Re: Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa by Diana Mu
Posted: Sun Jul 28, 2019 2:53 am
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:
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.
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.