The Turquoise Lake

High in central Tibet, between Lhasa and the old town of Gyantse, a long lake winds among bare brown hills. Its water is a blue-green so deep that travellers have reached for the word turquoise for as long as they have written about it.

This is Yamdrok Tso. Tibetans also call it Yamdrok Yumtso. When the explorer Sarat Chandra Das rode along its shore in 1882, he was told that yumtso means "turquoise lake," and he thought the deep water earned the name.

This page is about that lake, about the other great lakes of Tibet, and about what the tradition remembers of Guru Rinpoche among them. Guru Rinpoche, the Precious Master, also called Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born, is the eighth-century master to whom the Seven-Line Prayer is addressed.

A word of honesty first. The sources this page could find tie him to Yamdrok only in general terms. So the story widens out, the way a lake does, to take in the lakes of Tibet more broadly, with Yamdrok at its heart.

A lake of many arms

The plain facts, from Wikipedia: the lake is more than seventy kilometres long, about 4,440 metres above the sea, and one of the three largest in Tibet. It freezes in winter. Its shore is so folded with bays and inlets that it is hard to say where the lake begins and ends.

Its shape, Tibetans say, is like a great scorpion, as the scholars Petra Seibert and Lorne Stockman report. Seen from high above, the long arms of water do curl and reach, the way a scorpion's claws and tail do.

The lady of the lake

In Tibet, lakes, like mountains, are never only places. Wikipedia sums up the old view simply: they are the homes of protective deities, and so they hold a special power.

Seibert and Stockman count Yamdrok among the four "Great Wrathful Lakes" and name its guardian as the goddess Dorje Gegkyi Tso; Wikipedia gives the other three as Namtso, Manasarovar and Lhamo Latso. Local stories, Wikipedia adds, go further and say the lake is a goddess transformed. So in one telling she lives in the water, and in another she is the water.

Her name opens a door to another story on this site. Rigpa Wiki lists the Twelve Tenma, sister goddesses of Tibet's mountains and lakes, and among them is one called Dorje Gekkyi Tso, the Tamer of the Hordes of the Vast Pastures. The tradition remembers the twelve as goddesses whom Guru Rinpoche bound under oath to protect the teaching, a story told in The Twelve Sisters of the Snows.

You may also hear the lake linked with Dorje Yudrönma, the Turquoise Lamp, whose taming is told on that same page. Himalayan Art Resources notes that some traditions make her the leader of the twelve. The sources do not settle which lady belongs to which water, and this page does not try to.

Lake after lake

What did the Guru do among Tibet's lakes? The life stories answer with a long journey. In The Wish-Fulfilling Tree, a life story revealed by the treasure revealer Chokgyur Lingpa in the nineteenth century, Guru Rinpoche looks back on his road through Tibet and names the places where he bound its spirits, one after another.

Many of those places are lakes. On the shore of a lake called Nyima Khü, the text says, he bound fierce beings under oath. At Namtso he bound the mentsünma, whom the translators describe as ancient goddesses of Tibet. At the Blue Lake of Ma he subdued a goddess of the water spirits.

To bind under oath, in these stories, never means to destroy. The old guardians stay in their lakes and mountains. They are given a promise to keep, and the teaching to protect.

Seibert and Stockman write that Yamdrok, its islands and the hills around it are closely tied to Padmasambhava's deeds. They do not tell those deeds one by one, and no source this page found does either. This page leaves that quiet as it is.

What travellers did record is that the old relationship went on. As Das rode along the shore, his companion stopped at a crag said to be the haunt of spirits, scattered a pinch of roasted barley flour and lit a stick of incense, so as not to give offence.

The lake that holds a people's life

Tibetans speak of la, a life-force that, in the old view, can dwell in a place outside the body, such as a lake. A lake that holds it is called a la-tso, a life-force lake.

The Tibetologist René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, as Seibert and Stockman quote him, recorded a legend that Yamdrok is the life-force lake of the whole Tibetan nation. If it ever dried up, the legend says, the people of the Land of Snows would not live on.

Das heard another story about the depths. Water spirits called lu live in Yamdrok, he was told, and their king dwells in a palace of crystal far below the surface. The lu are the Tibetan kin of the Indian nagas, spirits of springs, rivers and lakes.

Samding, on its hill

On a narrow neck of land that juts into the lake stands Samding, a name Wikipedia gives, after an early traveller, as the Temple of Soaring Meditation. It sits on a bare hill about ninety metres above the water. Between the arms of land lies a smaller inner lake, the Dumo Tso.

Samding is the seat of the Dorje Phagmo, a line of women teachers, each recognised as the rebirth of the one before. The first was Chökyi Drönma, a fifteenth-century princess and a student of the great bridge-builder Thangtong Gyalpo, whose story is also told on this site.

Tradition holds that Samding exists for the lake's sake. Das was told that the Dorje Phagmo's spiritual influence keeps the inner lake within its bounds; otherwise, he heard, it would rise and flood all of Tibet, and the monastery was first built for that very purpose. The scholar Judith Simmer-Brown, as Wikipedia reports, says much the same: the first Dorje Phagmo came to Samding to tame the lake.

The accounts differ on how Samding began. Wikipedia names a thirteenth-century founder, Khetsün Zhönnu Drub, while Das was told the founder was a lady he calls Jetsün Tinle Tsomo. Its school is given differently too: most sources place it in the Bodong tradition, though some early travellers called it Nyingma.

In its own story Samding is a place of the Dorje Phagmo rather than of Guru Rinpoche. Yet the two threads meet. Wikipedia, following the scholar Hildegard Diemberger, says the ninth Dorje Phagmo became a renowned Nyingma master and treasure revealer who passed away at Samye, and that a relic of hers is still honoured at a Nyingma monastery on Yumbudo, an island in the lake.

Das noted a gentle law as well. The wild goats, wild sheep and musk deer of the Yamdrok country were under the Dorje Phagmo's protection, and none could be killed there.

The Sky Lake

North of Lhasa, beyond the snow range of Nyenchen Tanglha, lies Namtso, the second great lake of this story. Its name means Sky Lake; Mongolians called it Tengri Nor, the Heavenly Lake. At about 4,700 metres it lies higher than Yamdrok and is far larger, and its water is salt.

Here the link with Guru Rinpoche is plainer. Wikipedia notes that the caves around Namtso are traditionally associated with him and with Yeshe Tsogyal, his great disciple, and that pilgrims have sought them out for centuries. The Wish-Fulfilling Tree remembers the goddesses he bound there, and also names Tanglha, which the translators take to be the great mountain god of the range, among the spirits he subdued.

Wikipedia records a hermits' custom too. Practitioners would walk out across the frozen lake at the end of winter to its islands, carrying their food, and stay through the summer in retreat, unable to return until the ice formed again.

The two lakes are joined by more than holiness. The scholar L. Austine Waddell wrote in 1895 that a sanctuary of the Dorje Phagmo stood on an islet off Namtso's western shore, much like Samding, with a few monks and nuns under an abbess.

By the shore today

People still walk along Yamdrok's shore, pilgrims among them, some murmuring prayers, some silent. Whatever else has changed, the water is still that colour.

A lake-born master

The second line of the Seven-Line Prayer remembers that Guru Rinpoche was born on the heart of a lotus. The traditional accounts set that lotus on a lake, Dhanakosha in Oddiyana, and one of his names, Tsokye Dorje, means "Lake-born Vajra."

Perhaps that is why the lakes of Tibet seem to belong in his story. Their guardians, the tradition says, became guardians of the teaching, and a lake said to hold a whole people's life is, in the old stories, kept by goddesses who gave him their word.

Practices connected with the lake goddesses and other protectors belong with a qualified teacher, and the Find a Teacher page can help anyone drawn to learn more. Anyone, though, may recite the prayer.