Lozen Posted April 3, 2006 written by T. Luis Cox (posted with permission) Canto Thirteen: A Consort's Arrival Wherein Yeshe Tsogyal first encounters Padmasambhava, the glorious Lotus-Born One So vast, how phenomena stretched out before him, centerless, his own form occupying the radiance of space like a music taking shape, a tongueless bell- he'd become what he'd always been, the humming clarion of atoms breaking into fire, an unborn appearance, a mist of ice and light veiling the Himalayas. He took in her long shadow through eyes the width of space itself, its undulation up snow an avalanche frosting his eyebrows. His khatvanga, tipped with icicles, glowed with a forge's iron, each of its three prongs sporting a dismembered head, one freshly severed, another desiccated, rotting, the last a bleaching skull. The shadow of a woman fell across snow in a lingering sunlight, a cold made of iron. It had a mountain's countenance, how it obliterated the moment between her stride and her arrival, a frost- bitten girl turning blue in a Himalayan gale, warming in the heat of a khatvanga drenched in steam and blood. 'Are you he?' she asked, remembering the long road behind her, touching and bowing her forehead to his feet burning away the snow. 'I'm the queen of Tibet Trisong Desutsen saw fit to offer to you, great Master. Will you have me?' Padmasambhava's lungs filled with a mountain's flanking gust, for a moment his legs draping over a Hell realm's battlefields, where hell-beings not quite human yet with legs and arms and faces pitched with a rage of murderers and tyrants, swung axes and blades, spinning and hurling themselves, a blackening foam of lava underfoot, a dream of appendages scattered across a horizon's infinite event Yeshe Tsogyal lifted her head from the shale of a mountainside and saw for the first time the irises of eyes that boiled with suns, a face that fell away into caverns and peaks as though there were no sky, no earth, no night, no grieving, no happiness, no day to measure with sand. Her body sang with a dakini's luminescence, in each grain of soil under her feet the very fire of her heart, an eddying maelstrom opening up under her - and she fell! fell until she caught against what seemed to be branches, thorns tearing at her until her clothes were rags, until she was naked and sprawled across a volcanic landscape. She was there, among them, in Hell, its sky gleaming starlessly, as though a sun about to explode filled its diameter, its light searing into her eyes with a diamond's perfect hardness, burning up and melting away the many limbs and torsos and skull-fragments of those condemned for kalpas heaped upon kalpas to this groundless furnace, this realm made by anger. She couldn't stand. She lay in a crumpled fetus, the taste of carbon staunching her lips and tongue, her knees sharp against her rib-cage, her nerves like phurbas into her heart's veins at the stench of an atmosphere made oxygenless, fetid by the blood sizzling in every outcropping and molten depression, alive with an awareness of pain so acute it defied sentience, reason, life. Even blood suffered here. Even what raised itself up vanished into fire's edge. 'Revive, revive, revive!" resounded a voice overhead, and suddenly Yeshe Tsogyal found herself upright, transfigured, as though she'd been given a new form, and all around her lumbered ten-feet high hell-beings, their necks and arms corded with blue veins pulsing in a network stemming from their hearts, each beat a curdling tympanic pealing of ten thousand drums so large any other world would have been dwarfed by their echoing alone, a percussion of tissue contracting, expanding, the ground lurching with their reverberations. They stood momentarily still, taking in their sentiences. Yeshe Tsogyal looked off across a field rolling away, no more than ten feet between each of them in a mosaic of skin swimming with fire, hairless, rippling; she grew bright, incandescent, where they began to wield their blades against each other, blood fountaining, in every direction; and the screaming, the boundless pain, more sharp than any suffering throughout all six realms, filled her ears with an agony that broke down sentience itself, had her grasping where there was no air. Arms, legs, fingers, hands writhed with a life of their own, again melting away, again taking shape around her in multitudes, again a war overtaking all thought. She stood there for a hundred million kalpas, all in the instant of her first glance into the motes of Padmasambhava's eyes, where she saw herself rising again to her feet to meet his immutable gaze. * And what a height it was. The roof of the world fell far below, the slight ridges of mountain ranges swelling along the skin of the earth like an old warrior's scars, while her feet sank into lava's intemperate corridors, a hungry ghost's ashen landscape, an animal's suffocating den. Her breath blew across continents, calming the oceans. Her eyes were space itself, the breadth of appearance in each atom's fluctuating retina, dissipating nexus. Matter melted in her mind like ice, her cloud-lungs growing heavy with moisture, flocks of geese and duck migrating across her sternum-horizon, a blizzard mounting its wings from the rooftop of the world. She felt for her face and her hands disappeared into the storm beginning to whip snow around them, the shapes of snow lions emerging out of drifts, a wind's voice containing the register of all mantra, a lattice of dorjes woven together by fire in a canopy over their heads, a wide-brimmed parasol, ornate with lotus blossoms and dharma-wheels, spanning the gulf between mountain ridges. Night was falling when Padmasambhava opened his cloak and walked out onto a plateau overlooking Tibet, taking from behind its folds a golden phurba enclosing them in a sphere of light, uttering in a voice made of talons and iron forges, "Om Vajra Kili Kilaya Sarva Bignan Bam Hung, Phet!" He flung the phurba up in the air, where it broke into lightening, and there Vajrakilaya, a blue, three-headed, six-armed, in a mandala of fire, careened and stamped, a light-body dancing in a blizzard's spiraling snow, his roar melting the frost along Yeshe Tsogyal's hem. He turned to her, glowering. His blue cheeks puffed out and a wind swept up a mountainside, nearly throwing, her to her knees, and he rose up like a mountain's precipice, rolling into his lowest pair of hands a phurba cut from ice, holding aloft a clutch of fire, a scepter, a pair of dorjes, a garuda arcing overhead in a mandala to seal air to stone. Padmasambhava held Vajrakilaya in his palm. His forehead grew smooth with the fire of a wrathful deity's vanishing descent into Yeshe Tsogyal's crown. * When the air had grown calm again, and the sun had begun its ascent up a ladder of stars shining with snow, refracting in each flake a source's vagrant singularity, Padmasambhava smiled. Here was the vessel he'd been waiting for, a stainless ivory, a milk's conjugal mingling with its container as it was about to be poured from one pitcher to another, a sunlight grown in liqid in its ripening into amrita, a sun resting on the meniscus of a horizon like an egg waiting to crack and fill all sentient beings with an endless expanse. She fell to one knee, clasping her hands at her heart. 'I am a simple girl from Kharchen, whose only wish is to abide in you, O great Guru! I offer you the coure of my body, speech and mind, until all beings have passed from all the realms into your groundless Light!' Padmasambhava looked out over Tibet, a conch held to his lips with the slenderest of gravitas, the stem of a lotus trailing through its coiling spirals, petals emerging out of its mouth into morning light suffused with Om Ah Hung, thickets of orchids and kusha grass, galaxies in thistle seed securing the breath of the wind that blew and blew a pure note, a sun's deliverance. 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