by Sarita [Cherry] Armstrong
2020
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The move to a bigger property at Dalhousie also allowed for some modest expansion of the school, requiring more volunteers and a gearing up of the administration. Cherry Armstrong, an eighteen-year-old whose mother was active in the Buddhist Society in London, arrived towards the end of the school's first summer in the hills.
Her role was a loosely defined mix of administrative and secretarial, particularly helping with the correspondence generated by the Tibetan Friendship Group and Freda's scheme for pen friends for young Tibetan refugees.The western friend would include a small monetary gift, usually in the form of money orders ... In return the Tibetan pen friend would send a little photograph or a prayer written in Tibetan ... My job initially was to keep this scheme working and it was often a life-saver for individuals with no financial aid. It was a system that needed no overheads -- once the connection was established the money went directly to the person for whom it was intended and usually continued for years.
Freda was good at delegating, and at multitasking. Every morning she 'held court' with a pile of papers (the morning post) on her lap. Tibetan matters were handed over to Trungpa Tulku who acted as her interpreter and scribe (as well as doing his own religious and language studies). Indian matters were handed to the Indian administrator of the school, Attar Singh; English letters were handed to me, while Freda herself would be simultaneously writing her own more important letters. During this time there would be frequent Tibetan or Indian visitors asking for help or for Freda to use her influence on their behalf and everyone was attended to with care and foresight. Sitting beside her whilst all this was going on I could see that her method of coping was to give her undivided attention to the specific matter in hand; a kind of purposeful concentration to the exclusion of all other matters. When one matter was dealt with, the next had her exclusive attention .... She had an immense capacity for work.19
Cherry learnt to type, often with an old typewriter balanced on her lap or on her bed. It was rudimentary but it worked. Alongside the daily grind, Freda was also adept at maintaining connections with those of influence. When a couple of months after the move to Dalhousie Anita Morris headed home to England, she carried a package for Christmas Humphreys, the judge and doyen of the Buddhist Society in London, and for the renowned violinist Yehudi Menuhin.
Among those who came to visit was the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who turned up 'with an equally scruffy-looking mate, looking like a couple of beggars' -- as Cherry recalls. 'Freda invited him to our communal supper. I can't say I was impressed.'20
Cherry Armstrong's unpublished account of the year she spent at the Young Lamas' Home School has the freshness and excitement of a youthful odyssey but one laced with a shrewd eye for how the operation held together as well as affection for the lamas and her fellow volunteers. She described Freda as a 'grey-haired English lady in a dark red sari, looking very much like a lama herself, who greeted her on arrival with a bear-hug and a resounding kiss. 'She talked of England with some nostalgia in spite of the fact that she had completely adopted the Indian way of life, the Buddhist religion, and the oriental way of conducting affairs.' The main room at Kailash, large and shabby, 'could have been the sitting room of an old English farmhouse if it were not for the red-robed figures padding silently over the worn carpet.' She had a room with views over the mountains, heated by a stove, 'a squat black metal cylinder standing with its three legs in a pan of water to prevent the floorboards burning', with a lid into which wood and fir cones were fed.21In the evening the lamas were doing a special puja, or religious chanting ceremony, to which we were all invited. The lamas were already assembled in the shrine room as we seated ourselves cross-legged at the back of the room. As they began chanting the sound which filled the room was completely alien to my ears and at first seemed quite cacophonous. Yet there was a fascination about it and I soon learnt to notice the rhythms and variations in tone. Half way through the ceremony the chanting faded away. Tin mugs were distributed and a monk brought Tibetan tea in a kettle with a yellow marigold stuck into the spout. I had been warned about Tibetan tea made with butter and salt as well as milk, but no one had warned me that unless I hid my mug somewhere out of reach it would be refilled again and again in spite of desperately shaking my head, nor that my pleadings of 'No more, thank you,' would be taken as mere politeness so long as my mug stood unguarded within easy reach of the spout of the kettle.
Cherry was also drawn into the teaching at the school -- one of perhaps half-a-dozen young westerners of different nationalities, only a few of whom had a serious interest in Buddhism. She found the atmosphere at the school to be relaxed and convivial. 'It was a place of laughter and joking.'
The yearly rhythm of the school adapted to changing circumstances. The Home School operated in Dalhousie from April to November. During those summer months, as Cherry recalls, the tulkus could learn English, French or German as well as Hindi, general knowledge and simple mathematics, while still keeping mainly to the rules of monastic discipline. One of the aims of the school was to avoid a social rift between the bulk of the Tibetan refugees who were getting educated in Indian schools and the young lamas, the elite of Tibetan society, whose religious vocation required them to be educated separately. The plan was that each winter the pupils would return to their gurus and concentrate on their religious studies.
In the first winter in Dalhousie, that plan was disrupted by a month-long border war between India and China, which ended with the victorious Chinese declaring a ceasefire on 20th November 1962. China crossed into what India held to be its territory both on the western part of the border, in Aksai Chin a remote area of eastern Ladakh, and in the east in what was then known in India as the North East Frontier Agency where many Tibetans had initially sought refuge. The school wasn't in any immediate peril but there was a real sense of alarm. 'Every evening we sat silently attentive round the tiny transistor radio as it crackled and spluttered out the latest reports of fighting and death,' Armstrong wrote. 'Every evening the news became worse. For this reason many of the tulkus' gurus who were living in the frontier area very near to the fighting had begged Freda not to send the tulkus back to them as was customary for the winter months. Freda had of course agreed and in a manner typical of her ways she decided to turn this into something positive for everyone.'22 She decided to move the entire school for the winter months to a Buddhist centre in Delhi, the Ladakh Buddhist Vihar, in one of the older and more central districts of the city close to the Yamuna river.
And she arranged two coaches to transport both young lamas and volunteers. On the way, the entire school visited the Dalai Lama at Dharamsala -- where Freda, Cherry and the lamas had their photo taken with the most revered figure within the Tibetan diaspora -- and meandered through Punjab on the way to the Indian capital. From there, several of the group went by train on a pilgrimage to the Buddhist sites in north India -- as Freda sometimes remarked, the Tibetan refugees were helping to bring Buddhism back to its original home, to the land where the Buddha achieved enlightenment.
The impact of the border fighting followed the school to Delhi. Hundreds of Tibetans displaced by the fighting, and so uprooted for a second time, appeared at the gates of the Buddhist centre. Cherry Armstrong looked on from her balcony as a yellow-robed senior lama strode over to the entrance: 'the gates were flung open and the people poured through, eager but unhurried'.Many filled the unoccupied dormitories, others crowded into tiny rooms and some made homes under the stairs, while others claimed a little patch of veranda for their belongings. Those at the back of the crowd for whom there was no room sat down with their loads on the river bank. During the next few days more and yet more arrived until they totalled over a thousand. Huge marquees usually reserved for festivals were erected to house them. Even more camped in the open around Delhi -- on islands in the middle of roundabouts, in parks, and on the roadside verge.
Their tattered clothes hung on them, thick and heavy in the Delhi heat, yet their grimy faces were cheerful. Lama Lobsang organised those inside the vihara into groups of a dozen or so, and it was not long before food aid and parcels of clothes arrived. I would never have believed that human beings in such desperate straits could have distributed these windfalls with such calm orderliness. I never saw any ill-feeling or someone trying to take more than their share ... The women and girls were shy about wearing short cotton frocks and indeed all their quiet dignity was lost in the new attire. They had lost everything to do with their homeland and now they had to change even the way they looked.23
For Freda, it must have reminded her of Misamari: the destitution, the shortage of medicine, and the desperately ill -- there were many suffering from TB among the new arrivals -- who sought her out for help in getting treatment.
Alongside this new emergency, Freda continued to pursue another hugely ambitious project. 'My two lama "sons" are coming to England in March ... wonderful young lamas,' Freda told Olive Chandler -- an indication of the strong emotional as well as spiritual bonds forged with these tulkus.24 Along with John [E. Stapleton] Driver, a scholar of Tibet who had spent several years in Kalimpong, she managed to secure a Spalding scholarship to allow Trungpa to study at Oxford University. Akong was to accompany him.
They were, in Cherry Armstrong's words, Freda's 'golden boys'. She recognised in Trungpa, in particular, an exceptional spiritual presence and an ability to communicate and to inspire those with whom he came into contact. Both had formal roles at the school -- Trungpa as codirector (he described himself as the school's spiritual advisor) while Akong made sure that the place ran with tolerable efficiency. Anita Morris, who taught English both at Green Park and at Dalhousie, had mixed opinions of the two. 'Akong was very much taking care of the younger ones -- a lot of them were a lot younger. So if they had any pains or any problems, they would go to Akong,' she recalls. 'He'd be going down maybe to a doctor at Dalhousie if necessary or just for ordinary shopping and taking care of things. Whereas Trungpa just did his own thing, his bits of painting and that sort of stuff.'25 A Tibetan lama who knew both well at Dalhousie comments that Trungpa always wanted attention and prominence, while Akong was solid and reliable. Trungpa was already developing a reputation as something of a wild child. Although it was a well-kept secret, he apparently fathered a child with a Tibetan nun who came to Dalhousie to visit him. They took a mattress up on the roof of the school -- said Trungpa's English wife in her memoirs -- and spent the night there. That was not at all typical of the school, but not entirely untypical ofTrungpa.26 He was an enormously important figure in the spread of Tibetan Buddhism in North America and Europe and one of the first to teach westerners in English, but he had lifelong issues about sexual promiscuity and the use of drink and drugs.
At Ladakh Buddhist Vihar, Cherry remembers Trungpa and Akong sitting in their room studying maps of the London Underground and out-of-date bus timetables in preparation for their journey. They travelled by boat. On the day they were due to dock outside London, the pupils at the Home School -- by now back in Dalhousie -- held a prayer ceremony on an open patch of woodland on the hillside adjoining Kailash. 'They lit a fire of juniper branches and the smoke rose in a blue spire into the branches of the trees and on up into the cloudless sky. We sat on brightly patterned Tibetan rugs spread over the stony ant-infested ground and the lamas began their chanting. It was a happy, picnic-like affair around the scented bonfire, with kettles of hot buttery Tibetan tea.'27 At Tilbury, Cherry's parents were on hand to welcome the two Tibetans -- as were Anita Morris and other well-wishers -- and to provide them with an initial berth at the family home in High Wycombe. Once installed at Oxford, Trungpa and Akong were joined by an old friend and another alumnus of the Home School, Chime Rinpoche. They shared a small flat in St Margaret's Road, on the same street as Freda's old college, and Akong took work as a hospital orderly to help support the household. All three became powerful beacons of Tibetan Buddhism in the west.
Alongside this noticeable success, Freda faced some acute disappointments. She made enemies as well as friends, and sometimes these rivalries became vicious. Lois Lang-Sims commented, without saying what prompted the observation, that Freda's enemies 'were not only numerous but of an almost incredible malevolence'.28 That intense animosity seems to have been behind the most wounding public assault on Freda and her integrity. The stiletto was wielded by D.F. [Dosabhai Framji] Karaka, an Oxford contemporary of the Bedis. He was a writer and journalist of some distinction, though by the early 1960s he was the editor of a not-so-distinguished Bombay-based tabloidstyle weekly, the Current. This was awash with brash, sensationalist stories, reflecting Karaka's fiercely polemical style, his crusading anticommunism and his impatience with Nehru, India's prime minister, for his supposed lack of zeal in standing up for the national interest. The weekly paper bore the slogan 'God Save the Motherland' on its front page.
In September 1963, Freda's photograph graced the front-page of the Current, accompanying a story which also took up much of the following page. It was a hatchet job. Under his own byline, Karaka asserted that 'an Englishwoman, married to an Indian, is attempting to express a great deal of anxiety to help the Buddhist cause as a screen for her Communist activities'. He insisted that 'Mrs Freda Bedi ... will always, in my opinion, be a Communist first, irrespective of her outwardly embraced Buddhism.' This was an absurd accusation. Freda's days as a communist sympathiser had come to a close almost twenty years earlier. Her husband had abandoned communism a decade previously. But the accusation of being a concealed communist was deeply wounding especially when the Tibetan refugees regarded communist China as their arch enemy -- the occupiers of their homeland and destroyers of their culture, faith and tradition -- and when India had recently been at war with China.
'Freda has dabbled with Communism ever since my student days in Oxford,' Karaka reported. 'She was, in fact, at Oxford at the same time as myself. Later, she married Bedi, a well known Indian Communist. They both came out to India and plunged themselves into the Communist movement.'29The article resorted to innuendo, suggesting that 'the alleged indoctrination of Sheikh Abdulla [sic] was largely to be traced to his very close association with Freda Bedi'. It suggested that some former associates of the Bedis in Kashmir had 'mysteriously disappeared'. Freda was alleged to have been caught up in controversy about Buddhist property and funds before turning, 'with the active encouragement of Shri J. Nehru, the Prime Minister', to the running of the Young Lamas' Home School. The article suggested that Freda was getting money from the Indian government, and using government headed paper to appeal for funds from supporters in America and elsewhere. Karaka suggested that the Tibetan Friendship Group was a 'Communist stunt' and he alleged that 'noted Communists, with the usual "blessings" of Mr. Nehru, are using the excuse of helping Tibetan refugees and Buddhist monks for furthering the cause of Communism in strategic border areas.'
Aside from the venomous smears, the only evidence of inappropriate conduct that the article pointed to was her use of official notepaper to appeal for funds for her school and other Tibetan relief operations. It cited a letter of complaint, sent by an unnamed Buddhist organisation which clearly was antagonistic to Freda, stating that she had been using the headed paper of the Central Social Welfare Board which bore the Government of India's logo. A civil servant's response was also quoted: 'Mrs Bedi is not authorised to use Government of India stationery for correspondence in connection with the affairs of the "Young Lama's Home" or the "Tibetan Friendship Group". This has now been pointed out to Mrs. Bedi.'
Even if Freda has been using government headed paper to help raise money -- which those who worked with her say is perfectly possible -- it was hardly a major misdemeanour. But detractors were able to use this blemish to damage her reputation. She was, it seems, distraught at this vicious personal attack and took advice about whether to take legal action. She was advised, probably wisely, to do nothing, as any riposte would simply give further life to accusations so insubstantial that they would quickly fade away. 'The accusation was that Freda was a communist in nun's clothing -- not that Freda was a nun at that time,' recalls Cherry Armstrong. 'I remember her being particularly distressed and "beyond belief' when she believed she had identified the culprit. Freda was totally dumbfounded about it.'
Freda was convinced that another western convert to Buddhism, Sangharakshita (earlier Dennis Lingwood), was either behind the slur or was abetting it.30 They had much in common -- including a deep antipathy to each other. Lingwood encountered Theosophy and Buddhism as a teenager in England and was ordained before he was twenty by the Burmese monk U Titthila, who later helped Freda towards Buddhism. During the war, he served in the armed forces in South and South-east Asia and from 1950 spent about fourteen years based in Kalimpong in north-east India, where he was influenced by several leading Tibetan Buddhist teachers. In the small world of Indian Buddhism, the two English converts rubbed shoulders. More than sixty years later, Sangharakshita -- who established a Buddhist community in England -- recalls coming across Freda, then new to Buddhism, living at the Ashoka Vihar Buddhist centre outside Delhi. 'She was tall, thin, and intense and wore Indian dress. She had a very pale complexion, with light fair hair and very pale blue eyes. In other words, she looked very English! I also noticed, especially later on, that she was very much the Memsaheb ... During the time that I knew Freda she knew hardly anything about Buddhism, having never studied it seriously .... She had however developed what I called her "patter" about the Dalai Lama, compassion, and the poor dear little Tulkus. So far as I could see, Freda had no spiritual awareness or Enlightenment. She may, of course, have developed these later.'31 His view of the Young Lamas' Home School is also somewhat jaundiced -- 'some of [the tulkus] developed rather expensive tastes, such as for Rolex watches.'
Sangharakshita's recollection is that he and Freda 'got on quite well, even though I did not take her "Buddhism" very seriously' as they were both English and (in his view) of working-class origin. He was not impressed by her husband: 'he struck me as a bit of a humbug ... I was told (not by Freda) that he was then living with one of his cousins.' In his memoirs, he recycled one of the allegations that featured in Current, that an 'Englishwoman married to a well-known Indian communist' was trying to 'wrest' control of Ashoka Vihar outside Delhi from the Cambodian monk who had founded it.32 Decades later, he continues to recount this and other of the items on the Current charge sheet, describing Freda as 'a rather ruthless operator' while in Kashmir. He recalls the furore over the Current article, but says that he had no reason to believe that Freda was using the Lamas' School for a political purpose. Freda never tackled him over her suspicions, but he does not deny a tangential involvement. 'It is possible,' he concedes, 'that certain reservations about the Young Lamas' Home School eventually reached the ears of Current.'
The incident was a reflection of the intense rivalries within the Tibetan movement and its supporters. 'Strong personalities do seem to draw opposition by their very nature,' Cherry Armstrong comments, 'and there is a lot of personal politics amongst the Tibetan groups -- not all light and loveliness as one might like to think.'33
--14: The Young Lamas' Home School, Excerpt from The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi, by Andrew Whitehead
Map
Kailash
"Did you have a good journey?" asked the Tibetan lama in deep red robes and rubber beach shoes.
"Yes" -- I hesitated as I wondered whether the night-long train ride across the Indian plains in the packed third-class carriage was 'good'. Interesting and exciting, but not good. "Quite good," I conceded.
The lama chuckled; he knew what I meant. We were sitting in a large, shabby room which might have been in an old English farmhouse if it were not for the red-robed figures padding over the worn carpet. The room was dim except for a brilliant shaft of sunlight that streamed through the window, showing up every speck of dust in the air. If I could have squinted through the inward-slanting sunbeam, I would have seen a range of the Himalayas topped with snow, dazzling against the deep blue sky.
Opposite me sat the grey-haired English lady who had greeted me on the hill path with a bear-hug and a resounding kiss. She spoke of England with some nostalgia, although she had adopted the Indian way of life, the Buddhist religion, and the oriental manner of conducting affairs. While we talked, I attempted to eat some rice and lentils placed before me by a thin, sadly smiling Indian cook.
Even in this outlandish place high in the mountains there were several Europeans and Americans who hurried to the room, eager to meet the newcomer from some civilised place on the other side of the world. First there was an elderly French lady called Suzanne, then Johnny, with his straggly beard and lank hair, who had travelled to India from America, taking several years over it as he considered all sensible travellers should. Jonathan had made his way overland from England, rebelling against his public school upbringing, although it remained an obvious part of his nature. Another Englishman, Frank, small and dark-haired sat quietly in the background, watching with bright attentive eyes. Maretta, also from America, seated herself cross-legged in an armchair, grinning at me like a Cheshire cat, her green eyes looking extra large behind black-rimmed glasses.
When I had done my best with the rice and lentils, they led me to another house where the volunteer helpers lived. My upstairs room was sizeable with wide windows overlooking beautiful snowy mountain peaks, now turning to gold in the setting sun. In the centre of the room stood the bed -- a wooden frame with tapes woven across it. I had been told to bring my sleeping bag. There was a cupboard, a chair and a table with a vase of wildflowers that Maretta had placed there. Next to the bed stood a medieval-looking stove -- a squat black metal cylinder standing with its three legs in a pan of water to prevent the floorboards burning. In the top was an aperture with a lid, into which wood and fir-cones could be thrown. The chimney rose to the height of my head then careered drunkenly across the room and out of the wall. Jonathan took the lid off the stove, cupped his hands, and blew vigorously into it. I was feeling cold and shivery in the unaccustomed surroundings, so he produced an aspirin "to stop old ladies from dying and being reborn." As he went out of the door he remarked, "We've been told to treat you like a sister," and gave me a wink.
I lay down in my sleeping bag with my duffle coat over the top and reflected on how quickly everything had happened! I had left school without the exam results to get me into a university, and after weeks of drearily looking through newspapers trying to find a job, a friend of my mother remarked, "I could arrange for you to work in India with the Tibetan refugees. You could go tomorrow if you liked. You wouldn't get much pay and conditions are not great, I hear, but it would be interesting work. I know an English lady who has a school for Tibetan lamas at Dalhousie in the foothills of the Himalayas. She always needs teachers and secretaries."
A few letters were exchanged, and my job confirmed. Then the news came that China had made aggressive incursions over the Indian border near to the school, and it looked as though it could break into full scale war. The Chinese had already built roads up to the frontier unnoticed by the Indians in this wild, unpopulated area! My parents fretted, but Freda Bedi who ran the school, asked if I could come immediately before they transferred to Delhi for the winter months.
The plane was three hours late in reaching Delhi but a Scottish volunteer from the school called Duncan, was still waiting for me. Three hours is not a long time to wait in India. We sped into New Delhi on the airport bus, passing the ubiquitous cows, the women carrying pots and bundles on their heads, the turbaned Sikhs. I had tried to imagine what India would be like, and with a superficial glance from the bus it did not seem extraordinary. I suppose I had expected the lean cows wandering across the road, the erratic driving with horns blowing, the poverty, the dust and dirt. But -- men riding bicycles in their pyjamas? There was a man with a briefcase and rolled umbrella defecating by the side of the road! Another was being given a shave on the dusty pavement: I giggled at him as I stared out of the window. The attendant caught my eye, and nudging his friend, laughed back at me. Then the bus moved on.
Early in the morning the overnight train from Delhi reached its terminus at Pathankot. I had started the journey with half a buttock lodged on a few inches of wooden seat and the worrying prospect of spending the night like that. The head of the soldier next to me kept falling onto my shoulder as he nodded off. Was it on purpose? I couldn't be sure, but was too polite to do more than edge away, whilst giving him a surreptitious poke with my elbow. The train was full of soldiers going to the north Indian front to fight the Chinese. They looked hopelessly inadequate. Halfway through the night an officer came onto the train, ordered all the soldiers to climb onto the roof racks so I could lie out on the bench seat, which I did regardless of feeling like a slaughtered lamb on an altar.
At Pathankot Duncan emerged from the other end of the carriage where he had spent the night on the floor in his sleeping bag. "This will be a treat. I've been looking forward to this," he said, as he steered me toward the First Class Station Restaurant where we ate a slap-up English breakfast with bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade, washed down with a proper pot of tea. Soon it was time for the bus to leave for Dalhousie, so with our luggage on its roof we started the journey over the last part of the plains and up into the mountains. Owing to the narrowness of the road, they allowed traffic to travel into the mountains only between certain hours, so before beginning the climb we stopped for an hour in a tiny village. I was feeling exhausted after the journey so stayed in the bus and stared out of the window. Duncan was asleep on a vacated bench at the back.
While the sun beat down, a sweet-seller, enormously fat, sat amongst his pyramids of sweets while the flies crawled over them. Did he ever sell any, I wondered? The sweetseller's head slumped onto his broad chest and he slumbered. A gaunt old woman with a ring in her nose was silting on a rope bed. She waved a hand and shouted raucously to a man on the other side of the roadway. Curry was mulling in a cauldron over a charcoal fire nearby. A cow nuzzled at the ground where someone had dropped a bit of flour. The bus conductor, a young Sikh in khaki uniform, the end of his turban hanging rakishly over one shoulder, was laughing with some passengers. The driver turned away from the group to urinate into the ditch.
At last a bus arrived from the opposite direction and the drivers chatted over a cup of tea together. Finally, we set off at a terrific pace towards the mountains. Each hairpin bend took us higher and revealed a more magnificent view. The driver delighted in driving at the edge of the road, and for me it was thrilling to look down over the precipice to the valley hundreds of feet below. Great landslips had left the red earth bare like a sore gash in the mountainside; boulders clung to the slope and a rush of stones showed where a river would pour down in a torrent during the rainy seasons. As the route became steeper and twistier, the air turned colder until I was huddled in my duffle coat, though Duncan remained unperturbed in his short-sleeved cotton shirt.
When we got out of the bus at Dalhousie, I could scarcely walk a few yards with my bags without gasping for oxygen like a fish out of water. We were 8000 feet above sea level but I felt rather foolish when I thought of mountaineers who make expeditions to places twice this height. After we had been walking for what seemed to be miles up a road that would have put me on my hands and knees if it had been any steeper; we turned off along a little track which threaded its way between enormous fir trees. At last Duncan pointed out my destination -- a large rambling old house built on an outcrop of rock on the hillside. This house was named Kailash, reminding all who lived there of the sacred Himalayan mountain. Just then, I saw coming towards us through the wood three maroon-robed Tibetan lamas and a grey-haired English lady dressed in a dark red sari, looking very much like a lama herself. This was Freda Bedi, who organised the school and who had greeted me so warmly.
The first evening I arrived, the lamas were doing a special puja; a religious chanting ceremony with drums and bells, to which we were all invited. The lamas were already assembled in the shrine room as we seated ourselves cross-legged at the back. As they began chanting, the sound which filled the room was completely alien to my ears and at first seemed quite cacophonous. Yet there was a fascination about it and I soon learnt to notice the rhythms and variations in tone. Halfway through the ceremony the chanting faded away. Tin mugs were distributed, and a monk brought tea in a kettle with a yellow marigold stuck into the spout. I had been warned about Tibetan tea made with butter and salt as well as milk, but no one had advised me that unless I hid my mug somewhere out of reach, it would be refilled again and again despite shaking my head, nor that my pleadings of "No more, thank you," would be taken as mere politeness, so long as my mug stood unguarded within reach of the spout of the kettle.
All the students at the lamas' School had the title of tulku. [1] [Tulku is the title given to a recognised reincarnated teacher. Lama means 'teacher' so all tulkus are lamas. Rinpoche, meaning 'Precious One', is used amongst western Buddhists for tulkus and lamas, but at the time of writing (1964) it was used primarily as a form of address rather than as part of a name. Any lack of this term in my writing should not be taken as lack of respect.] These were special children whom their countrymen believed had reached, through a series of innumerable rebirths (as they consider all beings to be reborn many times) a state of enlightenment, when they could be free from the round of birth, decay and death that all beings undergo. But of their own free will, they have decided to be reborn in order to help other beings along the spiritual path. Such beings are known as bodhisattvas. When a tulku dies, those who knew him well in his previous life, seek out his reincarnation and take him back to the monastery where he is brought up to this special role in life.
Tibetan society centred on the monastic system. Lamas and tulkus were regarded by the lay people as their spiritual teachers and often as their secular leaders too, the spiritual and worldly being far less clearly defined than in other cultures. The monasteries relied on the communities for their food and livelihood; the people by their own nature relied on the lamas for their spiritual needs and happiness. Amongst the Tibetan people one sees tremendous love and admiration for the Dalai Lama and tulkus and for the entire community of monks. It is this centralising force that unites the refugees and gives them an underlying purpose in life.
In India the younger generation of Tibetan children were receiving a western form of education in schools set up by the Indian government, but the tulkus were unable to attend and keep up their intensive religious studies at the same time. Freda realised that unless the tulkus of school age (some as young as eight or ten years old) received some modern learning, they would become an antiquated group within the current Tibetan society.
So she established the Young Lamas Home School to give a series of courses lasting from April to November, to teach them English and Hindi, French or German, plus some general knowledge and simple mathematics, whilst still keeping to the rules of monastic discipline. Thus they could adapt to the new requirements of Tibetan society, and some of them could be of great value in universities in the west. They would spend each winter with their guru (their mentor) to catch up with their demanding spiritual studies and meditation.
Most of the volunteer teachers had an understanding of the people they were teaching and of their requirements, which Freda considered more important than standard western qualifications.
Duncan's English Lesson
I was brought up in a Quaker household, though a very liberal one, and my mother's interests ranged over the years through Spiritualism and Theosophy to Buddhism. My upbringing left me with an underlying scepticism towards any priesthood. Yet here I was, thrust into the midst of it. But unlike Christian priests who claim to be intermediaries between their congregation and their God, the tulkus made no claims of their own talents or special standing, and seemed shy of appearing different from other people.
They had all been through incredible hardship on their escape from Tibet and witnessed terrible actions. Now they needed to adjust to an environment most of them never even knew existed! Yet, they maintained the gentle humility of one who accepts equally their own strengths and weaknesses. They retained a natural understanding and compassion towards others.
When told the story of Jesus Christ and shown a crucifix, they considered it desperately sad that the man had such a disastrous kharma [2] [Kharma is a basic Buddhist belief that everything that happens to you in this life is the result of past thoughts and actions, often carried over from previous lives. Whatever you do (or even think) in this life creates the kharma of the future. Tibetans not only believe in a personal kharma, but also in the collective kharma of a country, and indeed of a world.] They could not grasp why anyone would worship a man dying in such torment. Equally, the tulkus must have questioned the bad kharma they experienced in this life, when they were purported to be enlightened beings, whose kharma should have been all light and loveliness! But they all seemed to be taking it on the chin!
Coming from England, what struck me most was their cheerfulness and kindness despite all the hardships and anguish they had experienced. Because of their inherent belief in kharma, they had not developed the inevitable chip on the shoulder or bitterness that someone of a different culture would have. They were as full of fun as any young people, playing practical jokes on each other, laughing uproariously, or occasionally even giggling in the middle of a recital of the scriptures. Their sense of fun might have seemed childish (well, most of them were still children) if it were not coloured by their sensitivity.
The first lama I got to know was Lhaka Tulku, whose soft features displayed an inner beauty of spirit. One day, looking rather shy, he took us volunteers to the shack in the woods where he would live through the winter with sixteen other monks. Instead of Tibetan tea he had tactfully prepared English tea, very sweet and milky, which we drank in the garden sitting amongst giant orange marigolds, like so many golden suns against the deep blue sky. As we sat sipping the tea out of scalding glasses held in handkerchiefs, there was not a sound to be heard. The Tibetan enchantment had begun.
"Now please may I take you to the Gyume College?" asked Lhaka Tulku. ''They are having a special initiation ceremony. Mummy is already there." All the tulkus at the school called Freda 'Mummy'. She wanted me to do the same, but I found it hard as I had my own 'Mummy' at home. She also wanted me to take meditation with Trungpa Tulku, [3] [Chogyam Trungpa Tulku's style of 'crazy wisdom' became popular in America where he established the Shambala Buddhist Centres and published several books. A flamboyant lifestyle contributed to an early death in 1987, but his Buddhist centres live on. The importance of his initial 'jump start' to the American people, filling a spiritual vacuum in a way they could accept, should not be underestimated.] who spoke such good English, but I declined. I already felt like a sponge absorbing everything; to meditate as well would have been more than I could cope with. It seemed ungrateful to turn down such a wonderful opportunity, as she told me there were a number of Westerners that the tulkus refused to teach because they perceived their psyches to be such that it could do them more harm than good. Anyway, if I were to have practised meditation, I would have preferred a different teacher.
We followed the sound of deep-toned chanting, down a steep path towards a large white tent. A camp of tents housed the remaining few of the thousands who had once belonged to the Gyume and Gyuto [4] [The monks and lamas of this unique Tibetan tradition now have their own place at Dharamsala, thanks to the Dalai Lama's use of money from his Nobel Peace Prize. https:/www.gelukfoundation.org/gyuto-monastery/] Tantric Colleges of Lhasa, with practices and traditions going back thousands of years and properly understood by only a few. We were greatly honoured to attend the ceremony and only permitted because of our close association with the tulkus.
The monks had made a special mandala of finely powdered coloured stones and chippings. Its intricate geometric design was a symbolic representation to help the intuitive mind appreciate the whole state of being in which we live, the manifold, the condition of our existence; then showing the way back, or indeed the way on, to a state of reintegration with 'the Absolute'. They had been creating it as part of an initiation to a higher stage of meditation for some monks, accompanied by several days of chanting. Afterwards, they would destroy the exquisite mandala, which had taken many weeks to construct, to instil in them the realisation of the insubstantiality of human existence.
We went into a large tent attached to a house, the only place big enough to hold the whole gathering, and breathed in the incense-laden air. I watched for a while with conjectural interest, regarding with some misgiving this 'high church ritual' and unaware at the time of the true significance of the ceremony. Then, it was as if the intense atmosphere created by the ceremonial chanting, the booming of the trumpets, bonging of drums, tinkling of hand drums combining intricate hand movements with the sacred dorje, penetrated my aura of scepticism. A feeling of peaceful yet exultant joy swept through me. No longer an isolated being viewing a strange scene, I was bubbling over with joyful compassion that reached out to everyone and everything. It felt as though each person was giving off an electric current mingling in the surrounding air.
Later we were shown into a dark rather dingy room of the house, where the monks presented us with the traditional white Tibetan scarves of greeting. We sat quietly and grinned at each other over the obligatory tea and biscuits, unable to speak a word of each other's language, but radiating happiness without the least awkwardness. What a privilege it was just to sit with these people who spread about them such an infectious happiness. I later learnt of the idea of dharshan where one can receive a blessing simply by being in someone's presence. That was how I felt.
Outside again in the brilliant sunshine, as we walked back up the hill the others were chattering excitedly. But their words did not take shape in my mind. I was not a separate person who listened or heard or even thought. I was only a moving part of the incredibly blue sky, the trees and plants with their bright green leaves, and the sparkling white road. Had they put some soma in the tea? [5] [Soma is a hallucinatory plant mentioned in the ancient Vedic texts.]
A prayer to Brāhmanaspati for protection from wicked men
1 The godless man whoever plots against us, Brāhmanaspati,
Thou shalt give up as prey to me the worshipper who pour the juice.
2 If, Soma, any spiteful man hath aimed at us whose thoughts are kind,
Smite with thy bolt upon his face: he, crushed to pieces, vanisheth.
3 Soma, whoever troubleth us, be he a stranger or a kin,
Deprive him of the strength he hath: slay him thyself like mighty Dyaus!
-- The Hymns of the Atharvaveda, translated by Ralph T.H. Griffith