Altruistic World Online Library

Part 1 of 2

FIVE

January 4, 1970, the day after our wedding: When my mother recovered somewhat from the shock of hearing the news of our marriage, she moved quickly. She called relatives and friends to ask them to help her get the marriage annulled. She also phoned us the next morning, in a fairly hysterical state. I wrote in my diary, "Mummy said she would turn the press against Ami (my special name for Rinpoche), and we'd be arrested in England." This did not prove to be true, but it was a worrisome threat.

My aunt and uncle also phoned that morning, and they arranged to meet us for lunch that day. My mother had asked my Aunt Veronica and Uncle Michael to drive up to Edinburgh from their home in Northumberland, which was only an hour or two away. She wanted them to find out more about what was happening and to see if they could persuade me to give up the marriage. They drove up to our hotel in their big brown Bentley, and Rinpoche and I got in the back seat. My aunt and uncle were in the front, and they proceeded to have an awful fight about how to get to the hotel where we were going to have drinks. In the middle of this, my aunt turned to me and said, "You know, marriage isn't easy under the best of circumstances. I don't know how you can expect this to work out."

My uncle ordered drinks for us at the bar. Rinpoche had whiskey, and given the circumstances, he drank a fair amount. My uncle tried to open a conversation with him, saying, "Well, now, do tell me about yourself. When did you become a priest?" Rinpoche answered, "Oh, I was a year old." Of course, this was incomprehensible to my uncle, and he began to sputter. He didn't know where to begin to get a handle on the whole situation. The conversation degenerated from there, and he and Rinpoche proceeded to get drunk. My uncle started yelling at him, calling him a cradle robber and a baby snatcher.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, my uncle looked across the street and said in his most arch English accent, "Well, there's a Chinese restaurant. That looks appropriate! Let's eat there." We all got up and walked across the street, which was not that easy for Rinpoche, who was still using a walker after his accident. My uncle seemed to have no idea that going to a Chinese restaurant would not necessarily be the most pleasant experience for a Tibetan. However, Rinpoche loved Chinese food and had no particular animosity toward the Chinese people as a whole. Nevertheless, my uncle's lack of sensitivity struck me as a reflection of his narrow-mindedness. To my uncle, one Oriental was the same as another regardless of whether they were Chinese, Japanese, Burmese, or Tibetan.

After we sat down at the restaurant, my uncle started yelling at the waiter, "Boy, boy, come over here." When the waiter came along, my uncle said, "Bring something Chinese!" The waiter said, "I'm very happy to bring you a menu, sir;' to which my uncle replied, "Just bring something Chinese. Anything Chinese. It's all the same anyway." Not surprisingly, nothing was resolved at dinner. Toward the end of the meal, my uncle said to Rinpoche, "Well, you'd better go to America. You'll do well in America, because anything goes there."

After this painful evening with my aunt and uncle, Rinpoche and I felt quite alienated from my family, and we thought about driving to Samye Ling the next day. \We had already decided that we would not be going back to the ugly scene at Garwald House.) However, the next morning, Tessa and her boyfriend Roderick arrived at our hotel. They had traveled to Samye Ling the day after the wedding, where they had spent the night. They told us that people there were having a terribly difficult time accepting the marriage and that we shouldn't return right away. We decided to take a short honeymoon to Findhorn, a spiritual community in northern Scotland. We invited Roderick and my sister to drive up with us. That day we drove all the way to Inverness, which was a beautiful drive through the landscape of northern Scotland, much of which reminded Rinpoche of Tibet. I remember sitting in the car as we went through the highlands, staring at Rinpoche, thinking, "I can't believe I'm married to you. This is amazing. I can't believe this has happened." I felt like the luckiest person in the world, even though the situation definitely had taken some bizarre twists and turns.

The Findhorn community is famous for growing huge vegetables in the rocky highland soil and for talking to the fairies. It was started by Peter Caddy and his wife Eileen, who greeted us when we arrived. Rinpoche and I were given a nicely appointed trailer, and Tessa and her boyfriend also stayed on the property. It was a brief but delightful honeymoon. We took walks around the property, and Peter Caddy showed us artwork done by people there, which had something to do with extraterrestrials.

While we were there, I consulted the I Ching, and I got "The Marrying Maiden," with the first line a changing line, which mentions "the lame man who is able to tread." I found this amusing, thinking of it literally as referring to Rinpoche and his difficulties walking. The line said that undertakings would bring good fortune.

During our time at Findhorn, I was introduced to Rinpoche's custom of waking up in the middle of the night wanting something to eat. He had this habit for years, for most of his life in the West, in fact. While we were at Findhorn, I got up every night and made him a sandwich.

We also visited an ancient Benedictine monastery nearby, Pluscarden Priory. After Rinpoche mentioned that he was a Tibetan lama, the monks were very interested in him, and they gave us a complete tour of the facilities. We attended services there and had an interview with the prior. Rinpoche particularly enjoyed the Gregorian chanting used in the service, as well as the sweet-smelling incense, and he purchased some to take back to Samye Ling. He felt the monks were following a valid contemplative tradition there and that they were practicing the heart of Christianity. He was quite impressed by their contemplative lifestyle and was inspired to see people practicing an authentic Christian monastic tradition.

At the priory, Rinpoche talked to the monks about his relationship with Thomas Merton, whom he had met in India in 1968, a short time before Father Merton's sudden death. They had drinks together in a bar in Calcutta and were quite taken with one another. Merton commented in the journal he kept at the time, "Chogyam Trungpa is a completely marvelous person. Young, natural, without front or artifice, deep, awake, wise. I am sure we will be seeing a lot more of each other." Rinpoche, looking back years later on their meeting, said of it, "I had the feeling that I was meeting an old friend, a genuine friend. In fact, we planned to work on a book containing selections from the sacred writings of Christianity and Buddhism. . .. He was the first genuine person I met from the West."1

After our visit to Pluscarden, Rinpoche and I discussed the Christian contemplative tradition. I think it was the first time we ever talked about the relationship between Christianity and Buddhism. We joked that our children could become Christians as their rebellion against their parents. I asked Rinpoche, "What would you do if one of our sons said he wanted to become a Christian priest?" And he said, "I would encourage him to become the best Christian priest that ever existed; he would have to do, it completely, fully." He certainly didn't feel that he had cornered the market on wisdom. He appreciated the wisdom and discipline in other traditions. I didn't have a very good impression of the Christian faith, based on my own repressive experiences, but he helped me to see that there was more to it than the conventional approach.

Our time at Findhorn came to an end all too quickly; and we reluctantly resolved to go to Samye Ling, not knowing what to expect. When we arrived there, we were pleasantly surprised to find that a very nice bedroom had been prepared for us. An elaborate thangka of the Buddha had been hung in our room, filling an entire wall. It was a gift to Rinpoche from the queen of Bhutan, Ashi Kesang, when he visited there in 1968. Having this magnificent painting in our bedroom gave me a feeling of acceptance. One of the young monks living at Samye Ling, Samten, presented us with the traditional Tibetan offering of white scarves, or khatas, and talked about the positive significance of our marriage. Superficially at least, there was a sense of being welcomed.

Although we tried to settle in at Samye Ling, almost immediately we began making plans for our departure. Rinpoche gave some thought to returning to live in Asia since things had become so difficult in Scotland. He had me write to a university in Hong Kong, asking if they had a teaching position for him. They wrote back and said that if he could teach Tibetan, they would like him to join the faculty. I convinced him, however, that this was not the direction we should go. He also had been talking about making a visit to America, to do a lecture tour and to receive additional medical care there. Several close students who had left Samye Ling were in the United States looking for land for a meditation center on the East Coast. I encouraged him to think about going to America as soon as possible.

We stayed at Samye Ling for about two-and-a-half months. While we were there, I took Tibetan lessons with one of the monks, Phende Rinpoche, and studied thangka painting with Sherab Palden Beru. He was always very warm toward me, and he adored Rinpoche. He had some initial difficulty with the idea of our marriage, but after he adjusted, he was very kind to both of us. Rinpoche spent most of his time in our room, although occasionally he would come down to the shrine room during the pujas, or religious services. During this period, he sometimes wore monks' robes, tied with a yellow sash to indicate that he was a married lama. I learned to help him dress. Because of the accident, he needed my help. Other times, he wore Western-style dress, men's trousers with a blue button-down shirt and a maroon cashmere sweater. In that era, even his Western clothing often had a little bit of monastic feeling. He loved to wear a turtleneck that was the color of a monk's saffron robe.

During this period, Rinpoche still had to wear a caliper, or a brace, for his left foot and lower leg, which I used to help him put on. When we were first married, he used a walker, but he soon graduated to a walking stick, and eventually he was able to walk just with the caliper. In the long run, he didn't even need that, although he always had orthopedic shoes specially made for him.

Akong would not allow Rinpoche to lecture at Samye Ling. It seemed to be a, control issue. Rinpoche, however, did travel to other parts of Britain to teach. Once he was invited to speak at Bristol University. We stayed the night with an Indian family who was hosting the talk. Another time, we went down to Cambridge for Rinpoche to give a talk. We visited Ato Rinpoche and Alithea while we were there. Since meeting in India, Trungpa Rinpoche and Ato Rinpoche had remained close colleagues and friends. Perhaps because Ato Rinpoche had experienced obstacles to his marrying an Englishwoman, he and his wife were very understanding of our situation.

Since Rinpoche could not give talks· or group teachings at Samye Ling, most of his personal contact with students was in the form of private interviews, which were held in our room. He often set aside several hours a day for interviews. During that time, I practiced meditation, worked on my thangka painting, or handled Rinpoche's correspondence for him. We were preparing for the celebration of Losar, the Tibetan New Year, which would occur that year in early February, and I helped address New Year's cards for Rinpoche. Akong even gave me a typewriter and a place to work. A postcard came from a Mr. Karl Usow in Boulder, Colorado, inviting Rinpoche to visit there and teach at the University of Colorado. We both liked the mountains shown on the front of the card, and Rinpoche said it reminded him of the mountains in Tibet. I wrote back to Karl on Rinpoche's behalf, saying that we would try to come to Colorado for a visit.

One morning at Samye Ling, Rinpoche's interviews went on much longer than expected. Finally, I returned to our room to see what was up. I walked in on him passionately embracing a young woman. I was devastated. I locked myself in our bathroom and sat on the floor crying for hours. I didn't know what to do. I wondered if! should leave Rinpoche. He kept knocking on the bathroom door, but I repeatedly told him to go away.

After several hours, I came out, and we talked. Rinpoche was very sweet. He didn't seem to be avoiding or concealing anything, neither did he seem embarrassed. In some respects, it was an absolutely intimate and direct moment. He said that our connection was very deep and important to him. He told me openly that he expected that he was going to have intimate relationships with some of his female students, but that it didn't mean there was a problem with our relationship. Rinpoche said that in fact it was only because he had such trust in our relationship that he felt it would be possible for him to have these other relationships.

This is a very personal example, from my own life, of Rinpoche's truthfulness. He never lied to me about what he was doing. He was quite willing to talk about what had happened. The communication was so direct and real that I felt I could relax, and I started to let go of my conventional reference points. Rinpoche and I were deeply in love, and I didn't feel that he was using another relationship to blackmail me emotionally in some way.

On a fundamental level, Rinpoche was the most loyal husband I can imagine. In fact, our relationship went much deeper than many conventional marriages. My heart connection with him went far beyond the issue of sexuality, and I knew this from these very early times. As time went on, I felt that many relative difficulties were not fundamental problems -- if I let myself feel that deeper connection.

Although I had the formality of marriage with Rinpoche, my union with him was unique. We called it marriage, whatever it was, but Rinpoche was much too big a personality to trap into a monogamous relationship. It just couldn't be. Rinpoche was not an ordinary husband. He was not an ordinary man. I couldn't be possessive of him. I know that this may be difficult for people to accept, but it is my experience.

His life was dedicated to working with other people and their state of mind. In answering a letter from a student in 1971, he wrote: "I work with people -- that seems to be my reason for existence."2 I came to feel that if that sometimes carried over into sexual intimacy, that was okay. I never felt these relationships were an exploitation of his students. It was a way for him to create further intimacy with people. From a broad perspective, I came to realize that Rinpoche definitely was not here on this earth solely to be my sexual partner. It was not always easy or pleasant for me to accept this, but it was really okay.

In Rinpoche's monastery, the monks did a chant invoking the incarnations of the Trungpas, of which Rinpoche was the eleventh. Rinpoche's students in the West now do this chant as well. There is one stanza for each new Trungpa. In the stanza for the Eleventh Trungpa -- my husband -- he is compared to the Mad Yogi of Bhutan, a revered teacher who lived in the nineteenth century. He was famous both for the depth of his wisdom and for being very wild-drunken and bawdy. This was a very unusual reference because the other Trungpas were generally saintly monks, quite reserved in their behavior. This lineage supplication was written when Rinpoche was about ten years old, so it must somehow have been obvious to the revered lama who wrote this text that this Trungpa would be an unconventional person, another mad yogi.

In fact, Rinpoche's sexual experiences began before he left Tibet. A little while after we were married, I had a dream that he had a daughter in Tibet. I woke up and I said, "I had this ridiculous dream." "Oh," he said when I told him the dream, "It might be true." Then he told me about a night he spent with a Tibetan princess. He was in a procession with a beautiful princess from an outlying area, and he became infatuated with her. He managed to get close to her and suggested that she climb in through his window that night. She did, and they slept together. Before leaving Tibet, Rinpoche saw her again at some public event and she was clearly pregnant. So he might have had a daughter somewhere in Tibet.

As much as I appreciated my husband, I wasn't always accepting of his behavior. When we were first married, Rinpoche told me that it was normal for Tibetan men to beat their wives. I told him this was barbaric, but he said that it was just common practice. In the first few months of our marriage, he tried -- not very convincingly -- to slap me a couple of times when we were arguing. I said to him, "What do you think you're doing?" And he said to me, "This is just what Tibetans do." I felt that this was definitely not okay. I waited until he was asleep one day, and I took his walking stick and began hitting him as hard as I could. He woke up, and he was quite shocked, and he said, "What are you doing?" I said, "This is just what Western women do." He got the message, and it was never an issue again.

If you think about it, Rinpoche had no idea how to be a husband. He went to live in a monastery when he was thirteen months old, and although his mother came and stayed nearby until he was five, he had virtually no experience of family life. His role models were his gurus, and he had great examples in that area. He grew up as a monk, a student, and a Buddhist teacher, but he had to learn what it meant to be a householder, a husband, and a father.

In fact, at the time that we married, Rinpoche's seven-year-old son, Osel Mukpo, was living at Samye Ling. When Rinpoche visited India and Bhutan in 1968, he told Konchokla, Osel's mother, that he wanted to bring their son back to Scotland to live with him. It took a while to arrange this, but eventually he was able to come over. The first time I saw Osel at Samye Ling, I was struck by his physical beauty and small stature, the latter probably a result of malnutrition in India. He was very shy and spoke only Tibetan at the time. I remember him going off to his first day in kindergarten in a jeep with a local Scottish fellow, Mr. McTaggert. This beautiful, small, and very shy child was sobbing as the car left.

Osel arrived in England around the time of Rinpoche's accident. They had a very affectionate relationship, although Osel was shy around his father, understandably so. Rinpoche had asked the monks to look after his son while he was recuperating at Garwald House, since he was in no position to personally care for his son. When we arrived at Samye Ling after the wedding, Osel was living in the monks' quarters. In addition to attending the local school, he was being tutored in literary Tibetan by Akong and the other monks. They were apparently very rough with him. It seemed to be some sort of archaic method of Tibetan education.

Soon after I married Rinpoche, Osel had a high fever, and the monks put him to bed with no pajama top on. I felt that this was not the proper thing to do, so I asked one of the monks to put a top on him. The monk replied, "Oh no, it's good ifhe's cold. He'll get rid of the fever quickly." At that point, I said, "This is enough," and I got an extra mattress and moved him into our bedroom with us. He stayed in our room with us until we left for America.

In general, Rinpoche and I were very isolated from others during this period. Few of Rinpoche's close students remained at Samye Ling. Josie Wechsler, the English nun, was devoted to Rinpoche, and a few other close students were still around. A few friends would occasionally visit or invite us over, such as Ato Rinpoche and Alithea. Stash and Amalie lived nearby; and we would get together with them sometimes. Maggie Russell, whom Rinpoche had wanted to marry, came to visit once. I thought it was great that she had her own car. We spent a great deal of time alone, however, and there was a terrible underlying atmosphere of aggression toward us at Samye Ling.

During this time, Rinpoche's relationship with Akong continued to degenerate. In addition to their disagreement over the presentation of Buddhism in the West, there were other points of contention. Rinpoche was quite disappointed with how Akong related to the mental illness of one of the young monks at Samye Ling. He had to be hospitalized because of a nervous breakdown. Rinpoche felt that, rather than working with this person, Akong's main concern seemed to be to hide the situation from everyone. Rinpoche and I went to visit this monk in the mental hospital.

Akong was terribly mean to me. He put me on the work schedule to do dinner dishes almost every night. If he didn't like the way I did the dishes, he would knock on the bedroom door and tell me to come down and do them again. It felt like a humiliation tactic. This, of course, added to the tension that was building between Rinpoche and Akong.

Part 2 of 2

Akong insisted that Rinpoche should come down for meals rather than eating in our room. Rinpoche often preferred to spend time alone while he was recovering from his accident. He was going through a lot of personal trauma -- much of which had to do with his relationship with Akong. It was not very pleasant for him to come downstairs, as you can imagine. He also didn't keep normal hours -- which was true throughout much of his life. Often he was not awake when dinner was being served, but he would be hungry late at night. If I came to a meal, Akong would not allow me to take a plate upstairs to Rinpoche. Akong used to say, "He can't have food if he doesn't come down and get it." Rinpoche absolutely refused to give in to this kind of intimidation. Eventually, I got an electric frying pan and started to cook for Rinpoche in our bedroom. I knew almost nothing about cooking, but I learned how to cook meat for him in the frying pan. Although many Buddhists, especially in Southeast Asia, are vegetarian, Buddhists in Tibet could not have survived without meat in their diet. Rinpoche was always a meat eater, and I gave up my somewhat idealistic approach to diet when I married him.

It is said that if we eat evil food, if we consume the flesh and blood of beings who were once our mother or our father, we will, in a future life, take birth in the hell of Screaming, which, of the eighteen, is one of the hot hells. To the extent that we once consumed their flesh, so now red-hot clubs of iron will be forced into our mouths, burning our vital organs and emerging from our lower parts. We will have the experience of endless pain. And even when we are born again in this world, for five hundred lives we will take birth in monstrous and devouring forms. [4] We will become demons, ogres, and executioners. It is said too that we will be born countless times among the outcasts, as butchers, fishermen, and dyers, or as carnivorous beasts thirsting for blood: lions, tigers, leopards, bears, venomous snakes, wolves, foxes, cats, eagles, and hawks. It is clear therefore that, for the gaining of high rebirth in divine or human form, and thus for progress on the path to freedom, the eating of meat constitutes a major obstacle.

Most especially, we have been taught that the primordial wisdom of omniscience arises from bodhichitta. Bodhichitta in turn arises from the roots of compassion and is the final consummation of the skillful means of the six paramitas. It is stated in the tantra The Perfect Enlightenment of Bhagavan Vairochana: [5] "The primordial wisdom of omniscience arises from bodhichitta, which arises from the roots of compassion and is the fulfillment of the entire scope of skillful means." It is therefore said that one of the greatest obstacles to the birth of bodhichitta in our minds is our craving for meat. For if great compassion has not arisen in our minds, the foundation of bodhichitta is not firm. And if bodhichitta is not firm, we may well claim a hundred times that we are of the Mahayana, but the truth is that we are not; we are not Bodhisattvas of the great vehicle. From this it should be understood that the inability to eliminate the desire for meat is an impediment to the attainment of omniscience. For this reason, all those who practice the Dharma -- and indeed everyone -- should strive, to the best of their ability, to forsake this evil food, the flesh of their parents.

Some people will object that it is said in the teachings that one only encounters the karmic result of actions that one has actually committed; no result accrues from actions not performed. In accordance with the law of karma, therefore, if one eats the meat of animals that one has not seen to have been killed for one's consumption, if one receives no report that they have been killed for that purpose, and if one has no suspicion that they might have been so killed, no fault is incurred. "It's quite all right," they will say. "We had no hand in the killing of this sheep (or whatever other animal may be concerned). We can be sure therefore that the karma of killing will not ripen upon us; it will ripen on the killers."

This argument needs to be examined closely. Let us imagine that there is a homestead in the vicinity of a large monastery where the monks eat meat. The inhabitants of the homestead calculate that if they kill a sheep and sell its best meat in spring to the monastic community, they will make a profit on the sheep since they will keep its tripe and offal, head, legs, and hide for themselves. And the monks, knowing full well that the sheep has been slaughtered and its meat preserved, will come and buy it. The following year, the family will kill more sheep and sell the meat. And if they make a good living out of it, when the next year arrives, there will be a hundred times more animals slaughtered, and the family will get rich. Thus by trying to enrich themselves through the killing of sheep, they become butchers. They will teach this trade to their children and their grandchildren and all those close to them. And even if they do not actively teach it to others, other people will see their wicked work. They in turn will become butchers doing acts of dreadful evil, and they will set in motion a great stream of negativity that will persist until the ending of samsara. Now all this has happened for one reason only: the monastic community and others eat meat. Who therefore behaves in a more consistently evil manner than they?

If there is no meat eater, there will be no animal killer -- just as in Nepal and India, there are no tea merchants because nobody drinks tea there.6 The meat eater participates in the evil action of the animal killer. And since the meat eater's action is negative, it is quite mistaken to claim that its fully ripened effect will not be negative also. The Buddha has defined as evil any action that directly or indirectly brings harm to beings. And since what he says is true, it is clear that the eating of meat most certainly involves more injury to beings than the consumption of any other food. For this reason, the Kalachakra-tantra and its commentary both declare that, of the meat eater and the animal slayer, it is the former that has the greater sin. This being so, those who still contend that the fault of meat eaters is not so severe, or that they are not as guilty as the butcher, or indeed that they are entirely innocent, are being extremely rash. But right or wrong, why must they have such eating habits? My own belief is that they would be far better off if they could only rid themselves of their dependency.

Again, let us consider the case of a small monastery where the monks are poor and have no money, or else are thrifty and tight-fisted, or else are followers of the ancient Kadampa lineage, consuming only the three white foods. It would never even cross the minds of the lay people living nearby that they might kill animals so as to supply the monks with meat. It is said moreover that the mark of a virtuous action is that it brings direct or indirect benefit both to oneself and others. I believe therefore that if one wishes to commit oneself to an ongoing habit of goodness, there is nothing better than the resolve to abstain from meat. Those few monks who do actually have compassion should keep this in their hearts!

When a lama who eats meat goes on his summer or autumn alms tour, all his faithful benefactors think how fortunate they are that he will visit their house. "He's not just any old lama," they say. "He's an incarnate tulku! We must make him a good meal." Being aware of his eating habits, they slaughter a sheep and offer him the best cuts. The benefactors, for their part, make do with the entrails and think to themselves that the sheep came to a good end. How fortunate to be killed for the lama's dinner! And they tell each other it was right to put the sheep to death and that the sheep was really one of the lucky ones. But when it comes to their next life, the killers will find out how lucky they are!

By contrast, when the visiting lama does not eat meat, not only do the benefactors kill no animals, they hide whatever meat they have and go the whole day without it. They eat other food instead, sweet potatoes, for instance, curd and so on, so that both lama and benefactor keep themselves pure and unstained by negativity-while the sheep, for its part, stays alive and well! Let us pray that all lamas behave like this. For if they display wrong actions, other lamas and incarnations who follow after them will imitate them, and the net result will be that in summer and autumn, lamas and benefactors will join forces in planting the seeds of evil action at the very moment when they turn the wheel of Dharma! Bad for themselves and bad for others, this is the source of nothing but suffering in this life and the next. What else can one say but lama konchok khyen, "O Lama and the Three Jewels, think of us!"?

Then there are other people who say, "Je Tsongkhapa and his heart sons, and other learned and accomplished masters of the past, have taught, on the strength of quotations from the scriptures, that according to the vows of Pratimoksha one is allowed to eat meat that is pure in the three ways. But nowadays," they continue, "benighted Dharma practitioners, hermits and the like, talk a lot of nonsense about this and forbid the eating of meat. They are black demons, trying to deprive the monks of their food. On the contrary, it is by eating meat that the monks keep up their strength, the better to practice the Dharma. And anyway, if the sangha were not supported in this way, it would be as if their share of food were being given to butchers and ordinary people instead-which would be an extremely vicious and inconsiderate state of affairs. In any case," they conclude, "however many times people say that meat should not be eaten, the fact is that if monks and nuns are not allowed to eat meat (unstained by negativity), it follows that ordinary people should not be allowed to eat it either. And there are many good reasons for allowing Dharma practitioners to eat meat."

People who talk like this not only eat meat on their own account; they also advocate it in formal exposition and in private conversation. It is as if demons were advising them on what to eat. For all the Buddhas of the past have declared with one voice that it is on the basis of Pratimoksha that one must cultivate bodhichitta, the characteristic attitude of the Mahayana. By training in the causal vehicle of the paramitas and thence in the resultant vehicle of the Vajrayana, one must at length become the vajra holder of all three vows. Accordingly, we who practice the Dharma now, by following and serving our teachers, first take the vows of Pratimoksha, and then by gradual degrees we exercise our minds in bodhichitta, aiming for the practices of Mahamudra, Dzogchen, Path and Fruit, Pacification, and Cho. But even if we do not manage to get this far, I think that there is no one who, having taken refuge and bodhichitta, does not renew the associated vows every day.

If people take the vow early in the morning, in the presence of the Buddhas and their teacher, to cultivate bodhichitta both in aspiration and action, pledging themselves to the ways of the Bodhisattvas; and if, by the afternoon, they are harming beings-not of course directly but nevertheless indirectly-by saying that it is permissible to eat meat (consciously ignoring what the Buddha has repeatedly taught in the context of the Bodhisattva precepts-that meat, the outcome of harm done to others, should not be consumed), it can only mean that, gorged on meat, such people have lost their wits and are babbling in delirium. For this cannot be the view of a sane person. What a wonderful contrast if instead they can honestly say, "I am practicing the teachings of the sutras and the tantras, and I am sure that my conduct is unstained by faults."

Now, from the point of view of any of the three vows, when there is an important need and benefit for others and oneself, there are many special permissions that allow what is normally proscribed. [7] But it is a mistake to think that such dispensations are granted easily, without specific need. It may be objected that Khedrup Rinpoche taught, on the basis of reasoning and scripture, that it is permissible to eat meat that is pure in the threefold way. And people will no doubt refer to his book The Outline if the Three Vows and tell us to study it.

To be sure, we should attend to this matter with intelligence and care. There is not a single syllable of the Buddha's scriptures that the lord Khedrup has overlooked. He took them all to himself as personal instructions. He demonstrated by reasoning and scripture that the sutras and the tantras are in perfect harmony and mutually support each other, thus presenting the whole range of the Buddha's teaching as a coherent path. But when on one occasion, he said that for someone who has taken the Bodhisattva vow, the teaching of the Lankavatara-sutra [8] does not contradict the Pratimoksha precepts (which sanction the consumption of fish and the flesh of cloven-hoofed animals), he was merely presenting the view of those who said that to eat with desire the kind of meat prohibited in the Pratimoksha was allowed to people who had taken the Mantrayana vows. This view, however, he went on to refute.

Indeed, the eating of meat has never been permitted for those who have taken the Bodhisattva vows. On the contrary, it is clearly said that for them the consumption of meat is forbidden. This being so, those who are addicted to meat and who shift the burden of responsibility onto Lord Tsongkhapa, his heart son Khedrup, and other teachers of the past, by claiming that they allowed it, are very far from compassion, the mental soil in which the aspiration to supreme enlightenment is cultivated. They have no karmic connection with the Bodhisatttva precepts, high, medium, or low. So let them go ahead and say what they like-that they are eating meat because they are Shravakas or because they are tantrikas. And we will see what happens to them in the end!

Some people may object that, although meat eating is indeed wrong, the texts of both sutra and tantra say that if one recites the name of the Buddhas or certain mantras and dharanis, or if one performs a short meditation on the yidam deity together with the recitation of the mantra, the fault is purified. No wrong action is thus performed. Moreover, they say, if one does all this while concentrating on the slaughtered animal, the latter will be benefited and may even be considered fortunate, karmically speaking. Granted, they continue, when ordinary people kill goats, sheep, and yaks and eat their flesh with the blood still warm, their actions are wholly wrong. But when Dharma practitioners eat meat, and when they recite over it the words of the Buddha, charged with blessings as these are, the animal itself is greatly benefited. Therefore, they conclude, it is fine to eat meat, provided one does not have an excessive craving for it. And they also excuse themselves by saying that people and circumstances practically oblige them to eat meat.

But such people are to consider as follows-then they will understand. In the past, the compassionate Buddha said in the first turning of the wheel of Dharma that negative actions should be avoided, virtuous actions should be performed, and at all times one should have a good, kind heart. The Buddha did not, as part of his original teachings, say that Dharma practitioners could and should eat meat. He gave no guarantee that by the recitation of his words (mantras and so on) meat eaters might be preserved from evil. It is best therefore to refrain completely from eating meat.

Why then did the Buddha speak about the possibility of purifying the evils involved in the killing of animals for meat, in the consumption of meat, and other negativities? In fact, he was referring to the negative actions accumulated in one's past lives, from beginningless samsara till the present, while one was sunk in ignorance. Even more, he was alluding to the actions performed earlier in one's present existence, when one had no other means of sustenance or was overpowered and oppressed by ignorance, craving, and aversion. But now, if one recognizes one's evil behavior for what it is; if one confesses it with a regret as powerful as if one had just swallowed deadly poison; and if one has a strong purpose of amendment, vowing never to repeat one's mistake even at the cost of one's life; if one recites the names of the Buddhas, mantras, and dharanis, and if one makes tsa-tsas, performs circumambulations, and so on (which, of the four strengths of confession, is the "strength of remedial practice")-one's evil actions will indeed be purified. This is the teaching. [9]

The Buddha said time and time again in the sutras such things as: "My followers should give up all evil actions that directly or indirectly injure others." One may disregard his words; one may consciously lead others to commit evil in provisioning oneself with meat. One may think, "There are always skillful means in the sutras and tantras that counteract the evil so that I shall still be pure of stain." And one can let oneself off the hook by telling oneself that there are substances to be placed into the animals' mouths and words that can be whispered in their ears and impressed upon their minds so that they will not remain in the lower realms. But to do all this reveals a complete failure to grasp the meaning of the Buddha's teaching. It is a perversion of the Dharma. To behave in this way is to act like the Chinese Muslims10 who are outside the Dharma. For their clerics say that a great sin is committed if other people kill sentient beings but that if they do the killing, there is no sin. And since, they say, the slain creatures have thus encountered their religion, it will be better for them in the future. I have heard that these clerics take sheep by the neck and kill them by cutting off their heads. If this is true, there is absolutely no difference, in action and in intention, between such people and the kind of Buddhists we have just been describing. Henceforth, therefore, those who wish to eat meat should, in addition to their earlier justifications, take a few lessons from the Muslim clerics and study their tradition! They might learn a thing or two! Perhaps it will do them good and they will escape defilement!

Just look how a cat behaves. It catches a mouse and is thrilled, thinking that it is going to kill it. But then, almost as if taking pity on the mouse, the cat lets it go and plays with it-although this is certainly no game. Later, after amusing itself for a long time, it takes the mouse in its mouth, carries it off into a comer, and devours it. This is exactly what some Dharma practitioners do! They pretend to have compassion for the goat or sheep that is about to be killed, praying for it and reciting lots of mani mantras. Then, when the animal is killed and its flesh cooked, they take it away with them to some private place where no one can see them, and they gobble it down ravenously. Lots of people do this kind of thing. I heard once about a cat that had caught a mouse and was carrying it off. But then the cat thought to play with it. When it let the mouse go, the mouse escaped and hid under an upturned basket lying nearby. The cat sat there looking under the basket, mewing softly, all sweetness and compassion. But when the mouse ran still deeper into its hiding place, the cat got all upset, looking up and down. Everyone around just burst out laughing! This is just how some modern Dharma practitioners behave! They put on a show of compassion and recite lots of manis as the sheep is being killed. But if the moment of death is long in coming, they get fretful and agitated. Whenever I am confronted with such a farce, I think that not only the Buddhas in the ultimate expanse must be laughing, but ordinary people in the world must be very amused too, when they hear about the antics of certain Dharma practitioners! Even so, if people do generate some sort of compassion and recite mantras, I do in fact think that it is of some benefit to them, even if it is not much use to the dead animal!

This whole question may be summed up by saying that, for good and compassionate practitioners of Dharma, the question as to whether one is stained or unstained by negativities is quite irrelevant. Sincere practitioners feel a natural, visceral compassion for the slaughtered goats and sheep as if they were their old mothers. They will have nothing to do with killing them for the sake of meat. On the contrary, they save life eagerly; they ransom animals set aside for slaughter and release them. Otherwise, it is like trying to punch someone who is not there. Showing compassion for animals after they have been killed and the meat is being eaten-reciting mantras for the animal's sake-is nothing but a silly game. The people who do this kind of thing may appear fine and sympathetic in the eyes of the ignorant, but when you look closely, there is nothing to recommend their conduct, either in action or intent. If people t"vist the meaning of the Buddha's words and act evilly as we have described, this is not the fault of the Buddha's teaching. It is rather that the immaculate doctrine has been distorted by the actions and intentions of others-with the result that it becomes indistinguishable from the teachings of non-Buddhist heathens. If only we could all act in such a way that this does not happen!

Generally speaking, the Buddha's doctrine naturally makes for the welfare and happiness of beings. As it is said in the prayer, "May the Buddha's doctrine, source of every joy and benefit, remain for long!" Consequently, if human beings and animals living in the vicinity of those who say they are Buddhists coexist in happiness and peace, it is a sign that the Buddha's teachings are present. But if the reverse happens and there is harm and strife, this shows that there is no doctrine near. Nowadays, however, on the pretext of collecting for the monastic community, certain monks inflict great hardship on the villages and their inhabitants, whether human or animal. [11] It is heartbreaking to see. But here, I'd better not say too much. Anyway, nobody will listen. What is more, if I point out the personal faults of Dharma practitioners in high places, they mostly respond "vith angry words. And there is a danger that those who really are powerful might catch me and cut my mouth apart "vith a knife. So I'd better watch my step. In any case, people who are really sincere and compassionate vvill be helped by even the little I have said. On the other hand, no matter how much one speaks to people who are destitute of moral conscience and a sense of propriety, the result will be nothing but trouble for the speaker. In which case, as the proverb goes, "Shut your mouth is the best advice."

Our Teacher, great in compassion and skillful means, made a first rule about meat eating for the Shravakas who had taken Pratimoksha vows, specifying that the flesh of one-hoofed animals (horses, donkeys, and so forth), as distinct from the meat of cloven-hoofed animals (yaks, cows, and sheep), was not to be eaten. Later, he made another rule saying that, apart from meat that is pure in the three ways, all flesh products are proscribed. And then, in connection with the bodhichitta vow, and considering that there is not a single being who has not been our kind parent, he forbade the consumption of any kind of meat whatsoever, including the flesh of animals that have died of natural causes. It was said by the Kadampa teachers of old that the first two rules, formulated in the Pratimoksha context, were taught in the beginning for the sake of those who had an intense craving for meat. The Buddha knew that if the consumption of meat were totally prohibited from the start, such people would be unable to embrace the Buddhist teachings. Once they had entered the Dharma, however, and as their minds had been refined-and of course for the Bodhisattvas-the Buddha set forth the principle of total abstinence from meat. What the Kadampas said is very true. When the Buddha turned the wheel of the Dharma of the great vehicle, many Shravakas elevated their minds, and many of them generated bodhichitta, the supreme mind of enlightenment. They then abstained from the consumption of flesh. Consequently it is a mistake to think that all the Shravakas were meat eaters.

The great being, the second Buddha, Lord Tsongkhapa, says repeatedly in his collected writings, and proves his words with reasoning and quotations from the scriptures, that if one understands the line of demarcation between what is permitted and what is proscribed, one will understand that the sutras and the tantras all speak with a single voice. In the context of the three vows, he explains that specific need takes precedence over prohibition. Therefore, if there is good reason for it, and in order to benefit greatly both oneself and others, it is permissible not to abstain from meat and other sense objects such as alcohol and a consort, but rather to enjoy them as an ornament of ultimate reality. But this does not mean that one is allowed to enjoy such things in the ordinary way and in the absence of perfect justification. As Lord Khedrup says in his Outline of the Three Vows, "All those who generate the mind of supreme enlightenment, Bodhisattvas of the great vehicle-how wonderful it would be if they abstained from every kind of meat. Even at the Pratimoksha level, except for meat that is pure in the three ways, no meat eating is permitted. Even in one's dreams one should never claim, because one craves for it, that meat eating is permissible."

These days, however, one only ever sees the meat of animals that have been slaughtered for food. It's rare indeed to come across meat that is pure in the three ways. And rarer still are the practitioners who have no desire for it. It would surely be better, therefore, if the loudmouths who go trumpeting the acceptability of meat eating were to reflect instead upon the measure of their faults!

Not only is the eating of large quantities of meat bad for one in the long term (for one's future lives); it is an obvious fact that, even in the present life, there are many who perish due to the toxins that meat may contain. Many times do we see and hear that when Dharma practitioners tell their benefactors that they need some meat, the latter go off and kill a sheep. And when the bursars in the monasteries say that they have big festivals coming, twenty or thirty sheep are bought from the nomads and are slaughtered in the autumn. This is a common occurrence in monasteries large and small. The result is that when one goes on pilgrimage to a monastery, intending to make offerings and pay one's respects, one is confronted by the spectacle of stacks of carcasses, before one has even seen the images of the enlightened beings. Now if this does not deserve to be called "wrong livelihood," then tell me what does! You "Dharma practitioners" who fail to see the direct and indirect injury done to the lives of goats and sheep, are you blind? Is there something wrong with your eyes? And if you are not blind, don't try to pretend that you don't know anything about it!

-- Shabkar: Food of Bodhisattvas. Buddhist Teachings on Abstaining From Meat (Excerpt), by Shabkar Tsogdruk Rangdrol

To take care of Rinpoche's needs, I sometimes would steal food from downstairs. Akong kept the pantry locked, and he kept the keys with him. I would hide in the kitchen and wait for Akong to unlock the door to the pantry, which was a long narrow room. When Akong would walk to the back of the pantry, I would run in, grab things off the shelves, and take them upstairs to our bedroom. Sometimes Rinpoche and I would go into town to shop. If we could get a beef tongue, which he particularly enjoyed, I would boil it for him in the room.

Things between Rinpoche and Akong reached a point where they were barely speaking to one another. One day some major donors were coming to Samye Ling. Rinpoche was very turned off to the idea that Akong was putting on a fake front for these wealthy people so that they would give money. He didn't feel that genuine, spirituality was being practiced at Samye Ling at that point, and he thought that under the surface the whole situation was corrupt. Just before the donors arrived, while Akong was downstairs waiting to greet them, Rinpoche went into Akong's bedroom upstairs and completely destroyed Akong's personal shrine with his walking stick. Then he went and urinated all over the top of the stairwell, after which he lay down and passed out at the top of the stairs. He had had a lot to drink that afternoon, perhaps to work himself up to doing this. The whole event was extremely shocking, to me and everyone else there. But at the same time, because we had been treated terribly by Akong, I felt okay about it. Akong's way of controlling the situation was to use passive aggression. In his mind, there was always a good reason why he did this to us or that to us. It was very hard to get through to him.

Rinpoche didn't explain his actions to me, but I personally felt that destroying Akong's shrine and then making a big stink, literally, was Rinpoche's way of sending a message to Akong that he couldn't ignore. The sacredness of the situation there was being destroyed and the atmosphere was rotten for us at that point. Looking back now, I think that Rinpoche was willing to go to extreme ends to expose the hypocrisy he saw. Based on other things he said about Akong, I feel that Rinpoche was trying to wake him up. Of course I can't speak for Rinpoche and I don't know what was going on in his mind, but that was definitely the feeling that I had about it at the time.

Rinpoche's behavior was at times outrageous. I think this was probably the first time I had seen this side of him so graphically displayed. On the one hand, he was absolutely brilliant. On the other hand, his behavior could be so unconventional that he seemed rather crazy at times. It was like two sides of a coin: brilliant, or wise, on one side; unfathomable, or crazy from a conventional viewpoint, on the other. Of course, there's crazy and then there's crazy. As far as I'm concerned, in my entire association with him, he never did anything to harm another human being. He used to use the term "idiot compassion" to refer to being kind to someone when something more drastic was called for. He was never guilty of that! At times, he could be black and wrathful, but it was always with the agenda of waking people up. He would push people so that they would recognize their self-deception. His mind and actions were fearless and often quite fathomless. There were certain times when it was difficult to understand the motive behind his actions. Those things usually became clarified for me, and I think often for others, with time.

The situation at Samye Ling was becoming unbearably claustrophobic for us, to say the least. One morning Rinpoche suggested that we go to Glasgow to have a holiday and escape the dark atmosphere at the center. We checked into a nice hotel there and had a lovely time. Every night we would eat in the steak house nearby, which was a real treat for us compared to scrounging food at Samye Ling. When it came time to pay the bill, we realized that we didn't have enough money with us, so we had to go to the bank. The people at the hotel were very nice about this. We took a taxi to the bank. When I checked our balance, I was shocked that there was so little money in the account. I realized that we had forgotten to deposit one of Rinpoche's royalty checks for Born in Tibet, so there actually wasn't enough in the account to pay our hotel bill. We decided to take a taxi all the way back to Samye Ling, which was more than an hour's drive. The plan was that I would get the check, deposit it in our bank in Lockerbie, and wire the money to the hotel. Unfortunately, we didn't phone the hotel to let them know what we were doing. It never occurred to either of us that this would be a problem. I don't know if Rinpoche fully understood how the banking system worked in England, since most of his finances had been handled by Akong. For my part, I was a naive teenager.

By the time we reached the bank in Lockerbie with the check, the bank was closed. So we went back to Samye Ling for the night. The next morning, I took a taxi with Rinpoche into town. We deposited the check, and I wired the money. Then we went to the pub for lunch. We were there eating lunch when the Glasgow police arrived and arrested us for not having paid the hotel bill. We were put in the back of a black Mariah and driven to Glasgow.

They took mug shots of us at the police station. Rinpoche refused to let me call anyone about what had happened. He knew that Akong would use this event to humiliate us and fuel his view that Rinpoche had gone off the deep end. After the police booked us, we were put in jail. We had to spend the night in separate cells, filthy cold jail cells with ratty blankets and a broken toilet seat in the corner. I begged to be with Rinpoche, but the jailer said that I couldn't be in the same cell with him. He had only recently recovered from the complications of his accident, and I feared that he would become ill again because of the cold. Finally, the jailer agreed to give him some of my blankets.

The jailer asked me about my background and where I had been to school. I told him that I had gone to Benenden, and he said, "I've heard of Benenden." Then he said, "Why have I heard of Benenden?" And I said, "Probably because Princess Anne went there." And he replied, "Yes, that's right." It was hard for him to believe that an English girl who'd been at school with Princess Anne was being held overnight for not paying her hotel bill.

It was a bleak, bleak night, an absolute low point. It seemed that no matter what we did at this time, we were going to encounter terrible difficulties. The next morning we were taken to court. After I explained to the magistrate what had happened, he released us. We went back to Samye Ling, and no one ever knew about our night in jail. It would have been just the confirmation that Akong needed to reinforce his opinion of Rinpoche and me. The next day we received a telegram saying that all charges had been dropped because the hotel had received the money. So there were no lasting repercussions.

However, at this point, we realized that we needed to get out of Britain as soon as possible. During this period, Rinpoche would sometimes wake up in the night, experiencing some sort of panic. I actually don't know if it was panic exactly. He would wake up and he couldn't breathe. Sometimes, he would seem to be in another realm, I would almost say, and I would sort of have to bring him back by talking to him and insisting that he come back and listen to me. He told me that I was able to provide ground for him, which helped him to stay on the earth, somewhat literally. I don't want to psychoanalyze Rinpoche, but I think this was a very difficult period for him, in many ways. It was a momentous decision to leave behind his Tibetan identity and to strike out in the world. I think he was absolutely fraught with loneliness and sometimes with despair. At this point he didn't know how well things would go in America. He didn't know what was going to happen. To me, Rinpoche was the ultimate warrior. He was willing to jump off the edge of the cliff, not knowing where he would land.

On the other hand, he also had tremendous dedication to his world. Even though others might abandon him, he never wanted to abandon anyone else. For quite a while, even though it had been such a bad scene in Scotland, Rinpoche continued to talk about returning to Great Britain after the lecture tour in America. He had incredible loyalty to people there, even to Akong, whom he hoped would eventually open up to Westerners and come to appreciate the way in which Rinpoche wanted to live and teach. I, however, was convinced that we should leave for good. I told him that we weren't coming back. I was quite vocal about this, saying that the scene in Scotland was not a healthy situation for us. After our night in jail, Rinpoche didn't resist at ill. He consulted the I Ching, using yarrow sticks, which is the traditional method, and it indicated that "it furthers one to cross the big water." This was the turning point for us.

Years later, at a public event, he made a spontaneous toast to me, thanking me for helping us to get out of Great Britain: "You have cheered me up many times. In the past, I have gone through all kinds of depressing occasions and dungeons and an unspeakably unliberated world, pure and simple, a world that was not purified at ill. We went through that together, with you leading the way ahead of me. I appreciate that very much. You are an extremely brave lady, I must say. Such an extremely kind lady and an extremely resourceful lady as well, she managed to get us to this goddamned place called America!"3

Unfortunately, there were still obstacles to our departure. Earlier, Rinpoche had obtained a multiple entry visa to the United States. While we were making our final plans, we went to the American consulate in Glasgow to get information. When Rinpoche presented his British passport at the desk, the person behind the counter took it and stamped a huge "cancelled" across the visa. We were shocked. We discovered that Christopher Woodman had been to the consulate and told them dreadful stories, saying that Rinpoche was unfit to go to the United States.

Ever since our marriage, Rinpoche's relationship with Christopher and his wife Pamela had degenerated. After the wedding, we never went back to Garwald House, and we had barely seen the Woodmans. It seemed that Christopher and Pamela were jealous of the intimacy between Rinpoche and me. Also, Christopher in particular seemed to have developed tremendous anger and what seemed like a complex about controlling Rinpoche or reforming him. Rinpoche said that in part it was the result of the confusion generated by his falling-out with Akong, which forced students to take sides in this dharmic controversy. However, he also referred to it as a problem that sometimes arose for students in relating to their teacher, a phenomenon that he described as "hunting the guru." He had witnessed this personally in Tibet, when some of Jamgon Kongtrul's main students decided that their guru needed to be reformed. Rinpoche wrote about this in the first epilogue to Born in Tibet, which he wrote soon after we left Scotland for North America. He said there:

When a guru makes a great change in his life, it is often an opening for great chaos among the pupils who regard him as an object of security. Very few are able to go along with the change .... My marriage to my wife Diana took place in January 1970. This brought a ... reaction among the more possessive followers who regarded their guru as "lover." They began what may be called "hunting the guru." When this occurs the person is no longer open to teaching. The ego game is so strong that everything nourishes it and the person wants only to manipulate, so that in a sense he kills the guru with his own ignorance.

This situation reminded me of the time when Jamgon Kongtrul's disciples tried, with the best of intentions, to reinterpret with their scholarly research Jamgon Kongtrul's own words in order to show him their real meaning. They attempted to help him out with tremendous violence and feelings of superiority. This Ignorance of one's real purpose can be called the basic twist of ego.4

Christopher Woodman seemed to be "hunting" Rinpoche in this way. He convinced himself that Rinpoche should not be allowed to go to America. His stated purpose for containing him was that he seemed to think that Rinpoche was a disturbed individual who needed to remain in England. I think, in fact, that Christopher was very frightened about losing Rinpoche. However, his attempts to hold onto Rinpoche only drove a wedge between them. Later there would be further repercussions. For the time being, we had to decide what to do now that Rinpoche's visa had been cancelled.

Without him having a valid visa, we weren't sure that we could get into the United States, but Rinpoche still wanted to book tickets to New York He thought we might be able to gain admission. So we decided to proceed with our plans to leave.

However, we needed money for the tickets. We barely had enough to cover a few nights in a hotel in Glasgow. How could we possibly come up with the money to travel to America? Having no other choice, we decided to go to Akong and ask him to please give us the money for our plane tickets. I volunteered to approach Akong on our behalf, as he and Rinpoche were barely able to be together in the same room at this time.

Although Rinpoche's activities generated most of the income at Samye Ling, Akong kept complete control of the finances, and he gave Rinpoche almost no money for his personal account. Akong refused to give us the money, but he said that he would "loan" us the funds for the tickets if Rinpoche would sign over the seals of his lineage. These were the official marks of Rinpoche's position in Tibet. There were seven seals, some of them dating back centuries. Among them were two seals that were given to one of the early Trungpas by the emperor of China. Leaving them behind was like being stripped of his authority. Certainly, this was the message that Akong seemed to be sending, although ultimately Rinpoche's authority had nothing to do with any outer trappings. Akong also demanded that Rinpoche leave behind other religious treasures that he had carried with him from his monastery in Surmang. They included a gold statue of a protector, or mahakala, that was very precious to him, small statues of Milarepa and Padmasambhava, and other important relics. He had been able to bring only these few small but significant objects from Tibet, and now Akong demanded that we leave many of them at Samye Ling. We convinced him to let us bring some of these along with us, but all others had to remain with him. When you consider that the vast majority of the art and religious treasures at Rinpoche's monastery had been destroyed, it was quite devastating for Rinpoche to be asked to leave behind the last few things that connected him to Surmang. Akong was not even from the Surmang monastery, so for him to take control of the Surmang seals and treasures was quite outrageous.

I was so upset that I called my uncle -- the same uncle who took us out for lunch after we married -- and told him this terrible thing was happening. He was completely unhelpful and unsupportive. He was a lawyer, so I'd been hoping that he might give us some assistance, but he just said, "Too bad for you." So Rinpoche left the seals from the Surmang monastery with Akong, and we used the money to get our tickets. It was not until 1975 that we were able to recover them.

Even though the situation was so negative and circumstances seemed so difficult, Rinpoche had a sense of promise about what was to come. As he w-rote later, "I do not believe that there is a divine Providence as such, but the situation of karma and the wildness of Khenpo Gangshar and Jamgon Kongtrul directed me to cross the Atlantic with my wife in the spring of 1970."5

As we made preparations to leave, we secured a promise from Akong to take care of Rinpoche's son until we were able to send for him. Osel did not have a British passport, and with our visa difficulties, we could not bring him with us. As well, we had no money for a third ticket. I wish that he had been able to accompany us, as there were terrible difficulties bringing him over later on.

Finally, in early March 1970, the day arrived for us to depart. We had only been at Samye Ling for a little more than two months, but it seemed an eternity. In the taxi on the way to Prestwick Airport, for some reason that I absolutely could not fathom, Rinpoche decided that he wanted to stop off at the pub in Langholm, very close to Samye Ling, for lunch. I was completely. beside myself because there were only two flights a week to New York from Glasgow. He got mad at me for harassing him, so I gave in. Of course, with our luck, we got all the way to Prestwick and missed the flight. We had to go back to Samye Ling for four more days. However, we made it on the next flight. Looking back on it, I think that perhaps Rinpoche realized, more than I did, that in leaving Great Britain, he was saying his final goodbye to an important part of his life. He was saying goodbye to Akong, who had been his heart companion in the escape. from Tibet. He was saying goodbye to England, where he had mastered the English language, made many discoveries about Westerners and their relationship to mind, and made his first connection with Western students. So he took his time in leaving, frustrating as that was for me.

Rinpoche left Scotland with a ritual dagger, called a phurba, strapped to his midsection with a long scarf. A phurba is supposed to cut through obstacles and assassinate ego on the spot.

[Spottswoode] The name is Spottswoode.

-- Team America, directed by Trey Parker, Creator of South Park

This was one of the treasures from his monastery in Tibet that Rinpoche refused to surrender to Akong. He left Great Britain with at least this one piece of his heritage intact. It had belonged to the founder of Buddhism in Tibet, Padmasambhava. Rinpoche often carried it on his body in those days, almost as if it gave him the strength and protection that he needed to make this change in his life. It being a very different era, it didn't set off any metal detectors or alarms at the airport.

On the plane we were both very cheerful and, as Rinpoche wrote later, "We talked of conquering the American continent, and we were filled with a kind of constant humor."6 We flew into New York, hoping to enter the United States, but we were told that without the proper visas we wouldn't be admitted. However, since we were both British citizens, we were allowed to continue on to Canada. We took a flight to Toronto. We had finally arrived in the New World.

Looking back on the dreadful times we endured in Great Britain, part of me would like to forget about the whole thing and that part of me says, "Why tell people about these black times?" But then I remember what Rinpoche said about this. As my husband wrote, just a few months after we left:

Upon being asked to do an epilogue for the new edition of Born in Tibet, I began to think about the nature of these last years. Their most outstanding quality has been the strength of the teachings, which have been a constant source of inspiration during this time in India, Britain, and America.

Adapting to these new ways of life after the colorful and simple quality of Tibet, where people were so in touch with their natural environment, has been truly a great adventure. It has been made possible by the continually active presence of Jamgon Kongtrul of Sechen and Khenpo Gangshar, my teachers. They taught me about a basic sanity that has nothing to do with time. and place. They taught about the neurotic aspects of the mind and the confusion in political, social and other structures of life, which are universal. I have seen many fellow Tibetans as well as Westerners drawn into these problems.7

So in fact, I realize that it's very important to remember what happened in the last days at Samye Ling, because it was such an important lesson. It is a constant reminder to me of the pitfalls of spiritual practice.

SIX

Although we hadn't managed to get into the United States, we were excited about arriving in North America. Leaving the Toronto airport in a taxi, we noticed immediately that it was completely different from Great Britain. I was in awe of the place. The highways were huge, the cars were huge, everything seemed speeded up and larger than life. The taxi drove us to a seedy hotel, which was all we could afford, where we spent the night. The next. morning we wanted something to eat, so we went out to find a market. We found our way to a supermarket, and we were completely overwhelmed by the place. They didn't have stores like this in England. The employees in the store seemed so nice. They said things like, "Hello, can I help you?" "Did you find everything you were looking for?" and "Have a nice day." This approach seemed superficial to me. This would never have happened in England. I was amazed by the hugeness and the slickness of everything in the store. There were rows and rows of vegetables, frozen foods, cookies, and toilet paper, and in the meat section there were enormous cuts of beef and pork. Rinpoche picked out a big raw steak, and I got a frozen cake with lots of frosting. We took our purchases" back to the hotel, and we sat on our bed eating these huge, rich pieces of food.

The next day Rinpoche contacted a local Buddhist organization in Toronto. He explained that he was a Tibetan lama who had arrived in Toronto with nowhere to live. Originally, we had hoped to stay with Karma Thinley, a Tibetan teacher who had been living in Canada for several years. He had visited Rinpoche in Scotland, and they were quite friendly. However, he was away at the time.

We had no place to live, and we couldn't afford to continue staying in hotels. We. phoned Fran Lewis and Kesang, two of Rinpoche's students who were now living in Vermont, for advice. They had recently found a piece of land that was going to be Rinpoche's first meditation center in the United States. They suggested we go to Montreal, which was only a few hours' drive from Vermont. It would be much easier for them to come up and visit us there. They were already looking for an immigration lawyer to work on our case and hoped that it would only be a few weeks before we could enter the United States.

We had barely enough money to purchase train tickets, and we took a night train to Montreal. When we got there, the Buddhist Society put us in touch with a Korean monk, Samu Kim, who invited us to stay with him and his wife. She was a Westerner, but she was an excellent Korean cook, and we had some great meals with them. They had a little baby boy named Maji, which I believe means" offering to the Buddha" in Korean. At first, we got along quite well with them. Then, one night Rinpoche and Samu stayed up drinking, and the next day, Samu asked us to leave. I don't know exactly what happened. Samu said to Rinpoche, "You look like a buddha, but you're just an ordinary man. You look the story, you walk the story, but you're not the real thing. You can't stay here any longer." It felt like a hangover from the energy in Scotland.

The situation with Buddhism in Canada was similar to what we would find in the United States. There were a number of well-established Mahayana Buddhist communities in the major cities, but most of them were made up of Asian Americans and Asian Canadians originally from China, Japan, and Korea, for whom Buddhism was the dominant religion and the culture they had grown up with. It was quite a conservative scene, not one that Rinpoche was attracted to. Perhaps it was not so surprising that our first encounter ended on a sour note.

After we left Samu's house, we found a small furnished studio apartment for twenty-four dollars a week and another three dollars a week for the television. To come up with the first week's rent, I went through the pockets of Rinpoche's suits, and we paid most of the rent in change.

Eventually, we started to receive some support from Rinpoche's students in the United States, but in the beginning we were very poor and living mainly on rice. We had a big rice pot, and sometimes we would have enough money to buy a little meat or chicken to add to the rice. One day I spent seven dollars on food at the grocery store, and Rinpoche was upset that I'd spent so much money. Another day I went out to a market in Montreal to buy meat for dinner. I walked past a stall where they sold live pigeons to take home for dinner. They would kill the bird for you on the spot. There was only one left that day, and I felt so sorry for the poor thing that I spent all our money to buy it. When I got home, Rinpoche said, "What's for dinner?" And I said, "Well, I spent all our money on this pigeon." He was very nice about it. We put the pigeon out the window, and we just had rice for dinner that night.

Sometimes we walked around Montreal. However, Rinpoche was still using a walking stick and it was difficult for him to get around. So I used to do most of the food shopping, and we stayed in the apartment a lot. Rinpoche and I slept on a big foldout couch, and we watched a lot of television. We watched Pajama Party and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Our apartment was above a bakery, and Rinpoche would go down and visit with the French baker in the basement. He and Rinpoche liked each other a lot, and they used to drink whiskey together. Sometimes, the baker would give us a loaf of bread. We were so poor that this was really a treat.

There was a gay couple in the building who we used to hang out with sometimes. They took a lot of mescaline, and occasionally we would trip with them. I don't remember this as very significant. Later, Rinpoche became adamantly opposed to the recreational use of drugs, but at this point, he seemed to enjoy experimenting.

For the first time in my life -- because I had led such a sheltered life growing up -- I had to do laundry. Early on, not knowing any better, I put Rinpoche's cashmere sweater and silk shirts in the washer and dryer. Everything shrank terribly, and he was unable to wear them after that, but he was so sweet about it. When I brought his sweater back, he said, "That's all right, sweetheart. We'll save it for our first child."

As soon as we got our apartment in Montreal, Rinpoche cheered up. There was much more openness in the atmosphere, and he seemed inspired. Michael Aronowitz, a high-powered immigration lawyer in New York, was working on our case, and we were confident that we were going to be able to get into the United States. It was just a question of going through the red tape to get the visas. Rinpoche was optimistic about the future. In Montreal, we bought some 3-D postcards that were popular at that time. When you moved them back and forth, the scenes on the cards would change, and Rinpoche said, "One day we're going to be able to afford our own house, and we'll have one whole wall wallpapered in this 3-D stuff!"

His students started to come up and visit us from Vermont. Kesang and Fran came almost every week, and they often brought us some money to get by on. Joanne Newman, a new student who generously helped to finance the land for the meditation center, also came up to meet Rinpoche. They gave us news of how the center was coming along. They had decided to throw the I Ching to find a name for it. The I Ching talked about treading on the tail of the tiger, so with Rinpoche's blessing, they gave the center the name "Tail of the Tiger." Rinpoche was very excited to hear all the developments at "Tail," as we called it.

We also met Cyrus Crane in Montreal. He was about seventy at the time, one of Rinpoche's oldest students, chronologically speaking. He was a wonderful old man with long white hair. During his first meditation interview, he said, "Rinpoche, I need some advice. First, I did the Mahamudra and then I did the maha ati [advanced practices that take years to accomplish]. Now that I've done both of those, what should I do next?" Rinpoche told him, "I'm going to teach you to meditate."

While we were in Montreal, Rinpoche gave several public talks at Concordia University. We connected with a few people there. I remember meeting Judy Gault, who remains a very committed Buddhist. She and several other women started to hang around with us. We were also introduced in Montreal to Tindale Martin, a Western Zen teacher who had a small Zen center. He had spent time in Japan and was rather arrogant, but he was quite nice to us. His wife, Gisela, was a belly dancer. She supported the family with her exotic dancing, and we went to the club to see her dance once. The next year, Tindale invited Rinpoche to teach a weekend program at his center.

In the United States, Rinpoche would encounter other Western teachers like Tindale, people with some exposure to a genuine Buddhist tradition but lacking in their training or understanding. In fact, there were a number of rather odd misconceptions about Buddhism that were being fostered. There was a certain kind of Zen that was popular at this time -- well intentioned but often quite conceptual, not grounded in enough practice or experience. One of the problems was that there were so few Asian teachers able to comprehend Western culture and able to transmit their understanding to Westerners. In some sense, it was similar to the obstacles we had already encountered in Great Britain. Many Asian teachers were intimidated by Western students. The cultural barrier seemed so high that the teacher and the students couldn't cross that divide. In America, however, the situation was ripe for a breakthrough, and indeed we were to discover that some teachers -- such as Suzuki Roshi in California -- were already pioneering a new approach, one based on eye-level communication.

At the end of April, we received word that our visas were coming. Kesang drove up from Vermont to pick us up. We packed up our belongings, which were few at that time, and on May 1, 1970, we crossed into the United States. A whole new future was opening for us, and when we hit the United States, there was not even a hint of the bleakness or depression that had dominated our lives for so many months. It was like a huge wind of fresh air was dispelling the last few clouds in the sky. Tail of the Tiger was an old farmhouse with a barn next to it, located on more than four hundred acres of land in northern Vermont near Barnet, which is close to St. Johnsbury. Kesang and Fran were living there, as well as Joanne Newman and Richard Arthure. He was another of Rinpoche's close students from England and the editor of Meditation in Action. The day we arrived at Tail there were just a few people there, but the scene grew quickly as people from all over the East Coast started coming up to visit. At that time Tail of the Tiger was unique; there were no comparable Buddhist centers in New England.

The main house at Tail was small, with a living room and kitchen on the main floor and several tiny bedrooms. Upstairs, on the third floor, a somewhat larger room was turned into a meditation hall. Rinpoche and I were given one of the rooms on the main floor as our bedroom, in the back. Our bed was just a mattress on the floor. Most of the people who came around in that era, both men and women, had long hair and were sort of grungy. I continued to wear the hippie caftans I had brought from England, but I added peasant blouses, flowing skirts, and the occasional short skirt to my attire. At the beginning, Rinpoche's dress was noticeably more conservative than his students. He liked to wear an ascot with a silk shirt, for example. After a little while, however, he changed his dress a bit to go along with what other people were wearing. A few weeks after we arrived in America, we were on the West Coast and spent a day in Mexico. Rinpoche bought some embroidered Mexican shirts, and he used to wear those. He also got into a flannel shirt phase for a while.

There was group sitting meditation in the shrine room upstairs every morning. I often sat with people, although some mornings I would sleep in with Rinpoche. There were a lot of late nights. In the evenings, people would gather in the living room, and Rinpoche and I would hang out with people for hours. Sometimes he would just talk with people; sometimes he would give a short lecture in the evening. The activity would go on late into the night. Up to this point, to some extent, I had had Rinpoche to myself, and I had done everything for him -- cooking his meals, washing his clothes, making appointments for him, and so forth. It was an adjustment to have so many people around all the time and to have to share him with everyone.

One night I was tired of the group scene, and I decided to retire early. I thought Rinpoche should come with me. I tried to convince him to come to bed. He was in the living room talking to people about Padmasambhava bringing the teachings to Tibet. I said, "You've got to stop teaching. Please come to bed." He responded, "I'll be right there, sweetheart." I don't know how many times we must have repeated that exchange over the years! Of course, it was hours before he went to sleep. Although I sometimes missed the time we had had alone together, I was fundamentally very happy to be there -- with him and everybody else -- and delighted to see him able to expand and relax so much. He was really launching his campaign on the American soil.

Rinpoche was so inspired. Everyone we met in America had such open minds in those days, and they were eager to learn. Because of the openness and inquisitiveness of the new students, I think that Rinpoche felt that he could truly communicate with people. There was an immediate magnetism between him and the people who came to Tail. He didn't sit around spouting things he knew; his way of teaching was to connect on a heartfelt level with everybody in the room, whatever their state of mind was. That started from the very early times. People felt immediately drawn in and connected to him, and he felt the same way about them. He was extremely perceptive about where people were at. Some years later, he addressed a group of his students, reflecting back on these early days. He said:

As we all remember, each one of you had a chance to come to the dharma in your own various ways. In many cases, before we began working together, your situations were rather desperate. Some of you were struggling more than others, or suffering more than others, but each of you had your own style of manifesting your struggle and your pain. You each manifested your own kind of contortions, hunched-over-ness and jumpiness.1

You actually could see all of this manifested in the shrine room. Rinpoche didn't give people much direction in their meditation practice at that time. I think he wanted to let people hang out in the space a little bit. He realized that you couldn't take people from the extreme of casualness they were familiar with to a perfect situation of discipline without allowing some transitional space in the middle. In England, he had seen that when you try to impose discipline on people who have no background in the tradition, a lot of people end up imitating the discipline and confusing rigid behavior with meditative accomplishment. He was not interested in making that mistake twice.

So he just told people to sit, with no agenda whatsoever. Because he gave so little direction, the scene in the shrine room sometimes appeared quite sloppy and contorted to an external observer. People would begin their hour of sitting meditation with upright posture and legs carefully crossed. As the hour progressed, they would begin to squirm, hunch over, and change position. Some would get sleepy and fold up their knees so that they could put their head on their knees and sleep. The occasional person would actually lie down in the shrine room. Yet, behind all that disarray, people's minds and hearts were being brought to the cushion, brought to the dharma -- and that was what Rinpoche was going for at that time. He wanted to tap the brilliant minds he was encountering, and later, he knew that he would be able to straighten out their bodies -- literally.

Often, Rinpoche also worked with people through his sense of humor, which was quite boyish at times, almost what you would call childish, but very magnetic. Once, during morning meditation practice at Tail, he came into the room and walked up to the front, where he sat facing people for several minutes. He was carrying a small paper bag, which he set down next to himself. It began to vibrate and emit strange clicking sounds. These continued for a while and then came to a stop. Rinpoche exited from the shrine hall, leaving the bag behind. After he departed, of course, people couldn't resist opening the sack. Inside there was a child's windup toy, a set of chattering teeth. It was such a perfect image of how the mind chatters on while you are meditating. At the same time, it was purely a joke, something that made people laugh and delighted them. This was characteristic of how he worked with people: the double entendre that might have been coincidence -- or was it?

The first few weeks after our arrival in America is a blur of people, activity, and energy in my mind. However, I have one extremely vivid, rather peculiar memory. I was in bed with Rinpoche, and light was streaming into our room. He often used to sleep late in the morning. I was lying next to him, looking at him. I noticed that he had one single hair in the middle of his chest, which was quite long. I lay there looking and looking at this hair, and finally, I thought, "I've got to pull it out." I reached over and yanked the hair out of his chest. From a dead sleep, he woke up and tried to punch me in the face. Then we both collapsed in laughter.

Another time, when we were alone in bed, I was feeling romantic, and I said to him, "I love you more than anyone in the whole world!" He replied, proudly, "I really love you too. I love you second best of anything in the world." I said, "What do you mean, 'second best'?" Then he replied, "First I love my guru, and my guru is the buddhadharma. I'll always love the dharma more than anything else. But you'll always be the thing I love second best. My first commitment isn't to being a family man, but to propagating the Buddhist teachings. This is the point of my life. Hopefully the two things can work together." Even in matters of the heart, he was uncompromisingly honest.

One of the themes that arises from this early period is seeing how much a person may have to give up, in terms of personal happiness or fulfillment, when one's life is dedicated to helping others on such a big scale. Many people contributed to bringing Buddhism to America, and many of them made enormous personal sacrifices in order for Buddhism to take root as a genuine practice lineage in this country. When Rinpoche said that his first commitment was not to our relationship or to his family, I don't think he was being melodramatic. Essentially, he was describing what was a choiceless situation for him. At that point, I think that I already understood this, although it wasn't always easy to accept. Sometimes I just wanted to be with him and, beginning in this era, often it wasn't possible. At times, there was definitely a conflict between my desire to have some domestic privacy and his desire to be available to people twenty-four hours a day.

While we were staying at Tail of the Tiger, I had my own domestic drama. Very unexpectedly, my mother showed up in Barnet for a visit. Richard Arthure came and informed me, "Your mother is staying at an inn in Barnet, and she wants to see you." She refused to come to Tail of the Tiger because she still had not accepted my marriage to Rinpoche and wouldn't have anything to do with him. Rinpoche was worried that she would try to abduct me. However, I felt that I must go to see her. It was the first time I'd seen my mother since my marriage to Rinpoche. We'd had hysterical phone calls in Scotland, but she had refused to visit me at Samye Ling.

That evening Richard drove me to the inn. Rinpoche wanted him to stay with me. My mother was ranting and raving, and she said to Richard, "I want to know why my daughter has run away with this half-Indian, half-Chinese, half-Tibetan." Richard replied in his most proper English voice, "I can assure you, Mrs. Pybus, he's full-blooded Tibetan." This did not seem to help.

My mother insisted that I spend the night at the inn with her. I finally agreed, so Richard left me there with her. I asked him to tell Rinpoche not to worry, that I'd be back in the morning. My mother and I really had nothing civil to say to one another at this time, so shortly after Richard left, we went to sleep. Mother was in a room with two double beds. She said that there was no bedding for the second mattress and that I would have to sleep in the bed with her. I remember lying there awake and absolutely frozen in the bed. I slipped out around 5:30 in the morning and walked back to Tail of the Tiger. As I came around the bend in the road that led up to the farmhouse at Tail, I could see Rinpoche sitting in a rocking chair on the porch. He was so worried that he'd stayed up all night waiting for me. After that my mother left. Next she was going to northern India, where a private detective had tracked my sister. Tessa was living at this time in a hill station in the mountains as a hippie. (Tessa told me later how Mother hiked into the mountains to find her, carrying a bag full of bras to give my sister.) My mother had lost both of her daughters within one year. It was quite sad, but I didn't feel anything for her at the time. She was unable to appreciate anything about my life, and I didn't want to have anything to do with her.

Although we had been forced to leave the seals of the Trungpas ill. Scotland, Rinpoche had been able to bring a number of his paintings with him. In their own way, these were also treasures. They were done in the style of Tibetan thangka paintings, but like so many things that he did, they were both traditional and unusual. One of them was a painting of an important female protector of the Buddhist teachings, Ekajati, from the Nyingma tradition. It was a painting just of her head, which is what made it so unusual. Ekajati is a fierce protector with one eye, one fang, and one breast. Otherwise she is anatomically like a human being: two arms, two legs, and so forth. According to the traditional belief, she is the leader or chief of the mamas, who are a band of wrathful female spirits or energies who control the forces of war and peace, sickness and health. She is an extremely powerful lady. When I first spent time with Rinpoche, he was writing poetry to her, and he had this painting on the wall of his bedroom at Garwald House. He felt that in part it was invoking her energy that helped him to survive those dark times. When we moved to Colorado a few months later, Rinpoche decided to leave the painting of Ekajati at Tail of the Tiger and to make her the protector of the center. He wrote a chant to Ekajati, which he asked the practitioners there to recite at the end of their evening meditation practice. Rinpoche also left his painting of Padmasambhava at Tail of the Tiger. In this way, he began to plant the energy of his heritage in the American soil.

Even though this early time was quite formless and the atmosphere at Tail was almost like a hippie commune, Rinpoche was already subtly beginning to mold the situation. Over a relatively short period of time, perhaps a year, the atmosphere changed radically, and more discipline was introduced. Things began to tighten up. In the long run, Tail of the Tiger took on the feeling of a lay monastery where the residents were expected to follow a strict discipline of practice and study. But there were just the barest hints of this during the early days.

At the end of May, Rinpoche and I left on his first teaching tour in America. The people at Tail were putting together a series of summer seminars to begin in mid-July. We had about six weeks before the seminars would start, so we set out to see part of the country. Our first stop was New York City. We stayed with Jean-Claude van Itallie, a playwright best known at that time for his hit play America Hurrah. He was a friend of Kesang's who had first met Rinpoche at Samye Ling. Jean-Claude arranged for Rinpoche to give a talk at the Actors Workshop, where many avant-garde theater people congregated.

New York was amazing for us. It was so different from the European cities we both knew. We had a fabulous time touring around the city and meeting all kinds of people whom Jean-Claude introduced us to. This was the beginning of Rinpoche's very fertile relationship with Jean-Claude and more generally with Western artists. He was very taken with the experimental theater scene in New York. Rinpoche told Jean-Claude about his training in monastic dance in Tibet, and they began discussing ways that they could work together in the area of theater. Soon after this, Rinpoche began writing plays, a number of which were later staged in Boulder, Colorado,. and other locations.

While we were in New York, Mary -- whom Rinpoche had called the morning after we were married -- came to visit for a few days. I don't know where she and Rinpoche met, but they remained friends over many years, and he corresponded with her until his death. She lived in Wales with her husband and a number of children, and she was quite settled compared to most people we knew at that time. I related to her a bit like an aunt or another mother. While she was visiting, she gave me cooking lessons. I was trying to make meals for everyone at the apartment in New York, but I found it overwhelming to cook for a group. The only training I had in cooking came from occasionally helping Mrs. Wills make a cake when I was six years old. After Mary arrived and saw the trouble I was having, she walked me through the steps of how you make a meal and how you get it out on the table. I remember telling her that I didn't know how to cope with all the chaos in the kitchen. Her help was invaluable.

From New York, we flew to San Francisco, where Sam and Hazel Bercholz met us at the airport. Sam had recently started Shambhala Publications, and the first book he had published was the American edition of Meditation in Action. While he was still in Great Britain, Rinpoche had been fascinated to learn that someone in America had a company named after the kingdom of Shambhala, and he was delighted that this company , wanted to publish an edition of his book. Shambhala is an ancient mythical kingdom in Asia, with which the advanced Vajrayana Buddhist teachings of the Kalachakra Tantra are associated. Rinpoche had received many teachings on Shambhala in Tibet. In fact, when he was escaping from the country, he had been writing a book about Shambhala, which unfortunately was lost during the journey. Meeting his publisher was high on Rinpoche's list of things to do in America. For his part, Mr. Bercholz was quite anxious to meet the Tibetan lama whose book he had published.

Sam had a large presence and a warmth that we immediately connected with. His wife, Hazel, had been a dancer and was now the main graphic designer for the publishing company. They were absolutely welcoming of us, and in fact, Sam had arranged for Rinpoche to give several public talks and meet with interested students while we were in the Bay Area. Sam had cofounded Shambhala Publications with Michael Fagan, a rather tall, angular, and very intelligent man, and we stayed in Oakland with Michael and his wife Joanne during this visit.

One afternoon, we were taking an afternoon rest, and we made love in our bedroom at the Fagans'. The room had a sort of Elizabethan feeling, with a large purple wall hanging. We were not planning to have a child at that time. However, we were only using the rhythm method for birth control, and as we were making love, I had a definite feeling of someone else being in the room with us. I believe we conceived our first son, Taggie, that afternoon.

After spending a week in northern California, we flew to Los Angeles where Rinpoche had a speaking engagement arranged by students of J. Krishnamurti. The sponsors of the talk, I believe, had been members of the Theosophical Society but had now formed their own organization. The Theosophical Society was founded in New York at the end of the nineteenth, century by Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott. It fostered a great deal of public awareness of Buddhism in the West, but it also gave rise to many misconceptions, especially about the nature of Tibetan Buddhism, in particular due to Madame Blavatsky's spiritualist "communiques" from supposed Indian and Tibetan Masters. Members of the Society discovered Krishnamurti when he was a young man in India and tried to raise him as their great find, a great mahatma or spiritual master. Krishnamurti reacted against the mysteries of the Theosophists and began promoting a much more genuine investigation of spirituality and how to lead a sane life.

Krishnamurti was not in favor of organized religion, and he was quite an anti-teacher or anti-guru, calling on people instead to rely purely on themselves and to separate wisdom from the trappings of any tradition. Although Rinpoche respected many of Krishnamurti's ideas, he felt that Krishnamurti's rejection of the role of the teacher was too extreme. Rinpoche himself spoke out against charlatan teachers, but he believed in the importance of a genuine student-teacher relationship as the basis for developing non-ego and compassion on the Buddhist path. Rinpoche told me that he thought that perhaps Krishnamurti never met his teacher. He liked the man very much. A few years after this trip to Los Angeles, Rinpoche and Krishnamurti lectured together and had a dialogue at some event. Rinpoche commented that Krishnamurti's presence on stage was very dramatic and contrasted noticeably with his shy off-stage presence. In Rinpoche's case, there was no difference between being on- and off-stage.

The afternoon we arrived in Los Angeles, we were taken somewhere outside the city to a motel along a river. After we checked in, we had several hours to relax before Rinpoche was to give his talk to Krishnamurti's students. Rinpoche got completely drunk in the motel room, and I was freaking out because I couldn't imagine how he was going to give a lecture in a few hours. Somehow, he often managed to get drunk -- almost strategically it seemed -- when he had to talk to a group of people who were tripped out or who had extreme expectations. These people definitely fell into that category, beyond anything else we experienced in California.

I managed to get him on his feet and into the car, and I sat with him on the stage at the lecture hall. He was really four sheets to the wind. Some of the people in the audience seemed to have the Theosophical fascination with the magic and mystery of Tibet, while others seemed preoccupied with debunking any guru who might address them. People asked Rinpoche why he ate meat, why he didn't wear robes, and if he was a Buddhist. It seemed a bit ridiculous to ask a Tibetan teacher if he was a Buddhist. I felt that they were quite rude. They also wanted to know about things like psychic visions, ghosts, and astral projection. In general, they seemed extremely preoccupied with exotica and with external norms of behavior and not that interested in anything as mundane as the practice of meditation. These were exactly the kinds of misconceptions about spirituality that Rinpoche was trying to expose, so it was rather predictable that he would disappoint them and confound them with his behavior.

In fact, Rinpoche didn't respond to people, so I started answering questions for him. A woman in the audience started complaining that I shouldn't speak for him. In fact, as disciples of Krishnamurti, they didn't believe in gurus, so in a sense Rinpoche was responding to their beliefs by manifesting as the "anti-guru." They didn't seem to like this, however!

I felt that the whole thing didn't go well. At the end of the evening, the organizers gave us an envelope containing an honorarium and sent us on our way. When we opened the envelope in the taxi, we realized that it wasn't enough to cover even our lodging. There had been hundreds of people at the talk. I said to Rinpoche, "We've got to go back and ask for some money for the motel." Interestingly enough, he had sobered up completely as soon as we left the talk. He said no, we absolutely couldn't do that.

After the disastrous talk, we had a free day before flying back to San Francisco, so we took a bus into Mexico, where Rinpoche bought his Mexican shirts. The next day we returned to northern California for several more weeks. I think that Rinpoche accomplished a lot of important research on this trip. We encountered many spiritual seekers who he described as "free-style people indulging themselves in confused spiritual pursuits." In California, he witnessed some of the most extreme manifestations of the American counterculture at this time. There were hippies and Hare Krishnas roaming around Haight-Ashbury like strange lost tribes, political dissidents protesting in Berkeley and San Francisco, people at every talk who were into every imaginable spiritual trip. The scene in California was looser yet more extreme than on the East Coast, where there was still a hard edge of intellect. That was much harder to find in the West. In California, everything was "groovy, man." I think that it was while we were in the Bay Area that Rinpoche coined the phrase "cutting through spiritual materialism," which became the title of his best-selling book published in 1973. If he didn't use the phrase then, at least he was formulating the idea behind it. As he said sometime later: "Coming to this country was an interesting encounter .... A lot of people had already become professional spiritual supermarket shoppers, and some were still trying to become so."2 At the same time, in general, he didn't seem too put off or upset by most of the people he met. In fact, he felt that people's fascination was ripe to be punctured and that there were possibilities for authentic spirituality to flourish in America, even in California!

We spent several days with Tarthang Tulku, another Tibetan teacher, who had been in the United States for about a year. He had a small house in Berkeley where he lived and conducted sessions with his students. Eventually, he purchased a center in a beautiful area of Berkeley Hills. Tarthang and Rinpoche were quite friendly, and in later years, they talked about going on vacation together in Mexico, although that never happened. Tarthang was beginning to think about bringing Western psychology into his presentation of the Buddhist teachings. That was very interesting for Rinpoche, since he too had begun to use some of the language and ideas from Western psychology to present teachings on the nature of mind and development of ego. Their approaches were quite distinct, but there was some common understanding. Tarthang extended a great deal of hospitality to Rinpoche and me at this time, and we were grateful for his generosity. We stayed with him several times when we made visits to the Bay Area.

While we were in California, Rinpoche also had a remarkable visit with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of San Francisco Zen Center. Suzuki Roshi had been in America for more than ten years, and a large community of practitioners had grown up around him. He had an extraordinary effect on Buddhism in America. One would have to call him the true grandfather of the Practice Lineage in this country.

Sam Bercholz arranged for us to travel to Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, Roshi's rural practice center near Big Sur. We spent several days there. There was an instant' connection between Rinpoche and Suzuki Roshi. Roshi toured us around Tassajara, which he was justly proud of. It was a magnificent setting, with. cabins set into the hillside, a beautiful shrine room, and wonderful hot springs that we, enjoyed during our stay. In meeting Roshi, Rinpoche said that he had met his first real spiritual friend in America. He asked Roshi how he taught meditation practice to his-students, and Roshi said that he had decided to have all of his students count their breaths during meditation, which he described as "Bodhidharma style." Bodhidharma is considered to be the father of. Zen in China. Like Padmasamhhava in Tibet, he was unconventional and could be very wrathful.

Rinpoche was quite affected by seeing how Roshi was teaching meditation, especially the emphasis on group practice at Tassajara. As I've mentioned, Rinpoche was already presenting the discipline of sitting meditation as the main practice for his students. From his experiences in England, he had realized the danger of Westerners getting tripped out and confused by the tantric practices in Tibetan Buddhism. He had encouraged some students in England to do prostrations, the traditional entrance to Buddhist practice in Tibet. As soon as we came to America, however, he stopped giving that practice. Later he asked almost all of his students from England to repeat their prostrations, after they were well grounded in meditation.

The instruction Rinpoche had been giving since we arrived in America was telling people to sit without much technique at all. He felt, initially at least, that any technique could be perverted or misunderstood, especially in the Western culture with its fascinations. At the beginning, he said: Just sit, don't count your breaths, don't label your thoughts, don't do anything. Just sit. Later he began to refine the technique.3 His discussions with Roshi about sitting practice and his observation of the environment at Tassajara played an important part in how his presentation of meditation evolved. Soon after our first visit, Rinpoche arranged for some of his senior students to practice at San Francisco Zen Center and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center so that they would have an appreciation for the approach to sitting meditation that Roshi stressed. Several students from the Zen center were also invited to conduct the first meditation intensives at Tail of the Tiger, daylong sittings that Rinpoche called nyinthuns.

Rinpoche was also quite taken by certain aspects of the Japanese aesthetic. In later years, when other Tibetan teachers taught at our centers, they often commented that the meditation hall had a Japanese feeling. The colors Rinpoche used were definitely Tibetan: Chinese vermilion red, bright yellow and orange, intense blues, and gold. However, the shrines he designed for his centers were quite unlike those in a Tibetan shrine hall. Traditionally, Tibetan shrines have many offerings and other objects on them, and there are lots of statues and paintings around them. From some point of view, you might almost say they're cluttered. Rinpoche designed a very simple shrine on which there were seven offering bowls filled with pure water. In the center of the shrine a crystal ball was placed, representing the open nature of mind.

Rinpoche also became fond of Japanese incense, and it was used exclusively in his centers for many years. It has a much more subtle scent than Tibetan incense. He also used Japanese gongs in the meditation hall to signal the beginning and the end o£ practice sessions. In addition to the sitting practice of meditation, Rinpoche introduced walking meditation, and some aspects of that practice I believe he took from the Zen model.

However, what was most important about this first meeting was the heart connection between Rinpoche and Roshi. After we left, Rinpoche said that Suzuki Roshi was the first person he met in America who reminded him of his own teacher, Jamgon Kongtrul. Rinpoche had Roshi's picture put on the shrines at all of his centers in America, along with the photograph of Jamgon Kongtrul, representing the Tibetan lineage. In this way, he honored Roshi as one of the lineage fathers in America. We would see more of him in future visits to California, although, tragically, he died from liver cancer in December of 1971, soon after we met him. In the short time they knew one another, he and Rinpoche made grand plans. It was partially Suzuki Roshi's inspiration that led in 1974 to the foundation of the Naropa Institute, a university based on the Buddhist contemplative traditions and Western scholarship as well. Rinpoche's work with psychology also went in new directions due to his conversations with Suzuki Roshi about the need for a Buddhistinspired therapeutic community.

In addition to his publishing company, Sam Bercholz had started a metaphysical bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. We visited there several times during the month we were in California. Rinpoche was impressed with all the scholarly Buddhist books that Sam had there, as well as more popular tides. The bookstore was a hangout for anyone involved with the spiritual scene, and we saw posters advertising Rinpoche's public talks on the bulletin board there. Sam and Rinpoche began planning many new books, and Shambhala Publications became Rinpoche's exclusive publisher in America. Over the course of the visit, we became close friends with Sam and Hazel. The Bercholzes introduced us to many people during our stay, a number of whom became Rinpoche's students. By the time we left, asangha, or Buddhist community, was beginning to form in northern California, and Rinpoche promised to return soon and to send some of his senior students from Tail to teach in Berkeley and San Francisco.

Before we left California, I went to have a pregnancy test because I had missed my period. Rinpoche took me to see an obstetrician on Market Street in San Francisco. After the doctor read the results of the test, he called Rinpoche and me into his office and told us that it was positive. Rinpoche looked shell-shocked when he heard the news. I was also somewhat overwhelmed, being only sixteen at the time. Later, when he reflected back on this moment, he said, "It felt very clean-cut to fall in love and be with my wife. But then, when I first heard a San Francisco doctor say, 'Congratulations. The test is positive; I didn't know what to think. I felt that I'd been pulled down, made into a part of the world in an entirely new way, that the ship had dropped its anchor."4 In the hippie era, we used to talk about being brought down, or things being "a downer, man." Rinpoche, however, talked about being brought down to earth, or being grounded, as a very positive thing. I think he related to our marriage in that way.

I asked the obstetrician if it would be okay for me to ride horses during the pregnancy, as this had been an important discipline in my life and I was hoping to start riding again soon. The doctor said, "If you couldn't ride when you were pregnant, you would look outside the window and see women riding all up and down Market Street" -- implying that riding would have been used as a method to end unwanted pregnancies.

On our way back to Tail we stopped off in New York for the weekend. Rinpoche gave several public talks, one entitled "Meditation in Action" and another called "Tibetan Alchemy." It was now early July, and his seminars at Tail of the Tiger were due to start in another week. Even now, a mere two months after arriving in the United States, everywhere Rinpoche went he attracted new students. When we came back through New York, there were many more people around all the time. An important and absolutely chance meeting was running into the poet Allen Ginsberg. Allen was with his father, who was quite old and in poor health, and they were trying to hail a taxicab, the same cab we thought we were hailing.We were with someone, perhaps Richard Arthure, who introduced us to Allen. When he learned who Rinpoche was, Allen held his hangs in anjali (hands at the heart in a gesture of respect or reverence), bowed, and said "OM VAJRA GURU PADMA SIDDHI HUM," which is the mantra of Padmasambhava, the syllables that invoke the essence of his energy. We all decided to share the cab. After dropping off Allen's father, we went to Allen's place, where he and Rinpoche talked for hours about poetry, Buddhism, politics, sex -- everything. They wrote poetry together that night, and it was the beginning of a deep dharmic and poetic friendship. Later, when they knew each other better, Allen asked Rinpoche what he thought of being greeted by Padmasambhava's mantra:. Rinpoche told him that at the time he had wondered whether Allen understood what he was saying.

Rinpoche had started writing poetry in English while he was in England. He had studied English poetry at Oxford, and his early poems tended to be more formal, with allusions to Christian themes and Greek mythology as well as to Buddhist deities. He also had encountered Japanese haiku in India, which had given him a different idea, a sense of how one might compose poetry that was a more direct reflection of the mind. This was similar to the training he had received from his guru in Tibet in composing dohas, or spontaneous songs of spiritual realization. Allen introduced Rinpoche to the possibility of even greater freedom of expression and a kind of poetry that was as fresh, wild, and evocative as our experience of America. It was the first chapter in a long and important association with American poets and poetics, which had its intense ups and downs.

Interestingly enough, this was not the first time that Rinpoche and Allen had met. After Rinpoche's death, while going through photographs from a visit to India in the early sixties, Allen saw a picture of himself taken at the Young Lamas Home School in Dalhousie. A young monk was showing him around. He looked closely at the photograph and realized that it was Rinpoche who had taken him on that tour, ten years before they met in New York. Neither one of them realized this when they ran across each other in America.

After our weekend in New York, we headed back to Tail of the Tiger, where more and more students were arriving every day. John Baker and Marvin Casper showed up around this time. They became close friends of ours and close students of Rinpoche's. They ended up living in our house when we moved to Colorado later that year. Later, they became the editors of Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and the Myth of Freedom. Students from cities and universities an over the East Coast began appearing at Tail. There was, for example, a group from Brandeis University who started coming to Tail for seminars.

Rinpoche was scheduled to teach a long seminar on the Jewel Ornament of Liberation, an important book by Gampopa, one of the forefathers of Rinpoche's Tibetan lineage, and then he was to give another long seminar on the life and teachings of Milarepa. The people at Tail were expecting a hundred or more participants. I was looking forward to these seminars, which were to take place outdoors in a big white tent in a field behind the barn at Tail. I was experiencing morning sickness, but other than that, I was feeling well, and I was quite happy to be pregnant.

Just a day or two before the first seminar was scheduled to begin, I dreamt that Rinpoche's son, Osel, was being held captive in England by Christopher Woodman and his wife Pamela. In the dream, Osel was trapped there, and they wouldn't let him go. In fact, we knew that Osel had been staying with the Woodmans. Akong had gone on a trip to India, and he thought that while he was away, they could provide a better environment for Osel than he would have staying at Samye Ling. He had asked the Woodmans to take care of Osel without asking our permission first. Given the dreadful relationship that we had with Christopher and Pamela, this made us very nervous, but there was nothing we could do. As far as we knew, everything was all right. We had been making plans to bring Osel over as soon as things felt settled, perhaps at the end of the summer.

When I woke up, I told Rinpoche about the dream, and he was quite alarmed. He said, "You have to get on a plane right away and go get him." I said, "Oh, I think it's nothing," but he said, "No, you have to go today." Rinpoche trusted my dream life, and in fact, all my life I've had dreams that turn out to be significant. He had me phone the Woodmans to tell them that I was coming to get Osel, and they seemed to be fine with it. Then, he booked a ticket for me from Boston to Glasgow. He couldn't accompany me because he had to teach. I was going to stay a night or two in Scotland, and then Osel and I would travel back to be with Rinpoche at Tail of the Tiger.

I flew overnight to Prestwick Airport in Scotland, the same airport from which we'd left Scotland in early March. It wasn't very pleasant to go back there. I took a taxi from Prestwick to the Woodmans' place, Garwald House. I arrived in Glasgow early in the morning, and it was overcast, cold, and misty. The drive south toward Samye Ling was surrealistic. There were wisps of curling mist, and it was so foggy that you could hardly see the road ahead. After we had gone through Lockerbie, about two hours south of Glasgow, as we got closer to Garwald it got darker and more overcast, and there started to be dead animals on the road. First, it was just a dead little bird. Further on, I saw a dead cat. Then there was a dead dog in the road. After we came through Eskdalemuir -- which is quite close to Garwald -- there was a dead sheep. I know this stretches the imagination, but it actually happened. There was this roadkill gradually progressing in size between Lockerbie and Garwald House, and toward the end of the drive, both the cabbie and I were getting spooked. Just before the turnoff to Garwald House, there was a dead cow on the road. The whole scene was like a cross between Stephen King and Monty Python, and quite creepy. Somehow with the combination of the dream and all of these dead animals, I began to feel very strange. However, there was nothing to be done about it, so we continued down the long driveway to Garwald House.

Because the relationship with the Woodmans had turned so negative in the last months that we were in Britain, I was apprehensive about how they might greet me. I asked the taxi to wait while I went in. I only expected to be there for a short time. Sitting in the living room and drinking tea with the Woodmans, everything seemed very friendly and nice, and I thought, "I'm being ridiculous. Everything's fine. I've cranked up this whole thing." Osel came in and he looked good, very relaxed and healthy. He seemed well cared for and he looked like he was enjoying himself there. I gave him a big hug and then told him, "We're going to America to see Daddy." He seemed quite excited. After maybe half an hour, we got ready to leave.

I gathered up Osel's things, we, said goodbye to the Woodmans, and we started to get in the taxi. Before the door closed, unexpectedly, Pamela ran over to the cab, sobbing. Her whole face had changed radically. It was contorted by what seemed to me a combination of rage and pain. She leapt into the car and physically wrenched Osel out, saying, "You can't have him." He looked completely overwhelmed and panicked. I can't imagine what this conflict was like for him.

She took Osel back into the house. I went in to reason with her, and I said, "This is terrible. You have to let him go. You aren't his guardians. His father wants Osel to come to America." But she was adamant, saying, "I can't let you have him. You haven't made enough of a relationship with him. He should stay here longer. I'm not going to let him go." She was crying, completely upset and unmoving.

I took the taxi back to Lockerbie and checked into a hotel there. I phoned Rinpoche, and he told me to contact a lawyer. To tell you the truth, he didn't seem that surprised that this had happened. I phoned a lawyer in Glasgow by the name of Maurice Maurissey, who agreed to help us. The next day, I met with him and we went to Social Services to get things sorted out. We discovered that the Woodmans had also been there. From what we could tell, they seemed to have painted a picture of Rinpoche as some kind of demonic person. They said that he drank too much, which may have been true, but in other respects the characterization was unrecognizable to me. It was like a replay of the earlier visa problems with Christopher. If the Woodmans couldn't have Rinpoche in England with them anymore, it seemed that they were going to hold onto his son. The people at Social Services told me that Osel wouldn't be released to us until there had been a home study in the United States. It was quite a mess.

I ended up staying in England for many months trying to get the whole thing sorted out. I kept thinking that it would just be a few more days, a few more weeks, and then Osel would be able to be with us. I had to go through several hearings with Maurice, trying to arrange to have Osel released to me. Eventually, we arranged for him to leave the Woodmans and go to the Pestalozzi Village in the south of England. We knew that Osel would be in a good setting there while we worked out the legal problems.

The Pestalozzi Village was established after World War II to care for orphans and refugees displaced by the war. In the 1960s, they began taking in Tibetan refugees, followed by refugees from other Asian and African nations. The first Pestalozzi Village was in Switzerland. The one in England was established somewhat later. They had different houses where residents of a particular nationality lived, and they provided an excellent education and loving care for the children there. There was a housemother and housefather for every residence. Osel was able to be with other Tibetans where he could speak his own language. Tibetan was still his main language at that time. Once Osel moved to the Pestalozzi Village, I was able to visit him regularly, and I would go down to see him as often as I could.

It took months to make these arrangements, and I stayed most of the time in London in Beauchamp Place with Francesca Fremantle, who generously shared her flat with me. She was a close student of Rinpoche's from Samye Ling who later spent time in the United States and taught at the University of Colorado and Naropa Institute. She and Rinpoche worked together on the translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. She's quite a brilliant scholar. She was incredibly kind to me during this difficult period.

Early in the fall, after his seminars were done at Tail of the Tiger, Rinpoche flew over for about a week. I was so glad to see him. He sometimes liked to cook, often quite unusual creations, and he cooked dinner one night at Francesca's. His peanut butter and lemonade soup would be a good example of his unconventional cuisine. In London, he cooked roast chicken basted in liquid vitamins for Francesca and me. I told him this was disgusting; he said I was too conservative in my thinking and simply needed to open my mind.

We visited Osel together at the Pestalozzi Village while Rinpoche was in England. The Woodmans had told Osel frightful stories about Rinpoche, so at that time, Osel was quite afraid of his father. It was heartbreaking. At the end of the week, Rinpoche flew directly from London to Denver, Colorado. He was moving to Boulder to begin teaching at the University of Colorado, and I was to join him as soon as I was able. We still hoped that I would be bringing Osel with me. Rinpoche was quite worried about his son, and he was very grateful that I was willing to stay and work on the situation. This was another example of how he sacrificed the concerns of his personal life for his commitment to presenting Buddhism in America. It was truly difficult for him to leave with nothing resolved, but he felt that he had to honor his teaching commitments.

While I was in London, I was often worried that I would bump into my mother on the streets. I was showing quite pregnant by this time, and I knew she would disapprove. I had had no communication with her since she had surprised me at Tail of the Tiger in May. Francesca lived not far from Harrods, and I frequently thought about going there. They sold a game pie in the food halls there that I had a craving for. Finally, I decided to go and buy one. My mother often shopped at Harrods, so when I went in, I looked all over to be sure she wasn't there, and I got a sort of adrenaline rush.

Eventually, somebody told my mother I was in London, and she phoned me at Francesca's. I had just this one phone call with her, in which she said to me, "Diana, I hope the child in your womb does not do to you what you have done to me," and she hung up the phone. That was the sum total of our communication.

Finally, around the end of December, it became clear that I wasn't going to be able to bring Osel back to the United States with me. I was now more than six months' pregnant and wouldn't be allowed to travel on an airplane that much longer. I wanted to be with Rinpoche in Colorado to have the baby. I left England with a heavy sense of regret at leaving Osel and took a flight to Denver. It was not until 1972 that he was able to join us in America.

SEVEN

When Rinpoche arrived in Colorado in the fall, his students rented a small cabin for him in the mountains above Boulder, near an old mining town called Gold Hill. It was quite spartan, almost what you would call a stone hut. There was no indoor plumbing, just an outhouse. Rinpoche hadn't lived in a place like this since he'd left Tibet more than ten years ago. People may have thought a Tibetan lama would be more comfortable in a simple mountain setting. This might have been more a reflection of his students' hippie aspirations than an accurate reading of who he was at this point. On the other hand, it was by no. means a hovel, and he told me that he enjoyed himself there. The house was on a beautiful piece of property, with a view of the Continental Divide in the distance. It was owned by a family that had spent years in the foreign service in Asia. This was their summerhouse, which they named Gunung Mas, which is Burmese, I believe.

Before I joined Rinpoche, he moved into a larger house much closer to town. It was still a little ways into the mountains, about a ten-minute drive out of Boulder, in Four Mile Canyon. With the baby coming, he felt that we needed a better house for the family.

Rinpoche was quite proud that he was providing a home for us. Before I got there, John Baker and Marvin Casper took the train from Vermont to Boulder with all our belongings. Everything we owned fit in the allowed baggage on the train. In a phone call with John, I insisted that he take my pet goldfish on the train with him. In some areas, I behaved just like a spoiled teenager in those days. After all, I was barely seventeen. John always swore that he took the fish with him and that it died on the train, but I had my doubts.

When I arrived in Denver, Karl Usow picked me up at the airport in a Volkswagen bus. Karl was a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado; he, along with another professor, John Visvader, had sent the postcard to Scotland inviting Rinpoche to teach at the university. He had a big moustache, and his hair was over his ears, which was actually short for those days.

Colorado was in the heart of the West, with its rough and rugged frontier feeling. I saw people with cowboy hats and boots in the airport while I was waiting to get my luggage. It was certainly a different atmosphere from either the East or the West Coast. Coming to Colorado was the beginning of another whole adventure -- one that would leave a huge mark on our lives.

I was excited to be in Boulder and to have my own house. The new house was a large, two-story, fairly modern structure, what is called a "raised ranch." It was set slightly below the road that wound up the canyon, and Four Mile Creek ran in front of the house. There were poplar trees and evergreens growing around the property. Rinpoche and I had a sitting room and bedroom on the first floor, while John and Marvin lived upstairs. The living room, which was also upstairs, had been transformed into a shrine room where the community gathered to practice meditation.

Rinpoche had designed raised platforms for people to sit on. Several students built the wooden frames to hold single-bed mattresses. The frames were painted orange with gold leafing on them and were raised a few inches off the ground. Then Tibetan carpets were placed on top of the mattresses, and people sat on those. This was before Rinpoche adopted the use of meditation cushions, zafus and zabutons, from the Japanese Zen tradition. Rinpoche often sat and meditated with people in the evening.

By the time I arrived, a substantial scene had developed around Rinpoche in Boulder. Most of these people were not from Colorado. They were arriving from the East and West coasts, as well as from the Midwest. Some people flew in, but in those days, it was more than likely that someone would arrive in an old car with· belongings strapped to the roof. Some people hitchhiked into town. Some took the bus. All of them seemed to converge on our house. There were people there morning, noon, and night.

People would often crash in our sitting, room, which was all right with me if it was just for a night or two. Then one of Rinpoche's students brought his sleeping bag and stayed for a couple of weeks, and then his wife and children arrived and they were all camping out there. Finally I told him that they had to move out and get their own place. This wasn't the only time I felt the need for more privacy and kicked people out. When this happened, people often had very little sympathy for me. They related to me like I was this terrible woman that the guru just happened to be married to. It didn't seem to occur to people that this house was also our home and that there might be boundaries to how much we -- or at least I -- wanted to share the space with people.

In this instance, Rinpoche's student had a complete freak-out. He told me that I had no understanding of Buddhism, that the guru's house was his house too, and that he was always welcome in the guru's house. I told him, "Well, you can think what you want about your religion, but I'm calling the police if you're not out in twenty-four hours." The whole family left, obviously.

Even our bedroom was not always off-limits to people. There was a woman who liked to meditate in the room when we were sleeping. She would sneak in during the night, and when we woke up, she would be there on a cushion meditating in the corner. Rinpoche would lean over in bed and whisper to me, "She's in here again. Get her out of here."

God, those were really the days. It was a wonderful era, though. Anything seemed possible. It was around this time that it dawned on me that Rinpoche was going to create something magnificent. All of us, I think, began to realize that his influence was going to be enormous, on a grand scale. It seemed unstoppable. He was so much vaster than anybody else I have ever met. I began to see Rinpoche as a mahasiddha, someone who outwardly may live an ordinary, secular life but whose every action is an expression of ultimate sanity, or wakefulness, and compassion. I don't even think it had to do with him choosing to live his life this way. The essence of his being was on a different plane than most other human beings, including most of the other Tibetan teachers. There were absolutely no boundaries to his compassion and his desire to present the teachings. His passion and his role in this lifetime were to present Buddhism in the West, and he put up no barriers between himself and others. He didn't keep any little dim corner for himself at all. Many people give of themselves, but almost all of us reserve a pocket of privacy, some part of our personal life that we don't want to share. Rinpoche kept nothing for himself.

People freely flowed through the house. Even though the scene was sometimes crazy and intense, I enjoyed it most of the time, especially in the two months before our child was born. In the evenings, the house would· fill up with people, and I would sometimes cook dinner for everyone. There might be twenty or thirty people for dinner. I would make a big roast or a pot of stew, and we would all sit around and eat together in the kitchen.

During this time, Rinpoche's relationships with people were so immediate and informal that his students had the sense that they· could hang out with him all the time. To some extent that was true. Just before our son was born, one student who was at the house a lot asked to speak privately with Rinpoche, and she was really concerned. She said to him, "Now you're going to have a child, and you're not going to love us anymore." He reassured her that this was not the case.

A group of people who called themselves the Pygmies discovered Rinpoche and started to hang out at the house. They had a commune east of Boulder, and their motto was, "We're bodhisattvas, and we live on East Arapahoe." They were long-haired and unkempt, and they lived in tents most of the year, which wasn't all that unusual for those times. There were a lot of people living pseudo-tribal lifestyles in those days. I don't know how the Pygmies lived in the winter, but they seemed quite cheerful in all kinds of weather. Some of them pitched their tents around the house for a while, as I remember. I became good friends with a number of them.

People indulged in some interesting eccentricities in those days. Marvin Casper, who was living in the house, went through a phase where he didn't like to shower. Marvin had a theory that Westerners bathed too much. Marvin was a bit odd but very lovable. He liked to eat Wheatena and peas with mayonnaise on them. He often didn't wash the bowls he ate out of, putting them back in the cupboard dirty. When I inquired about this, he said that there was no reason to wash his dishes because he was just going to use them again. From this time onward, there were always people living with us who helped Rinpoche with his work. In that era, it was Marvin and John, but it was a lot of different people over the years.

Rinpoche did business at the house, as he had no outside office in those early days. He was making plans to write books, make movies, open meditation. centers. He was writing poetry, writing plays, taking photographs, giving a talk every other night of the week: He was planning to go back and forth from Boulder to Vermont several times a year, and there were requests from people all over the country for him to come and teach. There was endless activity, and he involved his students in every aspect of making and carrying out these plans.

When you think about the raw material that he had, it's quite amazing that he trusted these people -- all of us -- to help him spread the buddhadharma in America. In fact, this was a very important way that he worked with people and trained them. I say that from my own experience. I learned so much from him, from everything he did and. everything we did together. He gave me such confidence about who I was and what I could do. At the same time that he would build you up, he would also call forth the most genuine part of yourself, and he wore down the problematic parts. But he never did this by belittling you. He was very skillful that way. The only problem was that sometimes people lost track of the fact that they still had a lot of work to do on themselves. Living in his world, you sometimes felt that you had accomplished the whole thing on the spot.

If you mean impromptu drama then that means to make it up on the spot. (https://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_makin ... ama_called)

He doesn't know what he is going to say and is trying to make it up on the spot. (https://books.google.com/books?id=QtmGS ... 22&f=false)

Was the meaning there all along or did they make it up on the spot? (https://books.google.com/books?id=vPI7x ... 22&f=false)

When you find yourself in that situation, you will make it up on the spot (https://books.google.com/books?id=TFXm2 ... 22&f=false)

Mammon was a god before Jesus' sermon in which he didn't make it up on the spot. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AMammon)

Do you really just make it up on the spot? (https://www.activemelody.com/improvisin ... -its-done/)

Movement can also be improvised, meaning that the dancers make it up "on the spot" (https://www.elementsofdance.org/action.html)

If you don't know an answer, a fact, a statistic, then … make it up on the spot. (https://www.activistfacts.com/person/3370-paul-watson/)

From some point of view, you had, but then there's always the path. We all have that to work on.

Rinpoche would give private meditation interviews in a little room on the top floor of the house. Later, it became my son's bedroom. There were two chairs and a side table in the room. Although there were many informal scenes and a lot of hanging out around the house, Rinpoche always stressed the importance of these formal meetings with students, to discuss their meditation practice and their lives. I think that all of his students had private interviews with him during the first few years he taught in America. In the interview situation, at least in terms of my own experience, Rinpoche completely connected with the other person in a way that was frighteningly direct. Anyone who expected the interview to be an extension of the informal space around the house was in for a big surprise. One felt absolutely on the spot. His ability to connect with the deepest part of a person was uncanny.

Rinpoche had several people who helped him schedule his meetings and interviews. I had done a lot of this in Scotland, but in general I was no longer involved once we arrived in the United States. Kesang, Fran, Marvin, and John all helped out, and as more and more people came, Rinpoche asked other students -- new faces in Boulder -- to participate in this way.

Many people who came for interviews were members of the Buddhist community that was forming in Boulder. Others were spiritual seekers passing through town or students of other teachers who had heard about the Tibetan in the mountains outside of Boulder. Two long-haired American Hindu guys, Krishna and Narayana, came for interviews during this period. They were close students of Swami Satchidananda in Los Angeles, although originally they were from the East Coast. After Narayana's initial interview, he wrote to Rinpoche,

I have met many saints and teachers, but only one had the ability to change my state· to a noticeable degree just through darshan [being in the teacher's presence]. Swami Satchidananda was the one, but now you are the other. I am telling you this because I realize that it was a significant encounter and one that may have bearing on how I approach life and spirituality.1

You never knew in those days who someone might become. Years later, in 1976, Rinpoche would appoint Narayana (also known as Thomas Rich) as his Vajra Regent, his dharma heir. Long-haired Hindus might transform into Buddhist businessmen; hippie girls might become university professors.

For many of those meeting Rinpoche for the first time, their initial interview brought a shocking realization, not unlike what Narayana described. Many, many people felt drawn to him in a way they could not explain. During these early years, he was gathering many heart disciples, people with a deep karmic connection who would remain with him throughout his life. They somehow found their way to him and he to them. It was an amazing process, an amazing time.

It was not, however, an overly solemn period. Rinpoche remained impish and always ready for a good joke. Bhagwan Dass, an American who fashioned himself as a Hindu yogi or sadhu, showed up at the house one day. He had spent a long time in India with Ram Dass, also known as Richard Alpert, the Harvard professor who was converted by psychedelic experiences to the life of a Hindu sannyasin and who wrote the classic Be Here Now. (At this time, we had not yet met Ram Dass.) I was sitting in the kitchen at Four Mile Canyon, and in walked Bhagwan Dass, this tall person with unbelievably long matted hair, dressed entirely in white. He said to me, "Where's the guru? I want to meet the guru. I have an interview with the guru."

I said, "Well, he's upstairs."

He responded, "I was just up there, and that fellow sent me back down here."

I asked him, "Did he, by any chance, have suspenders and a shirt on?"

"Yes," he said. I suggested that he go back up there. Apparently he had wandered upstairs and asked Rinpoche "Where's. the guru?" and Rinpoche had replied, "I don't know."

In addition to all the other activities at the house, we sometimes had parties, some of which got pretty wild. I think that Rinpoche found it interesting to. socialize with people in this way. During this period, Rinpoche was on a steep learning curve. It was often a wild ride for him and everyone else. He liked to get right out on the edge with people and see what would happen. It was a very creative space for him. I think he regarded it as a kind of research. Although the whole scene may sometimes have seemed merely chaotic and totally unplanned, Rinpoche was not just hanging out with people in a random fashion. As he said later,

On my arrival in the United States of America, I was met by lots of psychologists and students of psychology; ex-Hindus, ex-Christians and ex-Americans of all kinds .... At the beginning, when I first arrived in the U.S.A., I was trying to find students' so-called trips and trying to push a little bit of salt and pepper into their lives and see how they handled that. They handled that little dash of salt and pepper okay. They understood it, but they would still maintain their particular trips. So then I put more of a dash of salt and pepper into their lives and further. spice ... experimenting with how to bring up so-called American students. It's quite interesting, almost scientific. You bring up your rat in your cage and you feed it with corn or rice or oats and you give it a little bit of drugs and maybe occasionally you inject it and see how it reacts, how it works with it. I'm sorry, maybe this is not the best way of describing this -- but it was some kind of experimentation as to how those particular animals called Americans and this particular animal called a Tibetan Buddhist can actually work together. And it worked fine; it worked beautifully.2

Rinpoche also saw himself as part of the experiment, as part of what was being worked on. Throughout this whole period, what I think drove much of the activity was a kind of electric passion or connection between Rinpoche and his students.

Soon after I arrived in Boulder, in February of 1971, there was a party to celebrate Rinpoche's birthday. Rinpoche wore his black high-necked chuba, which had gold piping on the collar and Tibetan buttons. He looked quite handsome in it. There was a snowstorm that night, and people came in and left their jackets and boots on the floor just outside the kitchen. At some point in the evening, Rinpoche was in the kitchen showing off all the gadgets we had. He was very proud of the sprayer th-at was attached to the sink. It was on a long flexible black pipe that pulled out of the sink, and we used it to spray the dishes and clean the sink. He said, "Look, I have all these modern conveniences for my family now."

I was a few weeks away from giving birth, so I went to bed quite early. Apparently, a while later, Rinpoche turned on the water in the sink and starting experimenting with the sprayer. He started with cups and glasses on the counter; then he moved on to the people around him in the kitchen. First, it was just a playful burst of water that caught someone on the shoulder, then someone else in the face. Then, he turned the water on full force and began directing the. sprayer at everything within his reach. By the end, everybody's coats and boots were soaked from all the water, which spread out across the kitchen floor into the entryway. Finally, Rinpoche himself became a victim of his own prank. As the floor became slippery, he fell down in a puddle at his feet, which delighted him as much as anything else.

Although I missed most of the action that evening, I was certainly privy to similar occasions throughout the years. Sometimes these situations would remind me of the scenes in movies that turn into food fights or brawls. There's something both repulsive and attractive about those scenes. I remember a movie where a man and woman start feeding each other food out of the refrigerator, and they end up on the floor in front of the icebox, with their clothes off smearing food on one another's bodies. Most of us are willing voyeurs for such an outrageous scene in a film, but we are less ready to pursue such activities in real life. Yet there's a kind of longing for that freedom. Rinpoche had an amazing ability to take an individual or an entire group of people into those spaces, and not just as an opportunity to indulge in some fantasy. There was a way in which he invited you to unleash who you really are -- and then to see the utter transparency and ordinariness of that. It didn't have to be as literal or crude as a water fight -- although it could be. But it might also be inviting you to compose poetry with him, or cooking dinner for him, or just what you felt from a touch of his hand on your shoulder. It could be funny or very sad. It was like going through a mirror into your own mind.

When I arrived in Boulder, Rinpoche was lecturing several nights a week at the Wesley Foundation, a church on Twenty-Eighth Street and Folsom. His evening talks were in addition to classes that he was teaching once or twice a week at the University of Colorado. About a hundred people would usually attend the evening talks, although the crowd grew as the weeks went on. Around this time, some students rented a house, where. a number of them lived. It had a little shrine hall in the garage, and many people started practicing there, instead of in our living room. Rinpoche did a shrine blessing there and named the house Anitya Bhavan, "house of impermanence." I think he knew the scene was going to quickly outgrow that space.

Indeed, the scene was growing exponentially, new people arriving every week from all parts of the United States. Before and after his talks, there would be people milling around outside the hall where the lectures took place. On the one hand, Rinpoche wanted people to meditate before his talks began, but on the other hand, he and his students were building a Buddhist culture. I think he knew that this social scene was an important part of building that world. Also, he did not want to always be at the center of the scene. He talked about the importance of a teacher being slightly eccentric, in the sense of off center, saying that an overly centralized situation would not encourage the students to develop their own strength and understanding.

After some period of hanging out, people would slowly filter into the room and find a place to sit on the floor. Finally, Rinpoche would arrive and slowly make his way along the. edge of the audience to the stage. The Wesley Foundation was a modern building, and it had two walls of stained glass, which met at an angle in the middle. From the outside, this looked something like a bird's open beak. Inside, Rinpoche sat in front of the walls of stained glass.

Many of these talks were incorporated into his first genuinely American book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which was published in 1973. I was so impressed by how spacious yet charged the atmosphere was at these talks and how delighted and relaxed Rinpoche seemed to be. There was a sense that he had really arrived. He was home. After the main part of the talk, there was always a long question-and-answer period, and many of the exchanges were both brilliant and intimate. There was still the occasional off-the-wall question, usually from a newcomer, about whether the Tibetans were related to the people who built Stonehenge, or something like that. By and large, however, students were sharpening and focusing their minds, and the discussions that took place were part of that process of developing intellect. People may have looked a bit ragged at that time, but you could tell that they were jewels in the rough. All of this was going on during the last two months of my pregnancy. In fact, Rinpoche gave a talk the night before I gave birth, and he gave another in this series just a few days after our son was born.

To prepare for the birth of our child, just like any other young couple, Rinpoche and I went to Denver together to take birthing classes. Rinpoche was very supportive and involved. He came to almost all the classes. We had decided that we wanted to use natural childbirth, which was a relatively new, progressive trend in those days. Dr. Robert Bradley, who founded the Bradley method of natural childbirth, was in Denver, so we signed up for his course. Dr. Bradley preached that childbirth should be painless. He said that if you had the proper training, you wouldn't have any pain at all. Rinpoche and I were convinced that this must be true.

My son was due at the end of February, but he came almost two weeks late. On the night of March 8, Rinpoche returned after giving a lecture at the Wesley Foundation, and we both went to bed. I was awakened by pain, and after lying in bed awake for some time, I woke Rinpoche up and I said, "There's something wrong with me. I'm having a lot of pains. Do you think I'm in labor?" He responded, "Oh no, Dr. Bradley said that childbirth isn't painful. I'm sure it will pass." I sat up for a while waiting for the pains to subside, but in fact they were growing more and more intense. For some reason, we were convinced that I wasn't in labor. We were both so naive about this, Rinpoche with his monastic background and me with my alienated English upbringing. Finally, I got into a hot bath, which I thought might alleviate the pain. I never drank at this point in my life, but I had a couple of shots of Johnnie Walker that night, hoping it might help.

Very early in the morning, around six o'clock, I went upstairs to John Baker's room and knocked on his door. I said, "John, I think there's something wrong with me. I think something's terribly the matter." He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well I'm getting these pains, and they're coming every five minutes." Within three minutes, I would say, he was up and had his clothes on and the car keys in his hand, and he told me, "Okay, we're going to the hospital." He drove me as fast as he could to Dr. Bradley's office in Denver. I was already six centimeters dilated at that point. They took me over to Porter Memorial Hospital, which was a Seventh-day Adventist hospital, and put me in the labor room there. After John got me checked in, he phoned the house and asked someone to bring Rinpoche down right away.

Stephen Butterfield, a former student, recounted in a memoir:

Tenzin offered to explain his behavior at a meeting which I attended. Like all of his talks, this was considered a teaching of dharma, and donations were solicited and expected. So I paid him $35.00 to hear his explanation. In response to close questioning by students, he first swore us to secrecy (family secrets again), and then said that Trungpa had requested him to be tested for HIV in the early 1980s and told him to keep quiet about the positive result. Tendzin had asked Trungpa what he should do if students wanted to have sex with him, and Trungpa's reply was that as long as he did his Vajrayana purification practices, it did not matter, because they would not get the disease. Tendzin's answer, in short, was that he had obeyed the guru.[21]

-- Osel Tendzin [Thomas Rich], by Wikipedia

For about half a year in 1980, I went to live in Rajpur, across the street from Sakya Trinzin. I asked him for teachings on my meditation practice and he convinced me he had a vision of him and me yab yum and that it was important for him to act on it with me. Not only was it the most pathetic sex act of my entire life, it was such a total farce. It was about as enlightening as a mosquito bite, less even, if that's possible. And when it seemed impossible that he could get beyond his Ganesh sized belly to have sex, I offered him oral gratification. He was worried that would get me pregnant.

-- Randy Sogyal Rinpoche, Best-Selling Lecher, The Writings of Am Learning

While I was lying there alone, I remember feeling quite afraid. During the latter phases of my pregnancy, it had been haunting me that I had no idea what to do with a baby. There was a forty-year-old woman in one of my childbirth classes who was having her fifth child. I asked her, "What do you do with a baby?" She answered, "Oh, you just change them when they're dirty, feed them when they're hungry, and hold them when they cry."

I was somewhat overwhelmed by the prospect of motherhood. I was so young and I had no helpful reference points from my past to prepare me for motherhood. I had never been around infants, and the only sort of mothering I'd known was my own mother's. I knew that I didn't want to repeat what she'd done. I was afraid that I would be an inadequate parent. There were very few women who had children in the Buddhist sangha at that time, so I didn't know who to turn to. All those anxieties came up as I was lying there alone in labor.

When Rinpoche arrived, I was well into transition. Dr. Bradley soon came into the room. When I was ten centimeters dilated, I wanted to push the baby out, and I felt that the best way. to do this was to put my feet up on the end of the bed and push. Dr. Bradley told me that this was not the proper thing to do. He said that I should squat down and grab my knees and push the baby out in that position. He had been studying how some aboriginal tribes gave birth, I think. I tried to do this, but I felt that I couldn't get any leverage. He stood there in the room and wouldn't let me do what I wanted. This must have gone on for an hour and 'a half. Finally, he stepped out, at which point, I immediately climbed back onto the bed, put my feet up against the end of the bed and pushed. The baby crowned, I was taken to the delivery room, and my son was born shortly thereafter.

Rinpoche was surprised that our first child was a son. There's a rather chauvinistic Tibetan tradition that if a lama marries and the first child is a daughter, this proves that he made a mistake in disrobing. If the first child is a son, it was the right decision. Rinpoche was convinced we were having a daughter. He didn't think our marriage was a mistake, but he didn't expect to get any breaks, as far as these beliefs were concerned. We hadn't even picked out a name for a boy. We were going to call our daughter Dechen, which means "Great Bliss." However, Rinpoche quickly came up with a name for our son. At Rinpoche's suggestion, we named him Tagtrug, which means "tiger cub." The next week, Rinpoche wrote to the Dalai Lama and asked His Holiness for a name for our son. The Dalai Lama named him Tendzin Lhawang, which means "holder of the teachings, divine Lord." So his legal name was Tendzin Lhawang Tagtrug David Mukpo. We called him simply Taggie.

Taggie was born around seven in the evening. He was quite gray when he came out, and I wondered if that was because it took so long to push him out. After the birth, Dr. Bradley -- who was very interested in Rinpoche because he was a Tibetan lama -- wanted to talk to him about reincarnation, but Rinpoche wouldn't engage in the conversation. He felt that the doctor had mistreated me, and he was not enchanted with his personality.

A while later, the nurses took Taggie to the nursery. At that time, they didn't let the baby stay in the room with the mother that much. Then, at some point, Rinpoche went home so that I could get some rest. In the middle of the night, they brought Taggie to me, to nurse. I remember being overwhelmed by the beauty of this child. I picked up the telephone to call Rinpoche to tell him how wonderful our child was. Rinpoche told me that he too was very excited about the birth of our son, and he read me a poem he'd written that night:

There was a crescendo of energy at the birth of Tagtrug.
Vajrapani flies in the space --
The action of tiger's leap bridges the valley.3

While we were on the phone, the nurse came running in and took Taggie away from me. She said that I couldn't be on the phone when the baby was in the room. She said he could pick up bacteria from the telephone. This was ridiculous, but I didn't know enough at the time to argue with her. I went to sleep missing my child. The next morning I got up and went to look at Taggie in the nursery. I felt such a maternal instinct that I decided I wanted to take him home immediately. I phoned Rinpoche and John and asked them to pick me up. When they arrived, I discharged myself from the hospital, and we took Taggie home.

Back at Four Mile Canyon, the situation was chaotic. Sam Bercholz was there visiting from California, and Kesang and other people were in the kitchen. They popped open a bottle of champagne to celebrate the birth of the baby. Unfortunately, the cork almost hit him in the head. After a little while, I decided to retire with Taggie to the bedroom.

Rinpoche was having more and more intense sessions with his students in the evenings. While earlier I would have joined him in these sessions, as my pregnancy advanced, my interest in the group scene decreased, especially late at night. Now, with my newborn son, I had less than no interest. This particularly didn't seem like the night for it, as far as I was concerned. I would have liked to have time alone with Rinpoche and the baby, and I felt incredibly invaded with all the people in the house. These scenes continued almost every night after Taggie and I came home. I found that I couldn't get enough sleep because there was so much noise. The baby was being woken up many extra times a night.

A few nights after Taggie was born, Rinpoche was sitting around the kitchen table with some students listening to reel-to-reel tapes of his talks, which they were discussing. At this time Sam Bercholz had already been talking with Rinpoche about editing his talks into a book, and Rinpoche and some of his close students were starting to go through the talks to determine what material might work in a book. The volume on the tape recorder was turned up quite loud, and they weren't being very quiet themselves. I couldn't sleep and I kept going in and saying, "Please try to be a little bit quieter. Please try to be quieter." It would quiet down a little bit, but then it would start up again. Finally, I marched into the room and snapped the tape reel in two with my bare hands. That put an end to it, at least for that night.

There were many times that I would complain to Rinpoche that I wanted more time alone with him. He would say to me, "Don't you like people?" And I would answer him, "Well, yes, I like people, but not as much as you do." When I complained to him that we didn't have enough time together, he would say to me, "Do you want to have a suburb-ian marriage? That would be terrible!" Well, there was no chance of that.

Sometimes during this era I would take drastic measures to get time with him. On Easter Sunday, I announced to everyone at the house that I had prepared an egg-hunt in the yard, and they all went outside to look for the eggs. Then I locked the doors and the windows, so that no one could get back in. Rinpoche asked me what was going on, and I just said, "Now you're mine!"

To me, one particular occasion marks the change in my life that came with the birth of my first child. When Taggie was only two weeks old, Rinpoche left for several days to investigate buying a piece of land in the mountains above Fort Collins. Before this, I almost always accompanied him when he traveled, and it was quite a shock when I realized that I was going to stay behind. Rinpoche would have welcomed my company, but tramping around in the snow in the Rocky Mountains in March with an infant made no sense. So I decided to stay home with Taggie. However, I felt abandoned and somewhat afraid of being home alone with the baby. When Rinpoche left, I was crying, sobbing actually. The house had been full of people ever since I'd arrived in Boulder. Now, for the first time, it was empty. A few people came by to visit and help out, but I was alone most of the time.

When Rinpoche came back, he said, "We're going to buy some land," and he was really happy about it. I was really happy to see him. I had no idea how significant it was that Rinpoche had located this land. The land he had discovered became the future home of the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center, now renamed Shambhala Mountain Center. In his mind, establishing a rural practice center in Colorado was a crucial step. He wanted a place in the western United States, similar to Tail of the Tiger in the east, where he could teach intensive seminars outside of the speed and confusion of the city. He also wanted a center with a lot of land where his students could do intensive group practice as well as solitary retreats. Later, he talked about the establishment of Rocky Mountain Dharma Center as the key to making meditation the foundation of his students' experience.

Rinpoche had great faith in the students from those early days. He always saw their workability. He invited the Pygmies to move to RMDC and help settle the land, because he could see their strength and their resilience. They were used to difficult living situations without many amenities, so they took to the land quite easily. They built a number of houses there, some of them quite strange, idiosyncratic constructions that are still there. They weren't great meditators at that time, but many of them have become so. In part, this is because he believed in them. He saw so much potential in everyone.

Finding the land for RMDC in my mind marks the end of our first year in North America, the first of seventeen years we spent together on this continent. In 1969, while still in England, Rinpoche wrote a poem, "In the North of the Sky," that expresses what coming to America was all about for him. As he said about himself there, "Here comes Chogyam disguised as a hailstorm."

I know my destiny. There will come a day when my name will recall the memory of something formidable—a crisis the like of which has never been known on earth, the memory of the most profound clash of consciences, and the passing of a sentence upon all that which theretofore had been believed, exacted, and hallowed. I am not a man, I am dynamite. And with it all there is nought of the founder of a religion in me. Religions are matters for the mob; after coming in contact with a religious man, I always feel that I must wash my hands.... I require no "believers," it is my opinion that I am too full of malice to believe even in myself; I never address myself to masses. I am horribly frightened that one day I shall be pronounced "holy." You will understand why I publish this book beforehand—it is to prevent people from wronging me. I refuse to be a saint; I would rather be a clown. Maybe I am a clown. And I am notwithstanding, or rather not notwithstanding, the mouthpiece of truth; for nothing more blown-out with falsehood has ever existed, than a saint. But my truth is terrible: for hitherto lies have been called truth. The Transvaluation of all Values, this is my formula for mankind's greatest step towards coming to its senses—a step which in me became flesh and genius. My destiny ordained that I should be the first decent human being, and that I should feel myself opposed to the falsehood of millenniums. I was the first to discover truth, and for the simple reason that I was the first who became conscious of falsehood as falsehood—that is to say, I smelt it as such. My genius resides in my nostrils. I contradict as no one has contradicted hitherto, and am nevertheless the reverse of a negative spirit. I am the harbinger of joy, the like of which has never existed before; I have discovered tasks of such lofty greatness that, until my time, no one had any idea of such things. Mankind can begin to have fresh hopes, only now that I have lived. Thus, I am necessarily a man of Fate. For when Truth enters the lists against the falsehood of ages, shocks are bound to ensue, and a spell of earthquakes, followed by the transposition of hills and valleys, such as the world has never yet imagined even in its dreams. The concept "politics" then becomes elevated entirely to the sphere of spiritual warfare. All the mighty realms of the ancient order of society are blown into space—for they are all based on falsehood: there will be wars, the like of which have never been seen on earth before. Only from my time and after me will politics on a large scale exist on earth.

-- Ecce Homo (Nietzsche's Autobiography), by Friedrich Nietzsche

Indeed, our first year in America was a whirlwind; a kind of spiritual storm that was gathering energy as it moved across the country. Like so many things I experienced in my life with him, it was a time that was both magnificent and sometimes lonely. I felt part of his world, absolutely, but I also had to begin to come to terms with my life separate from him. It was not always easy to be the guru's wife. But I must say, it was rarely boring.

Part 1 of 2

EIGHT

Taggie was a very easy baby. In fact, had he not been my first child, I think I might have worried because he so rarely cried. You could do almost anything with him, take him anywhere, and he didn't complain unless he was hungry. He would go right back to sleep after I fed him or rest passively in his crib. Later, when we discovered that he had so many problems, I wished I had known what to look for earlier.

When the baby was around two months old, in May of 1971, we all went to California together. We visited Suzuki Roshi again, this time at San Francisco Zen Center on Page Street. We had tea with Roshi and his wife Okusan in the garden as SFZC, and Roshi did a special ceremony for Taggie. He bestowed on him the Japanese name Toronoko-san, which means "tiger cub" in Japanese. During our second visit to California, we also met Alan Watts, and Rinpoche gave a seminar on Alan's houseboat in Sausalito. Alan had converted part of the boat into a shrine hall where his students came to meditate. He would sit up in front in brown robes while people chanted, and then he would give his talk. The scene there felt strange to me, somewhat of a Westerner's kooky approach to Buddhism. Rinpoche, however, was quite fond of Alan and appreciated him for having laid the ground for the further introduction of Buddhism in America by popularizing Zen during the sixties.

John Baker came on the trip to California with us. One day John was driving us somewhere in Oakland, and he said to Rinpoche, "Could you tell me something about mindfulness in the Hinayana?" He said that right as he drove through a red light, and we had a car accident. Rinpoche ended up with a few broken ribs, but fortunately no one was seriously hurt.

When we left the Bay Area, we drove down the coast to spend several days at Tassajara, where we had had such a lovely visit with Roshi the year before. While we were there, Rinpoche received a letter, hand delivered by one of his students, from His Holiness the Gyalwa Karmapa, the head of Rinpoche's lineage. His Holiness said that he had recognized Taggie as a tulku, the reincarnation of one of his own teachers, Surmang Tenga Rinpoche. The night the letter arrived, Taggie cried all night, which was very, very unusual for him.

It was a great honor that our child was being recognized as an important Buddhist teacher. This announcement signaled some measure of acceptance from the head of the lineage -- who had not been especially happy when Rinpoche gave up his robes and married me. Still, we knew that this appointment would bring with it a heavy burden of expectation from the Tibetan hierarchy. Earlier, I described Rinpoche's education and upbringing in Tibet. This was the normally accepted pattern for raising a young tulku. Although everything in Tibet had been disrupted by the Chinese occupation, many of the Tibetan teachers who succeeded in escaping were establishing monasteries in India and other countries bordering Tibet. As much as they could, they were reinstating the traditional approach to educating young lamas. In fact, His Holiness Karmapa had established his monastery in Sikkim and was training many young teachers there. There would be pressure on Rinpoche and me to send Taggie over to be educated, as soon as he was old enough to go. The Tibetans believe that if a tulku is not recognized, enthroned, and properly educated, he will develop mental illness, a kind of tulku's disease, because he is not fulfilling the role that is intended for him and for which he presumably came back and took rebirth.

Rinpoche didn't want to send Taggie back to India for training. Because he felt so strongly that the future of Buddhism lay in the West, he thought it would be better if his children were educated here. From his own experience at Oxford, he had tremendous respect and appreciation for the Western educational system. He also didn't want to recreate the loneliness of his monastic childhood for his own children. As well, he wanted to play a personal role in their upbringing, not only as the children's father, but by providing whatever spiritual guidance his children might need. So he wanted Taggie to remain with us. Then, at a later date his son could receive further training in Asia. As Taggie's mother, naturally wanted him to stay at home with us. With all of these issues and feelings, it's no wonder that Taggie cried all night after we received the letter!

From Tassajara, we continued down the coast to Los Angeles, where Rinpoche taught a seminar entitled the "Battle of Ego." He began to attract committed students in L.A. We spent time with Baird Bryant and Johanna Demetrakas, two filmmakers with whom Rinpoche made a close connection. Rinpoche was in the early stages of making a film about the life of Milarepa, in which he wanted to try out an approach to filmmaking that involved applying concepts from the tantric or Vajrayana school of Buddhism in which he was trained. He was interested in applying a tantric framework called the Five Buddha Families to making a film.

The Five Buddha Families -- buddha, vajra, karma, padma, and ratna -- refer to five distinct styles of both enlightened and confused behavior. Each "family" has both a sane and a neurotic manifestation. I During the early seventies, Rinpoche used this paradigm in much of his work, not only as it applied to art but also in understanding human psychology. In terms of filmmaking, he felt that how a scene is shot can capture or convey the energy of any of the five families. The camera could look at the same situation from five different angles and convey five different interpretations or insights. The idea of working with the qualities of the buddha families in their art was intriguing to Johanna and Baird, as it was to many other artists Rinpoche would meet.

In 1973 Johanna and Baird would travel with Rinpoche to Stockholm, Sweden, to film some magnificent thangkas of Milarepa's life housed in ,the Museum Ethnographia. He intended to use the footage of these thangkas in his film, but because of a problem with the camera lens, the footage they shot was out of focus, and largely due to this obstacle, the movie was never completed.

While we were in Los Angeles, we were invited to have dinner with Krishna and Narayana at the Integral Yoga Institute, or the IYI as they called it which was Swami Satchidananda's center. Rinpoche was excited about going to the IYI for dinner because he liked Indian food so much. They served us an excellent Indian vegetarian meal. After meeting Krishna and Narayana in Boulder earlier that year, Rinpoche had become interested in getting to know them, better, particularly Narayana. Narayana came to dinner in a red velvet shirt. I was impressed by his charisma. He was warm and outgoing and seemed quite intelligent. Shortly after our visit, Narayana and his girlfriend, Lila, along with Krishna and his new girlfriend, Helen, joined our community. Rinpoche asked them to move to Tail of the Tiger, which they did that summer. On their way there, they drove through New York to get Swamiji's blessing, which was freely given, and headed on up to Tail. They got a house in Kirby, Vermont, where they started the Trikaya Bakery. Lila was pregnant at the time with their first child. She and Narayana were married at Tail.

Now that I had the responsibilities of motherhood, I stayed home more of the time when Rinpoche traveled. Over the next few years, he crisscrossed America I don't know how many times. I can't count the number of days a year he was on the road traveling and teaching. When he was in Boulder, there was still a beehive of activity at the Four Mile Canyon house. In spite of the chaos that was a feature of our lives, this was a truly magical time in my life and marriage with Rinpoche. We were very close during these years. It was a time full of hope and promise, and I remember this as a particularly happy chapter in our life together.

There was something energizing about the chaos, in fact. Rinpoche was so expansive in its midst, and we had a lot of fun together during this era. In spite of all the people around all the time, it was quite intimate in a way. The community was still small, relatively speaking, and I rather liked it that so much occurred at our house. I enjoyed having Rinpoche at home a lot, even though he brought so much activity in his wake. I could always go to bed when I got sick of it. There were obvious frustrations -- the house was a mess and we had almost no privacy -- but it was a very relaxed time. I was experiencing my own sense of exhilaration and relief that I'd gotten out of the English situation and away from my mother. I was riding on the freedom high and the fact that I had this wonderful relationship, a wonderful life. Having a child was also fulfilling for me. We had left behind the black era completely. I couldn't imagine my life being any other way.

In tantric Buddhism, there is a whole pantheon of deities that practitioners visualize as part of their meditation practice. Some of these have a rather normal anthropomorphic form: two arms and legs, one head, two eyes, two ears, and so forth. However, some of the Vajrayana deities have multiple arms and legs, a number of heads, and many eyes that see in all directions. This is connected with the accomplishment of compassion or the bodhisattva's skillful means. Avalokiteshvara, for example, the buddha of compassion, is sometimes depicted as having a thousand arms and a thousand eyes, to convey his untiring and remarkable efforts to alleviate the suffering of beings. Beginning in this era, Rinpoche seemed to take on this quality of all-accomplishing, all-seeing superhuman activity. The multifaceted way he worked with people was remarkable. He seemed to have hundreds of conversations about all kinds' of things going on with all kinds of people all the time. If I tried to describe all of these relationships to you or tried to tell you about everything he was doing, even in one month, it would take up hundreds of pages. At the same time, being with him, it often seemed as though nothing was happening. There was a way in which he was absolutely open and spacious in the midst of all of this activity; and you never felt that he was distracted when he was with you. When he was talking to you, you always felt that you had his complete attention. I think that is one reason that I was able to tolerate the chaos and all these people so intimately involved in our life. I didn't feel that they were stealing him away from me. He was very much there for me, when he was there!

On the other hand, we both began to acknowledge that if we wanted to have time alone together, it was not going to happen at our house in Boulder or on his teaching tours. So we began to take vacations, or holidays, as Rinpoche preferred to call them, which was time set aside for the family. Occasionally, someone would come along to help out, but in the early days, it would just be Rinpoche, me, and our child, or our children, as it became quite soon.

The first vacation I can remember us taking was to New Mexico in 1971 when Taggie was an infant. I now had a driver's license and I drove the three of us to Santa Fe. On the way down, we spent the night somewhere in the mountains of southern Colorado in a motel. We went to a cowboy cafe for breakfast, and Rinpoche wore his Stetson hat. Then we drove on into New Mexico. We had rented a. small trailer, which was located in the landlord's backyard behind the main house. Rinpoche helped out a lot with Taggie while we were there. He used to put Taggie in bed with us, and he was very sweet with him. He would watch him when I had a bath and call me if he cried. One time, I left Rinpoche alone with Taggie to go to the grocery store, and he figured out how to change diapers with one hand, but he got irritated that Taggie would squirm. Rinpoche also tried out his theories of insect control in New Mexico. He didn't want to kill the ants that invaded our trailer, so he put little lines of Ajax cleanser in front of the glasses and the plates, because he thought the ants wouldn't cross the Ajax. Actually, it did work.

We liked to walk around the plaza in downtown Santa Fe and look at the things for sale. Most of the vendors were Native Americans who had pottery, jewelry, and other items laid out on blankets or a table on the wide sidewalks along the sides of the square. Rinpoche bought me some silver and turquoise jewelry while we were there. He commented that the Native Americans looked a lot like Tibetans, and we talked about the magic in the Native American culture and his appreciation for that. We visited a number of pueblos in the surrounding area during our visit.

We both loved the spicy Mexican food in Santa Fe. One night we wanted to eat in an expensive restaurant in Santa Fe, which was still something quite rare for us because we didn't have very much money. Rinpoche insisted that we splurge. We dressed nicely and made a late reservation for a romantic dinner. The restaurant was completely done up in red velvet, and it seemed to be a very exclusive place, a place of fine dining. We were served an elegant meal, and everything was beautifully presented. In the middle of the meal, Rinpoche picked up his baked potato in his hand and bit into it. I said, "What are you doing? This is really, really embarrassing." He replied offhandedly, "Oh, Prince Philip would do something like this."

Altogether, he felt very connected with the land in the Santa Fe area and the Native American traditions. We enjoyed ourselves immensely, and we planned to return the next year. On the drive home, Rinpoche commented that we should have named our first son "Gesar," after the Tibetan warrior king. I told him not to worry, that we could give that name to our next son.

After we got back to Boulder, Rinpoche took off on another teaching tour, and I was left at home. John Baker went with Rinpoche, and Marvin Casper was away somewhere else. At this time, P.D., another senior student, was also staying in the house with us. While Rinpoche was away, P.D. started to lose touch with reality and ultimately had a psychotic episode, which I had to deal with on my own.

When the two of us went to the supermarket together, P.D. picked out a huge raw ham and an industrial-sized package of coffee filters. Nobody in the household drank coffee, so I found this odd, but I didn't think too much about it. That night, after I went to bed, P.D. came into my bedroom in a manic state. I felt threatened by his tone of voice and his erratic movements and comments. I had the baby and I didn't want him in my room, so I got him to leave, and then I put the dresser in front of my bedroom door. He banged on the door for a while and tried to push his way in. This went on for a few nights. Every night he would try to break into the bedroom, and I kept myself barricaded in. Then, one morning when I got up and moved the dresser, I looked around the house but P.D. was nowhere around. I got the baby up and dressed to go out shopping. When I went out to the car, I found P.D. walking naked down the road in front of our house at Four Mile Canyon. I convinced him to come back inside and get some clothes on.

At that point, I phoned Rinpoche and told him that we had to deal with this issue as soon as possible. The night that Rinpoche got home, there was a party at the house to welcome him back. As always, a lot of people showed up to hang out with Rinpoche. During the evening, P.D.'s behavior disintegrated, and it was obvious that he "needed help. After observing him for a while, Rinpoche said, "I think we have to take him down to the hospital." So John Baker took our disturbed friend in one car, and I drove Rinpoche in the other. We went down the canyon to Boulder Memorial Hospital at the end of Mapleton Avenue. At this point, it was about two in the morning.

P.D. and John Baker had arrived ahead of us, and we joined them in the waiting room. The psychiatrist on duty came over to where we were all sitting, and before anyone could say anything, P.D. announced, "Here is Mr. Mukpo. I've come to commit him." Rinpoche replied, "Actually, P.D., I've come to commit you." Confusion ensued, with P.D. insisting that Rinpoche was the prospective patient. Finally, the psychiatrist said, "I want everybody to be quiet. I'm going to ask a third party who has come to commit whom." Shortly thereafter" P.D. was admitted to the hospital. There were a lot of wild times, but this one stands out for me because I had to deal with much of the situation alone. To me, it signified how vulnerable and somewhat abandoned I felt at times when Rinpoche was away.

Later I encountered Kunga repeatedly, and we became friends. He continued to teach, and in 1971 Rinpoche told me to start teaching as well. But Kunga was the star. Until one day when he had been in San Francisco teaching, we received word that he had had a mental breakdown of some sort. The report was that he had tried to have sex inappropriately with a woman, had somehow gotten himself stabbed in the leg by someone unnamed, had been running down streets naked, and more. Rinpoche sent some students to San Francisco to bring him back, which they did. At that time Marvin Casper and I were living with Rinpoche in a house just outside Boulder, Colorado in Four-Mile Canyon. It was to this house that Kunga was transported, and for a few weeks I watched and participated as Rinpoche worked with Kunga. Eventually, he was committed for a few weeks to Boulder Psychiatric Institute. After that he calmed down and, more or less, recovered, but never again did he hold the position of prominence he had prior to his “break.”

-- My Love for Kunga Dawa [Richard Arthure], by John Baker

That summer, we went to Allen's Park, which is a small town near Rocky Mountain National Park, about an hour north of Boulder. Rinpoche conducted a major seminar there on the six states of bardo, teachings connected with the Tibetan Book of the Dead. We stayed in a small log cabin next to the main lodge at the conference facility in Allen's Park, and Rinpoche taught in an outdoor tent. By now, there were around three hundred students attending his major seminars in Colorado. The tent was packed.

Rinpoche explained to me that his lineage and his monastery in Tibet were particularly associated with practicing and propagating the bardo teachings, and during 1971 he gave three seminars on material related to this. Although he had people practicing a basic form of sitting meditation, his lectures in these early years imparted some of the most advanced teachings from his lineage. I think that most of us understood about 2 percent of what he was presenting at that time. Some of the material was incorporated over the next few years into the study material for students interested in Buddhist psychology, and some of it was used in Rinpoche's commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which he translated with Francesca Fremantle. However, a great deal of it was simply being planted in people's subconscious, I think, so that much later they would come back to these lectures and begin to unravel the profundity of what he was presenting. After he died, the talks from this program were incorporated in a posthumous book, Transcending Madness: The Experience of the Six Bardos, edited by one of his senior students and primary editors, Judith Lief.

At the end of the summer, we went out to Tail for a month. We rented a house near Harvey's Lake, a five-minute drive from Tail of the Tiger, and Francesca Fremantle stayed there with us. Rinpoche taught a seminar entitled "Work, Sex, and Money," and then he gave another lecture series on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which he and Francesca were just starting to translate. She edited much of the material from his talks at Tail for the commentary in that book.

There was a huge group scene at Tail, but at the house we could get away from it and have time together as a family. Rinpoche was drinking a lot at the talks. One would have to say that his drinking was a regular feature of our lives. At that time, I didn't see it as a problem. Had Rinpoche remained in Tibet or the Tibetan diaspora in India, the ground would have been laid for him to present the Buddhist teachings. There was a traditional format there and a basic understanding to accommodate whatever he might want to present. Instead, he struck out into completely foreign territory. I feel that in presenting the Buddhist teachings in the West, alcohol was one of the vehicles that he employed. He told me that it helped to ground him and allowed him to communicate. Without it, I don't know if he would have taught with such outrageous directness and expansiveness. In tantric Buddhism, amrita, or blessed alcohol, represents turning poison into nectar or inspiration. It is the idea that you do not reject any situation or state of mind in your life, but you use the most extreme or negative things as fuel to transform the ignorance of ego into wakefulness. I think Rinpoche did use his drinking in that way, which I know is a controversial thing to say.2 On the other hand, I certainly acknowledge that, over time, alcohol was very destructive to his body. But that was not a question at that time, and in those days I didn't have an issue with his drinking.

And there is the drinking. We all know about alcohol because we use so much of it. Rinpoche drinks to the point where it is obvious to the community. It has figured in several incidents.

"Alcohol is the drug of choice at Naropa," said the Village Voice in an article on the school last fall. "With Alcohol, Rinpoche has said, you relate to the earth." And the Voice added "Or at least the linoleum around the toilet bowl."

We have arrived at a native intelligence about alcohol. We know that it contains a false wisdom.

-- The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, With a Copious Collection of Germane Documents Assembled by the Author, by Tom Clark

I was often Rinpoche's chauffeur to and from his talks. One night, he was quite drunk by the time we got into the car at Tail to come home. I parked in front by the house at Harvey's Lake, and he opened his door, stepped out, and just disappeared. When I got out, I realized that I had parked right next to a ditch on the property. Rinpoche was completely relaxed because of how much he had drunk, so luckily he was uninjured. I helped him scramble out of the ditch.

Another time at Harvey's Lake, one night after dinner, he drank until he sort of passed out on the hardwood floor in the living room. I didn't want to leave him there for the night, and I didn't want to sleep by myself, so I tried to figure out how to get him to bed. I found a large Indian blanket, I rolled him onto it, and I dragged him on the blanket down the hardwood corridor. He was quite heavy, so this wasn't all that easy to do. When I got to the bedroom, just when I was trying to figure out how to get him from the blanket to the bed, he started laughing, got up, and walked really fast back into the living room, where he lay back down and appeared to pass out again.

We often ate with people at Tail, but sometimes we would have a family dinner at the house. Rinpoche always liked meat for dinner. One night I worked really hard preparing a leg of lamb. He got impatient waiting for dinner to be served, and he said to me, "This is ridiculous. This whole cooking and eating thing doesn't make sense. You spend so much time cooking dinner, when it takes so little time to, eat it." I went out into the garden to pick some vegetables to go with dinner. When I came back, the leg of lamb -- which had been sitting on the table ready to carve -- had bite marks where big chunks of meat had been taken out of it. Rinpoche had just picked it up and eaten his dinner off the bone.

That summer, we spent time with Narayana, Lila, Krishna, and Helen at their house in Kirby, just outside of Barnet. Lila went into labor in September while we were staying at Harvey's Lake, and we went over to the house to witness the birth. Narayana was going to deliver the baby himself, but Lila had a terrible labor and ended up being driven to the hospital in St. Johnsbury, where she gave birth to their son Vajra. After that, Lila and I used to spend time together with our children. Rinpoche did a child blessing ceremony at Tail, and I remember Lila bringing Vajra to be blessed when he was just a tiny baby.

That fall when we left Vermont, I went with Taggie to England to visit Osel at the Pestalozzi Village. We were still waiting for the home visit from the Social Services people in Boulder. We didn't seem to be able to speed things up at all, which was quite frustrating. While I was in England, Rinpoche traveled to Canada to teach. I believe it was the first time he'd been back since arriving in the United States. He was scheduled to give seminars in both Montreal and Toronto. He kept phoning me in England to ask about Osel and to say how much he missed me. In Toronto, he gave a seminar at the home of one of his students, Beverly Webster, a very elegant woman who later became his executive secretary. While he was there, he met with Kalu Rinpoche, a venerable Tibetan teacher then in his mid-sixties, whom Rinpoche admired very much.

Suzuki Roshi had been quite ill and jaundiced that fall, but the cause, of his symptoms had not been diagnosed. Rinpoche always wanted to have news of what was happening with Roshi. One of Rinpoche's close students at this time, Bob Halpern, had been a student at San Francisco Zen Center for a long time before he joined us in Boulder. Bob went with Rinpoche on the trip to Canada, and Fran and Kesang also traveled with him. The night that Kalu Rinpoche visited, after he left, Kesang came to Rinpoche with the news that Roshi had been diagnosed with liver cancer, which was a terminal condition.

Before she finished telling him the news, he started weeping. Later, Bob told me that Rinpoche was screaming in agony, as though he were in the midst of death throes. Bob said that his tears actually turned red with blood, which fell on Beverly's snow-white carpet. After a long time, when he finally stopped, he said to Bob, "Go out first thing in the morning. I'll be there in a few days." He had his last visit with Roshi at San Francisco Zen Center a short time before Roshi's death; Rinpoche returned there for Roshi's funeral in December. During the ceremony, he went up to offer a khata, a Tibetan ceremonial white scarf. With one hand, he unfurled the scarf and it hung in the air and then draped perfectly, beautifully, over the casket at the same time that he uttered a piercing cry. After the funeral, he was asked to give a talk to everyone assembled at the Zen center, and during his remarks, he broke down in tears. Some people said that it helped them to recognize and express their own grief.

Do you remember at the funeral? Well first all these honchos from Japan and America one after another with red robes - the vice abbot of Eiheiji or whatever went by his casket and [Trungpa] Rinpoche walked up heaving in agony with the Tibetan white scarf and kept trying to put the scarf on him and he wouldn't go and it kept flipping off the casket and he was heaving with emotion and Okusan broke into tears who had been so composed through the ceremony and afterwards she in a hurried way ran upstairs to get his walking stick that he'd last used and came down into the hallway and gave it to Rinpoche.

-- Interviews: Bob Halpern cuke page, Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki, by David Chadwick

Rinpoche was so moved by Roshi's life and example and so saddened by his death. I believe that it spurred him on to implement the plans that they had made. He pushed forward the Maitri Project, which involved starting a therapeutic community for people with mental problems. Maitri means "loving kindness" in Sanskrit. The Maitri facility opened in Elizabethtown, New York, in the fall of 1973, and moved to land in Wingdale, New York, donated by Lex and Sheila Hixon in early 1974. The Naropa Institute, based on another of their joint inspirations, was inaugurated in the summer of 1974.

The end of 1971 was also an important time for another dharmic relationship in Rinpoche's life. In December, he spent another week at Tail teaching while I remained in Boulder. At that time, he met privately with Narayana and asked him to become his Vajra Regent and dharma heir, the primary inheritor of his spiritual lineage. In Rinpoche's tradition, the continuity of the teachings from one generation to the next is expressed through the teacher's handing down the oral teachings and the responsibility for maintaining the purity of the teachings to one or more dharma heirs. There is usually a primary dharma heir, as well as potentially many secondary heirs. In some situations, usually when a teacher has an established organization, he gives the position of regent to one student, who is expected to act on behalf of the teacher and the lineage after the teacher's death, until, in the case of many tulku lineages in Tibet, the teacher's next incarnation is old enough to assume his or her position. This idea of a regent who assumes power between one generation and the next has also been used in many monarchies, so regency is not purely an Asian concept.

For Rinpoche, it was extremely important to give the complete teachings of his lineage to a Westerner. In fact, I think he felt that he was giving many unique transmissions to his Western students, and he did not want them to feel that they were playing second fiddle to the Tibetans. So this appointment was a very important step. It showed that a Westerner could be trusted with the complete teachings and with the responsibility for the future of those teachings.

Rinpoche told Narayana to make plans to move to Boulder, so that Rinpoche could work closely with him, observing him and giving him proper training. Rinpoche had already told me that he was planning to do this. He often shared these kinds of plans and decisions with me. He would say, "This is a great person. I've brought him (or her) in. This is what he can do, and this is where we're going with it." Rinpoche asked Narayana to keep this future appointment secret for the time being. Rinpoche did not feel it was time yet to make this appointment public. With Rinpoche's permission, however, Narayana told his wife, his heart friend Krishna, and Helen. Indeed, this choice would have many implications for the future. I felt that Narayana was an excellent choice, although I didn't have Rinpoche's insight into his character. I thought he was quite charismatic and he had a special quality, a kind of intensity and brightness that were unique.

Our life was affected directly in another way by Rinpoche's visit to Tail that December. Another child came into our lives at this time. One of Rinpoche's students living on the East Coast, Eileen, was having serious psychological problems. She was a friend as well as a member of the sangha. She was so affected by her own psychological crisis that she couldn't care properly for her daughter Felicity, who was around seven. Felicity had been in a boarding school in New England, but she was very unhappy there. Eileen came to Tail of the Tiger with Felicity in tow when Rinpoche was there. She said that she couldn't handle her child any longer, and she was looking for someone to take her for a while. Rinpoche called and told me that he felt terrible about the situation. I suggested that we take Felicity, but he thought it would be too much for us to handle. Then Felicity gave Rinpoche a drawing she had made for him, and he was so touched by the gesture that he decided to bring her home with him. She joined our household for about a year.

During Taggie's first year, he was extremely uncomplicated. His motor development was quite advanced. He was sitting up and rolling over on his own at four months old. All the physical milestones were early, in fact. He was running around on his first birthday, in March 1972. However, I felt some concern when I talked with George Marshall, a student of Rinpoche's, when Taggie was fifteen months old. Adam, George's son, was the same age, and George told me how well Adam could talk. I thought to myself, "Oh, my child is a little slow in his speech development." Taggie did develop some speech, but often he just repeated what you said to him. He rarely vocalized anything on his own. He would repeat "doggie-dog" after me, for example, but he rarely would point at a dog and say, "doggie-dog" without prompting. However, he was my first child and I didn't know what to expect, so I didn't worry that much.

In the summer of 1972, Rinpoche and I went to Rocky Mountain Dharma Center for several weeks. It was to be the first time Rinpoche would teach a seminar there. For the summer, campgrounds were established for people attending the program, and a large tent was erected in a field, where Rinpoche would give his talks. I drove us up to "the Land," as we called it then. We had a Volkswagen Carmen Ghia at that time. As we were driving through the mountains, Rinpoche said to me, "Very soon we're going to be driving here in a Mercedes." I responded, "You know, you always have these terribly big plans." I wasn't convinced much would come of this. Sure enough, within a few years, we were driving to RMDC in a Mercedes, and Rinpoche reminded me about that conversation, as if to say, "See!"

As time progressed, our family finances became more stable. Rinpoche was able to take a salary for his work, and most of the time -- but not always -- he got paid. Our living situation remained modest for a number of years, and when we began to live in a more ostentatious way, it actually was not that we were spending huge amounts of money, but that we were using our rather modest mean~ and those of the organization to create an apparent manifestation of wealth. I am not saying that we remained terribly poor, by any means, but we were really living with what would be a comfortable middle-class income, most of the time. Sometimes, throughout our life together and up until the very end, there was no money and we were scrounging for the money to buy groceries. Most of the time, we were fine. On an inner -- nonmaterialistically based-level, Rinpoche was the wealthiest person I have ever known, but he wasn't the richest, in terms of financial assets. So, for example, when we got a Mercedes it was a used car. We never had a fleet of Mercedes or anything like that. We managed to keep up one slightly tattered vehicle for him at a time.

That summer we stayed in a little A-frame called Aloka, which means "light" in Sanskrit. Earlier that year, while we were at Tail, I had had a dream in which a being appeared to me and said, "Please give me a place in your body." I replied, "Yes, I will." While we were at RMDC, I conceived our second son, Gesar. He was the only one of my children who was planned, so to speak.

While I was pregnant with Gesar and we had both Taggie and Felicity at home with us, we received word that there would finally be a visit from Social Services in Boulder to establish whether we had a fit home for Osel. I had the house spotlessly clean when a man came to do the evaluation. He was a bit taken aback by how young I was, and when he saw that there were already two children in the home and that I was pregnant with a third, he questioned whether we could really handle another child. I was indignant. "Do my children look dirty? Do they look uncared for?" I guess that in the end we impressed him as being suitable parents for Osel, because not long after this we heard that Osel could come and live with us. Once again, Rinpoche's teaching schedule made it impossible for him to travel to England at the specified time, so once again I made the journey in the middle of a pregnancy to bring Osel home. This time, the outcome was as we had hoped. I picked him and his belongings up at the Pestalozzi Village, and we drove to London where we spent the night before flying to Denver.

To celebrate Osel's arrival and to help with his process of acclimatizing to family life and life in America altogether, Rinpoche and I decided to take another vacation to New Mexico before starting Osel in school. We decided to leave Felicity with friends in Boulder, and the four of us -- Rinpoche, Osel, Taggie, and I -- headed off to Santa Fe. For a few days, we stayed in the little trailer we'd had the year before, and then we moved in with Allen Ginsberg and a friend of his.

Just a few years ago, Osel -- who is now known as Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, the head of the Shambhala network of meditation centers -- shared with me jokingly how he felt as a child during this period. Apparently, when I told him we were going to take a family vacation alone, he was struck by anxiety. He thought to himself, "Oh no, nobody else is coming?" Rinpoche and I may have been somewhat overwhelming for him, and our unconventional, albeit cheerful, life was something he was not yet fully accustomed to. We thought it was so generous of us to take this trip, a great idea, at the time! He was probably relieved when we decided to stay with other people.

Allen Ginsberg suggested that we join him at David Padua's house, a friend in Santa Fe who had an adobe home near the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. Allen was staying there with his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky. During this vacation, it was pretty clear to me that Allen had a big crush on Rinpoche, and that he was a little jealous of me. When I went horseback riding with him one day, he made a number of sarcastic remarks that seemed out of place. I was surprised that he was mean to me. Allen probably imagined that, as Rinpoche's wife, I stood in the way of his having a relationship with the guru. Rinpoche was a beautiful young man at that time, just Allen's type. However, Rinpoche was not interested in men in that way. On the other hand, he and Allen had a lot to discuss in other areas. They were already making plans to launch a poetry school as part of the much bigger plans that Rinpoche had in mind for a Buddhist university.

Earlier that year, Allen had invited several poets to Boulder for a poetry reading. Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, and Nanao Sasaki were invited to read poetry with Allen Ginsberg and Rinpoche. In addition to his own poetry, Allen read some of Rinpoche's poems from a recently published book, Mudra, which included many of the early poems Rinpoche had written, in England in the sixties. The evening ended rather disastrously after Rinpoche put a large Japanese gong over his head while Robert Bly was reading a serious and significant poem. Rinpoche did a number of things to disrupt Bly's reading, actually. Gary Snyder and Robert Bly interpreted Rinpoche's behavior as rude and drunken. I guess it was, but from his point of view, their behavior was arrogant and bombastic, and he felt that humor was needed to lighten up the space. Allen took this controversy remarkably in stride, and managed to remain friends with all involved. Snyder and Bly, however, wanted nothing further to do with Rinpoche, and as far as I know, he had no regrets on his side.

Let us first briefly consider two prior episodes that occurred on the "Trungpa scene" in Boulder. They will help us understand Trungpa better.

The first was a benefit poetry reading for Trungpa's Karma Dzong Meditation Center, held at Macky Auditorium on the University of Colorado campus, May 6, 1972. Poets on hand included Ginsberg, Robert Bly, and Gary Snyder. Trungpa, acting as self-appointed emcee, was in his cups. During the reading, he upstaged the poets with his humorous antics, and at the end, he "apologized" for the poets in a muddled, patronizing speech ("I'm sure they don't mean what they said.") The evening ended with Trungpa drunk and truculent, yelling and beating on a big gong.

"If you think I'm doing this because I'm drunk," Trungpa told Ginsberg during the evening, "you're making a big mistake."

Ginsberg, already a great admirer of the young Tibetan master, was genuinely puzzled. "Is this just you," he asked, "or is this a traditional manner, or what?"

"I come from a long line of eccentric Buddhists," the eleventh Trungpa explained.

Ginsberg subsequently defended Trungpa for taking over the poetry reading.

But Gary Snyder, a longtime student of Zen, and Robert Bly, once a crazy-wisdom disciple at Samye-Ling, were offended by Trungpa's behavior -- Bly, as it was to turn out, quite seriously....

Unlike other Naropa faculty members, many Kerouac School poets have showed resentment when their paychecks were "loaned" back to the Institute without their having been asked.

In 1978, Ginsberg's pal, Gregory Corso, took out his resentment against the conservative Naropa administration by trashing his faculty apartment at the end of the summer session. This demonstration of Corso's own brand of crazy wisdom proved to be too much for the administration, which hasn't invited him back.

-- The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, With a Copious Collection of Germane Documents Assembled by the Author, by Tom Clark

Allen was an amazing human being in that way. As outrageous as he was and as much as he flaunted his sexuality and his politics, he was also a peacemaker and, except when he viewed me as a rival that one time, he was one of the most gentle, kind people I have ever known. It seemed to me that, sexual politics aside, he loved Rinpoche without hesitation, and as a student he was very devoted. He never seemed to doubt that what Rinpoche was doing was for the good of everyone involved -- even when it created difficulties for Allen in his relationships with other poets. He saw Rinpoche as a complete representative of the crazy wisdom lineage, and he took the crazy with the wisdom, with no questions asked.

While we were in New Mexico, Rinpoche killed a scorpion that we found in the boys' bedroom. It was the only time I ever saw Rinpoche kill anything. Rinpoche squashed it and flushed it down the sink. He felt badly about this, but he didn't want the boys to get bitten. While we were there, we also got our first big message that something was not right with Taggie. One morning, Taggie woke up early. He came and climbed into bed with me and put his hands on my chest. As I started to wake up, I saw that my chest was covered in blood. I soon realized that Taggie had cuts all over his hands. Somewhere in the. house, he had found pieces of broken glass and had been playing with them. I completely freaked out, but Rinpoche's response was very practical. He said that we should clean up his cuts and put socks on his hands. We did that, and he was okay. But it was very unsettling. Taggie's relationship with pain was never like a normal child's. A normal kid would cut himself once and cry, but Taggie kept playing with the glass. But we still weren't sure what it meant at this time.

Part 2 of 2

When we got back to Boulder, we settled into a kind of routine, to the extent that our lives were ever routine, with me taking care of the three children in the household, and Rinpoche putting most of his time into teaching and the many other projects he had going. He lectured at the University of Colorado several times a week, and he traveled to both coasts to teach, as well as making side trips to many new places like Minneapolis and Topeka, Kansas. He also gave a number of seminars in Boulder over the next six months, and he had special meetings and led workshops for people involved in psychology, film, and theater. In the spring of 1973, he and his students in Boulder were going to host a seminar on the Milarepa film project, as well as two other week-long conferences, one on the Maitri approach to psychology (involving the Five Buddha Families and other concepts) and a ten-day conference sponsored by the Mudra theater group, which was working with exercises that Rinpoche was developing out of his own experiences with monastic dance in Tibet. The theater conference was being partially funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which Jean-Claude van Itallie had obtained. He invited a number of prominent theater people to the conference in Boulder, including Robert Wilson, the eminent American artist and playwright, and his group of actors, as well as many others. There was a tremendous amount of work to prepare for all of this. And these are just a few highlights of what Rinpoche was doing at this time, just the tip of the-iceberg.

Rinpoche was incorporating facets of the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition into his presentation of secular disciplines such as film, theater, and psychology; later he would expand into many other areas as well. This weaving together of the secular and the sacred was characteristic of how he taught. Even in Great Britain he had had this tendency. In the 1960s he had already recognized that he was going to work with both the secular and the spiritual as indivisible aspects of his teaching. In the diary that he kept at that time, he wrote:

There are many people who are more learned than I and more elevated in their wisdom. However, I have never made a separation between the spiritual and the worldly. If you understand the ultimate aspect of the dharma, this is the ultimate aspect of the world. And if you should cultivate the ultimate aspect of the world, this should be in harmony with the dharma. I am alone in presenting the tradition of thinking this way.3

In December 1972, Rinpoche spent ten days in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, near Yellowstone National Park, teaching a seminar on crazy wisdom. Several of his students had bought a hotel there and were renovating it, planning to operate it as a tourist hotel called the Snow Lion Inn. In his seminar he presented an in-depth examination of the life of Padmasambhava and how his teachings and many manifestations were applicable to the present day as well as to the Tibetan medieval world of the eighth century. We all went to Tail of the Tiger for the Christmas holidays that year, where Rinpoche gave another crazy wisdom seminar. The teachings were magnificent, very much the heart's blood of his lineage. He had been waiting so long to present this material. After his death, these two seminars were edited into the book Crazy Wisdom.

Although I supported Rinpoche in whatever he felt he needed to do at this time, his lack of everyday involvement in our household was not ideal for our young family. When you have young children, I think almost everyone goes through a period that seems completely insane, and this was the era we were in during the early seventies, especially since we had so many children join our family so quickly. At this time, I was not even twenty years old. We didn't have much money for babysitters, and Rinpoche thought it was odd and somewhat degrading to hire people as domestic help. In Tibet, people served a teacher out of devotion rather than for money. It wasn't that Rinpoche was miserly, but he really felt that this kind of master-servant relationship was not healthy when it was purely a financial deal. He hoped that his students would help us out, and many of them did. I found, however, that by and large people didn't appreciate the difficulties of our domestic situation. Nevertheless, we made do as best we could.

Osel was trying to adjust to life in America and found school very challenging. Felicity was spaced out and often depressed and needing cheering up, and Taggie was becoming a real handful. I would get phone calls from the neighbors at five in the morning to tell me that Taggie was running around somewhere. While the rest of the household was still sleeping, Taggie would get out of his crib and go off for an adventure by himself in the neighborhood. One time, I found him playing on the roof of the garage of the Four Mile Canyon house. I remember trying to lure him away from the edge with jelly beans, holding them in my open palm and saying, "Candies, candies." Eventually I realized that I had to put an intercom in his room, and later I had to put a hook on the outside of the door. I felt terrible about locking him into his bedroom at night, but it seemed to be the only way to keep him safe. Once, when I was quite pregnant with Gesar, he slipped out of the house when I had taken my eyes off him for just a minute. I turned around and he was gone. He had on a little yellow, black, and red striped sweater, and I rushed frantically out of the house to see if I could spot him in the yard. Finally, I spied him in his bright-colored sweater across the highway halfway up a mountain. I had to climb the mountain in my pregnant state and carry him down. He was becoming difficult to care for.

Osel came into an already chaotic home situation, and in retrospect I feel that I was not a very good mother to him during these years. He was trying to adjust to America and to learn English, and on top of that, we found out later that he had a learning disability that exacerbated his problems. It took years to sort all of this out. When Osel was having trouble with math in school, for example, I would review his multiplication tables with him over and over. The next day, he would fail his math test, and I would become quite exasperated. He was incredibly shy, which made it more difficult for me to communicate with him. I was only nineteen at this point, and coping with three children -- each of whom had unique difficulties that needed attending to -- proved difficult. I was often frustrated.

Rinpoche was away a great deal of the time, and when he was in town he had so much going on that he was rarely home. There was still a lot of activity at the house, but in late 1971 we had acquired space for a meditation center in downtown Boulder, at 1111 Pearl Street, on what would later become the Boulder Mall. There was a meditation hall that could hold about a hundred people, several meeting rooms, and a suite of offices. Rinpoche gave the name Karma Dzong to the new center, which means "fortress of action," or it could also mean "fortress of the Karma Kagyu lineage." Rinpoche's students paid membership dues to cover the rent on this space. Although the hordes would still descend on the house from time to time, now much of the community activity was centered around Karma Dzong. So I was frequently home alone with the kids, even when Rinpoche was in town. Although this was a difficult adjustment, I also found that I enjoyed the space. I began to have more sense of my own life, apart from the scene that surrounded our life together.

However, I didn't have enough help with the children. Rinpoche and I talked about all this many times, and he tried to help find solutions. He continued to ask some of his students to provide assistance at the house. However, they were much more interested in being with him than in spending time with the children and me. Also, there weren't many people in our community at that time who had children. Rinpoche's students, many of them young people in their twenties, couldn't relate to what I was going through at all. There were a few mothers who were sympathetic, but they had their own families to care for. A few other people stepped forward and offered to help. However, sometimes, if I asked for someone's help, he or she would criticize me, saying that I should be doing a better job on my own. This didn't help the situation at all.

I wished that Rinpoche had more time for the family, and I think that he would have liked that too. He enjoyed those times that we were together as a family, on our vacations and such. But in general he was not that involved day to day. He had warned me this would be the case when we were first at Tail of the Tiger. Everything else came second to the dharma in his life. His mission, as I guess you might call it, was to bring the Buddhist teachings to America and to make sure that they flourished here, and he sacrificed much personal happiness for that. Unfortunately, his family suffered as well. On the other hand, he loved all of us tremendously, and he tried to be there for us as much as he could be. Whenever anyone in the family was having an acute problem, he would make time to attend to that. However, he couldn't do much to improve the overall quality of our family life during this era.

In the very early days, when we were still at Samye Ling, he once said to me, "I wish I were someone like Einstein." I asked him, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, I wish I was one of those people who was so into something that I would get up in the morning and I would have a mission, something to do that was really driving me." Well, as they say, you should be careful what you wish for! He certainly became one of those people.

Luckily, with everything else that was going on, I had a very straightforward pregnancy with Gesar. I hardly had morning sickness or nausea throughout the pregnancy, which was good, because I didn't have time for it. By the time I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, I was ready for this pregnancy to end. I wanted to get on with it. Hoping to induce labor, I went riding when I was enormous. When that didn't jump-start my labor, I came home and drank a glass of castor oil mixed in orange juice. (Somehow I knew that castor oil can cause contractions of the uterus.) Undoubtedly, it was an irresponsible thing to do. My water broke soon after that. I was admitted to Community Hospital in Boulder, and my doctor, Dr. Brown, was quite upset when I told him what I had done.

Although my water had broken, my labor didn't progress. They held me in the hospital, and after twenty-four hours, they began to administer Pitocin to induce labor. Dr. Brown had to leave unexpectedly, and I was left with another doctor. After I had contractions for twelve hours, he told me that he had surgery at 7 A.M., which was a few hours away, and that in hadn't had the baby by 5 A.M., he was going to do a C-section.

Quite a large group of sangha members was hanging out in Community Hospital, camped out in the waiting room, waiting for the child to be born. They were calculating the baby's astrological aspects while I was having contractions. Different people kept coming into my labor room, saying, "If you hold off just another half hour, the moon will be in the tenth house" and things like that. When Gesar was finally born, he was a triple Taurus. Rinpoche was with me the whole time. I was in an enormous amount of pain, the kind of pain where you don't know where the center or the focus of the pain is. They tried to give me a spinal injection of anesthesia, but it didn't work. The pain just kept going and going and going. Rinpoche was a fabulous labor coach, it turned out. He seemed . to know exactly how I was experiencing the pain, and he advised me on how to get through each contraction.

Gesar was finally born early in the morning on April 26. He came out with a full head of black hair and long fingernails. When they opened his mouth to suction him, I said to the doctor, "He has teeth!" The doctor said, "No, he doesn't have teeth." The doctor was fed up with me at that point because the whole thing had gone on forever. He said, "He doesn't have teeth. I've delivered thousands of babies, and babies aren't born with teeth." I started to have a panic attack, because I thought that if he had teeth, he might have a deformity. So I insisted, "No, he has teeth!" He said, "Listen, you need a cup of tea. You're English, and that will help. I'm going to show you the baby now, and the baby doesn't have teeth." Then he exclaimed, "Wait a minute. He's got teeth!" He had two pointed teeth that looked like fangs.

Gesar emerged as a strong personality in all respects. We gave him the name Gesar Tsewang· Arthur Mukpo. According to Rinpoche, King Gesar of Tibet was the first Mukpo, and he is regarded as a great warrior-protector of the Tibetan people. Tsewang means "lord of life." We added Arthur for King Arthur, another regal warrior king. Gesar was a little dynamo from the beginning. They removed his teeth in the hospital, because they were loose. Two months later he was teething again. He grew several teeth on the bottom, and they were also an odd set of teeth, so he was in the dentist's chair at two months old. Then, he didn't have center teeth on the bottom until his permanent teeth came in. The dentist put in a spacer to hold his back teeth· in the proper position and prevent them from filling in the front. As a toddler, Gesar used to bite other kids sometimes, and you could always tell if it was Gesar because you could see the mark of the spacer.

When Gesar was an infant, we were still living at Four Mile Canyon. When he was just a few days old and we were just back from the hospital, I put him in his bassinette and went to take a hot bath. Taggie came into the bathroom while I was in the tub, and I asked him, "How is Gesar?" And Taggie said, "Gesar is good. He's eating candies." I jumped out of the bath and ran into the other room. Taggie had stuffed lots of candies into Gesar's mouth, which I had to fish out. Another time, Taggie fed Gesar a container of blue shoe polish with a spoon. I became a rather frequent visitor to the emergency room.

As a baby, Gesar slept in the room with us. Rinpoche said that Tibetans would never have a separate bed for the baby, but I always thought we should have the baby in a bassinette or a crib. When Gesar was just a few days old, I put him to bed in his crib with a windup mobile. Whenever the mobile stopped moving, Gesar would start screaming. This continued until around two A.M., when Rinpoche insisted that we put him in bed with us. He said that if Gesar were in the middle, between us, he would be content and fall asleep. I told Rinpoche that I was afraid one of us would roll over on him in our sleep. Rinpoche said, "A father's instinct would never allow this." I gave in. About two hours later, I awoke to small muffled cries. In his sleep, Rinpoche had rolled on top of Gesar and was basically suffocating him. I started screaming to wake Rinpoche up, "Get off him! Get off him!" After that, if I put Gesar in bed with us, he slept on my side of the bed.

Gesar took to solid food very early, around three or four months old. At one point, I told Rinpoche that I didn't know when to stop feeding him, because Gesar would take everything I gave him. He never closed his mouth to refuse food, like Taggie did. So Rinpoche suggested, "Let's stage an experiment. Let's feed him and see how much he'll eat." Gesar sat in his infant chair, and Rinpoche and I fed him two bananas, a bowl of yogurt, and two pots of meat. We kept feeding him, and he ate until he threw up!

Gesar walked when he was eight months old, and he was an extremely active little boy. I remember thinking of him as a mindless body that destroyed my house. At age three and a half, Taggie began having seizures, but before that point, Taggie was actually much more in touch with the things around him than he was later, and he did talk a little bit. He was very fond of his brother and liked to take care of him. When Gesar was one and Taggie was three, they accidentally walked in on us making love. They stood at the door for a while staring at us, hand in hand. At a certain point, Taggie said, "Gesar, you can't be here. Go back to bed."

Two weeks after Gesar was born, Rinpoche and I took the two youngest boys with us to California. We stayed in the Bay Area for several weeks while Rinpoche taught a seminar on "The Nine Yanas of Tibetan Buddhism," which was the basis for a book entitled the Lion's Roar, published in 1992. Rinpoche was preparing to teach the first Vajradhatu Seminary in the fall of 1973, a three-month intensive program, during which he was going to make a formal transmission of the Vajrayana teachings to his most senior students. He saw this as a crucial step in the full transmission of Buddhism to the West, and he was thinking a great deal about the proper way to introduce this material. It was not just going to be an intellectual presentation, but he wanted to enter his students into the full practice and study of Vajrayana, which brings with it a heavy burden of responsibility for both the students and the teacher. He was acutely aware that if this were not properly done, if he failed to plant the true heart of Vajrayana in his students, it would be catastrophic for the future of his work altogether.

In preparation for the presentation at the seminary in the fall, he had decided to teach a more in-depth public seminar on the different stages of the Buddhist path. This was the "Nine Yanas" lecture series given in May 1973 in San Francisco. Rinpoche's students rented a small bungalow for us in a modest neighborhood in Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco. I tried to attend most of the talks, but much of my time was consumed with caring for Taggie and the baby.

In early 1973, Krishna and his family had made the move to Boulder at Rinpoche's request. At that time, Rinpoche established Vajradhatu, which means "indestructible space," as the umbrella organization for all of his meditation centers and his work in the United States. He appointed a board of directors that included Marvin Casper, Fran Lewis, Krishna (also known as Ken Green), and several. others. Rinpoche wanted to overcome territorial struggles between the two power centers of his work: Tail of the Tiger in Vermont and Karma Dzong in Boulder. Not long after this, Narayana (who was now going by his given name, Thomas Rich) also moved to Boulder and joined the board. Rinpoche wanted to make Boulder the national headquarters of what he envisioned would become a large organization made up of many centers around the country. Vajradhatu and its board were set up to oversee the activities of all of the centers and the expansion of the spiritual empire, of sorts, that Rinpoche was creating. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism was published in 1973, and sales of the book were taking off. It came onto the spiritual scene in America at just the right time to spark tremendous interest. It sold more than a hundred thousand copies in the first two years, which was a lot of books for that time. It spoke to the counterculture of that era in a direct, intimate way. More and more people came to hear Rinpoche speak. When Rinpoche gave a public talk in San Francisco during our visit in 1973, more than five hundred people attended. Within a year, there would be more like fifteen hundred in the audience.

Once again, all of these developments brought energy and chaos into our domestic life. Rinpoche had invited several members of the board to come to California with him, including Marvin, Tom, and Ken. A quorum of the board of directors was having spontaneous meetings in our dining room in Berkeley every other day and night, and the house was filled with a kind of backroom, smoky, corporate power-politics energy. The scene during this era was a bit like our version of scenes from the reality show The Apprentice. All of these guys -- and it was definitely a huge preponderance of male energy -- were learning how to be spiritual corporate types under Rinpoche's tutelage.

Starting around this time, Rinpoche began to experiment with the corporate model to see if it could be adapted as the framework for organizing the Buddhist world in America. This energy was certainly an antidote to the energy of hippiedom. Rinpoche had already put forward the idea to his students that they should view themselves as yogi householders rather than as monks and nuns. He definitely felt that a secular model was the way to go in America. Beyond that, he needed a structure for what was emerging as a large and complex spiritual organism with many arms and legs. As he brought new people onto the board, each one was given areas of responsibility. The growing staff at Karma Dzong was organized into departments, with each employee reporting to a department head who reported to a member of the board. Some of the plans for this structure were hatched in our little house in Berkeley. The group literally met around the dining room table a lot of the time. I found that I didn't want or need a seat at that table, and I watched this emerging organization with interest and some bemusement. Energy was really high during this visit.

Before going back to Boulder, we passed through Los Angeles, where Rinpoche gave a weekend seminar, and then we headed down to Acapulco for a few weeks of vacation. Gesar was only about six weeks old at this time, so it was quite adventurous of us. My sister, Tessa, was now living in Boulder, and she came along on the trip. We were invited to Mexico by Marty Franco, a student from Mexico, who paid all the expenses. She had a mariachi band meet us at the airport, and she arranged for us to stay in a diplomat's apartment, which came with maids. The maids cooked three meals a day for us. The first night they served us a cold beetroot soup, which no one liked except Rinpoche. He drank everybody's soup, and the next day his bowel movement was absolutely red and he was afraid that he had blood in his stool. I don't think he'd ever eaten beets before. The maids decided we really liked the soup, so they started making it every other night for dinner, and every time it was served, Rinpoche would drink all the soup. After a few of these meals, he finally said, "I can't drink this stuff anymore." There was a potted palm tree in the hall, planted in a hollowed-out elephant's foot, and we decided to pour the soup in the soil. Rinpoche didn't want to hurt the maids' feelings. However, they came in to clear the soup bowls just as we were pouring it out; we were never given that soup again.

There was a swimming pool in the apartment complex, and I gave Rinpoche swimming lessons while we were there. He was absolutely terrified of water. (Tibetans have no tradition of swimming at all. However, it distressed him that he couldn't swim, and he wanted to overcome his fear.) So every day we'd go into the pool together. I would hold his neck while trying to teach him to float on his back. I would tell him to relax, because he would completely tense up in the water. If I let go of his neck, suddenly he would sink. Finally, we got him a huge inner tube, so that he could enjoy being in the water and maneuver around the pool.

Our apartment had a balcony with a narrow railing that looked out over the pool. At night, Rinpoche liked to sit on the balcony and try to hit the swimming pool with melons from the fruit bowl. He usually missed, so in the morning there would be squashed melons around the sides of the pool as well as floating in the water. Eventually, the superintendent figured out who was doing this. They didn't kick us out; they just told us that we couldn't throw melons anymore.

Rinpoche also went parasailing in Acapulco.You are taken out on the ocean in a speedboat, with a parachute strapped to your body, and as the boat speeds up you're lifted into the air. I was so frightened for him that I couldn't watch. With his paralysis, I thought this was an absolutely insane thing to do. A week before a tourist had been killed parasailing. I went into the bedroom and closed all the curtains so I wouldn't catch sight of him. Apparently, when the sail brought him down in the water, he started to sink, so all these people had to swim out and save him from drowning.

While we were in Acapulco, Rinpoche wanted to take me to a tailor to have a suit made. The dress code was beginning to change in that era, and my hippie clothes no longer fit the visualization. Rinpoche thought that we should get a pale blue suit made for me, like the one that the Pan Am stewardesses wore. He thought that would be the perfect outfit for me.

Some days, we would sit and watch the cliff divers at the beach. We spent a lot of time at the beach, and Rinpoche got a dark tan. One day, when we were walking around town, an American woman came up and started talking to him in broken Spanish. He let her go on for a while, but eventually he said, "Madam, you can speak English if you want." I think she was taken aback by his proper English accent. Rinpoche also liked to go to the local market where you could bargain over the price of things. While we were in Acapulco, we took a side trip up to Tasco, where all the Mexican silver was made. It was quite a nice trip for all of us.

That summer there were further seminars at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center (RMDC). He gave another seminar on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was attended by about four hundred students. His second seminar there that summer was entitled "The Energy of Discipline," again perhaps in preparation for the seminary. At RMDC, they had purchased a small used trailer for Rinpoche to live in. They put it on a hillside that overlooked the tent where he gave his talks. It was a tiny place with a cramped living room and kitchen combined and a small bedroom in the back, barely big enough to fit our bed. It got quite hot in there in the summer, but Rinpoche loved it. They built a deck out the front door where he could sit and look at the mountains in the distance , and he also liked to sit out back behind the trailer, under some small pine trees. He was still waking up in the middle of the night and asking for a snack, and during this era he became fond of cold Spam and tomatoes on French bread. He called this "food-o," a pun on the Japanese bodhisattva, Fudo.

That year a house was purchased for us in Vermont, about ten minutes from Tail, and we went out to stay there for two weeks at the end of the summer. Rinpoche gave it the name Bhumipali Bhavan, which means the "place of the female earth protector." Rinpoche told me that it was named for me and was to be my house, and I have always thought of it that way. It was an old Vermont farmhouse with a spacious kitchen, dining room, and large living room on the main floor and four bedrooms upstairs. There was plenty of room for the whole family there. Rinpoche taught a seminar on "The True Nature of Devotion," and a second one entitled "The Question of Reality," in which he compared the Buddhist teachings to the teachings of Don Juan, which were popularized by Carlos Castaneda in that era. Some of his students were interested in the Don Juan books, and Rinpoche indicated that there was some sanity in them, along with a lot of confused ideas.

"What is death, don Juan?"

"I don't know," he said, smiling.

"I mean, how would you describe death? I want your opinions. I think everybody has definite opinions about death."

I don't know what you're talking about.

I had the Tibetan Book of the Dead in the trunk of my car. It occurred to me to use it as a topic of conversation, since it dealt with death. I said I was going to read it to him and began to get up. He made me sit down and went out and got the book himself.

"The morning is a bad time for sorcerers," he said as an explanation for my having to stay put.

"You're too weak to leave my room. Inside here you are protected. If you were to wander off now, chances are that you would find a terrible disaster. An ally could kill you on the road or in the bush, and later on when they found your body they would say that you had either died mysteriously or had an accident."

I was in no position or mood to question his decisions, so I stayed put nearly all morning reading and explaining some parts of the book to him. He listened attentively and did not interrupt me at all. Twice I had to stop for short periods of time while he brought some water and food, but as soon as he was free again he urged me to continue reading. He seemed to be very interested.  

When I finished he looked at me.

"I don't understand why those people talk about death as if death were like life," he said softly.

"Maybe that's the way they understand it. Do you think the Tibetans see?"

"Hardly. When a man learns to see, not a single thing he knows prevails. Not a single one. If the Tibetans could see they could tell right away that not a single thing is any longer the same. Once we see, nothing is known; nothing remains as we used to know it when we didn't see."

"Perhaps, don Juan, seeing is not the same for everyone."

"True. It's not the same. Still, that does not mean that the meanings of life prevail. When one learns to see, not a single thing is the same."

"Tibetans obviously think that death is like life. What do you think death is like, yourself?" I asked.

"I don't think death is like anything and I think the Tibetans must be talking about something else. At any rate, what they're talking about is not death."

"What do you think they're talking about?"

"Maybe you can tell me that. You're the one who reads."

I tried to say something else but he began to laugh.

"Perhaps the Tibetans really see," don Juan went on, "in which case they must have realized that what they see makes no sense at all and they wrote that bunch of crap because it doesn't make any difference to them; in which case what they wrote is not crap at all."

"I really don't care about what the Tibetans have to say," I said, "but I certainly care about what you have to say. I would like to hear what you think about death."

He stared at me for an instant and then giggled. He opened his eyes and raised his eyebrows in a comical gesture of surprise.

"Death is a whorl," he said. "Death is the face of the ally; death is a shiny cloud over the horizon; death is the whisper of Mescalito in your ears; death is the toothless mouth of the guardian; death is Genaro sitting on his head; death is me talking; death is you and your writing pad; death is nothing. Nothing! It is here yet it isn't here at all."

Don Juan laughed with great delight. His laughter was like a song, it had a sort of dancing rhythm.

"I make no sense, huh?" don Juan said. "I cannot tell you what death is like."

-- A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, by Carlos Castaneda

Ram Dass attended this seminar, having connected with Rinpoche in Boulder earlier that year. Rinpoche teased him a lot during the talks. At one point during a talk, he had Ram Dass sit at his feet, and he dropped the ashes from his cigarette onto his head. Ram Dass was quite into the outer purity approach: wearing white, eating special food, and doing purifications of the body. So perhaps Rinpoche was making a statement to him about innate purity.

In one of the most vivid dreams, I lived in a nunnery on a large white lake in Tibet… in a large room dominated by a huge white statue of a Buddha… people from a nearby village raised the money to build a white facade to the cave…. Rinpoche was going to marry a white girl…. We undertook other commando operations with odd code names: Operation Awake, Operation Blue Pancake, Operation Secret Mind, and Operation Snow White…. The women who [served] in the rest of the house wore white aprons with very ostentatious white shoulders over a black dress….. In Boulder a large white mansion on Mapleton Hill, about six blocks from our house, was rented for [H.H. Karmapa].…. I had a white Mercedes at the time, which I loaned to the dharmadhatu for His Holiness's use during the visit…. Rinpoche and I were both dressed in white….[Rinpoche] 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….. 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….. 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)…. I noticed how beautiful the purkhang was, ornamented with its gold designs and with the Mukpo colors: brilliant white, bright red and orange, and deep blue….. A white cloud in the shape of an Ashe appeared.

-- Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa, by Diana J. Mukpo with Carolyn Rose Gimian

In any case, their interactions were quite playful and fun to observe. Ram Dass was taken with Rinpoche in that era, and they were making plans to teach together. His long-haired Hindu persona was a contrast to the approach now developing within the community. We were starting to wear more conservative dress at that time, not yet suits and ties, but the bare-chested men were putting on shirts, and the madras and paisley were disappearing.

Then in the summer of 1974 I was at Naropa Institute teaching a course in the Bhagavad Gita, a course for which I felt Maharaj-ji was giving his blessings. There at Naropa I was part of a whole other scene, because Trungpa Rinpoche represents a different lineage. I found myself floundering a little bit because my own tradition was so amorphous compared to the tightness of the Tibetan tradition. Trungpa and I did a few television shows together. We did one about lineages and I felt bankrupt. I had Maharaj-ji's transmission of love and service but I knew nothing about his history. I didn't know how to talk about what came through me in terms of a formal lineage. I was also getting caught in more worldly play, and I felt more and more depressed and hypocritical. So by the end of the summer I decided to return to India. I didn't know what I'd find, but I'd go anyway. I knew I was different than I was ten years before, but I was still not cooked, and what we owe each other is to get cooked.

-- Grist for the Mill, by Ram Dass

At the end of September, Rinpoche went off to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where the first seminary was being held at the Snow Lion Inn. There were less than one hundred students accepted for the seminary, because Rinpoche wanted to be sure that he had a small group to whom he could impart these teachings very intimately the first time. There were many qualified people, but he took less than half of those who applied. It was important to him to have the right group and the right chemistry among the students and with him. Everybody lived in the lodge, and there was a schedule for everybody to help with cooking, cleaning, and other chores. The program was divided into three sections: Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. Each section was further subdivided into a practice period and a period of study, during which the students attended discussion groups and took courses from student-instructors during the day and attended Rinpoche's talks in the late afternoon or evening.

The seminary began with a week of sitting meditation. Everyone was expected to sit from seven A.M. until eight or nine o'clock at night, with breaks for meals and chores. Rinpoche gave one orientation talk, and then left for the week while people meditated. He went right back out on the road and gave talks in Boston while people were practicing at the seminary. He wanted them to really clear the decks, so to speak, by sitting for a week before study commenced.

When the seminary started, I was left back in Boulder with Osel, Taggie, and Gesar. Felicity had gone to live with her grandmother by this time. I was going for the Vajrayana portion of the program at the end of November, but I just couldn't take the children there for the whole three months. I celebrated my twentieth birthday on October 8, and I felt so lonely. This was the first time Rinpoche had been away for my birthday since we were married. He had celebrated my birthday each year with a special dinner, a gift, or a small party, which was really important to me, especially after the way my mother often ignored these events during my childhood. Some friends organized a small party, but I was still missing him. I went to my birthday party telling myself that I would have a good time. After everyone arrived, the host said that Rinpoche had sent a present for me and that it was in the closet. With much urging, I opened the closet door, and out he came. He had come back for my birthday.

He stayed a night or two and then went back to the seminary. I joined him there with the two youngest boys about a month later, just before he began presenting the Vajrayana teachings. This was such a significant event for Rinpoche. There were many reasons why he might not have gone ahead with this. For one thing, although there was a great deal of interest in Eastern religion at this time, there was also tremendous naivete and spiritual materialism in the United States. Many people saw Tibetan Buddhism as a set of magical and esoteric teachings and as a way to gain instant -- or at least quick -- enlightenment. There was much misunderstanding about what genuine spirituality is in the Buddhist tradition. Teachers like Suzuki Roshi had laid the ground for a true understanding of Mahayana Buddhism and had begun to teach the importance of practicing the teachings through meditation and applying them through the discipline of everyday life. However, there were still huge areas of misunderstanding.

Rinpoche had been working extremely hard to plow what he saw as fertile but confused ground, planting the genuine seeds of dharma in the American soil. During the three years that he had been in the country -- and it had only been three years -- his students had transformed themselves in many ways. He always attracted an incredibly intelligent bunch, and he nurtured that intelligence and encouraged a degree of cynicism and doubt to cut through the fascination with spirituality as a gadget or a toy. However, he also had to work with the ingrained individualism of the culture, which was both a strength and an obstacle to understanding the nature of a real devotional relationship between teacher and student. There has to be a degree of giving in or surrendering one's hard edge of egotism; otherwise, the Vajrayana teachings in particular can be perverted into egomania or misconstrued as purely an intellectual, or mind, game.

When people see photographs or videos from the very early days, what they are shocked· by is how disheveled, underdressed, and hairy everybody was. In fact, that was a relatively small obstacle. The real question was whether Rinpoche could actually penetrate past the shell, the veneer, that people were presenting. Could he get to the heart of the matter with them? It was still an open question for him after all this time.

He gave twenty talks in the first part of the seminary, in which he presented the Hinayana and the Mahayana aspects of the Buddhist path. People weren't sitting as much as he would have liked; they were partying a bit too much, but generally he was pleased with people's attitude and openness. He felt that people were ready and receptive for him to launch into the presentation of Vajrayana. This was a detailed but also very deep presentation of the path of tantra. He was pouring information into people, but much more than that, he was pouring his heart and the heart of his tradition into the minds and hearts of the students. Once he started, he was so inspired that his talks grew longer and longer. He himself was studying the teachings of Jamgon Kongtrul the Great, his root teacher's predecessor, as the basis for his presentation, and he was so animated and excited to be able to share this material with people.

About halfway through the Vajrayana section of the seminary, just as he was reaching a crescendo in the presentation of the material, as he began to describe the parts of the path that were central to the practices that his students would soon begin to practice -- just at that point, there was a disastrous incident. One afternoon, Rinpoche was so inspired that he talked for several hours without giving us any kind of a break. He seemed ready to continue lecturing on into the night. People began to get restless and fidgety. Usually the talks took place before dinner, and people were getting hungry. Their appetite for Rinpoche and the teachings, which had seemed insatiable for so long, was now overridden by their appetite for dinner. People were, I think, a bit overwhelmed by what Rinpoche was presenting, so their restlessness in part reflected their inability to take it all in. He went beyond anyone's idea of what was acceptable, conventional, in terms of how long he talked. Finally, someone suggested taking a break and continuing the next day. Then one of Rinpoche's closest students, who was a member of the board and someone we were very close to, suggested to Rinpoche that they vote on whether to continue or to stop for the night.

He could not have made a worse suggestion. The idea that the timing of the inaugural presentation in America of the essence of Rinpoche's lineage was going to be decided by a vote, by democratic process, was antithetical to the understanding of devotion that Rinpoche had been trying to foster in his students. It suggested to him that perhaps they hadn't heard a word he had said. When the students applied and were accepted to the seminary, it was like becoming engaged, in a spiritual sense. It wasn't a casual invitation. Presenting the Vajrayana teachings was, for Rinpoche, like getting married to these students. They were mutually about to embark on a relationship that would last throughout the rest of their lives and hopefully one that would be transformative for everyone involved. Essentially, he and the students were at the altar, in the middle of a wedding ceremony. When they decided to take a vote, he was about to present the ring, kiss the bride, and say, "I do." They were asking him to stop the ceremony in midstream.

He asked them to repeat what had been said. Someone else said, "Let's vote." He threw down the microphone and walked out of the hall. As he strode out, someone said, "Rinpoche, come back. He doesn't speak for all of us." It was too late. The air was black. He was never coming back. People sensed that immediately.

Rinpoche had been waiting ever since he came to the West to make this presentation. America had been waiting centuries for these teachings. But the students couldn't wait to have their dinner. It was over.

It seemed that way for several days. I have never seen him angrier. People were devastated. A huge black space hung over the seminary. Slowly, there was an outpouring of people's love and dedication to what was happening there. The students supplicated Rinpoche to continue. In the end, he saw, I guess, that there was ground to go forward, without compromise. Four days later he started to teach again, and this time, people were ready to hear what he was presenting, with no strings attached, no boundaries. He went forward and completed the presentation, and it was beyond magnificent. These were really unspeakably brilliant teachings.

What was so interesting was that when he got over his anger, he was completely over it. There was no hangover. Of course, people never forgot that lesson, and news of what had happened spread throughout the sangha. In a way, it completely changed the tenor of the space in which he taught from then· on. It wasn't a game. It wasn't a party. This was real.

During the last days of the seminary, we received the sad news that Alan Watts had died suddenly of a heart attack in California. The next day Rinpoche and I were alone, sitting together in our room. We both turned to each other at the same time and said, "Alan Watts." We felt him go through the room at the same instant. I'm sure his consciousness passed through.

At the end of the seminary, just a day or so before we were preparing to return to Boulder, Rinpoche said to me, "You know, I might die soon." I said to him, "What do you mean?" He responded, "Well, now that I've finished the seminary, I've taught everything I have to teach. There's nothing left for me to present. So I might die soon." He'd been in the United States for just three years. Now, he was saying that he'd done all he could. I told him, "That can't possibly be true. There must be something more." He paused for a minute, and then he said, "Yes, well, I have been having dreams about being a general. I had one last night. I was a general and I was leading the troops in battle. That was fantastic." Then he said, "I'd love to be a general." Finally, he said, "I guess if I could become a king and rule a nation, then I would have something to live for!"

This was one of those times when I realized that I did not know at all what to expect from Rinpoche. Ultimately, I don't think anybody did. You could never apply the same logic to Rinpoche that you could to other human beings. When you're very close to somebody, you presume that when a situation comes up, you can predict how this person is going to react. With Rinpoche, you never really knew, because he was operating in such a vast space compared to ordinary people. I wondered what to expect from him in the future. Clearly, it would be something out of the ordinary.

Part 1 of 3

NINE

Early in 1974, we moved into a two-story raised-ranch-style home in Boulder Heights, an area in the foothills north of Boulder. It was on the outskirts of town, much closer to Karma Dzong. There was a stable on the property where we kept a pony for Osel to ride, and the house had a comfortable feeling. Although some people thought it was too casual for Rinpoche, I felt it was a good family home, which accommodated more warmth and relaxation in our lives. It had a sunken living room and a big stone fireplace that I liked.

Even though Felicity had gone back to her grandmother, I still had my hands full with the three boys. During this era, Marty Franco sent Mexican maids to live with us and help out on the domestic front. Rinpoche was upset that we had live-in hired help, which he didn't approve of, but I was relieved, frankly, to have assistance with the children and the house. Rinpoche tried to get one of his students to marry the first maid so she could stay in the United States, but it never worked out. As an infant, Gesar started speaking Spanish because the second maid, Ensanada, spoke to him in Spanish all the time. At times, I had to speak to him in my broken Spanish so that he would understand me.

Rinpoche did a lot of traveling at the beginning of that year. In part due to the huge success of Cutting Through, he now drew audiences of more than a thousand people almost anywhere he gave a public talk. In January he taught at Tail; in San Antonio and Houston, Texas; and in Boulder. In February, he lectured in Chicago, New York, and Boston, flew back to teach in Boulder, and went on to San Francisco. So I was left on my own with the kids more and more.

I weaned Gesar when he was about eight months old, and soon after that I got my first period since he'd been born. I bled so heavily that I was almost hemorrhaging. We still had very little money in those days, and on this occasion our bank account was overdrawn. I had no money to buy groceries, there was nothing to eat in the house, and I needed to see a doctor about my bleeding. Rinpoche was on the road teaching. I phoned him to tell him all these developments, and he said that he was going to wire money to Western Union. I was losing a lot of blood, but I decided that I was going to pick up the cash on my way to the hospital. While I was standing in line at Western Union, I was bleeding on the floor. After I finally got the money, I drove myself straight to the hospital where I was admitted to have a D & C (dilation and curettage, a procedure that involves scraping the uterus). Those were challenging times.

My sister had settled in Boulder, and she lived with us in the house at Boulder Heights for a while. That spring, my mother decided to make a visit to Boulder to see both of her daughters. I hadn't seen her in four years. She timed her trip so that Rinpoche was out of town, and she stayed with me at the house. At that time, Osel was in boarding school in Ojai, California. We thought that an intense residential situation might help overcome his difficulties learning to read and write in English.

This was the first time that my mother met her grandchildren. I found her incredibly judgmental, going out of her way to tell me all the things I was doing wrong. She criticized everything about the way I fed and dressed my children. When I cooked baby food for Gesar, for example, she criticized me if I fed him the same meal twice. One day I left her at the house to do errands in town. When I came. back, she had rearranged the furniture.

Most of my life, I had felt intimidated by my mother, so I had never confronted her directly, although obviously I hadn't gone along with her ideas about how I should live my life. This visit was a pivotal one, because I finally stood up to her. After she'd been at the house for several days, we decided to put the boys in the car and go for a drive. The two boys were in the backseat, and Mother and I were in the front. She asked me, "Are you planning to have any more children?" She had obviously been waiting to ask this question. I replied, "Yes, we're thinking about it." She became completely unraveled, and she started ranting, "You know, that man wants to keep you barefoot and pregnant. That's all he wants." Then she got more and more hysterical. Taggie leaned over and touched her from the backseat, as though he were trying to comfort her. She slapped his hand away and screamed at him, "Don't touch me. You're black."

I didn't say anything. I turned the car around, and I drove back up to the house. I asked her to get out in the garage. I backed out, closed the garage door, drove back down to Boulder, and went to a friend's house. I phoned my mother from there and told her, "I'm not coming back to my house until you've left. You can find a way to get yourself to the airport and back to England. I don't care what you do, but I want you out of my house." I think that this completely shocked her, because I'd never said anything like that to her before. I thought that I might never see my mother again.

That spring, the graduates of the first Vajradhatu Seminary were beginning their ngondro, the preliminary meditation practices that prepare you for more advanced Vajrayana practice. Rinpoche did these practices in Tibet at the age of nine. As I described earlier, they include a hundred thousand full prostrations that are made while visualizing the Buddhist lineage in front of you and reciting the refuge vow. Then one completes the recitation of a hundred thousand mantras connected with purifying one's neurotic upheavals, followed by a hundred thousand offerings of a mandala that one represents symbolically by arranging heaps of rice. These offerings signify the surrender of ego, offering up one's neurosis as a gift to the Buddhist lineage. Finally, the student completes a million recitations of a short chant calling on the teachers of the lineage, which is connected with further surrender and the development of authentic devotion. This is not hero worship but invoking the indestructible qualities of sanity over and over, as represented in the teacher.

In Rinpoche's relationship with his students, if the seminary had been like the wedding, then ngondro was like the first year of marriage. Before beginning their prostrations, the students received a formal mind transmission from Rinpoche, which communicates the very heart of Vajrayana, stripped bare. In this transmission, the mind of the teacher meets the mind of the student, and it might be described as. the spiritual equivalent of a honeymoon. In contrast, practicing the Vajrayana preliminaries is quite difficult and demanding, nothing like you might have expected when you said, "I do." About fifty students in Boulder had completed the seminary and were now tantra students, or tantrikas. The tantra group met with Rinpoche almost every month, sometimes several times a month. Many of these gatherings took place at our house. We talked about the teachings we had received, how these were affecting people's experience, and the practice we were doing. Many people experienced intense ups and downs and a great deal of emotionality when they started prostrations -- as well as excitement and a feeling of being energized. Rinpoche felt committed to being there for people and seeing that they didn't go off the rails, so to speak.

Rinpoche understood that this was a critical time in the introduction of Vajrayana Buddhism in America. Altogether, he saw this as a dramatic era in Western history, when the pith of Buddhism was being introduced to Westerners for the first time ever. Since Western society is quite distinct from the world he grew up in, he also was constantly evaluating how best to present Vajrayana to us. Nevertheless, he felt that people had the desire and the capacity to absorb the teachings, and ultimately the fact that we were Westerners was not a barrier. Although Rinpoche had to overcome the obstacles I described earlier before presenting Vajrayana at the seminary, he trusted his students roo percent. Why should Tibetans be able to practice and to understand better than Western students? To some extent, Rinpoche felt that corruption had occurred in certain quarters in Tibet, which had weakened the way the dharma was practiced and taught there. So he welcomed America as new ground to be able to teach the essence of dharma without preconceptions. "Buddhadharma without credentials" was a phrase he often used in this era.

Although I received Vajrayana transmission after the seminary, I wasn't trying to do my ngondro practice. When I would ask Rinpoche about going on practice retreats, he never encouraged me. I felt that my practice at this time was being with him and with the children. I also saw horseback riding as a contemplative practice for me because it demanded mindfulness and tremendous discipline. For the first time since marrying Rinpoche, I had resumed riding regularly a few months after Gesar was born. For me, it was a bright spot in my demanding life.

During this period, Rinpoche was quite consumed with preparations for the inaugural summer of the Naropa Institute. Rinpoche's vision for Naropa, which he had been refining for a number of years, was to create a university that would revitalize the connection to spiritual and intellectual traditions, whether of the East or the West. He felt that a contemplative approach to education, combining rigorous intellectual studies with the direct investigation of mind through meditation and other disciplines, would be a great addition to higher education in America. He had experienced the best of Western education in his opinion, at Oxford, and while he had tremendous appreciation for the approach there, he felt that it lacked a connection to direct experience. He wanted to create a learning environment that would encourage both students and faculty to join together intellect and intuition.

As the months progressed, there were constant phone calls and innumerable planning meetings. Before the summer got underway, Rinpoche and I decided that we should take the children on another family holiday. Since Osel was away at school, it was just going to be the four of us.

During this era, Marvin and John no longer lived with us. They were both involved in preparations for opening the institute, and they were working on editing a sequel to Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism which was to be called the Myth of Freedom. Two other people had largely replaced the role that John and Marvin had played earlier. One was David Rome, who played a pivotal role in my husband's work for many years. The other was Landon Mallery, who was also a dedicated student. They drove Rinpoche to and from the office, helped schedule his appointments, and assisted him in many other ways. They didn't live with us, but they were around the house almost every day. Landy's parents owned a house in Eleuthera in the Bahamas, and he offered us the use of the house for our holiday, which sounded great.

Unfortunately, when we got there, we didn't enjoy ourselves at all. We were bitten by sand fleas on the beach, and it was alternately rainy and cold or hot and humid. No one wanted to go swimming in the ocean or he on the beach, and there was really nothing else to do. The kids were bored and not having a good time, which made it more difficult for everyone. On top of that, Rinpoche was constantly getting calls from people in Boulder, phoning about this or that issue related to Naropa starting up. It was hardly a vacation.

We finally decided to leave the Bahamas early, and the two of us would go somewhere else to have time by ourselves. I don't know how long it had been since we had spent time alone like that. Rinpoche suggested we go to the south of France. We arranged for someone to fly down and pick up the kids, and we went to Nice. Nobody could reach us there, so we actually had uninterrupted time to ourselves, which was delightful. We spent about ten days staying in a tiny bed and breakfast. Rinpoche loved the brioche and the croissants and the care au lait they served us for breakfast.

While we were there, I wanted to gamble, so we went to a casino. i played roulette while Rinpoche sat by himself at the bar, grumbling about what a waste of time and money this was. Finally, I took a break and joined him at the bar, which was on the second floor looking down on the gaming tables. Rinpoche was in a foul mood, feeling moralistic about how degraded it was to gamble. Then, he noticed some Japanese businessmen in silk suits approach a roulette table and start playing. He was intrigued by them, and his attitude changed completely. He said, "Okay! Let's gamble." So we went downstairs and sat at the roulette table together. He put one hundred dollars on red and one hundred dollars on black. Rinpoche kept playing red and black, red and black. The groupier was rolling his eyes. Eventually zero came up, and Rinpoche lost his two hundred dollars, much to his shock. He was beside himself, "I want my money back. I'm going to stay and gamble till it comes back!" I said, "No you're not. We're going home." That was the end of our gambling experience in Nice.

We enjoyed wandering through the Moroccan district in Nice, shopping and looking for places to eat. Rinpoche had a theory that the smallest restaurants would definitely have the best food. He found a tiny restaurant that had a beaded curtain across the front entrance. You went down a long corridor into the restaurant. There was no menu. You sat down, and they put food in front of you. They served us each a plate of ravioli. I bit into mine and found it rather disgusting. I asked the waiter to come over, and I asked, "What is this?" He said, "Madame, c' est ravioli sang de cheval," which means ravioli filled with horse's blood. I didn't finish my food, but of course Rinpoche finished his and ate mine, too. There was a mirror on the wall of the restaurant that Rinpoche liked, and he convinced them to sell it to him. We bought a few other things at antique shops while we were there. I still have a gold clock that we bought on the trip to Nice, which I keep on my mantel.

In the last weeks before Naropa started, Rinpoche was extremely busy getting ready for the institute's inaugural summer session. When everything finally came together, it was an unbelievable success. We had been hoping that maybe four or five hundred students would enroll for the summer. The opening ceremonies were held in a large auditorium in Boulder on June 10, 1974, and as the president of the Naropa Institute, Rinpoche made welcoming remarks to an audience of more than twenty-five hundred-which included the faculty, interested members of the public, and many of the two thousand students who attended the institute that summer.

Originally, Rinpoche thought about naming this new university Nalanda, which was the name of a renowned university in India. It was the greatest ancient center of Buddhist learning. Founded in the fifth century by the Gupta emperors, it remained an important institution until it was destroyed in the twelfth century by Muslim invaders. Some of Rinpoche's students thought that this name was too bold or perhaps too arrogant for a little institute in Boulder, Colorado, so Rinpoche decided. on the name Naropa Institute. Naropa was a great Buddhist scholar who taught at Nalanda in the eleventh century. He left the university to find his teacher when he realized that he understood the words of the teachings but not the real sense or meaning behind them. He is one of the forefathers in Rinpoche's lineage, so this was a particularly appropriate name.

Rinpoche wanted Naropa to be known as the premier place for Buddhist studies in North America, but he also wanted to encourage other religious and spiritual traditions to find a home there. Thus, a few years later, he inaugurated a Christian-Buddhist contemplative conference that has sponsored an interfaith dialogue for many years now. Rinpoche also envisioned the visual arts, music, theater, writing, and poetry being part of the curriculum at Naropa. It was a home for many avant-garde artists in the seventies and has become quite well known for the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which was founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman.

That first summer the faculty included a diverse and rather stellar lineup. Ram Dass drew about eight hundred devotees to the first session, many of whom had never met him but had read Be Here Now. He taught an evening course, which alternated with Rinpoche's evening lectures. The eminent anthropologist Gregory Bateson came and taught for one session. Jack Kornfield, who was not well known at that time, came for half the summer. He and other founding members of the Insight Meditation movement, including Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, were also there. Allen Ginsberg was teaching poetry, as were Anne Waldman and many other American poets. The composer John Cage came for a weekend. You could study thangka painting or Japanese tea ceremony. Rinpoche taught two evening courses the first session, and one the second. One of his plays, Prajna, was performed at Naropa by members of Mudra Theater during the summer. There was a great deal of theater, art, and music going on. Naropa was very much the happening thing.

Some nights I would go to Rinpoche's talk and if it went on too late, I'd send Taggie up to the stage in his pajamas to get a good-night kiss from his daddy before taking him home and putting him to bed. There were dinners and cocktail parties that we hosted and attended. I wasn't able to attend as many events as I would have liked since I was busy with the children. Rinpoche had meetings at all hours throughout the summer. He was thrilled to see the situation take shape and to have the opportunity to work with all of these people.

A group of Rinpoche's students had been working tirelessly, and largely without pay, for the past year to organize and prepare for the opening of the institute. Marty Janowitz, who is still a member of the Naropa board, was appointed the first director of Naropa and played a key role that summer. Rinpoche's students constituted the core of the administration. John Baker was very involved. He introduced Rinpoche at the opening of the institute, along with Jeremy Hayward, an English physicist who worked closely with Naropa in the early years and later joined the board of directors of Vajradhatu. The mayor of Boulder was also onstage for the opening of the institute. Rinpoche's students were there at Naropa in force as managers, conference organizers, teachers, and jacks-of-all-trades. Without the intense involvement of many of Rinpoche's senior students, Naropa could never have come into being. At the same time, this was a training ground for them, and they emerged from the experience with confidence and skills to apply in many other areas of their lives.

As the summer progressed, Rinpoche began to focus on the next big event. He had invited the head of his lineage, His Holiness the Karmapa, to come to America in the fall to visit Rinpoche, to see his students, and to make his first teaching tour in America. His Holiness was due to arrive in September. They had not seen each other since 1968, when Rinpoche briefly visited His Holiness's monastery in Sikkim. Rinpoche was nervous about the visit because he knew that His Holiness had heard stories about what Rinpoche was up to, and the version he had been told had been heavy on the outrageous, wild side and light on the "working for the dharma" side. Rinpoche did not know whether His Holiness would fully appreciate what he was trying to do in America.

Lecturing to more than a thousand scantily garbed hippies at Naropa that summer gave him pause as to how to present his students to His Holiness. Rinpoche might be able to see past the long beards, cutoff jeans, and tank tops, but this was not the image he wanted to present to his lineage. He wanted His Holiness to be able to appreciate the mind and heart connection he had made with all these Westerners. He feared that His Holiness would think that Rinpoche was consorting with barbarians, somewhat like having moved into the zoo with a bunch of jungle animals. Sometimes, if you looked around the room when Rinpoche was lecturing that first summer at Naropa, especially with the influx of Ramdassians at the beginning, you would see a menagerie of topless men with matted hair and long beards and long-haired girls sporting white robes or showing lots of cleavage. What to do?

In addition to concerns about their appearance, Rinpoche was faced with the challenge of introducing decorum to his students, in terms of how they would behave around the Karmapa. When Rinpoche first came to America, he was careful not to create a barrier between himself and others. He wanted to experience fully the world he was entering and meet people at eye level. He gave up his robes because he did not want to create an exotic impression where people would indulge their fantasies about him. He wanted them to see him not as a mystery man from Tibet but as a human being.

Rinpoche had grown up with attendants who treated him as a spiritual prince, but when he came to the West, he let all of that go. He didn't demand or expect special treatment. For one thing, there was no cultural reference point for the Western students to provide service to him. However, what he accepted for himself was not what he wanted to present to His Holiness. In preparation for His Holiness's visit, Rinpoche made it clear to his students how he himself wanted to receive the Karmapa and how he expected them to treat His Holiness as well. He described this later as follows:

In 1974, His Holiness the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa, the head of the Karma Kagyu lineage of Buddhism to which I belong, was to arrive for his first visit to North America. A group of us had a meeting, and we talked about protocol and other arrangements. Quite a number of people said, "Couldn't we just take His Holiness to a disco and feed him a steak? Do we really have to vacuum the floor? Maybe he should sleep on a waterbed. Couldn't he just come along and see what America is like?" In the end, that wasn't the approach we decided to take! ... That approach is bloated with arrogance.1

The previous year, Karma Dzong had moved into a much larger shrine room in the back of the building at 1111 Pearl Street in Boulder. The new meditation hall was a large room with a balcony above the main floor and could hold up to three hundred people. For His Holiness's visit, the room was completely redone. At Rinpoche's direction, walls were painted, floors were sanded, windows scrubbed spotless. Around the edges of the room, Rinpoche had the students paint the mantra from the Heart Sutra (one of the essential teachings of the Buddha) in gold letters. Rinpoche insisted that they build traditional Tibetan thrones, covered in brocade, for His Holiness to use when he presented teachings or held audiences, whether in the main shrine hall or at his residence. At the house rented for His Holiness in Boulder, Rinpoche had the walls draped in satin and brocade. For weeks before His Holiness arrived, he stayed up all night. He actually didn't sleep for days at a time because he wouldn't stop working on the preparations. Everyone was going full-out, turning themselves into seamstresses, carpenters, secretaries, housekeepers, cooks, administrators-he pushed people as far as they could possibly go. He asked Tom Rich and Ken Green (aka Narayana and Krishna) to take charge of the visit preparations along with Karl Springer, another student from the early days at Tail, and they worked around the clock as he did, both in Boulder and also traveling as the advance parties to both the East and the West coasts, wherever His Holiness would be traveling. Rinpoche asked all of his male students to wear a suit jacket and a tie during the visit, and women wore conservative skirts and blouses or suits.

Rinpoche also emphasized the style in which His Holiness should be served, explaining that the Karmapa was truly a spiritual monarch and that by treating him as such, the students would be able to appreciate the depth of the wisdom he embodied. People learned how to serve in both the Western and the Tibetan style. It was a crash course in table manners and etiquette for all of us. For some, it was reminding us of what we knew from our upbringing. For others, it was a completely new experience.

Rinpoche asked another group of his students to accompany His Holiness wherever he traveled, providing security and logistical support for the visit. The Karmapa arrived first in New York. He was given diplomatic status by the State Department in the United States. Therefore, he received police escorts in major cities and was accorded official recognition in other ways. Rinpoche's students organized a motorcade in every major city His Holiness visited, which included advance cars, a limousine for His Holiness, and vans following behind for the other members of his party, including the translator and the monks. The students who trained to be the drivers for His Holiness and his party also worked with local law enforcement wherever he went. They provided security for the high-profile parts of the visit.

At the household, a group of senior male students was trained to be personal attendants to His Holiness, in somewhat traditional Tibetan style. Because His Holiness was very strict about his monastic vows, he would not allow women attendants in his personal quarters.

Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, the 16th Karmapa, seated, with Freda Bedi at Rumtek Monastery, Sikkim, 1971

However, women were involved in many other aspects of the tour and the household.

While His Holiness was in Boulder, Rinpoche invited him to have tea at our home in Pine Brook Hills. While he was at the house, I noticed that the Karmapa wouldn't make eye contact with me. I felt badly about this, and later I asked Rinpoche why His Holiness wouldn't look at me. Rinpoche said, "He's very uncomfortable around you." And I said, "Why on earth would that be?" He said, "Because if you had the power to seduce me, you must be a very dangerous woman." After the first time he came to the house, Rinpoche talked with him about our marriage, and explained that I was not a seductress. Then, His Holiness seemed more comfortable around me, and in fact we had a very close, wonderful relationship. But that first encounter was very disconcerting.

If Nehru provided the political clout for her school, the spiritual blessing was to come from the Sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, Freda's guru. She duly invited him to Delhi to perform the necessary rituals, and took advantage of his presence by requesting him to grant her Refuge, the formal ceremony marking one's official entrance onto the Buddhist path.....

To Freda this was a hugely sacred and profound milestone in her spiritual journey. "When you take Refuge, you go on with your life, but in the cave of your heart you feel you have found the oasis, the place where you can take refuge in the sea of suffering, and where you can develop the enlightened mind."....

THE HEART CAVE
-- Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

"We need a living guru, and we train to see the Buddha in him. That gives us the water to make the seed of enlightenment grow."....

Single-handedly Freda had already set the scene for Buddhism to make the historic leap from East to West when she had the foresight to establish the Young Lamas Home School. In 1972, the year of her full ordination as a bikshuni nun, she took another momentous step in that direction by personally agreeing to take the Buddha's message to South Africa, the first of several overseas "missions" she undertook. Her journey there was significant not least because it revealed the full extent of the spiritual authority invested in her by the Karmapa, as well as the scope of the knowledge and personal realizations that she had attained in her relatively new religious path.

The invitation had come from Rosemary Vosse, a theosophist descended from Italian nobility, who had met Freda in India. She had literally begged Freda, now known as Sister Palmo, to come to South Africa, which was being brutally ripped apart by the bloody internal war of apartheid, as blacks fought for equal rights and the end to racial segregation.....

She addressed audiences, large and small, who had come as a result of publicity generated by her Tibetan Friendship Group. She was warmly welcomed, and the press was polite. She spoke from university podiums and temple high seats, telling people about her experience of Gandhi and her own time as the first Englishwoman to offer Satyagraha. And then, when the audience was warmed up, she moved on to even more unconventional themes -- reincarnation and the Tibetan tulku system -- showing them slides of the young rinpoches she had taught and of her own teacher, the Sixteenth karmapa.

"I tried to convey to them something of the wonder of the Tibetan masters, the Dalai Lama, and in particular my own guru," she said. The university students were especially rapt, she reported....

More impressively, Freda also revealed that she conferred initiations. This was nothing short of extraordinary. Only the most qualified lamas gave initiations, ceremonies that bestowed on the recipient the power, knowledge, and blessings of the particular buddha invoked. It was exceptional for a newcomer to Buddhism to be conducting this rite, and it was unheard of for a Western woman to do so. This was proof that the Karmapa held her in high spiritual regard.

"On Easter Sunday I was able to give the Forest Dolma (Tara) initiation, which His Holiness Karmapa had allowed me to confer. It was in a perfect setting, in a forest glade with pine needles all around, and the shrine at the foot of a tress," enthused the nature-loving Freda. She continued to give the Tara initiation throughout her tour. And then she ventured into the highly esoteric and advanced reaches of Tibetan Buddhism -- the Vajrayana or Diamond Path -- by conferring the initiation of the buddha of purification, Vajrasattva.

"I explained how to meditate on Vajrasattva, and say his hundred-syllable mantra," she explained. "It was a most interesting experience to be giving these teachings, and I do think that if the group carries on with the practice, there will be a quick and wonderful development, because the Vajrayana path is more rapid than the Mahayana path. But all the time I am weaving in the Mahayana. The Vajrayana is the meditation side, the Mahayana, the philosophy," she went on, indicating the highly arcane and intricate system of Tibetan Buddhism that Thomas Merton, the Jesuit, described as the most complex religion on earth. "It is complex and detailed because it is profound," said Freda.

Following her plan to sow permanent seeds of Buddhism in South Africa, Freda established small centers, often in people's homes, where people could gather to meditate, say prayers together, and study the Buddha's teachings. She fervently hoped the centers would grow....

When she flew out of South Africa, Freda left behind the Karma Rigdol centers she had established in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Port Elizabeth, all under the auspices of H.H. Karmapa, and a small but enthusiastic group of people committed to following the Buddhist path. Many, like Sheila Fugard, had taken Refuge with Freda, and had been given Tibetan names. Others, like Andre de Wet, became ordained taking a monk's name -- in his case, Karma Samten....

She accompanied the Karmapa on his first visit to the West in 1974, a five-month tour across North American and Europe. She was a Tibetan–English translator.


HH 16th Karmapa and Sister Palmo [and Diana Mukpo], Shambhala archives

-- Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Illustrating her point about the readiness of America to accept Buddhism, she gave a White Tara initiation (the female Buddha of Compassion in Action) in New York, which was simultaneously broadcast on local radio. It was an unprecedented break with tradition and a real entry of Buddhism into modern Western life.

Through the airwaves Freda's voice rang out: "Visualize enlightenment in the form of the Holy Mother, in order to receive all the blessings," she said. "The mind is a tremendous thing. If we can remove the veils, the obscurations, we can see the mirror-like quality of its pure state," she continued. "The Divine Mother helps us calm our minds and brings us the blessing of transcendental knowledge. She also increases life and gives us more energy."

She went on to explain further the esoteric meaning behind Tara: "Tara comes in twenty-one basic forms, whose primary functions are to remove all fears. There is a multiplicity of forms, but in fact there is just one. All is Buddha, all is Divine Mother. It's like fragmentation of light into prismatic colors."

IF I'M NOT ATTACHED TO THIS PARTICULAR
TIME-SPACE LOCUS THEN I CAN FREE MY
AWARENESS FROM MY BODY AND I CAN BECOME
ONE WITH IT ALL
I CAN MERGE WITH
THE DIVINE MOTHER

-- Be Here Now, by "Ram Dass," aka The Lama Foundation

-- The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi, by Vicki Mackenzie

Rinpoche also asked me to take a drive around Boulder with His Holiness and show him various local landmarks. Rinpoche instructed me that whenever His Holiness admired a building or noted that it was impressive or anything like that, I was to tell the Karmapa that the building belonged to us. I thought this was ridiculous, but Rinpoche insisted. I suppose it was some sort of macho Tibetan thing. His Holiness and I drove all over town, with me telling him that every large building in town, including the Harvest House Hotel and the entire University of Colorado, belonged to Rinpoche and his students. I'm sure His Holiness checked later and learned that we had considerably fewer real estate holdings than I had suggested.

Chogyam Trungpa: We need someone to help light the candles immediately.





-- Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche -- Screencap Gallery, produced and directed by Johanna Demetrakas

While he was in Boulder, the Karmapa especially wanted to spend time with Taggie, who was the reincarnation of one of His Holiness's own teachers in Tibet. He brought a number of gifts for Taggie, precious items that had belonged to the former Tenga Rinpoche. It was now obvious to everyone who spent time around Taggie that he was not developing normally. His Holiness felt that this was because Taggie needed to be raised in a monastic situation. He suggested that we send Taggie to Sikkim as soon as possible to study and receive training from His Holiness and to have a formal enthronement ceremony there. We took this under advisement, but Rinpoche still did not want to give in to this traditional approach. He felt that we should work with Taggie at home and also begin to investigate what Western doctors would say about his condition.

Traditionally, the veneration or respect that one shows a teacher is considered part of making an offering in order to receive the teachings. In medieval Tibetan times, students would travel to India to study with the great Buddhist teachers there. It was a long and truly perilous journey, not unlike the one my husband made when he escaped from Tibet in 1959. Practitioners traveling to India would amass a quantity of gold, which they used to cover their expenses, with the remainder being offered to the teachers they studied with. On the one hand, this was simply tuition. On another level, the point of the teaching gift was to give or surrender something in appreciation of the value of the teaching. It wasn't that the teachers wanted to get rich.

There is a well-known story about one figure in my husband's lineage, Marpa, who gathered together a great deal of gold dust to finance his three trips to India. Marpa later became Milarepa's root guru, or main teacher. When Marpa made his second trip to India, he returned there to study with Naropa, the great Indian teacher who was one of his main gurus, his root guru in fact. Marpa offered Naropa a portion of his gold but held some back for the trip home. Naropa demanded that Marpa give him all the gold. Marpa hesitated but Naropa insisted, saying, "Do you think you can buy my teaching with your deception?" When Marpa finally gave in, Naropa threw the gold dust into the air, scattering it everywhere, crying, "Gold, gold. What is gold to me? All the world is gold to me."

Henry Schaeffer: So, I'll tell him about the talk. Yeah, that was something, that was something. So there was already a set date that Rinpoche was going to come [May 27, 1971]. There was already a lot of controversy at Zen Center: Rinpoche was a charlatan, Rinpoche was just a pandita (scholar), not a yogi/practitioner. So this talk had been arranged and a lot of people came. You know, his books were out, Born in Tibet, Meditation in Action, and the first Garuda ... I drove Diana and Rinpoche, and Rinpoche had been drinking pretty good. So we walked in there, and they had the traditional ... the priest's dressing room ... a room shortly after you came into the building, and we went in there before the talk. People were all gathering and they're mostly there already, because we always got there a little late. So we're in there, and Rinpoche was sitting on a regular chair, and he had these high boots, remember the high shoes with a lot of laces? So I was kneeling on the floor.

Sam Bercholz: He had that leg brace thing.

Henry Schaeffer: Leg braces, yeah. Even after the operation, he still wore the braces. So I had to take all that off, and I was kneeling, and there was a knock on the door, and I think Diana opened the door, and it was Roshi. So Rinpoche says to Roshi, "Hi, Roshi, I'm drunk." So they talked while I was doing this, and then Rinpoche said to Roshi, "Well, Roshi, you can go now." So Roshi [says], "Okay," and he walks out and he's looking concerned. So Diana walks out with him, and closes the door, and they're standing in the hallway, and then Diana comes back in and says to Rinpoche, "Roshi thinks you're angry or upset with him."

Sam Bercholz: Do you remember what the talk was he gave? You were going to say that. I think Dick Baker was there, right?

Henry Schaeffer: Yeah, everybody was there. It was totally jammed, people on the floor. I mean ... have you ever been to Zen Center? [DC - Dick Baker was in Japan]

Walter Fordham: No.

Henry Schaeffer: It's got a big dining room and they had, you know, they moved all the tables out.

Sam Bercholz: Yeah.

Henry Schaeffer: There were people sitting in the aisles. There were people sitting everywhere, all around. Roshi is up there, Katagiri [Roshi] is up there, and Rinpoche still keeps them waiting a bit. So finally, Rinpoche says, "Well, time to go out." He wasn't staggering at that point, but when he got out in the hallway ... I am holding on to him and he's going all over the place. We're walking down, and they had these like French doors right there and we start walking in and all these people are sitting in the aisles and everything, and [I'm] barely holding him and he's going all over the place, like you're in a ship at sea, a stormy sea. I finally get him up to his seat. Katagiri is there. Roshi is there. And then I sat on the floor, and Yvonne Rand was sitting in a seat. I was right next to her. The place is jam-packed and they're all looking at him [Rinpoche]. He barely gets on the seat. He used to be able to cross his legs and he could always ... you remember this? When he sat, his right leg could go totally parallel to the floor even though ... Do you remember that?

Walter Fordham: Yeah. Right.

Henry Schaeffer: So he would ... and he would miss....[his leg] and he was doing all this stuff.

Sam Bercholz: What a joker.

Henry Schaeffer: And Katagiri went to help him, but Rinpoche went like that [demonstrates] to him. Because I saw it, you know, and Katagiri sat right back down.

Sam Bercholz: Sensitive guy.

Henry Schaeffer: Huh?

Sam Bercholz: He [Katagiri] was a sensitive guy. He knew.

Henry Schaeffer: He knew.

Sam Bercholz: It was just a little ... it was the tiniest little gesture.

Henry Schaeffer: Yvonne Rand said to me, "You're his attendant, you ought to be helping him," and I said, "No way." So there he is. He finally gets the leg up there, and I guess Diana brought the drink in. Whatever it was, but it was alcohol, and they had a glass of water there for him. But she brought him a glass too.

Sam Bercholz: Those were Johnny Walker days, so it was obvious.

Henry Schaeffer: So he's there ... Was it the Open Way?

Sam Bercholz: Something like that. That's right. I remember it was a Mahayana talk.

Henry Schaeffer: Yeah, yeah. At first it's very hard even for us to understand him, but pretty soon ... Oh .... He took a long time, like he used to, before he even spoke, he just [exhales], you know. He felt the whole room, and got the sense of it, and everybody is there with all their thoughts and thinking. I think he must have lit a cigarette and that really ... The drink and the cigarette ...

Sam Bercholz: It was driving them insane. Not like they didn't all smoke or drink, but still ... driving them insane.

Henry Schaeffer: Finally though, he does begin to speak, and as he's talking it gets clearer and clearer, and pretty soon he's just totally right there, and the room changed. It was really something, and then in the question and answer period, it was amazing. So many people, a lot of people fell in ... a lot of Roshi's students.

Sam Bercholz: They were so magnetized, it was unbelievable.

Henry Schaeffer: Yeah, a lot of them immediately planned to leave and go to Boulder, so that was the other thing. It made a tremendous uproar at Zen Center. It was so powerful, and like Sam said the other day, it was like a stroke, a samurai stroke. But it was so gentle, it was so gentle.

-- Henry Schaeffer with Sam Bercholz and Walter Fordham, by cuke.com

For example, in the Shobogenzo-zuimonki Dogen Zenji tells a story, which was told to him, about an influential person, Ichijo Motoie. One day Motoie discovered that his sword was missing, and since no one else could have broken into his house, one of his own men must have stolen it. The sword was found and brought back to him, but Motoie said, “This is not my sword, so give it back to the one who owns it.” People knew that the man who had the sword was the one who had stolen it, but because Motoie didn’t accuse him of it, no one could say anything, so nothing happened. This is the calmness of mind we should have, according to Dogen.

If we have generous, big mind, and if we have a strong spirit of practice, then there is no need to worry. Dogen emphasized a sparse, simple life. Without expecting anything, we just practice our way. Many students asked how it would be possible to support the temple or group without any plan, and he said, “If it becomes difficult to support our temple, we will think about it.” So before something happens, it is not our way to think about it too much. In that way we have complete calmness of our mind. Because you have something, you worry about losing it, but if you don’t have anything, there is no need to worry.

-- Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen, by Shunryu Suzuki

The visit of the Karmapa awakened Rinpoche's students to the traditional approach to devotion, which is exemplified by this story of Marpa. The teacher doesn't want your wealth for his personal gain. Rather, one has to surrender one's comfortable world. Rinpoche's students began to understand this through Rinpoche's own example of devotion to His Holiness.

The preparations and formality surrounding the visit of the Karmapa allowed hundreds of students in different parts of the country to be an intimate part of the visit. People lined up to serve in his household. It was hardly possible to accommodate them all, so more and more positions were added. Kitchen assistants, gardeners, housekeepers, shrine keepers, tea makers, and all sorts of positions were created or multiplied so that everyone could be included. This became an important way for people to spend time with His Holiness, because the Karmapa rarely gave lectures or invited dialogue in the way that Rinpoche did.

Instead, His Holiness conducted traditional ceremonies, which are considered to convey what is called adhishthana, or a blessing, to people. Mostly, these empowerments were conducted in Tibetan, so although a summary of the ceremony and the text was given to people in English, the audience often had very little idea what was going on. It was not so much what His Holiness said but rather his way of being that struck people and communicated to them. Being in his presence was quite an overwhelming experience. He radiated loving kindness and compassion and a warmth that was almost palpable.

During this visit, His Holiness performed the Vajra Crown ceremony in locations across the country. It is said that during this event His Holiness fully manifests as the buddha of compassion, Avalokiteshvara, and that anyone who sees this ceremony will be freed from rebirth in the lower realms (the realms of hell, hungry ghosts, or animals). When the Fifth Karmapa, Teshin Shekpa, visited the-court of the emperor of China in the fifteenth century, the emperor had a vision in which he saw a black vajra crown hovering over the head of the Karmapa. The emperor became a deeply devoted disciple of the Karmapa, and he had a replica of this crown made and presented to Teshin Shekpa. From this time forward, all of the Karmapas have conducted a ceremony in which His Holiness places this crown on his head and radiates a state of compassion and enlightenment. More than three thousand people came to the Vajra Crown ceremony in San Francisco, and there was similar attendance at ceremonies held in Boulder, Boston, New York, and other North American cities.

While in Boulder, His Holiness also performed a special ceremony in the newly renovated shrine hall at Karma Dzong, officially acknowledging Rinpoche's work to plant the Buddhist teachings in America and encouraging him as a vajra master to go further, especially in presenting the Vajrayana tradition. From this time forward, Rinpoche was known by the titles Vajracharya, or "holder of the Vajrayana teachings," and later as Vidyadhara, or "holder of wisdom." The Karmapa thus made a public statement of his appreciation for Rinpoche's efforts and achievements, and he wrote a special proclamation to this effect. I think everyone in His Holiness's party was amazed by what Rinpoche had accomplished, especially in light of how little time had passed since Rinpoche had arrived in America.

His Holiness also visited the land centers, the rural retreat centers Rinpoche had established: Rocky Mountain Dharma Center in Colorado, Tail of the Tiger in Vermont, and the newly acquired Padma Jong in northern California. (This center was to focus on presenting programs combining meditation and the arts; after several years, it was sold.) Rinpoche asked His Holiness to rename Tail, and the Karmapa gave the center the name Karme Choling, the "place of the teachings of the Karma Kagyu lineage." It is still known by that name today. His Holiness also traveled to the second seminary, which was being held in Snowmass, Colorado, and performed the Vajra Crown ceremony for the participants there.

The images and sounds that make up this film were all recorded during the Seminary, primarily during days off. His Holiness the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa visited Seminary and performed the Black Crown Ceremony, during his first visit to North America. The nun at the end, touching foreheads with Rinpoche, is Sister Palmo, Freda Bedi, an Englishwoman who gave Trungpa Rinpoche English language lessons in India, and facilitated his entrance into Oxford University.





-- 1974 Seminary: Visit the 1974 Vajradhatu Seminary in Snowmass, Colorado, by Vicki Alexis Genson

His Holiness's visit reinvigorated Rinpoche and gave him a sense of further direction in his work. Reestablishing his direct connection with the head of the lineage inspired him. He was so pleased to actually be able to bring together the old and new worlds. After His Holiness left, in late November, Rinpoche gave a seminar on his own teacher, Jamgon Kongtrul of Sechen, in which he talked about his upbringing and his relationship with his teacher in a very personal manner, beyond anything he had transmitted before. It was as though the visit of the Karmapa had forged a link to the lineage in a way that allowed Rinpoche to go deeper into the wisdom of that tradition and to share that with his students. In the past, he had given seminars on early teachers of the lineage, but now he was talking more about his own, intimate, direct heritage.

The Jamgon Kongtrul seminar coincided with the first Dharmadhatu Conference, which brought representatives from every major meditation center, or dharmadhatu (which means "space of dharma") to Boulder to meet with one another and to confer with the members of the Vajradhatu board of directors and with Rinpoche himself. This was a further step in creating the institutions that Rinpoche hoped would carry the teachings forward into the future. Tables were arranged in a huge rectangle in the large meeting room at Karma Dzong so the representatives from each dharmadhatu could sit together at the table, sharing information and making their reports. Rinpoche and the board of directors were seated at the head of the room, which was equipped with flip charts, markers, and pointers. Dharmadhatu members reported to the entire group on their activities, and key Vajradhatu staff people and members of the board of Vajradhatu made presentations to the assembled group. As Rinpoche began to understand more fully the energy of America, he began to create more of these situations that could harness the power of the corporate world -- which generally is a vehicle for materialism. However, he also saw the potential to adopt this model to promote the energy of enlightenment in America. Later, he perceived its limitations and the toll the corporate approach can take on people. For now, however, this was a skillful framework to employ. It encouraged Rinpoche's students to engage a bigger world and to feel that they were part of an exciting and expansive project. It also gave them familiar reference points from within their own culture for this expansion. At this time, you might say that Vajradhatu and the scene in Boulder were manifesting like the Wall Street of Buddhism in America (a phrase that a columnist in the Village Voice used around this time to describe Vajradhatu).

During this era, Rinpoche was also beginning to hand over more responsibility to his students for teaching meditation to others. In December, at Karme Choling, he conducted the first formal training for about fifty meditation instructors, and he held another training in Boulder in April 1975. Previously, he had authorized a few individuals as instructors, but this was the first time he gave this training to a group of his students. The sitting practice of meditation was always the bedrock of practice in our community. Starting in 1973, Rinpoche had instituted month-long periods of meditation, called dathuns, which all students were encouraged to complete, and attending a dathun became a requirement for being accepted to the seminary starting in 1975.

Part 2 of 3

At the end of April 1975, Rinpoche and I went on a trip to Europe with the two older boys, Taggie and Osel, leaving Gesar in the care of friends. This was partially to be our vacation, but we were also traveling to Samye Ling to retrieve the official seals of office of the Trungpas, which were still in Akong's possession. With the recent recognition of Rinpoche's achievements by His Holiness the Karmapa, Akong could hardly justify keeping them any longer.

Rinpoche wrote ahead, informing Akong that we would be coming. Rinpoche asked Karl Springer, who had been instrumental in all of the arrangements for His Holiness the Karmapa's visit, to accompany us on this trip. Karl was becoming very adept at dealing with Tibetan politics. Later, as a member of the board of directors, he became the head of the department of external affairs, which handled all of the visits of Tibetan teachers to our community.

For the meeting with Akong, we all dressed in our best business suits, even the children. Akong was very polite; there was no outward sign of conflict. After a long preamble, in which Rinpoche talked about his work in America and his family and inquired about Akong's work and his family, he told Akong that he had come to get his seals back, as well as other treasures that belonged to him from Tibet. Rinpoche was no longer somebody that Akong could mistreat. Within a few short years in America, Rinpoche was already much more influential than Akong would ever be. Rinpoche manifested that confidence and power, yet without any bravado. He demanded what was rightfully his.

Without hesitation, Akong returned everything, and we brought the seals back with us to the United States. From this time forward, wherever Rinpoche traveled, he kept his seals with him. They traveled in a special briefcase designed to hold them, and they came in the car or on the plane with him whenever he went somewhere to teach. In Boulder, or anywhere else where he resided for a period of time, the seals were always kept with him at his residence. Rinpoche barely let them out of his sight.

After we got home, Rinpoche wrote to Akong and thanked him for the return of the seals and told him how good it had been to see him again. However, he also said in this letter that he felt that the rupture in their connection was one that would not be repaired for many lifetimes.

From Samye Ling, we went down to London. To celebrate our victory, Rinpoche wanted to stay at one of the most posh, old-fashioned hotels in London, the Ritz in Piccadilly. Our room was beautifully appointed, with exquisite pink silk linens and bedspreads. Taggie proceeded to have diarrhea all over the bedspread, which I found beyond embarrassing. Later, when we went down to the Palm Court to have tea, Taggie was completely out of control, racing down the corridors. We had dressed him in a beautiful outfit, but this little child was a whirling dervish flying around the tearoom. He was becoming more and more hyperactive, which was especially apparent in this situation.

While we were in London, Rinpoche enjoyed shopping for clothes. He wanted to get a Jaeger suit for each of us, and he also bought himself a nice suit at Harrods. In later years, when we had more income, Rinpoche would get his clothes hand-tailored on Savile Row. Rinpoche had always enjoyed shopping for ties. During this era, he liked striped ties a lot. Later he had quite a collection of Japanese brocade ties. In general, he was rather conservative in his clothing tastes. He often wore pinstriped suits, and he also built up a collection of sports jackets. He especially liked French cuffs on his shirts, and he bought a number of pairs of cufflinks while we were in London.

We had so much extra clothing that it wouldn't fit in our luggage. Instead of buying another suitcase, I simply took a garbage bag and put our dirty laundry and casual clothing in it. When we checked out, the uniformed doorman at the Ritz pushed the trolley containing our luggage out to the street, where we were going to hail a cab to the airport. The garbage bag was sitting on top of the luggage. As we approached the curb, the bag was jostled and a pair of my underwear fell out onto the street. I was mortified. The doorman, however, didn't skip a beat. He leaned over, picked up my underwear with his white-gloved hands, and put it back in the bag. That was our departure from the Ritz.

From London we flew to Nice for several days of holiday. Having had such a lovely time the year before, we both wanted to return. While we were in France, I convinced Rinpoche that we should go to Vienna so that I could visit the Spanish Riding School. Now that I was riding regularly again, I had started to develop a great interest in the discipline of dressage, a classic form of horsemanship whose pinnacle was achieved at the school.

We visited a number of places in Vienna, including Schonbrunn Palace. Rinpoche liked to spend long hours in the restaurants in Vienna, and Taggie was very difficult to manage throughout all of this.

Luckily, we were able to obtain tickets for one of the dressage performances at the Spanish Riding School, known as "the Spanish." The day of the performance, we stood outside the Winter Palace in Vienna, where the Spanish is located. We waited in line a long time to get m to see the performance. When they finally opened the doors, people started pushing and shoving all around us. We finally made our way through the crowd and into the building. To get to our seats, we had to walk up a narrow flight of wooden stairs to the balcony overlooking the arena. The hall is magnificent, with enormous crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. The arena can hold several thousand spectators. It's an extraordinary environment.

We settled ourselves in our seats, and then classical music began to play over the speakers, signaling the beginning of the performance. In rode the most majestic white horses in formation, their bridles inlaid with gold and the saddle pads trimmed in gold braid. The riders rode impeccably in their brown uniforms and become hats. It was like watching a completely synchronized ballet performed by horses and riders. Five or ten minutes into the performance, Rinpoche started sobbing. I couldn't imagine why, and I said to him, "What's the matter with you? Is something wrong?" He answered, "There's nothing wrong. It's so beautiful. It's a magnificent expression of windhorse." (Windhorse is the uplifted expression of dignity that is described in the Shambhala teachings.) Rinpoche wept throughout the performance. I also was moved by this display of horse and rider so nobly joined in the art of dressage.

The Spanish Riding School of Vienna 08
SSE Arena, Wembley London
11.11.2016

Afterward, when we discussed our experience, I told Rinpoche that the fulfillment of my dreams as a rider would be to study the classical approach to dressage with one of the teachers from the Spanish Riding School. Although I was still very new to this discipline, Rinpoche took me quite seriously. He said to me, "You know, it's too soon right now, but I would imagine that within a couple of years you're going to find a way to come here and study."

With time came changes. As Trungpa grew more and more powerful and recognizable, the crazy-wisdom guru began to dress in expensive business suits, to ride around in the back of a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, attended at all times by a personal "vajra guard" composed of young, muscular Buddhist students in blue blazers. He guzzled sake and Rainier Ale ("green death," they call it), and chain-smoked American cigarettes. His wife, Diana, who had given birth to three sons between 1969 and 1973, had lately renewed an early interest in riding, and was becoming one of Boulder's premier female equestrians. (She was later to become the first woman from America to attend the famous Spanish Riding School of Vienna.)

-- The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, With a Copious Collection of Germane Documents Assembled by the Author, by Tom Clark

When we came home, Osel went back to school, Rinpoche went back on the road to teach, and I was left alone in the house with Taggie and Gesar. They slept in a bedroom together, and they were a handful. Although Gesar was two, he still had a crib. Taggie slept in the four-poster bed that had been mine when I was a child. The two of them together could be absolutely dreadful. After I put them to bed for the night, they sometimes would get up and play and totally destroy any order in the room.

When His Holiness had been in Boulder the year before, one of his gifts to Taggie was a small but exquisite rupa, or statue of the Buddha. His Holiness told me that in the Karma Kagyii lineage there were seven very special Buddha rupas made from the body relics of important teachers, and that he was presenting one of these to Taggie. We were proud that Taggie had been given one of these statues, and we put Taggie's Buddha on a special shrine in his bedroom. One morning when I went into their bedroom to get the boys up, my eyes turned to the shrine. The Buddha had been decapitated. I called out, "Oh, my god, oh my god. What happened to the Buddha?" Taggie said, "Gesar was hungry." Gesar ate the head of the Buddha. You could see the telltale teeth marks.

Although Gesar was active and often quite naughty, he was a normal, exuberant two-year-old. Unfortunately, this was not the case with Taggie. There were now many signs of his developmental problems. Earlier that year, we had put Taggie in preschool several mornings a week. One morning after we returned from Europe, his teacher called me from school and said that Taggie had collapsed and been taken to Boulder Community Hospital. By the time I got to the hospital, he seemed fine, and he was released without any recommendations for follow-up. Later, we realized that this was the first of many epileptic seizures.

Shortly thereafter, I was awakened by a wild noise at about 5:30 in the morning. When I came downstairs, I saw that Taggie had turned the blender onto high speed. In his right hand he had a bag of rice; in his left hand, he had a container of small silver balls that are used as decorations for cookies. He was pouring the rice and the balls into the blender and watching the whole mixture fly all over the kitchen. Lots of small children might do something like this if they had the opportunity. But Taggie seemed completely unaware that I was in the room with him, and he couldn't comprehend that he had done anything naughty. The quality of Taggie's behavior was abnormally distant and detached. What speech he had developed was deteriorating, and he was becoming more and more out of touch with ordinary life.

Taggie also became more agitated and out of control at this point. After a number of incidents, I called Rinpoche -- who was out of town at the time -- completely freaking out. I felt that I needed help. Rinpoche phoned one of his students, someone who worked closely with him, to see if we could get more help taking care of Taggie. I received a phone call from this man, whom I considered a close personal friend, and he said to me, "I don't know why you can't take care of Taggie. He's your child." It was, I guess, the typical male reaction, especially in those days, from someone who doesn't have any children. He was absolutely clueless what was happening and did nothing to help.

When Taggie's condition seemed to deteriorate, Rinpoche and I decided to take Taggie to a neurologist in Boulder. We explained to the doctor that our child had been more normal earlier on but that he was now getting both more out of touch and more hyperactive. After the doctor examined him, he said that we had to consider the possibility that Taggie might have a brain tumor. We were shocked and very distressed. The doctor recommended that we do a whole battery of tests, including pneumoencephalogram, in which they put air between the brain and the skull so that they can obtain an image of the brain. This procedure is supposed to be unbelievably painful. Now they have less invasive and less painful methods, but this was what they used in that era. Taggie had the test, but he never reacted as though he had any pain at all. He was supposed to have splitting headaches afterward, but he was up bouncing around on his bed shortly after the test was done. The results did not show a problem but. a subsequent electroencephalogram, or EEG, showed that Taggie's brain waves were abnormal. This set off another round of doctors' appointments and tests.

We took Taggie to a whole slew of specialists, none of whom could tell us exactly what was wrong with him. There was some dysfunction in his cortex, the doctors said, but we were told that he didn't fit the classical diagnosis of autism, so his condition was somewhat of a mystery.

I began to think that I had done something terribly wrong in the past. I felt responsible. I thought back to every accident Taggie had as a young child. I remembered the time he fell off of his changing table as an infant. He seemed fine, but I wondered: Did something happen then? Once as a young boy he fell and hit his head in a sausage shop in Boulder. I thought to myself, "That time he fell on his head, I took him to the doctor immediately and he was completely fine afterward." It seemed to me that if an accident had caused these problems when he was little there should have been ramifications soon after the event. I remembered that Taggie had a bad reaction to a pertussis vaccination when he was quite young, including a prolonged, high fever. Could this be the cause of his behavioral problems?

In fact, I don't think we will never know what caused Taggie's problems. That was the most frustrating thing for us at that time: being unable to find out what was the matter with him and what was the cause. The doctors could point to certain things, but they never gave us a label for what was wrong with Taggie, no definite answers, diagnosis, prognosis, or indication of what we should do. Clearly, he had autistic-like behavior, but no one called it autism at that time. Things might be quite different today.

Even to this day, to a certain extent, I keep trying to find the cause of Taggie's problems. I say to myself, "Did he have an accident? Did something happen to him?" But I can't put my finger on anything specific. Sometimes I wonder if the problems date back to his birth, when it took so long for him to be born and he came out all gray and oxygen-deprived. Sometimes I think there was a genetic problem. I wonder sometimes if there was a genetic mutation due to Rinpoche's heavy drinking. I was so young when Taggie was conceived: could this have made a genetic problem more likely? In my more rational moments, I realize that none of these theories are that relevant. I don't think I'm ever going to know what happened to Taggie.

The last time the doctor met with me, he said that they could describe what was wrong, but there was no name for it. He couldn't recommend treatment because there was really no diagnosis. I felt that I had to accept that we would never have a diagnosis for what was wrong with our child.

I began to feel that Rinpoche and I couldn't provide the proper care for our son and that we needed to do more to help him. It was terrible to feel so inadequate. Around this time, Taggie developed fears that he hadn't had before. We had several Tibetan paintings of wrathful deities, called mahakalas, at the house. Now, every time Taggie saw one of these pictures, he would go crazy, screaming and sobbing and running away. He had always been a happy child, so this change seemed strange and out of character.

In Tibetan monasteries, the main mahakala images traditionally are kept in a separate building, where practitioners conduct particular practices related to working with this wrathful energy. There are special rules about how certain mahakala paintings and sculptures are to be handled, when they are to be viewed, and other things like that. One of the earlier Tenga Rinpoches, one of Taggie's predecessors, is said to have made a fatal error in relating to the mahakala shrines at his monastery. Against the advice of senior monks, he ignored the regulations and decided to uncover the painting of a particular deity at a time that was forbidden. After that, he apparently went mad. Taggie's fears and our knowledge of this history in Taggie's spiritual background tended to reinforce the theory that his problems were spiritual rather than physical or genetic. In any case, Taggie became extremely afraid of the wrathful deities, and we thought perhaps it was related to the tulku disease that His Holiness was telling us was a product of not allowing him to be brought up in the monastery.

Part 3 of 3

That fall while Rinpoche was away, after one particularly difficult week, I phoned him to ask again for his help. He was at the 1975 seminary in Snowmass, Colorado, a program that lasted three months, and wouldn't be back for at least another month. The seminary that year in Snowmass ended up being quite difficult in certain respects. Against his better judgment, Rinpoche had allowed the American poet W S. Merwin, who had spent the summer at Naropa, and his girlfriend, Dana, to attend the seminary, although they were extremely new to our community. As the Vajrayana section of the seminary approached, Bill (Merwin) and Dana remained isolated from the rest of the participants, and Rinpoche felt they weren't connecting with him or with what he was trying to teach.

On Halloween things turned ugly. There was a costume party that night, which Bill and Dana tried to duck out of. From what I heard, the situation got quite extreme. Rinpoche had suggested that rather than using costumes to disguise themselves, people should unmask and expose themselves. He told people that they should literally unmask by taking their clothes off. Everybody got naked. Rinpoche noticed that Bill and Dana weren't there. He insisted that they should come to the party too and sent students to rouse them from their room at the hotel. When they didn't answer the door, the messengers broke in through the balcony. Bill became alarmed and fearful, and he cut one of them with a jagged piece of broken glass. He and Dana were eventually brought down to the ballroom, where they were stripped of their clothing. It was pretty shocking.

The third and final harvest festival on the Wheel of the Year is Samhain, observed on October 31. This Sabbat marks the end of the growing season and the beginning of Winter, which must be prepared for now in earnest. Herbs are dried for winter storage, fruits and vegetables are canned and preserved, and root vegetables are dug up and stored so they may nourish us through the cold months. The word “Samhain” comes from the old Irish and is thought by many to translate as “Summer’s end.”

While the cycles of life and death are implicitly recognized at every Sabbat, Samhain is when the necessary role of death is formally honored. The nights grow noticeably longer with each day. The God retreats now into the shadows of the dark season, symbolically dying back to the Earth before being reborn again at Yule. Many Wiccans and other Pagans consider this to be the most important day on the Wheel, a time when the veil between the spirit world and the mundane world is at its thinnest. Our ancestors and loved ones on the Other Side are said to be more easily able to visit with us and make their presence known at this time.

-- The Wiccan Calendar: Samhain, by Wicca Living

"It came out that the end of this sitting period we were going to have Vajrayana (they had gone through Hinayana and Mahayana). So ... Rinpoche ... not only did he command to have a Halloween party, but he also commanded that every one attend and wear a costume. It was very definitely set up as a kind of pre-Vajrayana feast, because the idea of Halloween, with all these bizarre costumes, and putting on masks -- it's kind of like admitting your neurosis -- like, who you come as, Halloween, on our scene, has been ... adopted as our Tantric holiday: because there's so many contradictions in it: the idea of unmasking and putting on masks, and dressing up: it's kind of getting totally samsaric, in other words.

"Vajrayana has a good deal to do with totally connecting with Samsara. So, the word was out, and everyone was quite shocked that we were going to have a party, that Rinpoche announced he was going to attend, that there was going to be very formal -- that Rinpoche had something in mind: that he wanted to have kind of a 'courtlike' atmosphere, and that every(one) had to wear a costume.

-- Jack Niland (Santoli) 6/23/77, Behind the Veil of Boulder Buddhism: Ed Sanders, The Party, by Ed Sanders

A day or two later, Rinpoche told Merwin and Dana, as well as all the other participants, that they could leave the seminary or they could stay. They remained, but after the program ended, they left for good. The story filtered out of the seminary -- in fact, nobody was trying to hide what had happened. Investigating the incident actually became a class project in the poetics department at Naropa Institute a year or two later, and the story made its way into an article in Harper's magazine in 1979.

L' affaire Merwin quickly became a hot gossip item on the coast-to-coast literary scene.

Its first effect was to create a wave of poetry-politics backlash against the Kerouac School. Robert Bly, who'd already been quietly criticizing Ginsberg for inviting only his friends to teach poetry at Naropa, now opened fire, discussing the "Merwin episode" (whose facts he had a very fuzzy idea of) in public at every opportunity.

Ginsberg, fearing the loss of a $4000 grant to the Kerouac School from the National Endowment for the Arts, responded by initiating the "Merwin cover-up" (later known as "Buddha-gate"). He contacted both Bly and Merwin and asked them to inform the NEA that there was no connection between Trungpa's alleged misbehavior and Naropa or the Kerouac School.

David Rome, Trungpa's private secretary, now wrote a letter to the Karma Dzong community of Boulder from the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center, where Trungpa was on retreat. According to one source, the letter warned the community against "enemies of the dharma" -- like, by inference, Robert Bly.

Bly returned to Boulder in May, 1977, and in the guise of a poetry reading presented his audience with a long harangue about the Merwin matter.

"I told Allen Ginsberg he is sacrificing the community of poets for his teacher," Bly is reported to have said on this occasion. "This Kerouac School is doomed."

At the intermission of Bly's "reading," a woman student of Trungpa rose and called the poet" not a warrior -- a coward."

Bly left town mumbling about "Buddhist fascism" -- the term, he claimed, which W.S. Merwin was now using to apply to the activities of Chogyam Trungpa.

The Ginsberg/Kerouac School grant application was turned down by the NEA.

Naropa and the Kerouac School had other grants to protect, like a $35,000 bundle from the Rockefeller foundation, and further applications on the fire. In order to seal these important projects off from the corrosive effects of gossip about the Merwin episode, Ginsberg, as principal media spokesman and cultural proselytiser of the Institute, sought to prevent further "leakage" of the story.

This was to prove impossible. In the summer of 1977, detective-poet Ed (The Family) Sanders was asked by Ginsberg to teach at the Kerouac School. Sanders brought in his doctrine of "Investigative Poetics" (with its motto that "poetry should again assume responsibility for the description of history") and offered his students total freedom in selecting a subject to which to apply it. They selected the Merwin affair. The ensuing class report exhumed the entire matter, sending an odor of raw anxiety through the halls of Naropa.

In the class report, the whole episode was spelled out in cold black-and-white testimony taken from principals and participants -- from everyone, in fact, except the star of the show. The eleventh Trungpa refused to cooperate in any way with the class project. Questions put to him went unanswered.

The class report was quietly circulated in xerox between September, 1977 and August, 1978, principally by the poet Ed Dorn, who distributed about 50 copies in and from Boulder. A copy that had somehow survived for six months in the Naropa Institute Library disappeared mysteriously in the summer of 1978.

There was by now considerable national interest in publishing the class report. Lawrence Ferlinghetti asked Allen Ginsberg for a copy so that he could consider it for publication by City Lights Books. Ginsberg turned down his old friend and publisher's request.

Other publishers and publications were appealing to Sanders for permission to publish. Sanders, who had carefully copyrighted the report (which was titled The Party), had begun to poll the members of his class by mail for their views on the issue of publication.

One of the first serious proposals came in August, 1978, from Boulder Monthly, a Boulder city magazine. As senior writer of the magazine, I made the proposal myself....

At the summer, 1978 session of the Kerouac School, the Merwin episode was constantly under discussion. Few, if any, of the poets on the summer faculty had seen the class report, but all had an opinion. Robert Duncan, for instance, compared the stripped lovers, Merwin and Dana, with Adam and Eve, expelled from the Garden. (Which made Trungpa into -- God?)

Toward the end of that summer there appeared in the Rocky Mountain News a very interesting story about Naropa. Tibetan Brings Buddhism to Boulder, the headline announced. Inside the story, a scene at a Trungpa lecture was described. A student asked a question about why classes already paid for are constantly being interrupted by requests from the administration for more money. Trungpa dismissed the question by telling the student to be patient, then, snapping his fingers for a glass of water, continued to speak, telling his listeners they were "nothings," that their lives were like "flat Coca-Cola -- full of yukiness, and yukiness has no personality."

At the end of the News story, the Naropa/Vajradhatu finance officer was asked some dollar questions.

"It's not so important where we get our money or what we do with it," the finance officer replied. "The important thing is what we are trying to do."

What, I wondered, is that?

I showed the Sanders class report to the publisher and editor of the magazine I worked for. They agreed to publish it. Then I wrote to Ed Sanders.

"The Investigative Poetry class at Naropa, that is, those who wrote The Party," Sanders replied on August 17, "voted by mail earlier this year on whether or not to publish the investigation. There was a majority not to publish."

Ed Sanders bumped into Anne Waldman in New York and mentioned to her that I had written to him. I soon received a phone call from a Naropa faculty poet. Was Boulder Monthly publishing The Party? No, I said. Relieved, the poet -- an old friend, by the way -- then advised me that both Anne and Allen felt any further circulation, distribution, or even mention of the Sanders class report would be "bad for everybody."

"I'm still shooting my mouth off all the time," Allen Ginsberg told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter on August 31.

On September 2, Ed Sanders reported to Ed Dorn that the latest result of the ongoing poll of the group was a 50-50 split on whether or not to print.

That same week, Anne Waldman and another faculty poet, Michael Brownstein, approached Ed Dorn with inquiries about how many xerox copies of The Party he had distributed. Brownstein then "weighed in with a piss-off notice" by way of a letter to Sanders protesting Dorn's circulation of the document. (Sanders had given Dorn express permission to distribute copies as he saw fit.)....

In early January, I attended a showing of the rushes of an Italian TV movie that had been filmed at Naropa in the summer of 1978, the summer after Ed Sanders' class had prepared its report. There was nothing about the Sanders Class report in this picture, however; it was a "friendly" documentary. Now it was being edited by the Trungpa braintrust. The viewing room, at a pod-controlled movie company's office contained some 40 well-scrubbed important Pods. In the front row sat Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Their comments -- particularly those of Ginsberg and Waldman -- seemed to be dictating the actual editing of the film.

All went happily for an hour or so, with many in-house Jokes and much bantering over tea and sake. Then Leroi Jones -- Amiri Baraka -- was on the screen, explaining that he was only visiting Naropa because Allen Ginsberg had asked him to come, Allen was his old friend, but really, he didn't agree with Buddhist philosophy at all, because Buddhist philosophy said the world wasn't real, which he -- Baraka -- disagreed with, being, he said, a materialist, especially when it came to politics ...

"Cut that," Ginsberg the producer was saying. He'd been fussing impatiently during the whole Baraka rap. Now he jumped up, proposing heavy editing of this section of the film....

Baraka's speech was appropriately mutilated. The moment of tension had passed. Onto the screen danced the playful, porky little face of the eleventh Trungpa, smiling, replying indulgently in his Oxford accent to a question about terrorists in Italy -- "Yes, politics, it's all part of the material we work with ... "

In January I overheard Allen talking to some innocent-looking young Naropa students at a party. He was telling them that, yes, it was true that this Merwin thing had taken place, but that individual rights don't apply on a seminary situation, so that Merwin only got what he had coming, and besides, yes, Trungpa was challenging the foundations of American democracy -- but that democracy was anyway a failed experiment, the atom bomb proved that, and now what Trungpa was up to was a whole new . . . a whole new "experiment in monarchy!" The students nodded numbly. What was wrong with an experiment in monarchy? I ground my teeth all the way home.

Two weeks before Boulder distribution, xerox copies of the February Issue of Harper's were making the rounds. That magazine had printed the Naropa diary of Peter Marin, a post-Jonestown conscience-victim who now reported his visit to Trungpa's school a year and a half earlier. "Spiritual Obedience" was Marin's general subject. He paraphrased parts of the Sanders report, for the first time bringing the Merwin affair to public attention on a national scale.

The Boulder Camera went to Vajradhatu for comments on the Marin article. Trungpa could not be reached, but his "Vajra Regent" or dharma heir, Osel Tendzin (aka Robert Rich, son of an Italian golf pro from New Jersey) told the paper that there was no disputing the words in the Sanders class report. "They saw what they saw" said Tendzin.

Will Trungpa change, the paper asked?

"Nothing will change," said Tendzin. "The practice will be carried out in the same way it has been for a thousand years." ....

Ed Dorn and I caught up with Allen one cold night -- January 12 -- when he was coming out of his Naropa class on the prophetic books of Blake. We went with several of Allen's students to the house on Mapleton which Ginsberg was sharing at the time with two of the Orlovsky brothers, Peter and Julius. While Julius roamed the house, Peter sang and washed dishes, and Allen spoke his mind -- with careful orchestration of the tape recorder, which he instructed me to turn off or on every few minutes.

Allen talked softly and at length about the Merwin affair and its ramifications. "With a guru," he said, "you make a contract to give up your privacy ... " Two hours later, when the tapes were filled, it was with a surprisingly dark and apocalyptic tale.

"I accuse myself all the time," Allen immediately admitted, "of seducing the entire poetry scene and Merwin into this impossible submission to some spiritual dictatorship which they'll never get out of again and which will ruin American culture forever. Anything might happen. We might get taken over and eaten by the Tibetan monsters ... All the horrific hallucinations of the Tibetan Book of the Dead are going to come true right now. Right here in Boulder ... The Pandora's Box of the Bardo Thodol has been opened by the arrival in America of one of the masters of the secrets of the Tibetan Book of the Dead."

Allen explained succinctly that the end product of the whole Merwin affair and its aftermath had been "universal paranoia" in the Boulder Buddhist community. But sometimes, he had to admit, such paranoia is justified. "And in the real world, as we know from Guyana, it could be completely justified. Some big guru makes a mistake, and turns out to have been mad all along."

Still, Allen hesitated to criticize his guru, Trungpa. "You know," he said, "you're talking about my love life. My extremely delicate love life, my relations with my teacher ... "....

No sooner had the tapes been turned off than Allen began to fret over certain remarks he'd made about Merwin, about Trungpa, about Burroughs, about Corso, about Ed Sanders; Allen acts the role of a very worried and weary warrior, these days. I took the tapes home and began to transcribe them.

Allen left on a trip to New York, to receive an award for his poetry. Before leaving, he nervously instructed me to hand over the transcription of our interview to Anne Waldman, for her inspection, before anything was published. I told him I'd see about that; I had a deadline to meet. Distracted by other affairs, Allen settled for this half-agreement, and after another feeble suggestion that we reconsider and send the interview to Playboy, he left town at the end of January.....

Why was the publication of The Party kept a secret until the last minute?

There was the consideration of possible sabotage. Some of the pods we at the magazine had encountered had been very intense people, when it came to defending the dharma. Rumor had it that one follower of Trungpa, a man we knew, had recently performed a scalping. Such characters might be capable of anything.

Further, we feared that Allen Ginsberg would find some way to interfere with or prevent the publication. "Watch out for Allen," Ed Sanders had warned us from the beginning. "He'll do anything he can to keep this thing from coming out."....

On March 2, Allen and Peter Orlovsky appeared at Boulder Monthly with Allen's "revised version" of our interview. In our office, they discovered boxes of fresh copies of the March issue, awaiting distribution. Trungpa was on the cover, and The Party, plus Allen's interview -- "When The Party's Over", we'd called it -- were inside.

Allen got very excited -- "I was wrathful," he later apologized -- and spent several hours interrogating me about our foul plot. Who had known? Who were the guilty ones? In Buddhism, It's necessary to isolate the threat, he said, so that the blame can be focused. I guess I'm the one you ought to blame, I said.

During our conference, Ed Dorn came and went, so did Sam Maddox; still Allen fretted and raved, for four or five hours. By now copies of the magazine were on the streets. Midway through the afternoon, in sailed Anne Waldman, mad as a wet hen, waving a copy of the magazine, the red fox tail on her hat swinging in my face as she demanded to know exactly who had been "in on" the guilty action.

"What do you think you are," the author of the only authentic anglo-American shaman-poem, Fast Talking Woman, yelled in my face "some kind of white knight riding in to save us from ourselves?

Anne's righteous anger was even more impressive than Allen's. She seemed almost inspired in her rage, and I thought for a moment she might be going to burst into shamanic prophecy -- but no. There were no Maria Sabina texts laying around for her to crib from, alas.

Both Allen and Anne told me that what made them particularly furious was that they had mistaken me for a poet friend, when in fact I had turned out to be acting with the motives and style of a mere journalist!

At twilight Ginsberg and Waldman repaired to Naropa for an emergency meeting of concerned pods. Pages of a magazine could be heard turning all through the meeting, all over the room, our spies later reported.

Two days after the magazine came out, Ed Sanders flew in from California. His arrival and one-night stay were kept a close secret. At least one physical threat against Sanders had been received, and this came from a male pod with an unstable history and a record of violence. Sanders was understandably apprehensive about being in Boulder at all, and slipped out of town in the morning, clutching a brown paper shopping bag full of Boulder Monthlys and looking both ways as he climbed into his ride to the airport.

At my house, the phone kept ringing. We'd pick it up, and no one was at the other end. Made us nervous, yes, but nothing ever happened.

Sam Maddox got a call from the girl who'd brought him to Trungpa's birthday party. Her pod friends were planning to turn on the sprinkler systems in our warehouse, she said, to destroy our whole edition.

It never happened.

What did happen is that the magazine sold like hotcakes all over Boulder. One tobacco shop owner sold 45 copies in one hour, and got the impression that most of them had been bought up by Buddhists in bundles of four and five....

Allen Ginsberg continued to follow me around with calls and messages, urging me to "sit" with him, to revise the interview, to publish his revised version, to give him the original tapes, to recant -- anything. When I rewarded him with a total cold shoulder, he did not give up, but continued to call, inviting me to meditation sessions, to tea parties, to famous-people dinners and poetry readings at Naropa.

Allen wrote a long letter to W.S. Merwin, apologizing for the Boulder Monthly interview (in which he'd said he didn't like Merwin's poetry) and even inviting Merwin to return to Naropa to teach. (For some reason, Allen sent me a copy.)....

"An Open Letter to American Artists," Callahan called his effort. It solicited participation of artists and writers in a boycott of Naropa, and asked for their signatures.

"I sent out a bunch of copies, and got 40-45 signatures," Callahan later told me. "Among poets I sent it to in the Bay Area, there was about a 50-50 split. But around that time I went on a trip to Seattle and Alaska and all the Native Americans I talked to -- Jim Pepper, Leslie Silko, Simon Ortiz -- all signed it. And other Third World people, like Ishmael Reed, Victor Hernandez Cruz, David Henderson, they all Immediately signed it too. But there was a clear party line split. Any poet with any Buddhist associations refused to sign it. They agreed with it privately, but they didn't sign -- and they gave me a whole bushel of reasons. 'Merwin deserved it -- Fuck Merwin,' things like that. I couldn't believe it. I went around with my mouth open for two weeks.

"Michael McClure called me up screaming at one o'clock in the morning. 'Those wimps at Naropa are no threat to you,' he said. 'I've told Allen for years, privately, to get out of that scene. Still, Allen believes in it, it's his family. You can't attack him for It. You re trying to ruin Allen Ginsberg. You can't do that!'

"Michael then organized a counter-campaign, calling up people to talk them out of signing. He did actually talk several people out of it. He called Gary Snyder, who called me and told me, 'Your response isn't generous enough.' I had talked to Gary two weeks earlier, and he had told me then that he had 'grave doubts' about Trungpa's behavior in this Merwin incident. I had asked him if he thought Trungpa's action was out of line, as Buddhism, and he said, 'That's right.' But now, two weeks later, he says, 'Take off my clothes? Sure, I'd do it. It's a big joke to me. Just don't criticize Allen in public.'

"No one defended Trungpa, let me emphasize that. They just won't attack Allen. His friends have very strong feelings about that."....

Callahan replied. "It was a case of party lines, party loyalty, of not losing gigs or giving up a station. Here were poets showing the kind of block mind militancy you'd never expect from them. It disappointed the hell out of me.

"It became a poets' war -- poets at war with one another. That seemed to me wrong. Can't you just say something's wrong, whatever side you're on?"

Callahan's petition evoked an immediate, nasty "letter of correction" (spank-note) from Anne Waldman, who admonished him to "look a little closer before you leap."

"This may be life and death for Naropa Institute," Waldman advised Callahan angrily....

At Boulder Monthly, we started to lose ad accounts from local Buddhist businesses, like the Boulder Bookstore, biggest in town. One Naropa faculty member wrote in to accuse us of a "blatant smear."....

On March 19, the Naropa poets held a big reading at the University. "Where are Tom Clark and Ed Dorn?" somebody in the audience called out. "Home watching television," sneered Michael Brownstein.

I was asked by the Berkeley Barb to report on the recent Buddhist/poetry doings in Boulder. To my subsequent piece of reportage on the "Buddha-Gate" affair I attached the signature "Robert Woods," which became my byline in the Barb.

Over the next two months, I was interrogated severally by angry pods concerning my role in the writing of this article.

"Who is Robert Woods?" my literary pod acquaintances demanded whenever they saw me. "We know it's you. It is, isn't it? Confess!"

I again began to receive lots of hang-up phone calls.....

Allen, in New York, wrote me a "Who is Robert Woods?" postcard, and sent it to Anne Waldman, asking her to send it on to me if she thought that proper. She passed it instead to another faculty poet. When I ran into that poet one day, he mentioned the card, and when I asked him for it, he gave it to me.

"Take it easy!" Allen wrote. "Whaddya want!? The Bardo Thodol ghosts I was talking about seem to be solidified in the anxieties you create for yourself and me & others by the secrecy you prolong by writing pseudonymous articles."...

Allen Ginsberg wrote to Ed Sanders to complain about our July issue. "Allen feels Boulder Monthly is being unnecessarily cruel," Sanders reported back to me.

In August, we at Boulder Monthly wrote Chogyam Trungpa a letter, requesting an interview. Our letter was returned by the officials at Karme Dzong, marked "not known at this address."

Pursuing a lead on another story (on "Powerful People"), a reporter from our magazine tried to reach Trungpa through his wife and mother-in-law. Several tea parties down the line, the reporter gave up, badly discouraged. The eleventh Trungpa is a very hard man to get an interview with. Maybe that's the source of his very great power, our reporter concluded.

Later in the month, I published a little story called "Buddha With His Hand Out" in Westward, a Denver tabloid. The story presented a few simple facts about Naropa's fundraising methods, such as the practice of asking students to turn over their housing deposit checks and to solicit contributions from their parents. A few days after the story came out, Naropa began bombarding me with all kinds of face-saving financial statements in the mail. My phone was ringing off the hook again with hang-up calls. Then I bumped into Anne Waldman on the Mall one day. She immediately brought up my little Westward piece, stamping her foot and accusing me of "yellow journalism."

"How could you do that?" she demanded, somehow managing to sound shocked.

I've been tempted to ask her the same thing for years.....

"I am sending the enclosed to Richard G. & Terry N. and this will be the extent of my west coast efforts. In that spirit, Grosinnger and the like shld have access to it where otherwise who knows what might happen. I neednt tell you there is a lot of ground heat ... the heat is considerable from time to time seems real, as in being tailed, & people beating on your door demanding every scrap of paper you've got. Anne [Waldman] anounced threateningly and dwarf grandly that she expected to have the Sanders-Dorn correspondance (as it was called) made available to her Right Away. She wants to know the minute hour & day the printer got the copy, she wants to be presented with all the pieces which will put this conspiracy together. Tom C. laughed in her face, I behind the back of me hand. Ed S. doesnt at all want to meet AM because Ed says that AM is the most violencia prone specimen around....This is like a sealed town, it's the original podsville They are 1500-2000 and they bought probably 75 percent of the edition. They organized in battalians and went around buying them up. So, they've read it. Unless we can extend this someway quick they're gonna move to crush. As Allen told Tom at a meeting I witnessed, the Buddhists have got to Isolate the threat, it has to come down for them to one entity, to which Tom replied If that's your only problem, I'm it."

"Just to clear up one thing: The day in the Boulder Monthly office when I demanded "dwarf grandly" to see the correspondence between Tom, Ed Sanders etc. it was to point up the facts of everybody's lying to me, personally, about the "status" and imminent publication of excerpts of "The Party" & Al's interview. I'm not interested in any of this from the point of a Buddhist or defender of the faith or some such nonsense -- it's long been my view the sooner the story in some semi-accurate form were out publically the better since I was sick of telling my own hearsay version. So my words that day, tongue in cheek I might add although I was pissed at having been LIED to and consequently "YOUR" dupe and fool etc. (I mean can you dig it??), were referring to the events of those days immediately preceding publication when Tom, Angelica and Jenny gave me the runaround concerning Al's interview which I'd been asked to "oversee" in his absence. I was told no one knew what was happening with the magazine, that it was almost definitely about to fold and that Tom would be out of a job (sob) and that there was no plan at present for The Party & so on. I resent this personally, as if I would try to stop publication, as if I'm the "enemy" -- I'm amazed you didn't get my point that day when I attacked Tom for "lying" to me and I think it's mighty irresponsible of you to give another impression of my "stance" in all of this since you & I have never sat down and discussed any of this one to one at all.

The only other sore point, as I see it, is the survival & continuation of the Kerouac School which I'm still in favor of. Perhaps if I heard from Bill Merwin a stronger indictment of the whole tamale I'd think different. I understand Tom'd like to see Trungpa deported don't know if you care that much, but since there's current petition discouraging poets & artists from taking part in any Kerouac School activities maybe best to get cards on the table?

My paranoia says you just don't want anything to do with me on friendship level and that my overtures to you to visit here, whatever are just plain embarrassing. Makes me sad though maybe I'm slowly outgrowing sentimentally. But all this makes me curious just how you tick. If you're still laughing at me behind the back of your hand guess there's no point. What I always dug about you was poet to poet not some macho bullshit. I'm wondering you think the Merwin Trungpa thing is bigger than both of us?"

I feel impelled to write you, not to offer any "explanation", but only to correct the somewhat glaring errors in the version that reached you.

First, the stripping (there was no beating, that seems to be an embellishment courtesy of Robert Bly, which he publicly recanted at a reading he gave in Boulder...

Next, a very open and thorough investigation was made of the incident by Ed Sanders and his Investigative Poetics class (Naropa Institute -- summer of 1977). In his introduction to the exerpt of The Party published in March 1979 Boulder Monthly, he says: "It would be proper to say that Naropa was less than eager for the report to be written, but on the other hand at no time, then or now, did anyone try to suppress the investigation, or to harass anyone who was preparing it." I don't know what you're refering to in point #2, but perhaps you should check your sources a bit more closely, and if there's really something to this, then state the facts!

There is no "Naropa in-house police force". The 'Vajra' guard is a function of Dharmadhatu, the Buddhist community in Boulder under Trungpa's direction. They have nothing directly to do with Naropa Institute, and Naropa students and teachers need have nothing to do with Dharmadhatu.

It would require little effort to verify any of these corrections to the points you've made in your "Open Letter". Reactions are raw and emotional enough to the "real story". No one needs a misleading and erroneous All Points Bulletin at this stage. I'm amazed you would act so surely on information that could only have come to you as hearsay. Anyway, this may be life and death for the Naropa Institute, so I would appreciate you looking a little closer before you leap.

It brings up to the surface a lot of thoughts that people have had anyway and discussed among themselves, but just didn't discuss publicly: fear of Buddhist fascism, paranoia about submission to a guru, the apparent incomprehensibility of the Merwin thing....It's like reading your marriage troubles in the newspaper...it goes back for centuries and millenia, as far as the structure of Vajrayana goes, and how it works out, and what's the relation between student and teacher....You can interpret it as another kind of metaphor, a marriage metaphor. Or you can interpret it as a metaphor for social paranoia in the barbarous Western mind....the whole question of individual rights -- which [I've] said before really didn't apply in that seminary situation....It doesn't apply on that occasion, as in a sense it doesn't apply in a marriage. Individual rights don't apply there, in the sense that in a marriage you give up some privacy. In some marriages you do. Or in the sense that with a psychiatrist you give up some privacy. Or in the sense that with a guru, very definitely, you make a compact to give up your privacy. That's the purpose of making that relationship, to get rid of privacy. If privacy is defined as egocentricity, selfishness or psychological secrecy. It's really complicated....That idea of privacy, and that idea of relationship between the pupil and the guru, is introduced in a formal way. The way it's done is an old historical technique which is well known, when seen from a distance, but when actually practiced seems monstrously strange theater, to an American mind. Particularly to an American individualistic mind....I hate to discuss it in public, is the problem. Because it's really a private shot....But the very nature of it is personal relations. So if it's discussed, it's got to be done really delicately. And here, I feel too defensive. Like a fairy being asked if he's a fairy. It's right on that level, almost. You know, you're talking about my love life. My extremely delicate love life, my relations with my teacher. It's really complicated. And as all love lives, it's shot through with strange emotions, and self questionings, and paranoias, and impulses. So to reduce it to discussion with reference to cultural artifacts like the Bill of Rights ...Whether his vanity was appealed to, to have them there --- or their vanity was appealed to, to go there. I don't know whose vanity it was....I feel culpable. It's my paranoia that I'm expressing....I accuse myself all the time, of seducing the entire poetry scene and Merwin into this impossible submission to some spiritual dictatorship which they'll never get out of again and which will ruin American culture forever. Anything might happen. We might get taken over and eaten by the Tibetan monsters. All the monsters of the Tibetan Book of the Dead might come out and get everybody to take L.S.D.! Actually that's what's happening. All the horrific hallucinations of the Tibetan Book of the Dead are going to come true now. Right in Boulder! And the face of one of them is Merwin -- you see the face and it goes, graahr! That's one level on which you see what's happening, and I think it's actually true....The Pandora's Box of the Bardo Thodol has been opened by the arrival in America of one of the masters of the secrets of the Tibetan Book of the Dead....Trungpa's putting himself out to the extreme, here, and taking enormous risks: and throwing himself out on the line, throwing his body down for Merwin to walk over....Yeah. For Merwin to walk over him....Most people had gone through it before. They'd gone through the same psychological violence, but within themselves....What we have is, a composite account from gossip....You see, at the seminary there are certain ritual poems that are recited en masse, some of which relate to horrific protective deities just like in the Book of the Dead. Which are very un-American, to say the least. From the point of view of anybody who hasn't been a poet, or something, they're really off the wall....I mean they're poems to these blood-drinking deities!....It bugs everybody. Bugs everybody! It's supposed to; that's what it's there for. To bug you, and make you examine exactly that fear. Precisely. To make you examine that paranoia, which is universal....It might have been a big mistake by Trungpa, to have him there at all....In fact the difficulty with the situation, the Buddhists say, is that anybody can interpret it any way they want. ...You think Trungpa hasn't got enough girls to lay? He just likes to lay people who don't want to lay him? Pretty Oriental girls who don't want to lay him?...I don't want to find out what happened. Partly straight out of fear -- I don't want to open up some horrible yaargh -- I don't want to know about Trungpa. That's one reason. You know, just like you don't want to ask your father about the night he fucked your mother and made you....But I don't actually know, precisely, what happened. But the other day I got so paranoid that I went in to see Trungpa and asked him specifically about the thing that stuck in most people's minds. It didn't bother me too much, but apparently it bugged a lot of other people. Because it sounded like Burroughs talking, actually. "You Oriental slick cunt, 'why are you hanging around with this honky?"....You're not supposed to say things like that. Even if you're supposed to be posing as a Vajrayana teacher, breaking down all privacy and breaking every possible icon in every mental form, and acting like a poet, no less. I mean, you're supposed to out-Gregory Corso Gregory Corso and out-Burroughs Burroughs, if you're a Vajrayana teacher.....And you look real close and it turns out to be a rope! In fact this entire thing is somewhat like that. As the entire world is, the entire world of illusion.....The situation was Halloween, the beginning of Vajrayana teachings. Everybody's supposed to blow their top and get rid of all constraints. There's traditionally a wild party where everybody gets totally bombed. But at the same time, everybody gets totally bombed in a tradition that's conscious-making....See, there's a certain kind of immunity to drinking you can develop. I mean, when you realize -- you've done a lot of sitting for years, so you're conscious of your fullness. At the point where you begin to realize you're getting too drunk to drink more, you stop drinking heavily and you sip very, very slowly. At the Vajrayana banquets and feasts this is what's done. It's very similar to what you read in the books about the Kama Sutra. Not coming, things like that. So now all the training you've had is applied to banqueting. A symposium, a Platonic symposium -- the banquet is supposed to be something like that. It's not just a big dumb slob banquet as such. It's got several thousand years of tradition behind it, and it's got rules and regulations.....If you notice in Trungpa's autobiography, Born in Tibet, he says there that he had to do that with his teacher, take off all his clothes. So he told her about that, how in Tibet it's much more shocking and scandalous to take off all your clothes. Here in America you have naked beaches, and so on. In Tibet, if you take off your clothes, you're violating all sorts of taboos. Here, it's just playful. So he tried to explain that to her, and to explain to her that she should respect her roots by taking part in a classical experience of the Orient, which she does come from....Just as I have begun to appreciate my own roots, as a Jew, or just as an American Indian respects his....His view of what he was saying was something dignified....According to him it had nothing to do with sex. And I doubt if it did have very much to do with sex. Actually I think probably very little. I think that was a paranoiac interpretation put on it later. As far as I can gather, what Trungpa was trying to do was give her a very reasonable common-sense explanation that what was going on here was a traditional Buddhist practice applied in America in as gentle a way as possible. And as funny a way as possible, without even the horrific shock that it might have been in Tibet. An enormous cultural heritage is being brought here, and laid out before them, and opened up....In the middle of that scene, to yell "call the police" -- do you realize how vulgar that was? The Wisdom of the East was being unveiled, and she's going, "call the police!" I mean, shit! Fuck that shit! Strip 'em naked, break down the door! Anything-symbolically. I mentioned privacy before -- the entrance into Vajrayana is the abandonment of all privacy. And the entry onto the Bodhisattva path is totally -- you're saying, "I no longer have any privacy ever again."....he said, I wanted to deal with him by opening myself up to him completely, by putting aside all barriers. "It was a gamble," he said....And Trungpa said, "Well, don't be amazed to find that actually the whole teaching is simply emptiness and meekness."....That's what he said. So you see, it's really complicated....It's very complicated, very complicated. In order to do what Trungpa did, he had to have the approval and backing of his boss, Karmapa Lama, the head of the Karmapa order, the 16th Karmapa in the succession, who lives in Sinkiang. The power of any guru is conferred on him by other lamas -- you have to understand the lineage. Chogyam Trungpa was taught by the fourth Tenzing Rinpoche, who is a descendant of this lineage....Trungpa's image is crazy wisdom. Traditional crazy wisdom -- outrageous behavior, outrageous activity. Total iconoclasm. And there has to be a consensus of lamas to decide the other lamas aren't abusing their scene. With one bad lama, or one fuck-up -- particularly from someone like Trungpa, who's so open -- it could really fuck up their whole scene. Just like, you know, Guyana.... Al Santoli, being one of the most active persons in the preparing of the Sanders report. Al's basic view now is that Vajrayana is so horrible, and so un-American that it should never be taught in America, and that Trungpa is the example of how bad it is, and how totalitarian and undemocratic and creepy it is. And that it is a big cosmic important thing that it be stopped.....I think Trungpa's ten times more interesting than Merwin.....So he didn't like "drink the hot blood of the ego."...You might take it literally. Who knows. If I were Burroughs I would say, "of course it's literal."....I think it's understood by democratic liberal radical minds that in order to take part in shamanistic ceremonies, the new breed of anthropologist takes part, rather than just appearing....I said, "What happens if you ask me to kill Merwin?" That was my idea....It was in my head, so why shouldn't I? I mean, the whole point is that that's precisely what you should consider....When I went to see him I asked him exactly that question. You see, the nature of the teaching and the teaching methods is such that it's very hard. How do you talk about Vajrayana teachings in public? It's very hard to do.....my consideration of it is not so much that Trungpa was wrong, but that he was indiscreet.....As if I haven't had enough with L.S.D. and enough with fag liberation, now I've got to go through Vajrayana, and pretty soon they're going to have articles in Harpers by idiotic poets that I never hired to begin with! About Merwin whose poetry I don't care about anyway!....Ed has a large quotient of paranoia too. Anything that reminds him of secrecy -- he's been all his life studying black magic and Aleister Crowley and playing around with all that on the sidelines. I mean, getting into the Manson thing, and then getting into Vajrayana and Trungpa and Merwin, is just sort of made for Ed Sanders....half the time I think, "maybe Trungpa's the C.I.A., and he's taking over my mind."....The poets have a right to shit on anybody they want to. You know, the poets have got the divine right of poetry. They go around, you know, commit suicide. Burroughs commits murder, Gregory Corso borrows money from everybody and shoots up drugs for twenty years, but he's "divine Gregory." But poor old Trungpa, who's been suffering since he was two years old to teach the dharma, isn't allowed to wave his frankfurter!....And American culture! "How dare you criticize American culture!"...."democracy, shit! What we need is a new Hitler." Democracy, nothing! They exploded the atom bomb without asking us. Everybody's defending American democracy. American democracy's this thing, this Oothoon....everyone wants to go back and say, "Oh, no, we've got it comfortable. Here are these people invading us with their mind control."....So, yes, it is true that Trungpa is questioning the very foundations of American democracy. Absolutely.....Trungpa is asking if there's any deeper axiomatic basis than some creator coming along and guaranteeing his rights....the Bill of Rights. The whole foundation of American democracy is built on that, and it's as full of holes as Swiss cheese.....And one of the things the Buddhists would feel would be an imperfection would be the need to justify....They're not being very equivocal about the absolutism of the Vajra teacher.....However, at the point of ultimate marriage of mind, or transmission of mind between Vajra master and pupil, if anybody makes a mistake, the pupil could kill the Vajra master. Or the Vajra master could go nuts. Or, you know, it could be fatal to both.....As indicated by this very low level beginner's situation with Merwin.....The last defense would be paranoia, and a fear of invasion from alien forces taking over your mind, like the horrors you sometimes sink into when you get on an acid trip. Sometimes it's justified. And in the real world, as we know from Guyana, it could be completely justified. Some big guru makes a big mistake, and turns out to have been mad all along.

-- The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, With a Copious Collection of German Documents Assembled by the Author, by Tom Clark

Although I wasn't there when these events transpired, I was with Rinpoche in situations that were probably as extreme as that. If he felt that the elements of a situation were ripe to puncture delusion or self-deception, he never held back -- though I don't expect people to understand or accept this at face value.

"Trungpa is like a doctor," Anne Waldman said in 1977. "The situation in this country is so sick, so neurotic-materialistic, spiritually materialistic, general insanity -- things are so out of hand that he is coming into a situation that needs doctoring."

Trungpa's crazy-wisdom doctor is at least a spiritual cousin of Dr. Benway, the apocalyptic junkie surgeon of William S. Burroughs. Dr. Benway enters the operating room raving and flings his scalpel into the patient from 15 paces....

With a few drinks of sake under his belt, the gentle, playful "Rinpoche" became Dr. Benway.

"When in the mood to crack the whip," an ex-disciple later recalled, "the prince does so with heavy-lidded wrath, taking a minimum of shit, his retainers looking on with sneering awe. I remember a night in Vermont. It got ugly."

-- The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, With a Copious Collection of German Documents Assembled by the Author, by Tom Clark

In some way, this incident was tied in for me to what was happening with Taggie. This was such a difficult time in our lives. In a certain sense, Rinpoche was dealing with extreme and seemingly unworkable energy at the seminary, while I was driving into a high wall of insanity (his phrase) in terms of Taggie and our family life. In fact, in a scenario that is unrelated yet strangely in keeping with the dark energies I've described, a child died at the very end of the 1975 seminary from complications of asthma while sleeping in the room at the hotel that Merwin and Dana had stayed in. (Although they stayed for the final talk of the seminary, they had left a bit earlier than others.)

Before this tragic event, I phoned Rinpoche at the seminary. I was just beside myself about Taggie. After listening to me describe the situation at home, finally, he said, "We should send Taggie to Karme Choling. It's a more monastic environment there, and there are people there who I can ask to help take care of him. He can stay there for a few years, and then we may have to send him to His Holiness. I don't see an alternative. I don't think we should wait any longer." Rinpoche said that he would talk to one of his close students, David Nudell, about becoming Taggie's main attendant at Karme Choling.

Some part of me was relieved. I remember Rinpoche saying, "There are a lot of people with a lot of sanity at Karme Choling. They are going to be able to look after him. You have to begin to let go."

I felt that Rinpoche was making the right decision for Taggie, based on what we knew at the time. We couldn't continue to care for him. He was not getting what he needed. That was very clear. Although I felt that we were making the right decision, it was an unbelievably painful prospect. Taggie was just four years old. I was losing my firstborn son.

We all have hopes and dreams for our children. In our case, we expected our first son to grow up and become a great Tibetan teacher. At the very least, we expected him to grow up and lead a healthy life. It wasn't like he was born with an obvious condition, such as Down syndrome, where we'd been told from the beginning that he would never be "normal." That must also be incredibly difficult for a parent, but sometimes it seemed that it would have been easier for me to accept Taggie's disabilities if I had known about them from the beginning. Perhaps we could have adjusted our expectations much earlier, understanding that he was going to have many mental challenges. Ours was the difficulty of not knowing. We had the excruciatingly slow realization that Taggie was not all right. Coming to this realization was heartwrenching.

Rinpoche also found the whole process very painful, although he didn't talk about it much. A few months earlier, in July 1975, he wrote a poem which began with a reference to the situation with Taggie:

Wounded son --
How sad.
Never expected this.
Oily seagulls

Crippled jackal
Complaining flower --
Very sad.
Is it?2

Beyond the need to let go of the hopes that I had for my child's future, now I also had to figure out how to physically let him go out of my life. That was the most difficult part of all for me. In the years after he went to Karme Choling, I was able to process some of this. But at this particular time, I found the prospect inconceivably painful.

While Rinpoche was still away at the seminary, I received a phone call from someone at Karme Choling saying that a member of the sangha, Tom Ryken, was on his way from Boulder to Karme Choling in a few days and could take Taggie with him. At that point, I phoned Rinpoche, pretty much in hysterics. Rinpoche said firmly, "Drop him off at Tom's house. He'll take Taggie to Karme Choling. Let him go." I was devastated. I felt absolutely alone. I couldn't even call anyone to help me because I couldn't stand to verbalize what was happening. Although I accepted that this was the right thing to do, it was unbearable.

I packed up Taggie's things, and on the appointed day I drove him over to Tom's house. I deposited him on the porch with his suitcase, rang the doorbell, and left. I didn't want to see anyone, and I just couldn't bear to say good-bye. It was awful. Clearly I didn't handle this well: but I couldn't do any better at that point. I felt that I had to let my child go, and this was the only way I could do it.

I suffered over this decision for a long time after that. For years, I had dreams where I was searching for Taggie.

TEN

During most of my childhood and early adolescence in England, I had been a rider. From the first moment I got on a pony as a small child, I felt deeply connected to horses and to horsemanship. My early training was in jumping and cross-country riding. When . I was in boarding school, we were also allowed to go out on fox hunts. I never went to the kill, but I would go out in the early part of the hunt with my pony, Blaze. Later on I did "eventing," which involves competitions or events in three phases, consisting of a simple dressage test, a cross-country test, and a jumping competition. As a teenager, I always hated the dressage component. I found it boring. In England in those years there was very little interest in dressage, so I had little exposure and no real feeling for it.

After my first two years at Benenden, I sold my pony. I didn't ride at all at Kirby Lodge. In fact, I didn't take up riding again until Rinpoche and I moved to Colorado. When Taggie was a baby, I would sometimes go riding at a local stable for an hour or so. I broached the subject with Rinpoche of whether I could buy my own horse. At that time he said that he didn't think it would be a good idea. It might make us look wealthy, which we certainly were not, and people might think that we were throwing money around. He was afraid that people would disapprove of him as a spiritual teacher if they thought that we were living a wealthy, aristocratic sort of life. He asked me to wait. I let the idea go for the time being, although I continued to ride occasionally.

During my pregnancy with Gesar, as I've mentioned, I rode from time to time. When Gesar was a few months old, Rinpoche told me that it would be all right for me to buy a horse. At that time, I had started taking riding lessons with Haze Kennedy, an Australian woman who taught at a stable north of Boulder called Hidden Valley Ranch. From our house in Boulder Heights it was a short drive to the stables. There was a young thoroughbred mare available for purchase and I found her particularly appealing. She was a light bay by the name of Fleur. Rinpoche renamed her Mirage.

I did some jumping competitions with Mirage, and I rode her in some hunter classes. After a few months, my riding instructor approached me with a proposal. She had a slightly older horse that was a more experienced jumper and had some training in dressage, and she herself wanted a young prospect. She asked me if I would be interested in a trade. Her horse was a saddle-bred-thoroughbred cross by the name of Mr. Chips. I agreed to make the trade because I thought it would be helpful for my education as a rider. I felt that I could learn from a horse that knew more than I did.

Mr. Chips was large, a sixteen three hand liver chestnut, a big horse with a wonderful temperament.1 He was sensitive and responsive and willing to work. Rinpoche began calling me Mrs. Chips because I started spending so much time at the barn. I competed Chips in some jumper competitions, and I did quite well in the lower jumper classes with him. Then I decided to ride him. in a three-phase novice event in Colorado. I scored well on the cross-country and the stadium jumping, but I did poorly in dressage.

In order to improve as an all-around rider, I decided to take time off from jumping and concentrate on learning more about dressage. In fact, I decided to devote a year to it. At the end of that year, I fully intended to go back to jumping as my main riding discipline. I began by taking dressage lessons from Haze Kennedy on a regular basis, three times a week. She had some elementary dressage training and was a good instructor. I found that I looked forward to my time at the barn as a break from the hectic, chaotic life that I had with Rinpoche and the children.

At that time, a Hungarian rider by the name of Charles de Kunffy was coming to Colorado on a regular basis to teach dressage clinics. He had been a member of the Hungarian three-event team. I took several of his clinics and then started to show my horse in lower-level dressage events. In a short time, I discovered that I was becoming absolutely fascinated by the art of dressage.

Dressage itself is a French word that simply means "training." The origin of classical horsemanship goes back more than two thousand years. Greek warriors trained their horses so that they would be supple and maneuverable in battle. The earliest surviving treatises on dressage were written by Xenophon, a great Greek general who employed what we would now call dressage training techniques to improve the performance of his horses in battle.

There is no exact equivalent for the word dressage in the English language. Dressage is the deliberate, gymnastic training of the horse over a long period of time, making use of the horse's natural movements and gaits, so that the horse becomes highly trained, agile, and extremely strong while still maintaining the beauty and flexibility that one sees in the natural movements of animals loose in the field. Dressage is a joining together of horse and rider. It is not just that horse and rider work together physically, but a meeting of minds must take place if the training is to be successful. Part of the attraction of dressage is that it produces and depends on such intimate and thorough communication between horse and rider.

The Romans did not have much use for this approach to horsemanship, and during the Dark Ages, the art of dressage was almost completely lost. The armor worn by knights was so heavy that it was impossible for the horses to maneuver with agility. What was needed for medieval battles were sturdy horses that could move in a straight line carrying their knights into combat. The subtlety of dressage was useless in these situations.

During the Renaissance, beginning in the fifteenth century, dressage flourished once again. It was rediscovered in Italy, where the first riding academy in Europe dedicated to the classical art of horsemanship was opened in 1532 in Naples. Noblemen came from all over the continent to learn the discipline of riding, and it soon spread to France, Spain, Germany, and England. It became the fashion to have a small dressage arena attached to all the major courts and noble households of Europe. The Spanish Riding School in Vienna, which Rinpoche and I had visited together in 1975, is the premier example of the classical approach to dressage that developed during the Renaissance. It was built in 1735 as the manege, or arena, attached to the Hapsburg Palace in Vienna, but the school itself predates the building by almost two hundred years, making it the oldest school of dressage still functioning today. Archduke Maximilian, son of emperor Ferdinand I, introduced Spanish horses in Austria in the sixteenth century. The first Spanish horses were given to the Hapsburg family as part of a dowry. They were interbred with local horses at Lippiza, producing the distinct Lippizan breed. It is the stallions from this breed that are used exclusively in the Spanish Riding School.

As I pursued my novice training and learned more about the history of dressage, I felt that I was making a link to a noble discipline, which I wanted to thoroughly explore and master. At a time in my life that was difficult, with the painful realization of the situation with Taggie, it was extremely helpful to have this growing connection to something so uplifted and profound.

Around this time, I purchased a thoroughbred stallion, which we named Vajra Dance. He was from the bloodlines of a famous racehorse named Native Dancer. Vajra Dance had apparently been purchased by a syndicate for a large amount of money. He was competed on the racetrack circuit, but he turned out to be very slow. Then he fractured his sesamoid bone in his left front leg and had to be retired from racing. He was sold for very little to a gentleman living in Sonoma County, California, who gave the horse some training, and the horse had shown an aptitude for dressage. I purchased him to upgrade to a better mount, one that would be more appropriate for dressage competition. I brought the horse back to Colorado, and working with Haze and in clinics with Charles, I learned to ride many dressage movements on him.

When Rinpoche and I visited the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, it spurred me on to involve myself more deeply in my training. Around this time, Charles de Kunffy told me that he felt that I had natural talent and feel for the horse, and I began to sense that this might be the case. I became increasingly committed to fully pursuing the discipline of dressage.

After Taggie left for Karme Choling, I looked into spending an extended period of time studying with Charles. He was headquartered in northern California, where he had been teaching riding at a school for gifted children, and he invited me to come out and work with him. At that point I felt it was impossible for my riding to progress beyond a certain point with the limited resources in Colorado. I discussed this with Rinpoche, telling him that I felt that I was not going to be able to get fully trained riding three times a week at Hidden Valley Ranch. Rinpoche was quite encouraging. He was traveling a great deal and understood that I needed to pursue my own discipline. He supported my need to develop myself in this way.

Dressage was just starting to be appreciated and practiced in the United States at this time, so it was difficult to find a qualified teacher. I went out for two months to train with Charles. Initially, I brought Gesar with me, but the child-care arrangements were very complicated there, so after a few weeks, I sent him back to Boulder. We arranged for a nanny to help care for him in Boulder while I was gone.

I dove into the riding situation in California, and it was a very healing time for me. I spent all day at the barn, and with Charles giving me instruction, I was able to make quite good progress in my riding.

At the end of the two months, I returned home and continued riding on my own. In late February 1976, Rinpoche and I went to Mexico on holiday, accompanied by John and Karen Roper. John was a lawyer and a member of the Vajradhatu board of directors. This time, we went to the village of Patzcuaro, a charming town on the edge of Lake Patzcuaro, several hours south of Guadalajara. Louise and Roger Randolph, students of Rinpoche's from Oklahoma, owned a small vacation house there, with a beautiful walled garden and several other cottages on the property. They were very generous to Rinpoche and me -- and to the Buddhist community as a whole. Earlier, Roger had donated a large parcel of land in southern Colorado to be used as a retreat center. Rinpoche named it Dorje Khyung Dzong, after the retreat center at his monastery in Tibet where he had spent so much time as a young man.

Roger and Louise gave us the use of their house in Mexico many times. On this, our first trip there, we had a delightful holiday. Rinpoche liked to go to the open market in Patzcuaro to buy food for dinner. You also could bargain for beautiful copper plates and bowls there, which were locally made. We sometimes went to a hotel on the main square for dinner. They served a soup there that Rinpoche loved, called Sopa Tarasca, named I believe after the Tarascan Indians whose capital was located on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro. Apparently the recipe was created originally around 1960 by one of the chefs in the area. The tomato broth has a dark chili added to it that gives it a smoky flavor, and pieces of tortilla are broken up and put into the broth.

I brought along my saddle from home, thinking that I would be able to go riding in the village. John Roper thought this was ludicrous and that it was a complete waste of energy to haul the saddle around with us. However, I found a stable near the house and was indeed able to ride almost every day.

When we returned from Mexico, Rinpoche jumped back into teaching and traveling. He was also busy making preparations for the arrival later that spring of His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, with whom he had a heart connection from their time together in Tibet and later in India.2

Back in Boulder, I found myself unsatisfied with my riding regimen. I wanted to devote myself to dressage and training myself as a rider during this period of my life, in addition to being a mother and wife. I told Rinpoche that I was interested in moving to California to study with Charles for a year or two. I could take Gesar with me, and we could come home for extended visits as often as possible. Initially, Rinpoche was a bit shocked, and he seemed conflicted about whether it was a good idea, as was I in some respects. It was not common for a woman with young children to do something like this in this era. Perhaps it would not seem so extreme today. However, I felt it was the right thing for me to do. Rinpoche said, "I'm going to lose my wife if you do this." I replied, "No, it's not a question of you losing your wife. I just want to get proper training. You're traveling so much these days that I don't need to stay here all the time. I need an opportunity to realize my discipline to the fullest potential." I told him that if I wasn't able to pursue the discipline 100 percent; I was going to give it up. I wasn't going to do this unless I could do it properly and completely. After we discussed the situation for a while, he said, "Sweetheart, if this is what you need to do, it's fine. Go ahead." From that time onward, he was completely supportive.

Within quite a short period of time, I had rented a house in Lafayette, California, near Walnut Creek, and Gesar and I moved there. He went to preschool in the neighborhood, and I found a stable near the house where I could keep Vajra Dance. Charles came several times a week to give me riding lessons, and I was able to work with the horse myself on the other days.

Somewhat to my surprise, although I missed Rinpoche, I felt very satisfied having my own life and my own household in California. In a certain way, it felt as though a cloud had been lifted in my life. I didn't feel that there was a problem in my marriage or my relationship with Rinpoche, but I did feel that it was almost impossible for me to have any kind of sewed life in Boulder. It was so difficult to raise a family in the midst of everything that was happening there, and it was even more difficult when nobody outside of the family seemed to appreciate how hard it was.

In that era in Boulder I did have some close friends as well as my relationship with Rinpoche to sustain me, but that was not always enough. There was another side to my relationship with people in the Buddhist community. At times, there was an element of jealousy toward me on the part of some of Rinpoche's students. I was married to him, and in some ways, as his wife, I was the closest person to him. People were extremely hungry for the teachings, and sometimes I appeared to stand in the way. of their unfettered access to my husband. I was often complacent about this because I felt content in my life with Rinpoche, so I was able to relax, have my family, and ignore a lot of things. The early seventies was my time to have my family and my children with him. At the same time, there was a growing dichotomy between Rinpoche's role as a teacher and his role as my husband and the father of our children. This became most apparent at the time that Taggie left our household. I wanted something, a commitment of time, from Rinpoche in the domestic realm, and I could have almost nothing. This was frustrating.

But, at the same time, I didn't develop my riding career out of a conscious desire to get away. I simply became fascinated by dressage and I loved horses. But studying dressage did allow me to develop my own space and my own life. I think, to tell you the truth, that pursuing my own profession was the only way that our marriage was able to survive. On the one hand, there was the unconditional nature of our love and our relationship. On the other hand, to a very great extent; Rinpoche belonged to his students. He belonged to the dharma. There was never a question about that. I had to make peace with it.

Once Rinpoche understood the genuine nature of my commitment to riding, he encouraged my independence and helped me to grow with my own discipline. He was incredibly supportive, and he never complained again about my being away because of my riding career. He didn't seem threatened by it or concerned. His encouragement helped me to find the sense of freedom and enjoyment at this time in my life. I was still so, so sad about Taggie. I dreamed about him a great deal. But I began to move forward and to put my life back together.

I was barely settled in the house in Lafayette when Khyentse Rinpoche arrived at the end of April for a two-week visit to the Bay Area. He had already been in New York and was going on to Boulder after he left California. Rinpoche had told me stories about him for many years, and I was aware that he held him in the highest esteem. I would say that Rinpoche had a bit of a spiritual love affair with Khyentse Rinpoche. When you saw the two of them together, they seemed extremely close.

Interestingly, His Holiness Khyentse Rinpoche and his party arrived in Berkeley before Rinpoche did. He had already greeted His Holiness in New York and spent time with him there, and he was committed to teaching a seminar at Karme Choling before coming out to Berkeley. I think it was very telling that he let other people do the advance work for His Holiness's visit. Rinpoche felt that his students could greet Khyentse Rinpoche and host him properly until he arrived. This was a measure of how much trust he put in his students and how far he felt they had come in just a few years.

After the Karmapa's visit in 1974, Rinpoche kept certain organizational features of that visit intact. For one thing, he felt that the students who had provided security for the Karmapa's visit and had been his drivers were both benefiting from this discipline and also creating a strong container in which the teachings of the Buddha could be presented with proper respect for and recognition of their power. Rinpoche originally gave the name Dorje Kusung, or "vajra body protectors," to this group. Later, they became known as the Dorje Kasung, which means the "protectors or guardians of the command or the sacred word" -- which refers to the Buddhist teachings. He asked several people to assume leadership roles within this new organization in Boulder, and he charged them with protecting the physical space at Dorje Dzong (the name he gave our national headquarters in Boulder) and with protecting and serving himself and his family, as well as visiting teachers. He also began to develop local chapters of the Dorje Kasung in other centers. Wherever Rinpoche taught, after His Holiness Karmapa's visit, members of the Dorje Kasung were present as his personal guards, or guardians, and they also created a sense of boundary when he taught, positioning themselves in various parts of the shrine room where he was speaking. Some people found the presence of the Dorje Kasung threatening, and they mistakenly thought that either these people were armed, which was ridiculous, or that they were trained to be aggressors. In fact, their function was much more as peacekeepers. There would be more developments in this realm as time went along.

This year of building the kingdom:
Dealing with the four seasons,
Studying how millet grows
And how the birds form their eggs;
Interested in studying how Tampax are made,
And how furniture can be gold-leafed;
Studying the construction of my home,
How the whitewash of the plain wood can be dignified,
How we could develop terry cloth on our floor,
How my dapons can shoot accurately

-- First Thought Best Thought, 108 Poems, by Chogyam Trungpa

The Boulder guru keeps a household protection squad, known as the Vajra Guard. They are the Beefeaters of Buddhism. When the guru goes out in public, so do they. (In between times, they meditate.) The rumor is, they're armed with M-16's. Others say it's submachine guns.

-- The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, With a Copious Collection of German Documents Assembled by the Author, by Tom Clark

-- Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche -- Screencap Gallery, produced and directed by Johanna Demetrakas

It was a flowering such as had never been seen before. Naropa University opened its doors. Every major city in the United States and Europe had a Vajradhatu meditation center and ambassadors were sent out from the Court of Shambhala. When the Prince gripped my arm for support he guided me through the halls, streets, and airports. His step was sure and firm. It was as if I were the crippled one instead of him. The Court was filled with activity.

In one week I had a schedule of over 150 volunteer servants: guards, drivers, cooks, cleaners, nannies, gardeners, servers, secretaries, shoppers, and waiters. All were wanting to participate in the flowering energy that filled the Court, which made it indeed seem to stretch over several miles with a park in the center on the top of a great circular mountain. What had been created was an openness where everything could be explored. We were encouraged to practice, study, and investigate our inner and outer worlds and examine any resulting pain or pleasure.

In the midst of this creative turmoil the Prince challenged me on my military propensities with a casual remark made into the bathroom mirror one morning.

"When we take over Nova Scotia, Johnny, you will need to attack some of the small military bases there."

''Attack military bases!" I said with surprise. "Me?"

"Well, not alone," smiled the Prince, still looking into the mirror examining his freshly brushed teeth. "You could have a commando unit of Jeeps and halftracks." He was looking at me in the mirror as he continued, "You had a halftrack once, didn't you?"

"Yes," I replied, remembering the olive drab army vehicle I owned at the farming school I once ran, seemingly a hundred years ago.

"Well?" the Prince's voice sounded.

My mind activated like a World War II movie as our intrepid band in Jeeps and halftracks raced along the curved snake-like back roads of Nova Scotia toward the unsuspecting enemy. My khaki wool uniform blended with the green countryside, I gripped the metal frame of the Thompson machine gun in my capable hands. On my head was the red beret bearing the Trident badge and the motto "Victory Over War." I smelled the engine oil fumes mixing with the flower perfumes of the country lane as we whipped along on our desperate mission. The sun glinted on our bayonets, or wait, perhaps it was night ...

"Well?" asked the Prince again.

"Oh, oh," was the reply, as I returned from the battle to the bathroom. "Yes, yes, Sir," I said. "We could do that."

"Good," continued the Prince. "You might have to kill one or two.

Kill one or two? What's that mean-kill one or two? was my silent response.

"But I thought we are not supposed to kill," I said, somewhat alarmed.

"Just a few resisters," said the Prince.

Resister, what the fuck is a resister? ran through my mind. Out loud I asked, "Resister? What kind of a resister?"

"Someone may resist enlightenment," stated the Prince.

"Oh, those. Well, yes, we could take care of them," I reassured him.

"Good, good," said the Prince, turning to leave the bath­room. As he opened the door he concluded with, "Well, Major Perks, perhaps you could put all of that together."

I spent the next several hours studying Army surplus catalogs and The Shotgun News. At the local gun store I picked up copies of Commando and SAS Training Manuals. I made a list of equipment and concluded that this "invasion" was going to be costly. I went to the Prince.

"Where will we get the money to organize this armed com­mando force, Sir?" I said, almost saluting.

"Perhaps we could steal the equipment," he suggested.

"Wow," I exclaimed. "You mean like a covert operation." The words and idea thrilled me.

"Exactly," said the Prince. ''And we need a code name for it." He contemplated for a moment and then said, "How about Operation Deep Cut?" As I turned the words over in my mind he continued, "Yes, what is needed here is a surgical strike."

I excitedly repeated the code name, "Operation Deep Cut, covert operation Surgical Strike." This was going to be worth killing just one or two!

"Yes," said the Prince with delight. "Buy some books on tactics and strategy. We should all study them. And you, Major Perks, will be in command." I could hardly wait to take my leave and get started on the campaign. I put on my military hat, saluted the Prince, and ran out of the room, tripping and falling down half the stairs in my haste. The Prince's head popped out of his sitting room doorway. ''Are you okay, Major?" he called down to me.

"Yes, Sir, fine, Sir. I just missed a step," I replied, pulling my uniform straight.

"Good," he said. "Jolly good, jolly, jolly good. Carry on, Major." I saluted again and rushed down the remaining stairs.

I could not wait to tell the other officers in the military about my secret mission. They were all amazed. "Have you told David yet?" was Jim's response. "Not yet," I replied. David was the Head of the Military, now that Jerry had dropped out. I could not fathom why the Prince had chosen David for this position. David was a very unmilitary, slight of build, a Jewish intellectual. He looked more like Mr. Peepers in a uniform -- nothing like Montgomery or Patton.

"I bet his balls shrivel up like raisins when I tell him about this," I scoffed. Indeed, David was quite alarmed at my description of "killing one or two resisters."

"Let me talk to Rinpoche before you do anything," he said anxiously, falling back in his chair.

"Okay," I said, adding with a tone of command, "go ahead, but it's all set. The Prince said so."

Later the Prince called me into his sitting room. I explained that David seemed hesitant about killing a few resisters.

"Oh, he's such a Jewish intellectual," said the Prince.

"Why, that's exactly what I think," I agreed.

"Really?" said the Prince, looking at me with curiosity. "Good, jolly good. You carry on, Major. I'll take care of David and tell him you have a free hand." I left hurriedly to tell the other officers the latest news on my secret commando operation....

Lady Diana, the Prince's wife, had confiscated his Scottish Eliot Clan kilt some months back because she felt he did not look good in Scottish regalia. It was rumored that the missing kilt was hidden at the mother-in-law's house.

"What we need is a practice run," said the Prince to me one morning. "Major, here's a job for your new commando group. We will invite Diana and my in-laws to the Court for dinner and while everyone is here your group will retrieve my kilt."

I saluted with a very big "Yes, Sir" and ran off to inform my comrades-in-arms.

The mother-in-law's house was situated in a small field near the edge of town. On the night in question we waited in our darkened limousine on a side road by the Court. There were four of us, dressed in black. We watched in nervous excitement as the mother-in-law's car pulled up to the Court. and the occupants entered the building. "Let's go," I commanded in a hushed military tone, and the driver sped toward our goal. Near the house he shut off the headlights and silently rolled to a stop in the shadows. We rolled out into the grass ditch and crawled on our bellies across the lawn. I pushed at one of the dining room windows. It opened and I was halfway through when Walter hissed, "The front door is open."

It was too late, however, as I was already pinned in the open window frame by the top window which had slid down on my back. My legs were dangling outside and my arms and head were inside the dining room. The others entered the dark house in a more upright fashion and hauled me through by yanking on my arms....

Triumphantly we returned to the Court. Dinner was finished and dessert was about to be served. I placed the kilt on a silver tray and presented it to the Prince and the seated guests. Lady Diana cried out laughingly "Oh no, Darling" to the Prince, who beamed and gave me the thumbs up sign. The other guests were delightedly amused.

In the following weeks we undertook other commando operations with odd code names: Operation Awake, Operation Blue Pancake, Operation Secret Mind, and Operation Snow White. "Why Snow White?" I asked the Prince. "Because she has to be woken up," was the reply. That made no sense to me. Why did you need to wake up a military operation when we were already totally awake and combat ready? I labeled the answer as crazy and added it to the collection.

During this time I started to have flashbacks to my childhood during the war. I had dreams of the bombing, the bodies in the yellow shrouds, the news footage of concentration camps. I began to feel confused about which was real, my remembrances of things past, the present military operations and the Court, or the future takeover of Nova Scotia. My uneasy feelings returned as did the panic attacks.

I did the same old stuff to avoid confronting any of it. I immersed myself in work, sex, entertainment, alcohol, and food. I knew I was okay, if only I could get myself together. I poured out my woes to the Prince, who was no help. In fact, he did not seem to understand at all and was quite unsympathetic. The more I freaked out the more demands he made on me....

"How are things going for the military encampment?" he asked....

-- The Mahasiddha and His Idiot Servant, by John Riley Perks

One of the most notable religious leaders of India about 1500 A.D. was Kabir. In his system Hinduism and Islam mingle. Nanak, who founded the religion of the Sikhs, is only one of a number of teachers who drew their inspiration from him. Kabir vigorously condemned both idolatory and caste; and he had great influence all over North India. In the Bijak, a volume of his religious verse, there is a poem which pictures the fighting yogi and his irregularities very vividly:-- [23]

1. O brother, never have I seen yogi like this: puffed up with pride he walks, caring for nothing.

2. He teaches the religion of Mahadeva (i.e. Siva) and therefore is called a Mahant.

3. In market and street he sits in the posture of a yogi; he is an imperfect Siddha (saint) a lover of Maya (the illusion of the world).

4. When did Dattatreya [24] attack his enemies? when did Sukadeva [24] lay a cannon?

5. When did Narada [24] fire a gun, or Vyasadeva [24] sound a horn?

6. They who fight are of little wisdom; shall I call such men ascetics or bandits?

-- The Fighting Ascetics of India, by J.N. Farquhar, M.A., D. Litt. (Oxon.)

In 1976, when Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche arrived, members of the Dorje Kasung provided service to him and his party and also to Rinpoche and our family. Once again, they put together the motorcades for the visit, as they had done for the Karmapa, and they were on duty in His Holiness's household as well as at Rinpoche's house. When His Holiness was scheduled to be at the center in Berkeley or San Francisco, the Dorje Kasung would drive him there, greet him at the door, and provide an unobtrusive presence in the hall where he spoke or conducted a ceremony.

To prepare for Khyentse Rinpoche's visit, Rinpoche sent out several students as an advance team, including Michael Root and Tom Rich. At this time, Rinpoche had made an announcement to the Vajradhatu staff in Boulder that Tom Rich would be empowered in the summer of 1976 as his regent. This was still supposed to be a secret, but gossip has always traveled fast in our community, and most people were aware that Tom Rich was going to playa very important role in the future of Rinpoche's teaching.

My house was about a thirty-minute drive from the Berkeley dharmadhatu, where Khyentse Rinpoche would be teaching. It was not feasible for Rinpoche to stay with me throughout the whole visit since he had many events to attend or conduct in Berkeley and San Francisco. The members of the dharmadhatu rented a nice house for him in the Berkeley Hills. I sometimes stayed with him there, and he spent time at my house in Lafayette.

Part of the preparations centered on transforming the home of Sam and Hazel Bercholz into a residence for Khyentse Rinpoche. They had generously offered the use of their house for 'this purpose. Once again, as had been done for His Holiness the Karmapa, walls were covered In satin, brocades put on chairs and made into bedspreads, shrines constructed and installed. People were now becoming a little more familiar with this approach to hosting a Tibetan teacher, and although it was a huge undertaking, it went fairly smoothly. Once Khyentse Rinpoche arrived, Ani Pema Chodron (now the resident teacher at Gampo Abbey and the best-selling author of many books on Buddhism) was among a group of students who often served at His Holiness's residence in Berkeley Hills. She had taken her ordination as a novice nun in 1974 and was one of very few Western monastics in our community at this time. She was very cheerful and always willing to help with things around the house. This is the first time I that I can remember meeting Pema.

There were also many preparations at the Berkeley dharmadhatu. More shocking to people was that Michael and Tom also wanted Rinpoche's rented house to be dolled up a great deal.

It was one thing to make all this fuss for His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, but why did my husband need such fancy accommodations? No one suggested satin, but Michael and Tom made it clear that the house's weary couches and slightly broken down overstuffed chairs wouldn't do, nor would it work to use its Indian bedspreads on either the bed or the walls. Furniture was borrowed and rented, floors scrubbed, art borrowed and hung on the walls, and the house was transformed from a middle-class intellectual's frumpy home to something of another order.

The idea was also introduced that Rinpoche would be dining more formally, and that good china, silver, and crystal were needed for his household. Jacquie Giorgi, a woman in the dharmadhatu, had been given Lenox china and silver as wedding gifts, and she agreed to loan everything. Inexpensive crystal glasses were purchased, along with a set of Oriental dishes for Japanese and Chinese food service. People were invited to sign up to serve meals at Rinpoche's residence and to help out around the house in other ways.

I myself was a bit surprised by all this, watching it at a distance, since Rinpoche and I had never lived this way in Boulder. Apparently this experiment had gotten under way in New York the previous month when Rinpoche was there to teach several seminars and host His Holiness. Rinpoche stayed in an elegant apartment in Manhattan, and his household had been much more elaborate than anyone remembered from the past. Rinpoche seemed to be taking another leap or embarking on yet another path, putting together the beginnings of what would soon become the Kalapa Court, as our home was known from the summer of 1976 on.

As the date for Khyentse Rinpoche's arrival loomed, it was clear that His Holiness's household would not be ready in time. I volunteered to have him stay at my house for several days while the transformation of his residence was completed. On the day of Khyentse Rinpoche's arrival, Gesar and I drove with people from the dharmadhatu to the airport. Sam and Hazel were in the welcoming party from the dharmadhatu, along with Tom Rich, David Rome, Michael Root, and others representing Vajradhatu. We all greeted His Holiness as he stepped off the plane at the San Francisco airport. A tall, stately gentleman with penetrating eyes and a huge smile, Khyentse Rinpoche traveled in robes, but they were layman's robes since he was a married lama. His wife had stayed behind in Bhutan. He was accompanied by his daughter, Chime Wangmo, his grandson Rapjam Rinpoche, and several other attendants. His bearing and presence were noble. He beamed, and people melted around him. I felt immediately drawn to him.

After a welcoming ceremony at the Berkeley dharmadhatu, His Holiness was driven to my house in Lafayette. I gave him Gesar's bedroom, and Gesar and I slept together in my bedroom across the hall. His daughter and grandson were put up somewhere else, as my house was simply too small for all of them. With Khyentse Rinpoche came an entourage of drivers, attendants, cooks, and other dharmadhatu members. I made mamas for His Holiness, which are Tibetan dumplings that Rinpoche had taught me how to prepare. They are a great· favorite with Tibetans and quite delicious. The newly trained servers brought the food out to us with shaking hands. His Holiness took it all in stride. I think he would have been happy with a simple family-style meal, but he graciously accepted the awkward pomp and circumstance that was offered.

For the remainder of the time that he stayed with me, the hordes were banished. His Holiness had his. translator, Tulku Pema Wangyal Rinpoche, stay with him so that he could communicate with me. We provided a single Dorje Kasung member and driver to help. out at the house. Everyone else cleared out, so it was a quiet and delightful time for me being in the presence of this greatly accomplished teacher.

The day after Khyentse Rinpoche arrived, I invited him to come to the stables with me, and he spent several hours watching me ride. He loved the horses, and seemed to enjoy himself. He came out to the stables several times. When I think about it now, realizing what a truly great man His Holiness was, I marvel how I took the whole situation for granted.

One morning while he was staying in the house, I came out of my bedroom, and His Holiness and his attendant were sitting cross-legged on the floor in the narrow corridor between the two bedrooms. He motioned me to sit down across from him. I came and sat down on the floor near him. He was sitting in front of a little heating grate. I sat on the other side of the grate. After a little while, through his translator he said to me, "I'm sorry. I have to give you some difficult news." I inquired, "What is it?" He said, "I had a dream last night. Your son Gesar is the incarnation of Sechen Kongtru." Then he said, "I know this may be very difficult for you, but this is my dream, and we should enthrone him right away."

I have to say I was somewhat shocked. He was telling me that Gesar was the reincarnation of my husband's own teacher, Jamgon Kongtrul of Sechen, who had died in prison in Tibet around 1960. Somehow, being in Khyentse Rinpoche's presence, I was able to accept what he was saying and to take it in stride. Like Rinpoche, he commanded the space in such a way that you felt completely at ease and able to set aside normal, habitual patterns and reactions to things, at least for a while. So I just took this in, and we. proceeded to talk about the plans for how to accomplish the enthronement ceremony in Berkeley.

As soon as I could, I excused myself and phoned Rinpoche with this news. He also seemed to take it as somewhat matter-of-fact, and he seemed quite pleased and excited. We talked about having the enthronement ceremony as soon as possible, within the next few days, as soon as possible after Rinpoche's arrival from the East Coast.

Then, of course, I had to break the news to Gesar. He also seemed to think it was a fine idea, although I wasn't sure if he understood what I was telling him. He was barely three at the time. Much later, he told me that as a child he had many memories of life in Tibet, so I think he had always sensed something and now it was making sense to him why he had these sorts of flashbacks.

One thing that was curious was that Rinpoche had scheduled a public seminar to be held in Berkeley on the weekend right after His Holiness left for Boulder. It had been entitled -- months in advance -- Empowerment." This seemed remarkably synchronistic.

A date for Gesar's enthronement was set, and the next day His Holiness moved to his own residence in Berkeley, where he was joined by his daughter Chime and his grandson Rapjam Rinpoche. His Holiness was already scheduled to conduct several public ceremonies for the members of the dharmadhatu. It was decided that a few days following those ceremonies, he would enthrone Gesar as Jamgon Kongtrul of Sechen.

About a year earlier, the dharmadhatu had moved into the second floor of an office building in downtown Berkeley that was owned by the Odd Fellows of Berkeley, a group somewhat like the Freemasons. In fact, it was their headquarters. They still kept one or two offices and a large hall for their own ceremonies, but they leased us a smaller hall, which held, about 150 people. The Berkeley center is still in that space today.

Throughout Khyentse Rinpoche's visit, I was trying to juggle my commitments in the riding world with the events in the Buddhist world. One day I drove up to Santa Rosa, which was about two hours north, to look at a horse that I was interested in buying. I had to speed back to get to the dharmadhatu in time for a ceremony that afternoon. I have always been an absolutely wild driver. I was driving my truck, a silver Dodge Ram Charger, and going at least ninety miles per hour. Suddenly I saw lights flashing in my rearview mirror, and I realized that I was about to get pulled over by the police. I was afraid that I would get a big ticket and certainly be very late for the events in Berkeley. So I started braking and putting my other foot on the gas at the same time, to make the truck's movements look very erratic. Then I leaned down and pulled off the gas pedal.

In that truck there were two buttons that attached the pedal to the base; It had come loose before, so I knew about this. Then I pulled over and stopped, obtrusively holding the pedal in one hand. When the state trooper approached the car, he looked quite stern. I pretended to be completely hysterical. I told him the gas pedal had jammed, so that the only way I could stop the truck was to pull it off. I kept saying, "I thought I was going to die! I thought I was going to die!" I threw myself on the steering wheel. The trooper was quite concerned, and he was incredibly nice to me. He said, "Please calm down. Everything's going to be okay. Don't worry. I'm going to help you." Then he asked me if I thought I could drive, and I told him I thought I'd be okay. I didn't want him to see how easy it would be to reconnect the gas pedal, so we tried controlling the gas pedal by pushing on the little metal thing on the end, and it seemed to work okay. He said, "Okay, I'll lead you to the nearest gas station, and they can help you there." When we got to a gas station, I waited for him to leave, and then I put the gas pedal back on and took off. I arrived just in' time for the beginning of the event.

To prepare for Gesar's enthronement ceremony, some women in the dharmadhatu who had experience sewing had made him a tiny set of Tibetan monastic robes to wear. A small throne was hastily constructed for the ceremony, from plywood covered in cotton batting, topped with satin and brocades.

Gesar had to have his hair cut short for the ceremony. Rinpoche told me that I didn't have to shave his head, but I made such a mess of his hair when I tried to cut it that we ended up shaving it anyway. When he returned to preschool after this event, some of the children teased him about his bald head, hut he didn't take much notice.

I might have worried that something terrible would happen to Gesar, based on the experience with Taggie, but I didn't really believe that tulku disease was the source of Taggie's problems. I knew that Gesar was a strong individual who could handle whatever came along. Rinpoche and I both felt that he would be fine. When Rinpoche got to town, he stayed out at the house in Lafayette with us for several nights so that we could all be together and adjust to His Holiness's recognition of our second son as a tulku. While Rinpoche was there, he Came to the stables, where he met Charles de Kunffy for the first time. He had wanted to meet the man for whom I had moved to California. Charles was completely taken with Rinpoche and wanted to visit him in Berkeley at the first opportunity.

The day of his enthronement, Gesar and I were driven by members of the Dorje Kasung to the dharmadhatu in Berkeley. He was dressed in his little monks' robes, and he looked adorable, I must say. He was beaming the entire time. When we got there, His Holiness was on a throne in the shrine hall, already making preparations. Rinpoche had also arrived ahead of us, having come from his house in Berkeley. There were several hundred members of the dharmadhatu assembled in the shrine room. When we got to the entrance of the meditation hall, everyone stood up and Gesar walked in, very much a little gentleman, with me right behind him. He sat on his little throne and I sat in a chair next to him for most of the ceremony. At one point when he became restless, I had to sit up on the throne and he sat on my lap. Rinpoche was seated on a chair next to the thrones for His Holiness and Gesar. Rinpoche looked incredibly happy throughout the whole thing. Osel was also there to witness the enthronement. He was in boarding school at the Ojai Valley School near Santa Barbara at this time, a school founded on, the teachings of Krishnamurti and Rudolf Steiner. He was maturing into a much more confident and outgoing young man.

The enthronement of a reincarnate teacher is a traditional ceremony. His Holiness performed the liturgy in Tibetan, with a translator explaining to all of us what Khyentse Rinpoche was doing and saying. He presented Gesar with certain ritual objects, and he gave ,him a series of blessings and empowerments. To keep him quiet during the whole thing, His Holiness would lean over and feed Gesar candies. He had quite a supply with him to dole out! I also had a stash of sweets in case more were needed. His Holiness also gave a talk about the relationship between the Kongtruls and the Trungpa tulkus and how they had been close during each generation, with one being the teacher to the next, and vice versa, as new generations were born. At the end of the ceremony, everyone was invited to come up and present a white scarf to His Holiness and another to Gesar as an offering, and Gesar blessed everyone by putting his hand on their heads, which is also traditional. Rinpoche and I were the first ones to offer scarves and receive our son's blessing. Then everyone else filed up. Gesar behaved magnificently during all of these proceedings, and he seemed to take to the whole situation quite naturally. Of course, children love attention" and he was definitely the center of attention that day!

The day after the enthronement, Khyentse Rinpoche departed from the San Francisco airport. Everyone had been deeply affected by his visit and by his extraordinary presence, so it was a touchingly sad good-bye for us all. We felt that in meeting him we were meeting the heart of the Tibetan tradition in which Rinpoche had been raised, and to have that coming so personally into our lives was very moving.

For the next several weeks, Rinpoche was teaching a lecture series at the Berkeley dharmadhatu. One night I went out to a club in San Francisco with Charles and Rod, a good friend of his. Around eleven o'clock I suggested that we drop in on Rinpoche. Charles was worried that Rinpoche would have already gone to sleep, but I assured him this was extremely unlikely. So we dropped by, without any notice. When we got there, Rinpoche was sitting in the living room, impeccably dressed in a suit, surrounded by a group of about a dozen students who were also very well dressed. They were having drinks before sitting down to a formal dinner. Rinpoche was delighted to see us and insisted that we stay for dinner.

We sat down to a lavish meal in the dining room. There was an exquisite linen tablecloth and beautiful linen napkins, and the food was served on the very nice Lenox china that was on loan. In the middle of the table was a large ornate silver candelabra. There were five or six servers, who served each course, kept the wine flowing, and cleared our plates from one course to the next. Charles couldn't believe that Rinpoche ate like this every night. I couldn't believe it either, but I didn't let on that this was any different than a typical night in our household had ever been.

Charles was enchanted. As the evening progressed, I could see that Rinpoche had a few designs on Charles. He wanted to know everything about Charles's riding background. Rinpoche also started to intimate that Charles might make a very successful career iu Colorado by starting a school there with me. I realized that he had my interests at heart -- wanting to see my career go forward and wanting me to connect with powerful people in the dressage world -- and also that he might have an idea about how to bring his wife back to Colorado at some time in the future!

Throughout the month, Rinpoche continued to court Charles, and Charles remained absolutely enamored of Rinpoche. At the very end of the month, just before Rinpoche went to Santa Cruz, he invited Charles, Rod, and me for a banquet at the house. During this month, Rinpoche had Max King, one of his students who was an excellent Chinese cook, preparing all of his meals. Rinpoche arranged for Max to make a roast suckling pig for the banquet. Max had never cooked a whole animal like this before, but he consulted a number of chefs and was able to make a delicious meal that was also magnificently presented at the dinner table. Charles was absolutely beside himself. He was a pretty sybaritic individual, and Rinpoche really got to him with the roast suckling pig. It was beyond the beyond of what he could imagine someone doing in their own home. I must say it was quite a tour de force on Rinpoche's part.

At the end of the month Rinpoche returned to Boulder, and I stayed on in Lafayette. Around this time, Pat Cate joined our household as Gesar's nanny. She was the mother of Kelsey, the child who had tragically died at the 1975 seminary. Kelsey had been her only child, and she was still very much in mourning for him. I saw her at one of the events at the dharmadhatu in Berkeley, and I could feel her pain. My heart went out to her. I particularly sympathized with her because of my feelings for Taggie. Rinpoche and I talked about it, and he thought it would be a good thing for her to be part of a family and to have some positive contact with a young child. I invited her to live with me and help with Gesar. She stayed with us on and off for a number of years. When she remarried, her husband, Tom Adducci, also joined the household.

Pat became quite involved in our life day to day. I remember that once she had to break up a terrible fight between Gesar and me. I put him to bed at the end of a particularly trying day, but he absolutely would not stay down. He kept getting up while Pat and I were trying to have dinner. Finally, I said, "If you get up one more time, I'm going to spank you." He got up again, and I swatted him. Gesar being Gesar, he hit me back. He was absolutely indomitable, even at that age. He was just three years old, and I couldn't control him at all, even with physical force. We really started going at it, and Pat had to separate us. She put Gesar to bed, and I stayed out of it.

Gesar was strong willed from day one, and becoming a tulku didn't put a dent in that. He could be quite naughty at times. Gesar was terribly cute, but he was a wild man at that age. At the house in Lafayette, I received a new checkbook in the mail one day. Gesar woke up in the wee hours of the morning and ripped all the checks out and laid them on the living room floor. He then took paints from his room and proceeded to paint not only the checks but the whole carpet in the living room of our rental house. Perhaps this was the first sign that he had inherited some of his father's artistic talent, but I didn't appreciate what he had done at all. During the summer, I took Gesar to Boulder with me to see Rinpoche for a few weeks. While I was home, Rinpoche invited Charles to come for a visit as well. Rinpoche definitely was still courting Charles and pushing the idea that he should start a dressage academy in Boulder. Charles, however, resisted. He wanted to remain in California and wasn't ready to make such a big move. He had just invested in property in southern California, where he hoped to have a successful training school. I also think he was a little intimidated by Rinpoche and the scene around him, and not sure what he would be getting into if he moved to Colorado.

At the end of the summer, when I went back to California to continue my dressage training, Gesar and I moved down to Charles's property in Hesperia, which was in the high desert in southern California. Charles had recently opened his school there, where he felt he could do. more intensive training of both horses and riders. I only stayed for a short period of time, a matter of months, because I was becoming increasingly. frustrated with my riding. I was training intensely, but I wasn't getting the scores that I wanted in competition. I began to feel that there were major holes in my training. I was already competing Vajra Dance at the upper or international levels of dressage, having worked very hard on his training. Still, although the horse was showing at these levels, I didn't feel that my own training was anywhere near complete. Charles would tell me that I shouldn't be so fixated on my scores. However, I felt that they were reflective of my ability and knowledge.

I knew that something was missing. On an ongoing basis I was not scoring nearly as high as I should, based on the time and effort I was putting in and the feedback I was getting from Charles. When I didn't do well in an event and was upset, Charles would just say to me, "Well, a lady would come back after not doing well at a show, have a glass of sherry, and forget about it."

Over time, considerable tension developed between Charles and me about my training. Nevertheless, I enjoyed spending time with him, and I valued his help. I also felt obligated to help him build up his school. He became concerned about being able to make the mortgage payments on the property because it turned out that not enough people were willing to study with him in that remote desert location. He became very stressed out and developed high blood pressure. We continued to have serious disagreements. Finally, I reached a decision that I couldn't get the training that I needed m this situation. I decided to return home to Boulder for a while until I could sort out what the next step for my dressage career might be.