the town of Lumbini, she had a vision: a blinding white light flashed on the black velvet of the night sky, and a chariot with shining white horses harnessed to it swept through the air … After this vision, the disease almost left her. According to Lhamo, it was then that she became closer to the goddess.
A great healer lived in this inconspicuous house
In the 1980s, she found herself in the north of India, in Ladakh, where Dolkar met her guru. Ladakh healer Abhi Lhamo immediately recognized her secret, but did not yet know which goddess was trying to master Dolkar. She only realized that Dolkar was not clean enough for the goddess to enter her body. The clash of the human and the divine manifested itself as madness. To reveal herself, the goddess sent a purifying madness to Dolkar. For two years Abhi Lhamo removed from the body of her student all, as they say today, negative.
One day Abhi Lhamo, being in a trance, asked the goddess, who was trying to enter the girl, who is she? The goddess replied that she came from Tibet, her name is Dorje Yudonma and for her incarnation on earth she chose Dolkar. That day Dolkar's face brightened wonderfully. Since then, the mental illness left her, the fits of rage stopped.
Lhamo Dolkar passed all tests and trials in one of the monasteries and was recognized as the true incarnation of the goddess Dorje Yudonma.
The last test for her was the healing of the yak.
She saw that the cause of the yak's illness was a nail he swallowed and stuck in the esophagus. The girl managed to remove the nail.
One day she met a beggar hunchback boy. Through a copper tube she sucked the hump for a whole week, and the boy's back became straight.
In the Mill Brook
Lhamo Dolkar visited St. Petersburg in the late 90s. She received the sick in a country house at the Mill Ruchey station. A lot of what is considered supernatural has engraved in my memory. And the way Lhamo accurately diagnosed the patient from the photograph, and the way, throwing away her pipe, literally gnawed into the patient's sore spot, pulling out a stone the size of a quail's egg, and the way she fiercely beat on the cheeks of the mentally ill, shouted to him, pointing to the altar: Look there, look! You see - there is Buddha! Look at Buddha! - And the recent madman suddenly began to look around him with a meaningful look.
But most of all I remember the case with one of my acquaintances.
This man considered himself unhealthy. It seemed to him that hair was circulating through his blood vessels. This feeling did not allow him to live in peace. Lhamo nobody talked about it. When my friend sat down with Lhamo, she lifted his shirt and began to suck the disease out of his body with a tube. At the end of the procedure, she pulled the hair out of her mouth and gave it to the shocked patient.
Lhamo liked Russia. She liked our cool summer, and coniferous forests, and spacious landscapes. She laughed when they brought her red caviar as a gift, not knowing that she could eat it. She advised to cut down the spruce trees on Red Square near the Kremlin: then, in her opinion, things in Russia should go much better.
Life goes on … Goddesses do not die. When people stop believing in them, they simply leave until better times … Dolkar is no more. Shortly before her death, Lkhamo Dolkar said that she would like to be born again, now in Russia, in Buryatia. And who knows, maybe the wonderful story that we told you already has its continuation? …
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №52. Author: Oleg Pogasiy