“Don’t Drink the Milk”

Once upon a time, in a large nomadic community in Amdo, there was a family of three brothers. All three brothers were greatly inclined toward dharma and did little else but meditate and engage in other spiritual practices. One day, the three brothers heard that a very holy lama was supposed to be coming to their area to give an empowerment for chöd practice. The three brothers discussed whether they should go to receive the empowerment, and having agreed that they should, they went on their way. Everyone who received the empowerment was required to travel to various places to practice, like one hundred mountainous locations, one hundred nyen, or spirit-haunted power-places, one hundred charnel grounds, and so on. The three brothers committed to do this, and having received the profound chöd empowerment thus had to travel to a nyen sa—a rugged, isolated, and scary spirit-haunted location—as they had promised. Even so, the three of them understood very clearly that traveling to a nyen sa was not easy at all.

The way the chöd tradition works is that when one practices, one has to roam around and visit whatever nyen, tsen, döndré, and other noxious or harmful spirit-haunted locations one can find. If all three brothers went off to practice at the same time, it would cause problems for the family, so for this reason the brothers decided that they would not go all at once but would go in stages, one by one, with one brother going off after the previous one had accomplished his practice. The other two brothers would serve the one who was practicing. The two younger brothers went with their older brother to the nyen sa where he was practicing with enough provisions for one week and set up camp. The other two then returned home, promising that they would check in on their brother after a week had passed. After a week had passed, the middle brother went to check on the eldest one. When he got there, a fear unlike anything he had ever felt before came over him spontaneously. He approached the tent carefully, but he could hear nothing at all and everything appeared quiet. He called to his older brother in a quiet voice: “I’ve come here to bring you food!” he said, but no one answered. Then, feeling great fear, he opened the tent door and looked inside. There he saw his older brother dead, with blood coming out of his nose. 

When he got there, a fear unlike anything he had ever felt before came over him spontaneously.

The circumstances of the older brother’s death were terrifying but a complete mystery. In keeping with his earlier promise, the middle brother decided that he would stay at the camp. After one week, the youngest brother went to the camp to check on the middle brother. As he neared the tent, an unbearable feeling of fear and panic, unlike any he’d ever experienced before, came over him. Not daring to open the tent, he called out his middle brother’s name in a loud voice. But no one answered. Now even more afraid, he opened the door of the tent abruptly and looked inside. There he saw his middle brother, who just like his eldest brother, was stone dead, with blood coming out of his nose. When the youngest brother examined the tent carefully, he discovered there were indistinct letters written in blood on its surface. What looked like “You shouldn’t drink the milk” was the only thing he could make out. He couldn’t work out the meaning of this, however, and it remained a total mystery to him.

Now the youngest brother found himself alone, with no idea what to do. Both his older brothers were dead. He really wanted to know how they had died, but he had no way to make sense of their cause of death other than just “Don’t drink the milk.” So he stayed right there and practiced chöd. He divided his practice into six sessions across the day and night. He chanted three times a day and three times a night. From the first day until the seventh day, there were no sounds or movements at all, everything appeared still and quiet. After sunset, during the evening of the seventh day, he again engaged diligently in the practice of chöd. After completing his practice session, he went to sleep in a meditative state and practiced dream yoga. After sleeping for a little while, he heard a woman singing and woke up. When he got up and looked out the tent, he saw that not only had dawn broken but it was already around midday. Astonished that the sun could have risen even though he’d only slept for such a short time, he applied himself to the practice of chöd as usual. 

After a little while, voices and a great clamor seemed to fill the valley, and when the youngest brother went outside the tent to take a look, he saw a nomad who was moving encampments and a woman singing with a very beautiful voice approaching, herding cattle and sheep. After a little while, the nomad family erected their tent close to his own. “Now I have neighbors,” he thought. “Which isn’t so bad at all—both my older brothers have died, so what’s so bad about having friends to console me in my grief?” Thinking this, he applied himself to his practice. A little while later, the singing woman came to him. “Ngakpa-la [esteemed tantric yogi householder], please have some of this milk that I’ve just collected,” she said. He took up the milk with great pleasure, but when he started to drink, he suddenly remembered the cryptic message “You shouldn’t drink the milk,” and many thoughts arose in his mind. Then the woman who’d given him the milk started to get a little agitated. “Ah, this woman is really a dremo, a demoness!” he thought and threw the milk back at her in her face. With a great cry, the woman disappeared without a trace. In that moment, the demoness’s magical illusion was broken and it changed back to nighttime, and everything appeared quiet and still again. Now, at last. He understood clearly that his two older brothers had been killed by the demoness. 

I heard this ghost story directly from an old ngakpa when I was little. I, Tenpé Nyima, aka Tabdün Wangpo, put all that I heard from him into words while in America, unadulterated and without any personal embellishment at all.

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This excerpt was adapted from an article that appeared on Ben P. Joffe’s blog, A Perfumed Skull, which was translated from Tibetan from Khabdha.