October 2008
A few years ago, during one of Lama Norlha Rinpoche’s visits to New Hampshire, he gave a public talk at the Unitarian Church in Portsmouth on the topic of how to be happy. The gist of his advice was this: in all our relationships, especially with those closest to us, always focus on the person’s good qualities and their kindness, and never think about their flaws and misdeeds.
As usual, the Buddha’s solution to our problem is very simple. The difficulty is in overcoming our habitual patterns, or internal resistance, in order to apply it or even remember it in the heat of the moment.
I have written about how prone I am to notice the flaws in things, to wish for something to be different, no matter how good my situation is. That seems to be my default setting, and from years of observation, I suspect it is the case with many of us humans, at least those of us with enough resources that we aren’t filled with joy just to have a roof over our head or enough to eat. Just as a cat is programmed to pounce on the slightest movement, we seem to be programmed to notice the slightest flaw or discomfort, and often to focus on that instead of the bigger, happier picture. A classic example is what the real estate industry terms “buyer’s remorse,” that feeling of dread that comes over us as soon as we finally close on the coveted house and begin to notice its every defect.
In retreat, Rinpoche urges us to appreciate our rare, if sometimes challenging, opportunity, rather than give in to the ever-present demons of worry, doubt, and discontent. “Mind is empty,” he said one day. “This means you can change your thoughts.”
He repeated that advice just this week, in the context of reminding us how many methods we now have for dealing with emotional ups and downs. If our meditation is being derailed by an intrusive train of thought, especially one that brings up anger, sadness or some other disturbing emotion, there are various meditational methods we can apply—but we can also just: Hop on a different train! Change the channel! Think about something else! Most helpful, of course, is to turn our mind to a Dharma topic such as remembering impermanence or reviewing the reasons patience is more beneficial than anger—but any positive alternative thought will do the job.
Of course, altering one’s overall thought picture is not an easy task, and Rinpoche was not addressing such situations as clinical depression, which make it harder and may require outside help. But maybe we could just start to work on our everyday garden-variety thoughts, the small ones, when we are just feeling out of sorts with our life or our loved ones. When they leave a mess for us to clean up, or interrupt us for the sixth time, or forget something important, maybe we could google our brain for their lovable qualities and all the times they have shown us that they care.
The very definition of samsara, according to the Buddha, is that it is suffering, ranging from minor dissatisfaction up to terrible tragedy. Even at its best, it’s just never completely, 100% right at any given moment—or if it is, that moment is over in a flash. Rinpoche has also said, “The Buddha taught that samsara is nothing but suffering. So why are you surprised when you suffer?”
The trick, then, to a happy mind is first to understand that something will always be at least a little wrong, and then to persistently reset the dial from “notice what’s wrong” to “notice what’s right.” Meditation is very helpful with this process, because it gives us direct access to the dial, first by cluing us in to what our mind is actually doing at any given moment, and then by providing alternative settings along with the means to apply them
We’ll have to use manual reset for awhile, until our habits begin to change, but if we practice enough—eventually our default setting could be buyer’s delight.
Ha, ha, it’s not really 4:00 a.m. as I write this. I just wanted to echo the title of the first post I wrote, a year ago this month. Normally at 4:00 a.m., we are starting our first meditation session (thun) of the day. Each morning between 4:00 and 5:35, we must complete 100 each of the preliminary practices: prostrations, Dorje Sempa (Vajrasattva), the mandala offering, and Guru Yoga, now that we have finished the intensive accumulation of 111,111 of each of those practices. The other three meditation sessions of the day are devoted mostly to our current main practice.
On the main practice front, we recently finished two weeks of intensive calm abiding (shinay) meditation, using a sequence of techniques similar to the ones we practiced at KSC based on the presentation in Bokar Rinpoche’s book Meditation: Advice to Beginners. Our manual in retreat is one of Bokar Rinpoche’s sources, the Ninth Karmapa’s Ocean of Definitive Meaning.
Now we have begun two weeks of intensive taking and sending meditation (tong len), which we also studied and practiced periodically at KSC. It is quite wonderful to be able to practice for several hours each day with no other interruption than our own internal distractions. These, of course, are no small thing, but retreat provides the leisure and incentive to really work with them and learn to see them as part of the practice rather than an intrusion. We are taught not to try to block thoughts or think our meditation is unsuccessful if thoughts arise. Instead, we aspire to see through whatever arises in the mind; to rest in its essence, the nature of mind, instead of engaging in our usual habit of following thoughts into long bouts of distraction or disturbing emotions such as anger, desire, jealousy, and pride, thus further obscuring the mind’s naturally peaceful essence.
September 30 will be the first anniversary of my move to Kagyu Thubten Chöling Monastery. A year ago, I was in the midst of sorting and packing my belongings, and anticipating how much I would miss people and places while in retreat. I do miss people; and sometimes at odd moments I find myself mentally revisiting familiar scenes, often from the vantage point of driving: passing the peach orchard on Young Road in Barrington (it’s peach season right now!) or driving on Roller Coaster Road in Strafford; traveling Route 4 in Nottingham and Northwood; waiting to make a left turn at the traffic signal in front of the main entrance to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine.
Especially during taking and sending, these memories, and any associated emotions, provide more fuel for practice. We spend all day (ideally, anyway) visualizing ourselves taking on the suffering of others, both specific individuals and sentient beings in general, and exchanging it for our own happiness and merit—breathing in everything painful or unwanted, breathing out everything positive and desirable. Anyone who comes to mind becomes a target for this practice. May all their suffering come to me, and may they experience all my happiness, good deeds, merit, and prosperity of the past, present and future. May they enjoy complete freedom from suffering and attain full awakening. Right now!
Realized practitioners are said to be able actually to accomplish this exchange, as in the classic story told by Kalu Rinpoche in his book Luminous Mind. Maitri-yogi, a teacher of the eleventh-century master Atisha, was giving a teaching, when suddenly he cried out in pain. Someone had just thrown a rock at a dog nearby, and Maitri-yogi instantly took the dog’s suffering upon himself, sustaining a large bruise on his back.
When contemporary aspiring bodhisattvas first learn taking and sending, someone always asks, a bit anxiously: what if I really start to feel the other person’s pain? Kalu Rinpoche’s famous answer: “Think, ‘Oh good, it works!’” But most Lamas just say not to worry about it, it’s not going to happen, except possibly in our overactive imagination. At this stage, the practice is really for our own mind training and operates mainly at the level of aspiration. Though some positive energy is surely dispatched in the other person’s direction, our real goal is to begin to lessen our own ego-clinging, our reflexive sense of me-first, the true source of all our own pain and suffering, through mentally reversing one of our deepest habitual patterns: seeking pleasure and fleeing pain, taking the best for ourselves and leaving the dregs for others.
We are supposed to continue the practice all the time—while walking, eating, going to sleep, any time we are able to remember to do it. Breathe in the bad, breathe out the good. In the Torch of Certainty, the nineteenth century master Jamgon Kongtrul advises us, “Even on your deathbed when you cannot perform any other practice, use your time sending and receiving for as long as you can breathe.” Truly, this is a practice we can do any time, anywhere!
October 5 will mark the beginning of our tenth month of retreat. The outside world has definitely faded, though I often think of family and friends and keep in touch as much as I can by mail. I haven’t heard a phone ring or a new song, read a newspaper, or seen a movie in almost a year. I am finding that, aside from my loved ones, there’s not that much I miss. What does it matter if I know who said what about whom, which movie is an Oscar contender, whether Britney is still in the news. It’s all just more fuel to keep the cycle spinning, the same old laundry going round and round.
In retreat, as the cacophony of outer phenomena recedes, you start to notice more inner space, more peace and quiet, more opportunity to catch a glimpse of what’s real and unchanging at the heart of all the relentless commotion of this world. In fact, at the moment, the only things happening outside my immediate mind (“outside” being of course a relative concept): a pair of yellow-shafted flickers are pecking at the ground under the picnic table, a squirrel is making a great racket peeling a walnut, and the groundhog is getting wicked fat.
September 2008
One of the great things about being a Buddhist is that no matter where you are or what you’re doing, and no matter how bleak—or how perfect— things may look at any given moment, there’s always something you can do to improve the situation. (This is no doubt true of other spiritual paths as well—I just happen to familiar with Buddhist methods.) Below is a concise guide to a few of the techniques we can pull out in any setting to calm our own mind or send some positive energy to someone in need. Each of them is best cultivated in regular sessions on a cushion or chair; that makes them easier and more effective on the spur of the moment. But if you aren’t able to organize yourself to practice formally, any engagement with them is helpful.
Programs and books for further exploration:
August 2008
Lama Norlha Rinpoche, when he teaches meditation, sometimes illustrates his instructions with a classic example: If we become accustomed to sitting in meditation with a spaced-out, blank mind, it is said that we are sowing seeds for rebirth as a hibernating animal. The raccoon, says Rinpoche (via his ace translator, Lama Jamdron), disappears into its den in the late fall, and when it re-emerges in the spring: same old raccoon!
That, it seems, is not how we want to meditate. When we sit on our cushion or in our chair, our mind should be relaxed, much like the raccoon enjoying its rest after an action-packed summer. But, unlike the raccoon, we should not actually be sleeping—in the midst of our relaxation, our mind should also be very alert, tuned in to our object of meditation and aware of every passing thought. Otherwise, we are wasting our time, and might as well be taking a nap or watching a “Full House” rerun.
I’ve read that Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche instructed students to meditate as if they had a snake on their lap. During my years in New Hampshire, driving on icy roads provided another apt analogy. In either case—at least assuming Trungpa Rinpoche was talking about a poisonous snake—even the slightest lapse in vigilance could be fatal, a situation that naturally inspires the mind to be finely attuned to every new development.
The point is not to make meditation sound impossible, or even difficult. It’s not that we should expect to have a “perfect” meditation session every time we sit down. Or even once! In her book The Wisdom of No Escape Pema Chödron devotes a chapter, called “Precision, Gentleness, and Letting Go,” to how these three qualities or techniques of meditation complement each other and can be used as remedies whenever one of them goes out of balance. When you catch your vigilance developing into tightness, tension, or a cascade of thoughts, then you apply relaxation in the form of gentleness or letting go; when you get too spacey or dull, then you rachet up the precision.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, in The Joy of Living, likewise urges us not to be hard on ourselves as we enter into the process of taming our minds. He says that as long as we maintain “the intention to meditate” during our session, it’s a productive one. We are all going to space out or get caught up in thoughts from time to time; the point is that as soon as we remember what we’re doing, we return to our relaxed vigilance. Doing that patiently again and again over time gradually wears away our strong habitual patterns to reveal mind’s brilliant underlying nature, and is what meditation is all about.
Time is going to pass no matter what we are doing, and we are going to get old one way or another—unless, of course, we die tomorrow. Either way, we will suddenly find ourselves at the door to the next life, prepared or unprepared.
The good news is that we don’t have to be at the mercy of the passage of time. We can put it to work for us—even turn it into an asset! If we meditate every day, even for a few minutes, that all adds up automatically as the days, weeks, months and years inexorably fly by. Lama Norlha Rinpoche has said that however much practice we do during our life, it will be in the bank when we need it, to help us through hard times, the process of dying, and the transition to what comes next. Naturally, we’ll be a lot better off when the crunch comes if we have managed to make regular deposits over time.
We can apply the same advice to our daily lives. If we spend every day completely immersed in one project and one thought after another, or lost in distraction in front of the TV, when we wake up in our next life: same old raccoon!
In three-year retreat, the goal is to be 100% focused on our practice all the time—and since we are engaged in formal practice most of the time, it’s not too hard to remember, even if we don’t always succeed. But even during our short breaks, we are encouraged not to think about what we are eating or how much sleep we are getting or what bizarre thing our neighbor seems to be up to, but to apply the techniques of meditation as much as possible in all situations, so that it eventually becomes our default mode.
In household life, where the ratio of formal practice to activity is reversed, we can still put most or even all of our time to constructive use via three handy devices:
And once we awaken, maybe we’ll be able to do something for that old raccoon.
August 2008
For the past few weeks, we’ve been entertained almost every day by a family of raccoons: a mother and five cubs.
The cubs are SO cute! They climb the chicken wire enclosure where the guinea hens used to live, engage in wrestling matches, and wreak general, adorable havoc on the property, as mom looks on to make sure they stay safe. Early one morning one of the cubs picked a green tomato (our only food crop, aside from a few herbs), and one of the retreatants, who happened to be outdoors just before the 6:00 a.m. chanting, hissed at it to discourage further destruction. It hissed back nonchalantly, and carried on.
The other morning, in pre-dawn twilight, I was out on the front porch enjoying a brief break in the summer heat, when suddenly one of the cedar trees that line the maroon fence waved at me! Astonished, I kept my eyes on the tree…and it waved again! Then I noticed a pair of bright eyes near the top of the tree, and another pair on the waving arm. It was still waving when I had to go back inside.
Observing the raccoon cubs’ antics, it is easy to forget a key downside to the animal realm, but sooner or later, there is always a reminder. One day last week, the birdhouse near the guinea hen coop had its top open, and there were telltale feathers.
Usually when there is evidence of predation, it is left behind by our resident cat, Dee Dee. But prying open the top of a birdhouse is a bit beyond her capabilities. Darn those cute raccoons.
And that Dee Dee! Her full name is Dun Drup, which in Tibetan means “Goal Accomplisher.” She is an ace hunter, and we frequently stumble upon her victims, dead, mortally wounded, or merely terrified. Occasionally we can intervene in the nick of time, but usually all we can do is dispose of the remains and say a few prayers.
Dee Dee is a poster child for the paradox of cyclic existence. She is absolutely the world’s most lovable cat. She lends herself to almost any sort of contact with humans. You can pick her up, rub her belly, scratch her head, squeeze her, turn her upside down, play her like an accordion, or carry her in your arms as you circumambulate the house. She is a perpetual purr machine. They don’t come any cuter than Dee Dee.
Unless, of course, you are a mouse or chipmunk or vole or sparrow or, the worst case so far in retreat, a pair mourning doves. The Dreaded Dee Dee is a certified mass murderer. She revels in the sheer joy of killing. She is also convinced, despite all our scolding, that her deadly sprees contribute to the household larder. There seems to be no way to discourage her.
Why do we keep a cat? In a word: rodents. Why don’t keep her indoors all the time? Eight residents and four doors, versus a cunning, one-pointed feline brain. But even if we kept our personal hands clean of murderous felines, there are billions more where she came from.
We do our best to make sure she is in at night—not only to protect others, but also to save our sweet kitty from a similar fate at the hands of one of the local coyotes. What goes around comes around: that is the law of karma, cause and effect. Dee Dee is headed for a gruesome fate, whether or not it is the way this particular life ends for her. In fact, her victims are paying off their own karmic debts, according to the Buddha’s teaching. Even in this lifetime, some of them were terrifying predators a little further down the food chain.
If you are expecting me to attempt to tie this up into any perspective that makes sense within the context of life as we know it, forget it. It’s a mess! When things are going well and we’re not confronted with the direct evidence—if our cat hasn’t brought in a bluebird lately, and no one close to us has died or received a devastating diagnosis, and we haven’t lost our job or been hounded to the brink by papparazzi—it’s easy to forget what a whirlpool of confusion and vale of tears we really inhabit. For awhile. And when bad things do happen, we can never ultimately sort out who’s to blame. There’s always another layer to it, if we dare to look, and eventually our analysis just hits a wall.
When the World Trade Center was destroyed in 2001 along with thousands of ordinary citizens going about their daily routines, we were horrified. KTC monastery is within commuting distance of New York City, and some of our members knew victims, or were even there. But when we prayed for the victims, we also prayed for the killers. According to the Buddha, people (and animals) do terrible things out of ignorance, thinking they are doing something else entirely, often quite oblivious to the heinous nature of their acts or the suffering they cause. They are busy focusing, as we all do at least most of the time, on another part of the picture: their own goals and their own immediate happiness. And they will pay dearly for it in the end. Just like lovable Dee Dee, and those adorable raccoons.
But wait—that’s not all! The truth that life as we know it is laced with suffering is just the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, his nutshell description of the way things look to a fully awakened mind. The other three truths are all good news: the truth of origination (the mayhem has a cause), the truth of cessation (the mayhem can be ended), and the truth of the path (the complete, step-by-step how-to manual). The raccoon story, and everybody else’s, can have a happy ending. All we have to do is get to work.
July 2008
When I was a child, my hero was the cartoon character Mighty Mouse:
“Here I come to save the day!
Mighty Mouse is on the way!”
I used to dream about being a girl superhero. I had a ponytail and flew through the air and rescued people from “bad guys.” That was when I was about six years old. I soon gave up the fantasy and caved in to reality: I was just another powerless kid who had to go to school every day and do my chores and homework, and when I grew up I would be a powerless adult who went to a boring job and paid insurance premiums.
Guess what? Though there is undeniable truth to the “reality” version of things, the fantasy turns out to be no less true. I might not have known this had I not encountered the path of Vajrayana Buddhism, in which imagining ourselves as superheroes is not only allowed, it’s the fast track to enlightenment! And it’s not considered a fantasy; it’s an equally valid—even a more valid—way to see ourselves.
Though the Vajrayana (the type of Buddhism that came to us from Tibet) includes all the types of practice done in the other Buddhist traditions (Hinayana and Mahayana), it is distinguished by what are generally called deity practices, in which we visualize “deities” who have superhuman abilities to help beings in particular ways; in some cases, we even visualize these deities as ourselves.
These Buddhist deities are not deities in way we usually understand the word. They really are more like superheroes, whose function is to rescue beings in all the realms of existence from all types of harm. For example, Chenrezi, a four-armed luminous white superhero, relieves suffering with light rays of compassion; Green Tara, a green female superhero, stamps out fear, danger, poverty, and other types of distress. Medicine Buddha, who looks like a blue Buddha, dispels illness. There is a whole class of superhero “protectors,” some of them quite fearsome looking, who make it their business to quash our enemies and demons.
According to the Buddha, everything we experience is in some way a reflection of our own mind: the superhero deities thus correspond to various fully developed aspects of our innate potential, and the “bad guys” they take out are our own familiar disturbing emotions—anger, desire, jealousy, greed, pride, etc.—which they magically restore to their true identities as aspects of our underlying, unrealized wisdom.
In the Mahayana traditions of Buddhism, which include the Vajrayana, all practitioners aspire to be bodhisattvas, or enlightenment warriors. Bodhisattvas can look quite ordinary and show up anywhere—your next-door neighbor could be one. They don’t generally announce themselves, but work quietly to help beings in whatever way is needed. That could be as dramatic as stepping in front of a train to save a child, or, as Tai Situ Rinpoche once explained in a teaching at KTC, it could be as simple as making someone a cup of tea. You might even see one rescuing an insect from certain death—to a bodhisattva, every living being counts.
The most powerful bodhisattvas are those who have attained realization of the true nature of mind, and can therefore see what beings really need and exercise their powers to provide it; Chenrezi and Green Tara are considered realized bodhisattvas. However, anyone can become a beginner bodhisattva simply by making a formal commitment to attain full awakening in order to help others do the same, and then setting out to make it so.
A few years ago, a college student showed up at one of our Dharma center meetings in rural New Hampshire in a log cabin in the woods overlooking a quiet pond, where we met (and my fellow practitioners still meet) one evening a week to do calm abiding meditation and the practice of Chenrezi. This young man had just seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and he wanted to learn to do the magical feats and airborne acrobatics displayed by the characters in the film. We looked at each other for a moment, then welcomed him to our practice: Yep, Chenrezi practice is a perfect place to start!
July 2008
Just a few days into three-year retreat, almost seven months ago, I was helping a fellow retreatant polish some shrine bowls. It was during the lunch break, the only time talking is allowed, and we discovered that we had both come up with the same metaphor to describe our experience so far: down the rabbit hole!
Many aspects of retreat are like being in another world. We hear very little news from outside, even about the monastery whose grounds we inhabit; we are protected as much as possible from anything that might engage our thought processes unnecessarily and interfere with the process of letting them naturally settle so that we can begin to connect directly with our own vast, peaceful, powerful underlying inner nature. A classic Buddhist metaphor is of being caught up in the waves versus experiencing that they are part of the great, calm ocean.
It’s just a temporary escape; when we emerge from retreat we will fully engage once again with whatever waves the world throws our way. But in order to develop the capacity to engage truly effectively, a period of isolation is needed, and that’s what three-year retreat provides.
Well, that’s half of it. It might be isolated, but it’s full of life and activity, even if most of it is internal. Three-year retreat includes a large number of diverse meditation practices, some of them designed to calm down our current, ordinary mental busyness (the waves), and others intended to activate the various aspects of our potential realization (the ocean). These practices can be quite complex, colorful and dynamic: for more on this topic, see “We Are All Superheroes,” also posted this month.
Or, to paraphrase another classic work of Western literature:
Oh, the places you’ll go and the people you’ll meet
When you sit on your seat in a three-year retreat!
Anyway, this is just by way of letting you know that, though I am aiming to send in a post or two about once a month, there are likely to be some lulls in the process. During these first seven months, and probably for several months to come, we are still in the upper reaches of the rabbit hole, pretty much just out of sight of the surface. But my understanding is that some of the practices we will do in the future will serve as express elevators to the depths of our minds…and those periods may not be conducive to the kind of conceptualization required to write a web post.
As I mentioned in the introduction to this web page, Lama Norlha Rinpoche has given me permission to write occasionally from three-year retreat in order to keep in touch with the New Hampshire/Maine community of practitioners affiliated with KTC Monastery. But I can only write what I know (or think I know), and that isn’t much, compared with what is available from the many accomplished teachers in the Kagyu and other Buddhist traditions. There is a wealth of genuine teaching accessible via books, dvds, cds and the internet, and best is to find an authentic teacher to study with if possible. KTC Monastery is open to visitors, and its schedule of teaching and practice, along with contact information for its twenty or so affiliated centers, can be found on its website, www.kagyu.com. If you can’t get to KTC or an affiliated center, start with books or other media by Kalu Rinpoche, Tai Situpa, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Pema Chödron, and others.
Most likely, I’ll be back with another friendly post in August.
From the yellow brick road,
Yeshe Chödron
via Owl
June 2008
The maroon fence outside my window is a favorite resting spot for birds. Sometimes they sing a song, but usually they just sit for a moment or two, maybe groom themselves a bit, and then they’re off to the next thing. In April there was a parade of Carolina wrens, usually en route to the new house with some fresh nesting material. In May, the wrens could still be heard in the distance, but the fence belonged to song sparrows. Now the sparrows are rarely seen or heard, and a pair of catbirds seems to have moved in. (One is meowing on the fence as I write. Nope…now it’s gone. Postscript from end of June: the catbirds are now gone, and the blue jays have taken over.) One evening awhile back, when I was feeling momentarily dispirited, a shy wood thrush, usually heard from far off in the woods, stopped just long enough to sing its magical song.
Whenever a catbird lands on the fence, in the back of my mind there is always the hope that it will sing. If lunch is buckwheat and parsnips (it happens), I wish it were something else. If it’s Thursday after lunch (housecleaning day) I wish it were Friday (incoming mail day). The weather could be warmer…or cooler…or a little less humid. The chanting could be smoother…or more in tune…or faster…or slower….My mind could be free of thoughts…or at least full of better quality ones. What exists that could not be improved!
I have come to suspect that samsara, a.k.a. cyclic existence, this prison of confusion and suffering, might be defined simply as the state of wanting things to be different. Could it be that as soon as we wake up and see things as they are, and are able to rest peacefully in that without wishing them otherwise—whether we are walking on the beach or at work on Monday morning with a bad-tempered colleague—bingo!
In the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, of which the Vajrayana is a part, that is not quite the whole story. In order to reach full awakening, we still need to develop and carry out the motivation to help all other beings attain the same state of peace and ultimate happiness.
Still…if only I could rest in the present moment without wishing for a slightly different present moment…then everything would be perfect!
June 2008
Three-year retreat is the best possible place to be; and most of the time it feels like the best possible work to be doing, and I am very mindful of how lucky I am to have this rare opportunity.
But it also has its challenges. Right now, in late June, it’s very hot. It’s hard to get up before 4:00 a.m., and sometimes it’s hard to stay in the same seat doing the same practice hour upon hour, day after day. At this point, nearing the end of our first six months, the initial novelty has worn off and we are facing many more months of hard work without a lot of the comforts and escapes we used to take for granted. I sometimes feel like I’m “in the weeds,” my friend Anne’s copy editing term for being in the middle of a tough project with no end yet in sight.
The biggest challenge so far: retreat is pretty much designed to paint your ego into a corner. On a daily basis, I fail to live up to my own standards, in terms of both practice and interpersonal relations. As each day connects a few more dots in my devious ego’s outline, sometimes I feel temporarily discouraged, and there are days when I want to run and hide in a closet.
A few inspiring books have helped me through the difficult moments, e.g., the chapter on patience in The Jewel Ornament of Liberation by Gampopa, Shantideva’s The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, Ngulchu Thokme’s 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Thubten Chödron’s excellent book Working with Anger (which draws upon some of these very sources, and puts them into a Western perspective), and Mingyur Rinpoche’s brief account in his book, The Joy of Living, of his difficult first year of retreat, and how he overcame his own personal challenges through intensive application of the very meditation methods he was being taught.
When Lama Norlha Rinpoche was here to teach a couple of weeks ago, as he was leaving the shrine room, he stopped to look at a beautiful calligraphy by Tai Situ Rinpoche that hangs above the stairwell. Someone asked Rinpoche what it says, and he answered, “Ro nyam.” Asked what that means, he said, “Equal taste.” Asked to explain equal taste, he said: “Happiness and suffering are the same.”
He told us that in Tibet, practitioners would rub something soft, such as an offering scarf, against one cheek, while simultaneously rubbing something abrasive, like sandpaper, against the other, to try to get a first-hand glimpse of ro nyam.
Rinpoche often instructs us to examine our mind when we are very happy or very unhappy, and locate the part of the mind that feels the same no matter what, that is unaffected by passing emotions. I have found that instruction very helpful, both before retreat and in it. It’s an experiment anyone can do. If we just put to use the parade of emotions that march through our minds all day long, maybe we can skip the sandpaper!
May 2008
In its thirty years of existence, KTC Monastery has hosted many great Lamas, including the Dalai Lama, the Sixteenth Gyalwang Karmapa, Kalu Rinpoche (under whose guidance KTC was founded), Tai Situ Rinpoche, Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche, Thrangu Rinpoche, Bokar Rinpoche, Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, and many others. Just to read their names confers blessing!
On May 19, 2008, we hosted an especially historic visit: the Seventeenth Gyalwang Karmapa, Orgyen Trinley Dorje, stopped here for a glorious morning on his first visit to the West, in the midst of a whirlwind two-week tour of the US. (New York City; Wappingers Falls, NY—that’s us; Woodstock, NY—his official seat in the US.; Boulder, Colorado; and Seattle). We spent weeks preparing to receive him, and by all accounts it was a splendid event. (We just got to see the part in our retreat house.)
Just 22 years old (a year older than my daughter), the Karmapa first attracted worldwide attention when he made a daring escape from Communist-controlled Tibet to India at the end of 1999, at age 14. He’s been in India ever since, and we’ve been awaiting our first chance to meet him.
It was a particularly poignant moment, as it was his previous incarnation, the Sixteenth Karmapa, who, along with Kalu Rinpoche, urged Lama Norlha Rinpoche to come to New York City in 1976 and undertake the monumental task of establishing the first traditional three-year retreat program in North America. Lama Norlha Rinpoche was with him in Chicago shortly before he passed away there in 1981; he had visited KTC in 1980, as preparations for the retreat were gearing up, but was no longer with us when the first, historic retreat actually began in June of 1982.
After a welcoming ceremony in the main house, an informal talk in a tent outdoors to an audience of more than 300 members of KTC and its affiliated centers (including Jeffrey, Anne and Marguerite from KSC-NH), and a walk down the hill to bless the recently completed foundation of the new Maitreya Center and the stupa that overlooks the Hudson River, the two retreat houses were the last stops on his itinerary.
He spent about ten minutes in each retreat house—first the men’s retreat, Naro Ling; then the women’s retreat, Nigu Ling. At Nigu Ling, we played a traditional welcome on the various Tibetan instruments—conch, cymbals, drum, reed horns and long horns— even though we have barely begun learning them (I played the drum, the easiest one). Then we followed him upstairs to our tiny shrine room, where we served him traditional tea and sweet saffron rice, performed a symbolic mandala offering ceremony, and chanted some prayers. He inspected each of us closely from his seat during all this, which only took about five minutes. Then he made a few remarks, partly in English and partly in Tibetan translated for us by another renowned teacher, the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche; and wished us well in our practice. As he was leaving, he shook each of our hands—not a traditional blessing, but a very special one.
We were told that upon taking his seat in the main shrine room at the beginning of the visit, he immediately asked in which direction the retreat houses lay. In his previous incarnation, he had a strong interest in this project, but six cycles of retreat were completed and the seventh begun, and he himself traveled from one lifetime to the next, before he was finally able to see the results. In fact, we are the first Western retreatants he laid eyes on. He promised that he will be back for a longer visit, and we hope it will be soon.
Like his predecessor, the young Seventeenth Gyalwang Karmapa radiates warmth, charisma, confidence, and wisdom. In his presence, it is impossible to look anywhere but at him. He speaks with humility, and has a playful sense of humor; we heard frequent laughter from the tent during his talk, and were told that, in honor of the unseasonably cold, windy weather that day, he began by welcoming his audience to Tibet.
He is already a very accomplished meditation master and teacher. Some of his early teachings, beginning in his teens, are included in Michelle Martin’s biography of him, Music in the Sky, which also includes a harrowing account of his escape from Tibet. I found these teachings quite moving and wonderful, along with a recent teaching on compassion in the summer 2008 issue of Buddhadharma Magazine, which features his photo on the cover.
In addition to forging an auspicious connection with this powerful young spiritual leader, the Karmapa’s visit also served to remind us what a breathtaking thing it is to be in the presence of an authentic realized master. At Kagyu Thubten Chöling, we have the great good fortune to live every day in the presence of a realized master, who has been patiently teaching us, through words and example, for more than thirty years. Sadly, it is easy to take such an experience a little bit for granted when it is so readily available. Seeing the Karmapa reminded us how very lucky we are.