Tales of Flight for Halloween

Series: Halloween

Tales of Flight for Halloween

As we do every year at this time of year, we tell stories around the fire while roasting chestnuts. I remember some stories that my master Alags Chörten told about his master Khenpo Norzang (Norbu Zangpo). Two in particular have stayed with me. The first begins in the middle of nowhere, in the mountains of eastern Tibet, where my master and his master were far away from everything, in solitary retreat in the mountains. They had just left prison and Khenpo could hardly walk because of the injuries he had sustained. Alags wasn’t ‘very fresh’ either, as he jokingly told me! So Alags was used to seeing his master limping around all day with the help of a walking stick.

One night, as he was finishing a practice late, he heard a noise outside his hermitage. It sounded like someone running and jumping. Intrigued, my master got up to look. The moon was flooding the landscape with its silvery light, and he could barely make out anything as he stepped out of the darkness of his cave hermitage. Suddenly, he saw a human-like creature flying between two rocks. “A demon! ” he thought at once. He moved forward to get a better look and hid behind a rock to watch the demonic being unnoticed. What a surprise when he realized that the creature in question had the features of his master! He couldn’t believe his eyes: indeed, his master (?) was balancing perfectly on a thin rope stretched between two rocks, without the slightest difficulty. “Come on, that’s not possible, Lobsang, my master can’t move like that! It must be a demon!” he thought to himself. Without insisting, he turned silently and went to bed, not without a number of questions in his mind.

“What struck me most was not what he told me, but the fact that he repeated word for word what I thought when I saw him!”

The next morning he went to see Khenpo Norzang in his hermitage and said: “Master! I saw you at night walking on a rope as if you had no difficulty moving. What’s more, you seemed to be floating in space.” His master replied: “Come on, that’s not possible, Lobsang, your master can’t move like that! It must have been a demon!” Alags didn’t insist, and they never talked about it again. When he told me this, Alags concluded: “What struck me most was not what he told me, but the fact that he repeated word for word what I thought when I saw him!”

The second story was told to my master by Khenpo Norzang. It takes place near Dzogchen Monastery in eastern Tibet. When Khenpo Norzang was young and not yet a scholar or a great practitioner, he heard from villagers in a small village near where he lived about “witches”, “flesh-eating dakinis”. Intrigued, he went there to check out what was being said. While there, several people told him that during the night, four or five witches had been seen flying low in the sky, uttering curses against the population. Some thought the next step would be a villagers’ feast!

With no time to return home before dark, Norbu Zangpo spotted a small nunnery just outside the village and asked if he could stay in an adjoining building. In the middle of the night he awoke to the sound of recitations. What a surprise when he went outside and saw four nuns slowly floating to the ground chanting mantras! So the villagers’ witches were nuns chanting mantras? The next morning he went to see them, and the nuns told him that they had done certain special practices during the night, and that they would go to the village so that their recitations would benefit the people. He told them what the villagers were saying about them, and they decided, so as not to frighten the villagers, to fly to the other side, where there was no one, and recite mantras for any animals (or demons?) they came across! And (future Khenpo) Norzang went back to his own practices…

Some good stories for this season!