Re: Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa by Diana Mu
Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2019 4:23 am
SEVENTEEN
After Ashoka was born, we were at Chateau Lake Louise for several weeks. Rinpoche didn't seem concerned at all about whether or not Ashoka was his son. He loved him; he always loved him. When Ashoka was three weeks old, Rinpoche picked him up and said, "This will be the next Lord Chancellor of Shambhala!" When Ashoka was little, Rinpoche also used to say, "Something is really special about this baby."
A few weeks after Ashoka was born, we received a letter from His Holiness the Karmapa saying that Ashoka was the incarnation of Khamnyon Rinpoche, the Mad Yogi of Kham, a very important Kagyu lama who had monasteries in both Tibet and India. We decided to wait and not to make any plans about Ashoka's future at that time. There was the question of Ashoka's parentage, and we didn't know what effect that might have in the future.
When we first brought Ashoka home from the hospital, I was staying with Rinpoche in our bedroom at Chateau Lake Louise. Rinpoche thought it would be nice if the baby was in bed with us, as we had done with Gesar. We tried this arrangement, but Rinpoche's kusung seemed to come into the room almost every half hour. Rinpoche was having stomach problems in that era, which continued for some time. He would get nauseous frequently, which was one reason that he would ring for a kusung to come in.
I on the other hand was experiencing some postpartum depression, or at least my hormones were raging and I felt vulnerable and exhausted. I desperately needed to rest at night. With people coming in all night long, and the baby waking up all the time, I finally freaked out completely and started screaming at Rinpoche. We had a huge fight. Rinpoche started screaming back at me and chased me around the bedroom until I finally barricaded myself in the bathroom with the baby. He thought I was being unreasonable. I took a room down the corridor at the hotel so that I had a separate place to sleep with the baby. After that, we got along fine.
The Kalapa Assembly took place at Lake Louise while Ashoka was just a tiny infant. I would bring him to the talks, and there was a screen on the main stage that I used for privacy when I needed to nurse him during an evening presentation. A number of times during his presentations at the assembly, Rinpoche asked me to make remarks to the assembled students or to answer questions. He continued to want me to participate actively in the assembly.
Soon after we got back to Boulder, the Regent and Lady Rich moved out because we needed the room for the new baby. They rented their own house a few blocks away from us, which Rinpoche named the Kalapa House. I also wanted and needed to have my own bedroom at this point. Rinpoche very sweetly arranged for me to have $1,000 to decorate my sitting room, which was off of my bedroom. This was the first time that I felt I could have my own space and arrange it the way I wanted within the Court.
Right after Ashoka was born, an article was published in one of the national dressage magazines about my training in the Spanish Riding School. During this period, there was considerable interest in my riding experience, and several magazines ran features about the time I had spent at the Spanish. I saw the magazine about three or four days after giving birth, and I felt so out of shape compared to how I looked on the cover of this magazine. I thought, "Oh my goodness, it's going to take a long time to get back into this shape." Funnily enough, when I returned to Boulder when Ashoka was just a few weeks old, I got a telephone call from a television producer who wanted to do a feature on the Shambhala School of Dressage for the Arts and Entertainment network. The only time they could possibly film me was then, when Ashoka was a newborn. I had to ride for this, even though I felt inadequate. I managed to pull myself together, and it went very well, in fact. The Arts and Entertainment feature was initially aired locally, but then it was chosen at the end of the year to be shown nationally.
During the period when Ashoka was an infant, I appreciated life at the Court in many respects. I could see that it was a wonderful situation for a lot of people in the community to have contact with Rinpoche in an intimate way.
Rinpoche had a daily routine at the Court in Boulder. Of course, being Rinpoche, he constantly disrupted or changed the routine, but still there was a predictable pattern to his life. When he first woke up in the morning, his kusung would come in and present him with tea bowls for the main shrine downstairs as well as for the shrine in the kitchen and for the personal shrine in his sitting room. Rinpoche would add gunpowder tea to each bowl and then pour hot water into the bowls. Then the kusung would take the bowls and put one on each shrine, as an offering to the protectors, the forces that guard the Buddhist teachings. This daily offering is traditional in many schools of Buddhism.
Once, when Ashoka was quite little, he was in bed with Rinpoche and me. That morning the kusung was a man named Scott Forbes. When Scott came in with the tea offering bowls, Ashoka grabbed at one of them. I said, "No, no, don't do that. That's the Buddha's." So Ashoka sat back and let Rinpoche do the offering. A couple of hours later, we were walking through the hallway of the Court. Scott Forbes was standing in the hall. Ashoka stopped and he pointed at Scott and he said, "Look, Buddha!"
Some mornings, Rinpoche would take a shower before breakfast. He insisted that we should only have white towels in the bathroom. His philosophy was that with white towels you could see if they were dirty. Rinpoche himself didn't like to shower, but he insisted that we had to have these pristine white towels. A little later, he went through a phase where he took long baths in tepid water, uncomfortably lukewarm. He had a fear of water and disliked bathing. Somehow, however, he leaned into the bath thing and made it a regular activity for a while.
After Rinpoche had been awake for a little while, either before or after his morning ablutions, Shari would often come into the bedroom to consult with him about his breakfast. Sometimes he would get up and have breakfast downstairs or in the backyard; often he would eat in his sitting room. He liked to have what he called "bandit soup" for breakfast. This was frozen beef that Shari would shave into very thin slices and arrange artfully in a bowl. Then Rinpoche would have a small teapot containing boiling hot water, which he would pour over the strips of beef. The hot water would cook the meat a little and make a soup broth. (It was called bandit soup because when bandits were on the run, this is the kind of breakfast they could make quickly.)
Usually, Rinpoche would eat breakfast in his pajamas or his Japanese bathrobe, his yukata. Then he would dress for the day's work. He would indicate to his kusung what he wanted to wear for the day, and he or she would bring his clothing to him. He had a big walk-in closet where all his suits, uniforms, robes, and other clothing were kept. Sometimes he would go down to the office at Dorje Dzong. Other days, he would conduct business at the Court. As time went on, he spent more and more time at the Court and held many of his meetings there. He seemed in this era to be moving away from the corporate, office-based approach to business within Vajradhatu. Having seen the neurosis and limitations of that model, he began to make the Court the location for most meetings and the focus, or power spot, for decision making. The night before or first thing in the morning, Beverley Webster would bring over a typed schedule with his appointments for the day. She might also meet with him about what he was doing that day. In addition to his kusung, as time went on, he had an attache, who was both like a super-kusung and also someone to help oversee the conduct of business. The presence of the attaches was an important part of making the Court function not just socially but as the center of the business mandala. The attaches would brief people coming to meet him; they sat in on his meetings and made lots of phone calls on his behalf, and Rinpoche often would discuss possible developments and decisions with them. He especially began to rely on this approach after David Rome moved to New York in 1982 to run his family's publishing business. Before that, David did a lot of this himself. After David's departure, Jim Gimian took over many of the functions of running the office with Beverley. There was a core group of three attaches: Mitchell, Jim, and Marty Janowitz -- who was appointed the Kusung Dapon in the early 1980s after John Perks left. Rinpoche called them the "three musketeers." Altogether there was a group of about ten attaches, including several women, who rotated through the Court and also traveled with Rinpoche.
In the evening, there were often meetings, lectures, or other events that Rinpoche attended. Sometimes, this called for a change of wardrobe before going out. During this era, if nothing was scheduled in the evening, Rinpoche and I would sometimes go unannounced to somebody's house for dinner. There was one period when Rinpoche wanted to do this several times a week. We would decide whose house we were going to, and we would just show up at the door without warning. People were very hospitable, and usually they made quite a nice meal for us. Sometimes people were totally unprepared for guests and quite shocked by our arrival.
In addition to the everyday activities at the Kalapa Court, we also hosted many receptions, dinners, and celebrations of all kinds. If Rinpoche had been away for any period of time, there was a reception to welcome him home. Members of the board of directors and their spouses, staff from Vajradhatu and Naropa, and other invited guests would come to the Court the night he got home. He would greet each person, and people would join us in the blue room while he talked about the trip and about what would be happening next in Boulder. People were always anxious to see him, and these were generally very enjoyable gatherings.
Shambhala Day celebrations at the Court became more and more elaborate as the years went on. Often, Shari and other Court staff would prepare two or three elaborate meals for our guests on Shambhala Day. Sometimes a community member with culinary talent would volunteer as a guest chef for one of the meals. We could have sit-down breakfasts and dinner banquets for fifty or sixty people by turning the blue room into a dining room with long banquet tables and a head table for Rinpoche, me, and the rest of the family. During the rest of the day, people retired to different rooms to talk, have coffee and drinks, and to play board games. Rinpoche thought board games could be both engaging and edifying pastimes. He himself enjoyed the Oriental game of ming-mong, which is a game of strategy, a variation of go. He detested card games and I don't think we allowed them at the Court.
One year, after breakfast I invited a group of women up to my sitting room and we pulled out the Ouija board. It was a lot of fun at first, but then we contacted the spirit of a student of Rinpoche's who had died the previous year. Then we started talking to a lokapala, or a worldly deity. Who knows what was real about this? Rinpoche finally came along and said that he thought it was not healthy to continue. He was not much of a fan of indulging in the supernatural, especially not in the way that Westerners use these things as a parlor game.
In later years, we had receptions at the Court for visiting Buddhist teachers, and occasionally we hosted dignitaries who came through Boulder. Once we had a reception for a representative of the Chinese government. For Rinpoche, having a Chinese official at the Court was quite a coup. He looked like the cat that swallowed the canary that evening, I thought.
On another occasion, the widow of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was invited from San Francisco to the Kalapa Court for the opening of a Japanese tea house that Rinpoche had built in the garden. (I believe that the tea house was donated after his death to Naropa Institute and was moved onto their campus at some point.) It was a lovely occasion and wonderful to see Mrs. Suzuki again. A few years later, when some students began studying the Japanese tea ceremony, they would come to the Court almost every night of the week to take classes and practice the discipline of tea ceremony, or chado. That was another feature of how our house was used: it was available for classes and small gatherings, almost like a community center. Rinpoche wanted our home to be the focus for Shambhala culture, which was wonderful for the community but less satisfying for me in my desire to have a family home.
During this era, Rinpoche -- among his many vocations -- was quite involved with the presentation of Dharma Art, which refers to teachings on art in everyday life, as well as general aesthetics and the application of Buddhist and Shambhala principles to artistic disciplines. He spoke about nonaggression as the basis for genuine art, and in his seminars he gave demonstrations of flower arranging, calligraphy, and object arrangement, which students also worked with in small groups. At times, Rinpoche also talked about his photographs and about language and poetry in these, classes. Allen Ginsberg was a participant at several of the major seminars. Jerry Granelli, the eminent American jazz percussionist and composer, helped organize early seminars in California and was quite active with the early programs at Naropa. Over the years, Rinpoche was invited to do a number of ikebana or flower-arranging exhibitions. Later, the exhibits evolved into Dharma Art "installations" in which Rinpoche placed extraordinary flower arrangements in rooms that he and his students designed and created. At the end of 1980, he and a group of students had done a major Dharma Art installation at the LAICA (Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art) Gallery. In September 1981, Rinpoche went to San Francisco for several weeks to give a Dharma Art seminar and to do an installation there.
As with so many other areas, his artistic endeavors drew a large group of students to him, some of them professional artists but many not. A group called the Explorers of the Phenomenal World was formed to explore the principles of Dharma Art and to work on the exhibits and installations. One of the directors of this work, Ludwig Turzanski, was a professor of art at the University of Colorado when we arrived in Boulder. Ludwig and his wife Basia were our close friends from the earliest days in Boulder.
As the interest in ikebana grew, it became common for students to come several times a week to create arrangements in various rooms of the Court. I had always loved having fresh flowers, but this took on a whole new dimension, bringing color, elegance, and wonderful fragrance into Court life.
While I appreciated the world of the Court, it had its difficulties. Although there was a sense of well-being and harmony there, at the same time, it was not entirely satisfying for me personally or for our family. For example, when Ashoka was little, his bedroom was in a corner of the Court, right next to a room we called the kusung station, which was where the various servers would hang out when they were not on duty. If Rinpoche rang, the kusung were supposed to walk around the corridor to get to Rinpoche's room. The alternative was to cut right through Ashoka's bedroom, which had two doors. I would say to them, over and over, "Please don't go through Ashoka's bedroom." But instead of taking a few extra steps, the kusung would usually run right through his bedroom, often when he was asleep. Most of the time, they woke him up.
During this era, I was having a difficult time in my personal life. No one was consciously admitting that Ashoka was Mitchell's child, but it was becoming more and more apparent that this was the case. On the one hand, perhaps it was irrelevant. Rinpoche accepted Ashoka, he loved Mitchell, and Rinpoche and I were getting along extremely well most of the time. On the other hand, nothing fit together for me in my life. I started to feel quite groundless. I would sometimes break down and cry uncontrollably. Finally, Rinpoche asked Ed Podvoll, a psychiatrist who was directing the psychology program at Naropa, to come and see me. I used to talk with Ed a couple of times a week, trying to resolve things. A lot of the problem, I realize now, was that, for a long time, I really couldn't admit to myself that Ashoka was Mitchell's baby. It was a struggle to continually dismiss the obvious.
As well, I wanted Rinpoche to be more involved with the family on a day-to-day basis. When he was first getting up in the morning I would go in and sit on his bed and say, "Please, I need just a little bit for me and the family. Just once a week have dinner alone with the kids and me. I know you have a duty, and you have a job. But I need something, just once a week." We'd have these conversations, and I'd always end up crying. He would promise to make time, and then usually nothing would happen. After a couple of months of doing this on almost a daily basis, I stopped. Two or three days later, he came into my bedroom and sat on my bed and said, "Why don't you come and talk to me any more in the mornings?" I replied, "It's just too painful." He said, "Oh no, you can't stop. I'm starting to rely on these conversations you have with me." And I told him, "You know, I'm not masochistic. Why am I going to come in every day? It's too painful. You don't relate to your family at all. Now I've decided to give up. I've started to move forward, and you're saying you're unhappy about that?" I couldn't believe it.
Rinpoche may have been a mahasiddha, but he was also a man. And like some men, he seemed to have a double standard about extramarital affairs. The fact was that I had fallen in love with Mitchell. I know that it was difficult for Rinpoche. He had a lot of relationships, but he usually didn't fall in love with these other women. After Ashoka was born, Rinpoche sometimes worried that he was losing me. In fact, I was deeply in love with Mitchell. When I was a child, my father had talked to me about how it was possible to love more than one person in your life. He had told me that love was very big; it wasn't a small thing at all, and that one's life could accommodate loving many people. I found that I loved Mitchell more and more, and that our love for one another was genuine, strong, and growing.
There was another side to the whole thing, which was the relationship between Rinpoche and Mitchell. They were very close. One night, a few years later, the three of us were in Maitland, Nova Scotia, staying at the Great Ship Inn. I was going to bed early, and I wanted Mitchell to come to bed with me. Rinpoche was in the bathroom, and I went in there and said, "Let Mitchell off duty. I want to hang out with him." "You know, Sweetheart," he said to me, "the problem is, we're both in love with the same person." It was so very sweet. In its own way, it was workable, but there were definite difficulties. I can't deny that.
At this time, I didn't think that Mitchell and I were ever going to have a normal life together. That didn't seem possible. He was married. I was married. But we did have our time together. For me, partly it was that I enjoyed being able to share part of my life with someone who was more my own age, from my own generation. We would do simple, ordinary things like go to the movies together. We shared things that I just didn't do with Rinpoche anymore. At one point, I said something to Rinpoche about him being a father figure in my life, especially since I'd been so young when we got together. He didn't like my saying that, but there was something to it. I also did have a real craving to have a more quiet life and a more normal relationship. So there was some push and pull between Rinpoche and me, although we continued to love one another a great deal.
When Ashoka was about six months old, I took him with me over to Germany for a period of time. I had decided to go to Gronwohldhof and get back into my riding a little bit. I had sold Shambhala, one of my horses, in part because there were a number of people who had invested in buying him, and people needed to get their money out. I had Warrior with me in Germany. I was there training for several months. I felt that I had to get on with my life and that getting back into my career in riding was the healthiest thing for me to do. I did feel more of my own strength from that, and in many respects, it helped to cheer everything up in my world.
Throughout 1981, Rinpoche was preoccupied with His Holiness the Karmapa's illness. The Karmapa was very ill with stomach cancer, and Rinpoche went to visit him a number of times. He was distraught about the Karmapa's condition. Mitchell became involved in His Holiness's medical care and arranged for him to see Western doctors. In the end, His Holiness came to Mt. Zion Hospital in Chicago for medical treatment, and he died there on November 5, 1981. We all felt it as a great loss. He was truly a great leader, a dharma king. At the same time, when Rinpoche performed a funeral ceremony in Boulder for the Karmapa, he talked about His Holiness's death as a blessing to all beings and especially to the Western world. As he put it:
Very soon after the Karmapa died, Rinpoche went to Rumtek, His Holiness's seat in Sikkim, for several weeks. There, he spent time with all of the other Kagyu teachers, those who lived at Rumtek as well as those who descended there when His Holiness died. Because of my commitments in Europe, I was not able to accompany Rinpoche. It was the first time that Rinpoche had been back to Asia since 1968, apart from a brief visit to Hong Kong to see the Karmapa in the hospital earlier that year. He told me that when he would get up in the mornings, there would be hundreds of Tibetans waiting outside of his hotel hoping to catch a glimpse of him or to receive his blessing when he came out of the hotel.
As is traditional, His Holiness's body was preserved in salts for a period before the cremation. The body was placed within a special ceremonial closed coffin in the main shrine room at Rumtek for several weeks, and many people came to practice there and to pay their last respects. Rinpoche took a number of students with him to Rumtek, including the Regent, Mitchell, Dapon Gimian, the Dorje Loppon [Eric Holm], as well as John Perks, Karl Springer, and several others -- Ken Green, Chuck and Judy Lief, and a few assistants. They all spent time practicing in the shrine room at Rumtek with the Karmapa's body. To be able to practice in the presence of the teacher's body during this period is said to be a great blessing. After Rinpoche's death, I experienced the power of this. One can still feel the teacher's presence, and the energy of his compassion is quite available. The party could not stay for the actual funeral. (There had been a misunderstanding about the date of the cremation.) Rinpoche said that it was more important, in any case, to be there during the early period after His Holiness died.
After returning to Boulder, on the day of the cremation in Rumtek, Rinpoche conducted a funeral for His Holiness in the main shrine room at Dorje Dzong. It was during this sad and moving occasion that he made the remarks above. During the funeral, he also shared with all his students his feeling that with the death of the Karmapa his duty to the lineage became even greater. He had a sense of a heavy cloak of responsibility being placed on him. He felt more and more that the propagation of Shambhala vision was of great importance for the future of Buddhism in the West. From this time onward, he put even more effort into teaching, particularly emphasizing the advanced levels of Shambhala Training.
In May, 1982, His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who had enthroned Gesar in Berkeley, returned to the United States. At Rinpoche's request, His Holiness had agreed to perform a Shambhala enthronement ceremony for Rinpoche and me, which is generally an empowerment for a secular ruler, usually a king or queen. Khyentse Rinpoche had performed this ceremony when the current king of Bhutan was enthroned.
This empowerment is called the "Blazing Jewel of Sovereignty" and is commonly referred to in our community as the Sakyong abhisheka. In 1974, the Karmapa confirmed Rinpoche in the Buddhist lineage as a holder of the Vajrayana teachings, a vajra master.
Now it was very meaningful to him that Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche would come and confirm him as Sakyong. Rinpoche viewed this ceremony as an important landmark in the Shambhala teachings coming to the West. He told me that as part of the Sakyong abhisheka, His Holiness would give me the empowerment as Sakyong Wangmo. This was not a necessary part of the ceremony. Rinpoche could have asked His Holiness to do the ceremony just for himself, but he chose to make me the Sakyong Wangmo. He wanted me to feel that I was part of the ruling principle. I think this came out of his respect for women and the feminine aspect of society. He understood that Tibetan culture had become somewhat stagnant because it was such a male-dominated society. In order to create a rich society here in the Western Shambhala world, he felt that we needed to also empower the feminine principle. So while more of the focus during the ceremony was definitely on him, as it should have been, I was also empowered at the same time.
We started out wearing simple white clothing, somewhat like being on stage in our pajamas. This signified our basic human nakedness, which was adorned progressively throughout the course of the enthronement.
His Holiness was on a throne to Rinpoche's right. Rinpoche started out in a normal chair. I was seated throughout the ceremony on a chair to his left. His Holiness blessed our clothing, which we then put on. For Rinpoche, there was a white naval uniform, which from then on was always called the "abhisheka uniform."
I put on a beautiful brocade chuba that was custom-made for this event. Rinpoche then ascended a throne at the same height as His Holiness.
Rinpoche was given a white naval peaked cap, and His Holiness blessed a small white gold tiara inlaid with diamonds for me (a gift from Rinpoche). We also received special shoes, which in Rinpoche's case had a vishva-vajra (a diamond scepter with prongs in each of the four directions) drawn on the soles. Normally, you would never walk on that sacred symbol, but the king can walk on it, because for him the whole earth is regarded as a sacred golden ground covered in vishva-vajras. His Holiness also blessed various medals and presented them to us. These were the medals that Rinpoche had designed in 1977. We also were given beautiful velvet cloaks, which were edged with a custom-made brocade that came from Japan and included a special tiger-lion-garuda-dragon emblem as part of the design. (The cloaks were made by Deborah Luscomb, one of several talented seamstresses in the community who over the years made special articles of clothing or shrine cloths for members of our family. She had made the cloak for the Sawang's investiture as well.)
At a certain point, Rinpoche was given a large conch shell that he blew, signifying the proclamation of the king's command. Then a bugle played the Shambhala anthem. Many other offerings and toasts were made to Rinpoche -- and to me -- and he made remarks about the significance of the event. He talked about the role of the Shambhala monarch in conquering the setting-sun or degraded aspects of civilization. He also spoke about the need to create a Great Eastern Sun culture based on sanity, gentleness, and wakefulness. This was the role that he saw for himself, for me, and for all the citizens of Shambhala. In our case, the citizenry of Shambhala is spread throughout the world. While Rinpoche established the Kalapa Court as the focus or center of the Shambhala world, he knew that people would connect with the wisdom of Shambhala in many different places and at many different times. While giving this wisdom a seat at the Kalapa Court, he also wanted to extend the Shambhala principles to anyone who connected with this path of warriorship.
All four of our boys were there: Osel, Taggie, Gesar, and Ashoka. When Rinpoche returned from Sikkim, he had brought Taggie back with him. We thought that we would try having him at home once again, since nothing much had changed while he was in Asia. We took him to a whole new group of doctors who put him through a new group of tests, but nothing seemed to help. At this time, Taggie was living in the Court. He had an attendant at the enthronement so that he could witness it, although I don't think he knew what was going on.
For Osel, this day had special meaning because he knew that he would be receiving the same empowerment at some time in the future. In fact, he was given the Sakyong abhisheka in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1995, conducted by another great Nyingma teacher, His Holiness Penor Rinpoche.
Gesar was old enough to understand that this was an important event. He held himself with restraint and dignity throughout the long afternoon. Ashoka, meanwhile, was just a little over a year old. By the end of the afternoon, he was climbing all over me, the stage, and Rinpoche. At one point, Rinpoche was sitting on the throne in his regal uniform with Ashoka on his lap. They seemed quite happy together.
There were about two hundred people invited to the ceremony. I think it had a lot of meaning for everyone who was there. You know, in telling you the slightly whacky story of my life, I worry that what gets lost is the larger view, the larger significance of the events in Rinpoche's life. On this occasion, the whole environment was completely luminous. It was a superpowerful event in what was a powerful environment in any case -- all the time.
Rinpoche understood that the age that we live in calls for the proclamation of dharma as the imperial yana, the imperial vehicle. This is a dark and confused time, a time when people have lost much of the dignity in their lives. It takes a very bright light to get people's attention because they are so lost and jaded. Rinpoche was willing to shine forth that light, even if it was somewhat shocking, even when it was hard for people to make sense of. This was one occasion when the word "glorious" really applied. His Holiness was also a thoroughly luminous and expansive human being. He was magnetic, powerful, and so kind. On this day, Khyentse Rinpoche was beaming, and you could see the connection between him and Rinpoche. They were very close. It was a wonderful occasion. I didn't think so much about the implications as far as my own path was concerned. I felt that it was an affirmation of all of us, of all of Rinpoche's students. It also was an affirmation of hopefulness for Western society as a whole.
After Ashoka was born, we were at Chateau Lake Louise for several weeks. Rinpoche didn't seem concerned at all about whether or not Ashoka was his son. He loved him; he always loved him. When Ashoka was three weeks old, Rinpoche picked him up and said, "This will be the next Lord Chancellor of Shambhala!" When Ashoka was little, Rinpoche also used to say, "Something is really special about this baby."
A few weeks after Ashoka was born, we received a letter from His Holiness the Karmapa saying that Ashoka was the incarnation of Khamnyon Rinpoche, the Mad Yogi of Kham, a very important Kagyu lama who had monasteries in both Tibet and India. We decided to wait and not to make any plans about Ashoka's future at that time. There was the question of Ashoka's parentage, and we didn't know what effect that might have in the future.
When we first brought Ashoka home from the hospital, I was staying with Rinpoche in our bedroom at Chateau Lake Louise. Rinpoche thought it would be nice if the baby was in bed with us, as we had done with Gesar. We tried this arrangement, but Rinpoche's kusung seemed to come into the room almost every half hour. Rinpoche was having stomach problems in that era, which continued for some time. He would get nauseous frequently, which was one reason that he would ring for a kusung to come in.
I on the other hand was experiencing some postpartum depression, or at least my hormones were raging and I felt vulnerable and exhausted. I desperately needed to rest at night. With people coming in all night long, and the baby waking up all the time, I finally freaked out completely and started screaming at Rinpoche. We had a huge fight. Rinpoche started screaming back at me and chased me around the bedroom until I finally barricaded myself in the bathroom with the baby. He thought I was being unreasonable. I took a room down the corridor at the hotel so that I had a separate place to sleep with the baby. After that, we got along fine.
The Kalapa Assembly took place at Lake Louise while Ashoka was just a tiny infant. I would bring him to the talks, and there was a screen on the main stage that I used for privacy when I needed to nurse him during an evening presentation. A number of times during his presentations at the assembly, Rinpoche asked me to make remarks to the assembled students or to answer questions. He continued to want me to participate actively in the assembly.
Soon after we got back to Boulder, the Regent and Lady Rich moved out because we needed the room for the new baby. They rented their own house a few blocks away from us, which Rinpoche named the Kalapa House. I also wanted and needed to have my own bedroom at this point. Rinpoche very sweetly arranged for me to have $1,000 to decorate my sitting room, which was off of my bedroom. This was the first time that I felt I could have my own space and arrange it the way I wanted within the Court.
Right after Ashoka was born, an article was published in one of the national dressage magazines about my training in the Spanish Riding School. During this period, there was considerable interest in my riding experience, and several magazines ran features about the time I had spent at the Spanish. I saw the magazine about three or four days after giving birth, and I felt so out of shape compared to how I looked on the cover of this magazine. I thought, "Oh my goodness, it's going to take a long time to get back into this shape." Funnily enough, when I returned to Boulder when Ashoka was just a few weeks old, I got a telephone call from a television producer who wanted to do a feature on the Shambhala School of Dressage for the Arts and Entertainment network. The only time they could possibly film me was then, when Ashoka was a newborn. I had to ride for this, even though I felt inadequate. I managed to pull myself together, and it went very well, in fact. The Arts and Entertainment feature was initially aired locally, but then it was chosen at the end of the year to be shown nationally.
During the period when Ashoka was an infant, I appreciated life at the Court in many respects. I could see that it was a wonderful situation for a lot of people in the community to have contact with Rinpoche in an intimate way.
Rinpoche had a daily routine at the Court in Boulder. Of course, being Rinpoche, he constantly disrupted or changed the routine, but still there was a predictable pattern to his life. When he first woke up in the morning, his kusung would come in and present him with tea bowls for the main shrine downstairs as well as for the shrine in the kitchen and for the personal shrine in his sitting room. Rinpoche would add gunpowder tea to each bowl and then pour hot water into the bowls. Then the kusung would take the bowls and put one on each shrine, as an offering to the protectors, the forces that guard the Buddhist teachings. This daily offering is traditional in many schools of Buddhism.
Once, when Ashoka was quite little, he was in bed with Rinpoche and me. That morning the kusung was a man named Scott Forbes. When Scott came in with the tea offering bowls, Ashoka grabbed at one of them. I said, "No, no, don't do that. That's the Buddha's." So Ashoka sat back and let Rinpoche do the offering. A couple of hours later, we were walking through the hallway of the Court. Scott Forbes was standing in the hall. Ashoka stopped and he pointed at Scott and he said, "Look, Buddha!"
Some mornings, Rinpoche would take a shower before breakfast. He insisted that we should only have white towels in the bathroom. His philosophy was that with white towels you could see if they were dirty. Rinpoche himself didn't like to shower, but he insisted that we had to have these pristine white towels. A little later, he went through a phase where he took long baths in tepid water, uncomfortably lukewarm. He had a fear of water and disliked bathing. Somehow, however, he leaned into the bath thing and made it a regular activity for a while.
The Tibetans are very foul in their habits, some of which I may mention here. In the house in which I stayed there were some twenty servants, and they brought me a cup of tea every morning. They never washed the cup which I used, but brought tea in it every day, and they would say that it was quite clean, for I had used it only the night before, though it was as dirty as it could be. They think cups are unclean if they have been used by their inferiors, but they never wash those used by themselves or their equals, for these are clean in their eyes, though it is disgusting even to look at them. If I asked a servant to wash my cup, it was wiped with his sleeve, which might be quite wet and dirty from being used as a handkerchief. Then he said it was clean, and poured tea into it. Just think of it! It is impossible to drink out of such a cup, but still one must do so, for it would only arouse their suspicions to be too strict about such matters. It seems to be nothing compared with his other unclean habits that the Tibetan does not wash his plates and dishes. He does not even wash or wipe himself after the calls of nature, but behaves like the lower animals in this respect. To this there is no single exception, from the high priest down to the shepherd; every one does the same. I was, therefore, much laughed at and suspected when I followed the Japanese custom in this particular, and even the children would laugh at me. I was much troubled at this; still I could not do otherwise. This was a still greater trouble in the tents, for in Jangthang I used to have four or five dogs beside me whenever I retired for private purposes. You can well[265] imagine how terrified I was at first, though I soon got accustomed to them. And no sooner had I gone away than the dogs devoured the excrement. For this reason there is little or no filth lying about in Jangthang.
Nor are these the Tibetan’s only unclean habits. He never washes his body; many have never been washed since their birth. One would scarcely believe that they boast in the country, if not in towns or cities, of never having been washed. It calls forth laughter from others to wash even the hands and face, and so the only clean part about them are the palms of the hands and eyes, all other parts being jet-black. The country gentlemen and the priests, however, have partially cleaned faces, mouths and hands, though the other parts of their bodies are just as black as can be. They are quite as black on their necks and backs as the African negroes. Why then are their hands so white? It is because they make dough with their own hands with flour in a bowl, and the dirt of their hands is mixed with the dough. So Tibetan dishes are made of dirt and flour, and the Tibetans eat with their teeth black with sordes. It is a sickening sight! Why do they not wash their bodies? Because they have a superstitious belief that it wipes off happiness to wash the body. This belief is not quite so prevalent among the inhabitants of Central Tibet as among those of the remote provinces north of the Himālayas.
It is necessary at betrothal to show not only the countenance of the girl, but also to show how black she is with filth. If she is all black except her eyes, and her dress is bright with dirt and butter, she is regarded as blessed. If she has a white face and clean hands she will be less fortunate, for she is said to have washed away her luck. Girls are equally superstitious about this, for they too attach much importance in courting to the black[267]ness of the boys. I know it is difficult to credit what I have just stated; even I myself could not believe it until I had visited several places and seen Tibetan habits for myself. People below the middle class have no change of clothes, but generally dress themselves in torn and filthy rags. They blow their noses into their clothes in the presence of others. Their dress is often as hard as hide with dried dirt. It is as it were a concrete of butter, filth and mucus. But people above the middle class are a little less untidy. The priesthood especially are instructed to wash their hands and faces and keep their clothes clean. They are somewhat cleaner, therefore, but only in comparison with their people. It was often very difficult for me to accept invitations to dinner and tea amid these foul habits. While at Tsarang I tried very hard to get accustomed to them, but it is difficult to overcome physical revolt.
-- Three Years in Tibet, by Shramana Ekai Kawaguchi
After Rinpoche had been awake for a little while, either before or after his morning ablutions, Shari would often come into the bedroom to consult with him about his breakfast. Sometimes he would get up and have breakfast downstairs or in the backyard; often he would eat in his sitting room. He liked to have what he called "bandit soup" for breakfast. This was frozen beef that Shari would shave into very thin slices and arrange artfully in a bowl. Then Rinpoche would have a small teapot containing boiling hot water, which he would pour over the strips of beef. The hot water would cook the meat a little and make a soup broth. (It was called bandit soup because when bandits were on the run, this is the kind of breakfast they could make quickly.)
Usually, Rinpoche would eat breakfast in his pajamas or his Japanese bathrobe, his yukata. Then he would dress for the day's work. He would indicate to his kusung what he wanted to wear for the day, and he or she would bring his clothing to him. He had a big walk-in closet where all his suits, uniforms, robes, and other clothing were kept. Sometimes he would go down to the office at Dorje Dzong. Other days, he would conduct business at the Court. As time went on, he spent more and more time at the Court and held many of his meetings there. He seemed in this era to be moving away from the corporate, office-based approach to business within Vajradhatu. Having seen the neurosis and limitations of that model, he began to make the Court the location for most meetings and the focus, or power spot, for decision making. The night before or first thing in the morning, Beverley Webster would bring over a typed schedule with his appointments for the day. She might also meet with him about what he was doing that day. In addition to his kusung, as time went on, he had an attache, who was both like a super-kusung and also someone to help oversee the conduct of business. The presence of the attaches was an important part of making the Court function not just socially but as the center of the business mandala. The attaches would brief people coming to meet him; they sat in on his meetings and made lots of phone calls on his behalf, and Rinpoche often would discuss possible developments and decisions with them. He especially began to rely on this approach after David Rome moved to New York in 1982 to run his family's publishing business. Before that, David did a lot of this himself. After David's departure, Jim Gimian took over many of the functions of running the office with Beverley. There was a core group of three attaches: Mitchell, Jim, and Marty Janowitz -- who was appointed the Kusung Dapon in the early 1980s after John Perks left. Rinpoche called them the "three musketeers." Altogether there was a group of about ten attaches, including several women, who rotated through the Court and also traveled with Rinpoche.
In the evening, there were often meetings, lectures, or other events that Rinpoche attended. Sometimes, this called for a change of wardrobe before going out. During this era, if nothing was scheduled in the evening, Rinpoche and I would sometimes go unannounced to somebody's house for dinner. There was one period when Rinpoche wanted to do this several times a week. We would decide whose house we were going to, and we would just show up at the door without warning. People were very hospitable, and usually they made quite a nice meal for us. Sometimes people were totally unprepared for guests and quite shocked by our arrival.
In addition to the everyday activities at the Kalapa Court, we also hosted many receptions, dinners, and celebrations of all kinds. If Rinpoche had been away for any period of time, there was a reception to welcome him home. Members of the board of directors and their spouses, staff from Vajradhatu and Naropa, and other invited guests would come to the Court the night he got home. He would greet each person, and people would join us in the blue room while he talked about the trip and about what would be happening next in Boulder. People were always anxious to see him, and these were generally very enjoyable gatherings.
Shambhala Day celebrations at the Court became more and more elaborate as the years went on. Often, Shari and other Court staff would prepare two or three elaborate meals for our guests on Shambhala Day. Sometimes a community member with culinary talent would volunteer as a guest chef for one of the meals. We could have sit-down breakfasts and dinner banquets for fifty or sixty people by turning the blue room into a dining room with long banquet tables and a head table for Rinpoche, me, and the rest of the family. During the rest of the day, people retired to different rooms to talk, have coffee and drinks, and to play board games. Rinpoche thought board games could be both engaging and edifying pastimes. He himself enjoyed the Oriental game of ming-mong, which is a game of strategy, a variation of go. He detested card games and I don't think we allowed them at the Court.
One year, after breakfast I invited a group of women up to my sitting room and we pulled out the Ouija board. It was a lot of fun at first, but then we contacted the spirit of a student of Rinpoche's who had died the previous year. Then we started talking to a lokapala, or a worldly deity. Who knows what was real about this? Rinpoche finally came along and said that he thought it was not healthy to continue. He was not much of a fan of indulging in the supernatural, especially not in the way that Westerners use these things as a parlor game.
In later years, we had receptions at the Court for visiting Buddhist teachers, and occasionally we hosted dignitaries who came through Boulder. Once we had a reception for a representative of the Chinese government. For Rinpoche, having a Chinese official at the Court was quite a coup. He looked like the cat that swallowed the canary that evening, I thought.
On another occasion, the widow of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was invited from San Francisco to the Kalapa Court for the opening of a Japanese tea house that Rinpoche had built in the garden. (I believe that the tea house was donated after his death to Naropa Institute and was moved onto their campus at some point.) It was a lovely occasion and wonderful to see Mrs. Suzuki again. A few years later, when some students began studying the Japanese tea ceremony, they would come to the Court almost every night of the week to take classes and practice the discipline of tea ceremony, or chado. That was another feature of how our house was used: it was available for classes and small gatherings, almost like a community center. Rinpoche wanted our home to be the focus for Shambhala culture, which was wonderful for the community but less satisfying for me in my desire to have a family home.
During this era, Rinpoche -- among his many vocations -- was quite involved with the presentation of Dharma Art, which refers to teachings on art in everyday life, as well as general aesthetics and the application of Buddhist and Shambhala principles to artistic disciplines. He spoke about nonaggression as the basis for genuine art, and in his seminars he gave demonstrations of flower arranging, calligraphy, and object arrangement, which students also worked with in small groups. At times, Rinpoche also talked about his photographs and about language and poetry in these, classes. Allen Ginsberg was a participant at several of the major seminars. Jerry Granelli, the eminent American jazz percussionist and composer, helped organize early seminars in California and was quite active with the early programs at Naropa. Over the years, Rinpoche was invited to do a number of ikebana or flower-arranging exhibitions. Later, the exhibits evolved into Dharma Art "installations" in which Rinpoche placed extraordinary flower arrangements in rooms that he and his students designed and created. At the end of 1980, he and a group of students had done a major Dharma Art installation at the LAICA (Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art) Gallery. In September 1981, Rinpoche went to San Francisco for several weeks to give a Dharma Art seminar and to do an installation there.
As with so many other areas, his artistic endeavors drew a large group of students to him, some of them professional artists but many not. A group called the Explorers of the Phenomenal World was formed to explore the principles of Dharma Art and to work on the exhibits and installations. One of the directors of this work, Ludwig Turzanski, was a professor of art at the University of Colorado when we arrived in Boulder. Ludwig and his wife Basia were our close friends from the earliest days in Boulder.
In 1984, after his retreat in Mill Village, which John Perks wrote about in his book, Chogyam Trungpa (CT) decided to marry some more women. To his devotees, this decision came directly from the Rigdens, who were these supposed ‘heavenly beings’ who sat around in the clouds above outer Mongolia and directed the actions of the self-proclaimed universal monarch. Apparently they had nothing better to do than watch the sangha and tell his majesty what strategic moves he should make in his efforts to take over the world. At first, the Rigdens said he should take three more wives, so in order of weddings that would have been Karen Lavin, Cynde Greives [Grieve], and Wendy Friedman.
But as time passed they upped the number to five. That’s when I met him. I was number five and I was groomed to be attractive to him by the father of the children I nannied for. During the summer of 1985, after our wedding, CT apparently fell in love with Ciel, and she became number 6. Agnes Au followed about four or five months later, I think, bringing the total number of wives to 7. But just to be on the safe side, they had 250 copies of the marriage licenses made.
I need to say here that Ciel first slept with CT when she was very young, 13 or 14 years old. Of course people will deny this but it is the truth. She told me herself. I doubt anyone out there has the guts to back me up on this, however. Most still want to believe he was omniscient and powerful and not some pervy, rapey asshole who preyed on children. If your daughter was sleeping with the king of the universe at that age, would that be OK?...
Ciel married CT on her 18th birthday. I was at the wedding, as were the other wives, and I remember her parents brought Polish caviar and vodka, or maybe it was champagne. Her father made a toast, saying he gave his daughter to CT completely, that he trusted him with all of his heart and soul, and that he was honoured to become part of the family, or something similar. CT toasted him back as his father in law and thanked him for his kindness or generosity or something. (Folks can you imagine?)
-- The Life and Death of Chogyam Trungpa's Child Sex Slave: Ciel Turzanski [Drukmo Nyima], by Leslie Hays [Drukmo Dashen]
As the interest in ikebana grew, it became common for students to come several times a week to create arrangements in various rooms of the Court. I had always loved having fresh flowers, but this took on a whole new dimension, bringing color, elegance, and wonderful fragrance into Court life.
While I appreciated the world of the Court, it had its difficulties. Although there was a sense of well-being and harmony there, at the same time, it was not entirely satisfying for me personally or for our family. For example, when Ashoka was little, his bedroom was in a corner of the Court, right next to a room we called the kusung station, which was where the various servers would hang out when they were not on duty. If Rinpoche rang, the kusung were supposed to walk around the corridor to get to Rinpoche's room. The alternative was to cut right through Ashoka's bedroom, which had two doors. I would say to them, over and over, "Please don't go through Ashoka's bedroom." But instead of taking a few extra steps, the kusung would usually run right through his bedroom, often when he was asleep. Most of the time, they woke him up.
During this era, I was having a difficult time in my personal life. No one was consciously admitting that Ashoka was Mitchell's child, but it was becoming more and more apparent that this was the case. On the one hand, perhaps it was irrelevant. Rinpoche accepted Ashoka, he loved Mitchell, and Rinpoche and I were getting along extremely well most of the time. On the other hand, nothing fit together for me in my life. I started to feel quite groundless. I would sometimes break down and cry uncontrollably. Finally, Rinpoche asked Ed Podvoll, a psychiatrist who was directing the psychology program at Naropa, to come and see me. I used to talk with Ed a couple of times a week, trying to resolve things. A lot of the problem, I realize now, was that, for a long time, I really couldn't admit to myself that Ashoka was Mitchell's baby. It was a struggle to continually dismiss the obvious.
As well, I wanted Rinpoche to be more involved with the family on a day-to-day basis. When he was first getting up in the morning I would go in and sit on his bed and say, "Please, I need just a little bit for me and the family. Just once a week have dinner alone with the kids and me. I know you have a duty, and you have a job. But I need something, just once a week." We'd have these conversations, and I'd always end up crying. He would promise to make time, and then usually nothing would happen. After a couple of months of doing this on almost a daily basis, I stopped. Two or three days later, he came into my bedroom and sat on my bed and said, "Why don't you come and talk to me any more in the mornings?" I replied, "It's just too painful." He said, "Oh no, you can't stop. I'm starting to rely on these conversations you have with me." And I told him, "You know, I'm not masochistic. Why am I going to come in every day? It's too painful. You don't relate to your family at all. Now I've decided to give up. I've started to move forward, and you're saying you're unhappy about that?" I couldn't believe it.
Rinpoche may have been a mahasiddha, but he was also a man. And like some men, he seemed to have a double standard about extramarital affairs. The fact was that I had fallen in love with Mitchell. I know that it was difficult for Rinpoche. He had a lot of relationships, but he usually didn't fall in love with these other women. After Ashoka was born, Rinpoche sometimes worried that he was losing me. In fact, I was deeply in love with Mitchell. When I was a child, my father had talked to me about how it was possible to love more than one person in your life. He had told me that love was very big; it wasn't a small thing at all, and that one's life could accommodate loving many people. I found that I loved Mitchell more and more, and that our love for one another was genuine, strong, and growing.
There was another side to the whole thing, which was the relationship between Rinpoche and Mitchell. They were very close. One night, a few years later, the three of us were in Maitland, Nova Scotia, staying at the Great Ship Inn. I was going to bed early, and I wanted Mitchell to come to bed with me. Rinpoche was in the bathroom, and I went in there and said, "Let Mitchell off duty. I want to hang out with him." "You know, Sweetheart," he said to me, "the problem is, we're both in love with the same person." It was so very sweet. In its own way, it was workable, but there were definite difficulties. I can't deny that.
At this time, I didn't think that Mitchell and I were ever going to have a normal life together. That didn't seem possible. He was married. I was married. But we did have our time together. For me, partly it was that I enjoyed being able to share part of my life with someone who was more my own age, from my own generation. We would do simple, ordinary things like go to the movies together. We shared things that I just didn't do with Rinpoche anymore. At one point, I said something to Rinpoche about him being a father figure in my life, especially since I'd been so young when we got together. He didn't like my saying that, but there was something to it. I also did have a real craving to have a more quiet life and a more normal relationship. So there was some push and pull between Rinpoche and me, although we continued to love one another a great deal.
When Ashoka was about six months old, I took him with me over to Germany for a period of time. I had decided to go to Gronwohldhof and get back into my riding a little bit. I had sold Shambhala, one of my horses, in part because there were a number of people who had invested in buying him, and people needed to get their money out. I had Warrior with me in Germany. I was there training for several months. I felt that I had to get on with my life and that getting back into my career in riding was the healthiest thing for me to do. I did feel more of my own strength from that, and in many respects, it helped to cheer everything up in my world.
Throughout 1981, Rinpoche was preoccupied with His Holiness the Karmapa's illness. The Karmapa was very ill with stomach cancer, and Rinpoche went to visit him a number of times. He was distraught about the Karmapa's condition. Mitchell became involved in His Holiness's medical care and arranged for him to see Western doctors. In the end, His Holiness came to Mt. Zion Hospital in Chicago for medical treatment, and he died there on November 5, 1981. We all felt it as a great loss. He was truly a great leader, a dharma king. At the same time, when Rinpoche performed a funeral ceremony in Boulder for the Karmapa, he talked about His Holiness's death as a blessing to all beings and especially to the Western world. As he put it:
Each time the departure or arrival of a Karmapa takes place anywhere in the world, it is a blessing in that particular land .... We do not regard His Holiness's death as an attack by unexpected obstacles. We can see it as a blessing. Never before has any realized person such as the Buddha, Jesus Christ or Mohammed set foot in the Western world. The Western world needed taming. It needed the compassion and skilful means of enlightened mind. It needed the blessings of the Karmapa to conquer the ground and bring the great fruition of the Practice Lineage.1
Very soon after the Karmapa died, Rinpoche went to Rumtek, His Holiness's seat in Sikkim, for several weeks. There, he spent time with all of the other Kagyu teachers, those who lived at Rumtek as well as those who descended there when His Holiness died. Because of my commitments in Europe, I was not able to accompany Rinpoche. It was the first time that Rinpoche had been back to Asia since 1968, apart from a brief visit to Hong Kong to see the Karmapa in the hospital earlier that year. He told me that when he would get up in the mornings, there would be hundreds of Tibetans waiting outside of his hotel hoping to catch a glimpse of him or to receive his blessing when he came out of the hotel.
As is traditional, His Holiness's body was preserved in salts for a period before the cremation. The body was placed within a special ceremonial closed coffin in the main shrine room at Rumtek for several weeks, and many people came to practice there and to pay their last respects. Rinpoche took a number of students with him to Rumtek, including the Regent, Mitchell, Dapon Gimian, the Dorje Loppon [Eric Holm], as well as John Perks, Karl Springer, and several others -- Ken Green, Chuck and Judy Lief, and a few assistants. They all spent time practicing in the shrine room at Rumtek with the Karmapa's body. To be able to practice in the presence of the teacher's body during this period is said to be a great blessing. After Rinpoche's death, I experienced the power of this. One can still feel the teacher's presence, and the energy of his compassion is quite available. The party could not stay for the actual funeral. (There had been a misunderstanding about the date of the cremation.) Rinpoche said that it was more important, in any case, to be there during the early period after His Holiness died.
After returning to Boulder, on the day of the cremation in Rumtek, Rinpoche conducted a funeral for His Holiness in the main shrine room at Dorje Dzong. It was during this sad and moving occasion that he made the remarks above. During the funeral, he also shared with all his students his feeling that with the death of the Karmapa his duty to the lineage became even greater. He had a sense of a heavy cloak of responsibility being placed on him. He felt more and more that the propagation of Shambhala vision was of great importance for the future of Buddhism in the West. From this time onward, he put even more effort into teaching, particularly emphasizing the advanced levels of Shambhala Training.
In May, 1982, His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who had enthroned Gesar in Berkeley, returned to the United States. At Rinpoche's request, His Holiness had agreed to perform a Shambhala enthronement ceremony for Rinpoche and me, which is generally an empowerment for a secular ruler, usually a king or queen. Khyentse Rinpoche had performed this ceremony when the current king of Bhutan was enthroned.
This empowerment is called the "Blazing Jewel of Sovereignty" and is commonly referred to in our community as the Sakyong abhisheka. In 1974, the Karmapa confirmed Rinpoche in the Buddhist lineage as a holder of the Vajrayana teachings, a vajra master.
The attached with reference to yesterday's conversation. I ignore the specific reasons for the scheduling change, but surmise that Mr. Springer's apology was found unsatisfactory.
The Karmapa established his numerous centers in this country so as to give his lineage proper, authoritative representation, which he may feel is not transmitted by Trungpa's centers. Since the Karmapa discovered and confirmed the present Trungpa's Tulku status and accepted on two occasions Trungpa's lavish hospitality, the Karmapa's present non-recognition of Trungpa is a harsh step, which Trungpa's inability to curb his outrageous womanizing and boozing probably precipitated.
-- Letter from Lud Kramer to Tom Clark: Accompanying (1) excerpts from The Tibetan Review and (2) notices from the Office of Tibet indicating a change in the Dalai Lama's American tour schedule -- leaving out Boulder, September 13, 1979
Now it was very meaningful to him that Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche would come and confirm him as Sakyong. Rinpoche viewed this ceremony as an important landmark in the Shambhala teachings coming to the West. He told me that as part of the Sakyong abhisheka, His Holiness would give me the empowerment as Sakyong Wangmo. This was not a necessary part of the ceremony. Rinpoche could have asked His Holiness to do the ceremony just for himself, but he chose to make me the Sakyong Wangmo. He wanted me to feel that I was part of the ruling principle. I think this came out of his respect for women and the feminine aspect of society. He understood that Tibetan culture had become somewhat stagnant because it was such a male-dominated society. In order to create a rich society here in the Western Shambhala world, he felt that we needed to also empower the feminine principle. So while more of the focus during the ceremony was definitely on him, as it should have been, I was also empowered at the same time.
We started out wearing simple white clothing, somewhat like being on stage in our pajamas. This signified our basic human nakedness, which was adorned progressively throughout the course of the enthronement.
White clothing has significance in many religious faith traditions. Some of these traditions include:
• Buddhism: In many Asian cultures, white clothing is worn as a sign of mourning. It is the traditional color of funeral garb. In Sri Lanka, lay Buddhists wear white clothing during ceremonies and auspicious times. In Thailand, dedicated lay devotees who take on 8 precepts (called Upāsakas / Upāsikās) wear white.
• Christianity: Christian baptismal garments are traditionally white. Some churches also adopt white clothing for certain members of their clergy or religious; best known is the white clothing of the pope. Angels in human form are described as wearing white clothes.
• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: LDS members attach particular significance to white clothing. The officiant and the proselyte at a Mormon baptism are both dressed entirely in white. It is traditional, though not required, to dress babies and small children in white when they are blessed. In recent years, it has become common for men who bless or pass the sacramental tokens to wear ties and white shirts. Additionally, temple workers and temple patrons dress in white temple attire to work in the temple or participate in temple ordinances. LDS undergarments are also white.
• Hindu: In funerals, the Hindu people wear white casual clothes in respect of the dead. Widows and sometimes widowers are expected to dress in white clothing to signify their status. (See Mourning (Hindu).)
• Judaism: The ceremonial kittel (Yiddish/Ashkenazic Hebrew: "robe or coat") worn on religious holidays, is white to symbolize purity. The tallit katan(Yiddish/Ashkenazic Hebrew: "small tallit") is likewise white in color, as, on high holidays, is the gartel (Yiddish/Ashkenazic Hebrew: "belt, girdle, or sash").
• Islam: Islam encourages men to wear white clothes for it if known as the purest of colours. Muslim men wear white especially on Fridays. It is preferred for Muslim men to wear a white ihraam (special garments for Hajj), which consists of an izaar (lower garment) and a rida’ (upper garment) when going to the pilgrimage to Makkah. This is symbolic to the fact that everybody will die and the fact that it portrays simplicity. White is the preferred colour for the shrouds of the dead in Islam. Prophet Muhammad has been reported to have said: 'Wear your white clothes, for they are the best of your clothes, and shroud your dead in them.' (Reported by Abu Dawood and al-Tirmidhi).
• Mandean: Adherents dress in the Rasta, a required white garment worn during baptisms and other ordinances.
• Santería: Initiates in Santería are required to wear white clothing for a year, white clothing is also standard attire for attending Santería religious services.
• Sikhism: Kundalini yogis, as taught by Sikhi master Yogi Bhajan, wear all white and cover their heads to expand their auras and practice mindfulness.
• Voodoo Entire white clothing is considered a default attire for lay worshippers attending Voodoo ceremonies as a sign of purity and modesty. White attire is also worn during initiation and ordination ceremonies. White is considered sacred to the Voodoo spirits of Dahomean origin and is sometimes worn by Voodoo adherents on days sacred to Dahomean spirits.
• Wicca: Ritual robes are often made from white cloth, with little or no decoration, according to the customs of certain traditions. White represents holiness and purity.
• Zoroastrianism: Priests of the faith dress in white robes and caps.
-- White Clothing, by Wikipedia
His Holiness was on a throne to Rinpoche's right. Rinpoche started out in a normal chair. I was seated throughout the ceremony on a chair to his left. His Holiness blessed our clothing, which we then put on. For Rinpoche, there was a white naval uniform, which from then on was always called the "abhisheka uniform."
I put on a beautiful brocade chuba that was custom-made for this event. Rinpoche then ascended a throne at the same height as His Holiness.
Rinpoche was given a white naval peaked cap, and His Holiness blessed a small white gold tiara inlaid with diamonds for me (a gift from Rinpoche). We also received special shoes, which in Rinpoche's case had a vishva-vajra (a diamond scepter with prongs in each of the four directions) drawn on the soles. Normally, you would never walk on that sacred symbol, but the king can walk on it, because for him the whole earth is regarded as a sacred golden ground covered in vishva-vajras. His Holiness also blessed various medals and presented them to us. These were the medals that Rinpoche had designed in 1977. We also were given beautiful velvet cloaks, which were edged with a custom-made brocade that came from Japan and included a special tiger-lion-garuda-dragon emblem as part of the design. (The cloaks were made by Deborah Luscomb, one of several talented seamstresses in the community who over the years made special articles of clothing or shrine cloths for members of our family. She had made the cloak for the Sawang's investiture as well.)
At a certain point, Rinpoche was given a large conch shell that he blew, signifying the proclamation of the king's command. Then a bugle played the Shambhala anthem. Many other offerings and toasts were made to Rinpoche -- and to me -- and he made remarks about the significance of the event. He talked about the role of the Shambhala monarch in conquering the setting-sun or degraded aspects of civilization. He also spoke about the need to create a Great Eastern Sun culture based on sanity, gentleness, and wakefulness. This was the role that he saw for himself, for me, and for all the citizens of Shambhala. In our case, the citizenry of Shambhala is spread throughout the world. While Rinpoche established the Kalapa Court as the focus or center of the Shambhala world, he knew that people would connect with the wisdom of Shambhala in many different places and at many different times. While giving this wisdom a seat at the Kalapa Court, he also wanted to extend the Shambhala principles to anyone who connected with this path of warriorship.
All four of our boys were there: Osel, Taggie, Gesar, and Ashoka. When Rinpoche returned from Sikkim, he had brought Taggie back with him. We thought that we would try having him at home once again, since nothing much had changed while he was in Asia. We took him to a whole new group of doctors who put him through a new group of tests, but nothing seemed to help. At this time, Taggie was living in the Court. He had an attendant at the enthronement so that he could witness it, although I don't think he knew what was going on.
For Osel, this day had special meaning because he knew that he would be receiving the same empowerment at some time in the future. In fact, he was given the Sakyong abhisheka in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1995, conducted by another great Nyingma teacher, His Holiness Penor Rinpoche.
Gesar was old enough to understand that this was an important event. He held himself with restraint and dignity throughout the long afternoon. Ashoka, meanwhile, was just a little over a year old. By the end of the afternoon, he was climbing all over me, the stage, and Rinpoche. At one point, Rinpoche was sitting on the throne in his regal uniform with Ashoka on his lap. They seemed quite happy together.
There were about two hundred people invited to the ceremony. I think it had a lot of meaning for everyone who was there. You know, in telling you the slightly whacky story of my life, I worry that what gets lost is the larger view, the larger significance of the events in Rinpoche's life. On this occasion, the whole environment was completely luminous. It was a superpowerful event in what was a powerful environment in any case -- all the time.
Rinpoche understood that the age that we live in calls for the proclamation of dharma as the imperial yana, the imperial vehicle. This is a dark and confused time, a time when people have lost much of the dignity in their lives. It takes a very bright light to get people's attention because they are so lost and jaded. Rinpoche was willing to shine forth that light, even if it was somewhat shocking, even when it was hard for people to make sense of. This was one occasion when the word "glorious" really applied. His Holiness was also a thoroughly luminous and expansive human being. He was magnetic, powerful, and so kind. On this day, Khyentse Rinpoche was beaming, and you could see the connection between him and Rinpoche. They were very close. It was a wonderful occasion. I didn't think so much about the implications as far as my own path was concerned. I felt that it was an affirmation of all of us, of all of Rinpoche's students. It also was an affirmation of hopefulness for Western society as a whole.
Shambhala Anthem
In heaven the turquoise dragon thunders,
The tiger's lightning flashes abroad.
The lion's mane spreads turquoise clouds,
Garuda spans the threefold world.
Fearless the warriors of Shambhala,
Majestic the Rigdens on vajra thrones.
The Sakyong kingjoins heaven and earth.
The Sakyong Wangmo harvests peace.
The trumpet of fearlessness resounds,
The all-victorious banner flies.
Temporal and spiritual glory expand,
Rejoice, the Great Eastern Sun arises!2