Drigum Tsenpo

A hundred oxen came into the grove with ash loaded on their backs. Two hundred gold spear points had been tied to their horns. When the beasts were driven together they shoved and stamped, the sacks split, and a grey cloud rose that hid one man from another at arm’s length. Somewhere inside it was the king of Tibet, a son of the gods, who had given away his magic weapons that morning and turned his own ladder to heaven upside down because his opponent asked him to.

Tibet’s first kings were not supposed to die like other people. The line began when a ruler came down from the sky onto a mountain, and each king after him kept a cord or ladder that joined him to the heavens. When a reign was over, the king went back up it. He left no body. There was nothing to bury and nobody built a grave. This went on for seven reigns, or six, depending on who is counting. Then came Drigum Tsenpo.

His trouble began with a deaf nurse. When he was still small, the household asked the old woman what the boy should be called. She asked three questions first. Had a certain golden rock crumbled? Had a certain meadow burned? Had a certain lake dried up? They told her no, all three still stood. She heard the opposite. Believing every omen had gone bad, she gave the child a death name, Drigum, which most readers take to mean killed by the blade. The oldest account says flatly that the naming was a mistake, and that it got into his mind.

He grew up with every gift a divine king could have. He could go to heaven and come back. He owned a spear that stabbed by itself, a sword that cut by itself, a coat of mail that put itself on and a shield that parried without a hand to move it. He was also hot, proud and violent, and he could not leave anyone alone. He went round his own vassals, twelve cousins on his father’s and mother’s sides, and dared each of them to fight him. Each one said no. Then he asked his marshal, a man named Longam, whose title in later tradition is keeper of the horses. Longam also said no. The king would not take the answer.

So Longam named his price. He would fight if the king handed over the four self-working weapons. The king handed them over. On the field, at a place called Nyangro Shampo, Longam asked for two things more: that the king cut the bright red cord at his head, and that he turn his nine-step sky ladder to face the ground. The king agreed to both. It was a stupid thing to do.

Then the oxen came in and the ash went up. Longam struck inside the cloud. The king’s ancestor god reached down to haul him to safety, and Longam pulled a monkey out of his armpit, which threw the god into the heart of the glacier on Mount Tise, where he died. Drigum Tsenpo was killed on the spot. Later tellings shift the blame. In some it is Longam who cuts the cord, and in others the king, whirling his own sword over his head in the fight, slices through it himself.

For the first time there was a royal corpse. Longam sealed it in a copper vessel and threw it into the river. It drifted downstream and ended in the belly of a water spirit called Ode Ringmo. The king’s two sons were given the dog-names Shakhyi and Nyakhyi and sent away east to the land of Kongpo.

Longam did not enjoy it long. Two loyal men rubbed poison into the coats of some fine hunting dogs and walked them into his stronghold as if they were a gift. He stroked the fur. That was enough.

The body was harder to get back. A young man named Ngarlakye, raised by his mother in exile, set out to find it. The water spirit would trade the dead king for one thing only: a human being whose eyes closed like a bird’s, from the bottom up. He walked until his boots wore through and his food ran out, went home, packed again and went on. At last, beside a canal, he found a baby in a cradle whose lower lids rose when it blinked. The mother asked no payment in goods. She asked for a promise. Whenever a king or queen died, the mourners were to bind up their hair, paint their faces red with vermilion, dress their bodies, gather at the corpse, and eat and drink. He swore to it and carried the child to the spirit.

The sons took their father’s body up a mountain in Kongpo and built over it a tomb shaped like a tent turned upside down. The younger stayed there as lord of that country. The elder marched west with three thousand three hundred men. The men of Longam’s clan put cooking pots on their heads for helmets, and it did not save them. He took the stronghold, took the herds, went up to the castle of Chingwa Taktse and ruled as Pude Gunggyal.

Drigum Tsenpo’s strength was borrowed from the sky, and all of it could be handed over. That is the plain shape of the story. Weapons that fight by themselves will fight for whoever holds them. A ladder to heaven is only useful the right way up. He was beaten by a servant who had no magic at all, only a hundred oxen, some sacks of ash and the sense to ask. Later Tibetan tradition moved his grave west, to the upper Chongye valley, where the tombs of the historical kings still stand, and counted every burial mound after it as the price of one man’s temper.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Drigum Tsenpo?

Drigum Tsenpo was a legendary early king of Tibet, usually counted as the eighth in the Yarlung line. He is remembered as the first Tibetan king to die on earth and leave a body behind. The kings before him were said to return to the sky at the end of their reigns.

How did Drigum Tsenpo die?

Drigum Tsenpo was killed in a duel with his own marshal, Longam, whom he had forced to fight. Before the fight he gave Longam his four magic weapons, cut the cord at his head and turned his sky ladder upside down. Longam then attacked him inside a cloud of ash kicked up by a hundred oxen.

What was the sky cord of the Tibetan kings?

The sky cord was a rope or ladder that joined each early Tibetan king to the heavens. At the end of his reign a king climbed back up it and left no corpse. In the oldest account Drigum Tsenpo cut it himself at Longam’s request, and later tellings say Longam cut it or the king severed it by accident with his own sword.

Why is Drigum Tsenpo linked to the first tomb in Tibet?

Drigum Tsenpo was the first king to leave a corpse, so he was the first who needed a grave. His sons recovered his body from a water spirit and built a tomb over it on a mountain in Kongpo, shaped like an upturned tent. Later tradition places his tomb in the upper Chongye valley instead.

What happened to Longam after he killed the king?

Longam was killed by poison. Two men loyal to the dead king rubbed poison into the fur of hunting dogs and brought them to him, and he died after stroking them. Drigum Tsenpo’s elder son later destroyed Longam’s clan and took the throne as Pude Gunggyal.

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