ARTICLES
WHO WAS THUKTE SHERPA? “In his life in the moment, in his freedom of attachments, in the simplicity of his everyday example, Tukten has taught me over and over, he is the teacher that I’d hoped to find… “When you are ready,” Buddhists say, “the teacher will appear.”
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Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard, Viking Press, 1978, p. 316.
hope you agree that the above is a very impressive accolade for anyone, let alone a humble Lance Corporal, from an award-winning author, and is the main reason that prompted this article. What had we all missed about Thukte?
this request! As it happened, he was a great choice. He was always popular with the British Officers, very cheerful, with a wide ready smile. The other mess waiter for the 2/6th was Desmond’s orderly, Tekbahadur Pun. The two for the 1/6th were Kalusing Gurung and Rambahadur Thapa. Kalusing became a renowned “joker” and dancer in the 1/6th for which I got much credit from his CO Gil Hickey.
In the 1960s, Matthiessen, who had lived with the Amazonian tribes of Brazil, and taken their “spiritual medicine”, ayahuasca, introduced his wife Deborah to LSD and other hallucinogens. She in However, Thukte was a bit of turn had given him the rudiments an outsider in the 6 GR Gurung/ of Zen Buddhism and this became Thukte Sherpa, Nepal, 1962 Magar environment and he found his primary study for the remaining it very difficult, when made a Lance Corporal, to get 40 years of his life. He eventually became a Zen monk and established a Zen Buddhist retreat on Long others to work for him given their view of his jhat and status. Regrettably he subsequently volunteered for Island NY. redundancy and was discharged on 15 March 1970. The Snow Leopard describes a journey Matthiessen Soon after his discharge Thukte was hired for made with the naturalist George Schaller in 1973 to Bonington’s Annapurna expedition. The other Sherpa the Dolpo Region of Nepal. was Ang Pema. Of the two Sherpas, Bonington wrote: Some 18 months after joining the 2/6th I was sent “Ang Pema was invaluable as a high-altitude to Nepal to help recruit the 1,700 strong 1962 Galla. porter while Thukte was a superb chef and major This was the largest post war intake of recruits domo. He was well built but lacked the inherent and replaced those who enlisted in 1947. Although toughness of the successful high-altitude porter”. persons much more expert than I carried out most of the recruiting I was given the specific task of Bonington’s observations provided some clues to recruiting four mess waiters, two for each Battalion. Thukte’s origins. Throughout his life he claimed to be One of these was Thukte Sherpa. from the Khumbu region, but his inability to succeed at very high altitude indicates that Thukte was born at Thukte arrived in Dharan with a message from a much lower altitude than Ang Pema. He was from George Lorimer for Desmond Huston that he might the Khumbu region, at 13,000 feet above sea level, make a good mess waiter. I could hardly turn down
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