Re: Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa by Diana Mu
Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2019 10:21 pmEIGHTEEN
In the summer of 1982, not long after the Sakyong abhisheka, I moved up to Nova Scotia with Gesar and Ashoka. (By this time, we had concluded that nothing was going to change with Taggie. The monastery in Sikkim was willing to have him return, and Rinpoche felt this would be the kindest environment for him at the time.)
Rinpoche was talking about moving to Nova Scotia at some point in the future. He had toured the province again in 1979, and at the end of 1981, he had spent several weeks there, culminating in a seminar at the Keltic Lodge in the northernmost part of Nova Scotia, on the island of Cape Breton. He became more and more enthusiastic about the place with every visit. Beginning in 1979, a few of his students moved there from other parts of Canada and from the United States. When I arrived, there was already a small dharmadhatu in Halifax.
I thought that the sanest thing for the children and me would be to move up ahead of him and get a farm there, where I could have horses, and the children could have a more normal life. I bought a farm in Falmouth, near Windsor, Nova Scotia, which we named Willowstream Park, after the farm that my parents had owned in South Africa. I brought several horses up there, including Warrior. I had also purchased a young stallion at Gronwohldhof when I'd been in Germany the previous year. I bred him to more than twenty mares in Nova Scotia in the spring of 1982.
Rinpoche was excited that I was going to live in Nova Scotia. He saw me as pioneering the development of the Shambhala world there. For me, it was both an attempt to participate in furthering the vision that he was trying to promote and a way to have a personally sane existence. Being married to Rinpoche was sometimes like being married to a cosmic force rather than a human being. As time went on, this was more and more the case. I felt the need for a more ordinary human existence, which I thought the situation in Nova Scotia would provide.
Rinpoche had asked Jane and Tom Ryken, two senior and trusted students, to live on the farm with me. They were very committed to us and helped the family a great deal; we had quite a pleasant household for most of the year that we were there together. A student of Rinpoche's from Australia, Geoff Martin, also joined us and was a great help. We had a large vegetable and flower garden, and I used to do a lot of pickling and canning. Ashoka was happy running around on the farm, and Gesar enrolled in King's Edgehill, an excellent private school in the neighborhood.
Rinpoche used to come and visit periodically, and Mitchell also came up a few times.
There was an indoor arena a half-hour from the farm where I could ride, and I started competing Warrior in a number of local shows. I received excellent scores competing at the lower international or FEI levels, and I was invited to ride in a clinic in Toronto with the Canadian Olympic coach at that time, Johann Hinnemann. At the end of the clinic, Hinneman told me that he liked the horse but felt that he would do better at Prix St. Georges, the first international level, than at the Grand Prix level, the highest level of dressage. Hinneman suggested that I sell Warrior.
After going to Toronto, I seriously got the riding bug again, and as my opportunities were so limited in Nova Scotia, I decided to move back to Europe in early 1984, to continue training and find a horse with more potential. I sold Warrior and moved over to Germany with Gesar and Ashoka, intending to stay for the whole year. After looking around a bit for a new horse, I went back to Gronwohldhof, Herr Rehbein's facility. There was a horse there, Poseidon, that I had known about for several years, that had always appealed to me. When I rode him, he was a beautiful mover and gave me a good feeling. I thought that I should purchase him.
Hinnemann was skeptical. He called and said, "If the horse is already eight years old and he hasn't been successful competitively, there's something wrong and they shouldn't be selling him to you." I called Herr Rehbein at that point, who was furious that someone was saying these negative things. I had suddenly ended up in the middle of a political upheaval. I decided to trust Rehbein, so I went ahead with the purchase.
After several months training at Gronwohldhof, I began to have doubts. Poseidon was very big, and he proved to be spooky and quite difficult to ride. Later, I learned more about his medical history -- had I known these details earlier, I would not have purchased the horse, because the prognosis was not good. In retrospect, I don't think Herr Rehbein was malicious in selling me the horse in any way. He took an educated gamble. He was trying to help me find a good horse that I could afford. In the end, I lost on that gamble.
After riding the horse for more than six months, I found that he was getting more and more difficult to ride. The difficulties with my horse coincided with the time that I was supposed to return to North America to visit Rinpoche, who had begun a year's retreat in MillVillage, Nova Scotia. So in the fall of 1984, I went to MillVillage, and then I spent time in Boulder. This provided me with time to think about whether Poseidon was the right horse for me. I decided to sell Poseidon. I phoned Rehbein at that point and asked him to sell the horse. For months, I continued to call Gronwohldhof to ask if he had been sold. Every time I called, I was told, "No, No, he hasn't sold yet." This continued for almost a year.
During this period, Vajradhatu experienced severe financial problems. Most of my own financial affairs were handled by the organization. I kept asking if my bills at Gronwohldhof were being paid, and I was told that they were. It turned out I was almost a year in arrears, without my knowledge. The people at Gronwohldhof had basically repossessed the horse without saying that was what they were doing. Then Poseidon went lame. He was no longer worth anything, and Vajradhatu had let the insurance lapse. It was a fiasco.
In some quarters of Vajradhatu, there was resentment about the expenses connected with my riding, and I started to question whether it was worth going through all the negativity, especially when nothing seemed to be working out. I became depressed about my riding career. I was also quite worried about Rinpoche's health at this point, so I decided to stop riding. As it turned out, I didn't resume my career for four years, until after Rinpoche's death. Today, I find that I have more enjoyment and love for my discipline than ever before in my life. But at that particular time, that four-year hiatus was necessary.
I left Germany in the fall of 1984 and went to Nova Scotia, where Rinpoche was in retreat. He had contacted me and told me that he wanted me to come over to receive the Vajrayogini abhisheka from him in retreat. After all these years, I still had not had this transmission, and Rinpoche seemed to feel that this was extremely important at this time. He was planning to confer another important empowerment, the Chakrasamvara abhisheka, after his long retreat, and he wanted me to be able to take that as well. Chakrasamvara is the consort of Vajrayogini and a very important yidam in our lineage. Vajrayogini represents the wisdom aspect of the teachings, while Chakrasmavara represents the practitioner's skillful action and compassion. Since wisdom and compassion are indivisible, Vajrayogini and Chakrasamvara are joined in union in the iconography. These are some of the most profound and important teachings that Rinpoche could transmit to the West. Looking back now, I feel that he knew that his life was coming to an end, and he wanted to be sure that I received these transmissions from him.
The house he was living in was an old sea captain's house about two hours outside of Halifax. There was a large kitchen on the main floor, and people would hang out around the kitchen table at odd hours of the day and night. Near the kitchen there was a shrine room where the staff, and occasionally Rinpoche, would practice. There was a spacious dining room where Rinpoche ate at all hours of the day and night -- his schedule changed a lot -- and a large living room. The main cook, Joanne Carmin, who we called Machen (which means "chief cook" in Tibetan) also had a room at the very back of the house on the first floor. She spent the entire year in retreat with Rinpoche. There was always at least one attache, and one kusung on duty, and Rinpoche had a number of other guests who came and went. There was also a little guest bedroom on the first floor, where Gesar stayed when he visited his father for several months. Upstairs, Rinpoche's bedroom was a large room with a walk-in closet and a separate bath. Other bedrooms for the staff and visitors were also on the top floor.
The year before he went to Mill Village, Rinpoche had been on a schedule that was often totally turned upside down. He got into the habit of staying up all night and sleeping during the day. During the all-night sessions in this era, he began teaching his students elocution with an Oxonian accent, the English accent of a person educated at Oxford University. He wrote exercises that his students practiced with him at all hours of the day and night, and he also wrote a novel about life in the Shambhala Kingdom, which he liked to have read aloud in Oxonian, sometimes at three or four in the morning.
By the time he got to Mill Village, his schedule of activities was even stranger. He would often stay up for twenty-four to forty-eight hours straight, and then he might sleep that long. No one knew when he would be awake or when he might be sleeping. Sometimes, he would eat dinner three times in a day; sometimes, he would hardly eat at all. It was not very easy to be part of his staff or his household at that time.
Rinpoche's approach to retreat was quite different from the approach of a group retreat where everyone feels good and relaxes and communes with nature or with God. Rinpoche's retreats were more like the trials of Christ wandering in the desert or what ascetics in various traditions went through in their caves. Altogether, retreat in the Buddhist tradition is meant to be very tough. It is an undistracted opportunity for a student to work on unraveling ego and neurosis at a fundamental level. Rinpoche was both doing that for himself and he was also working with his students. The situation he created for himself and others in retreat was stripped bare of the conventions of everyday life. He was free to be exactly as he was, without any pretense. Even beyond the personal and interpersonal level, he was working on the karma of his whole community in North America, trying to liberate what was stuck both now and in the future.
I felt that his approach, how he worked with himself and with others in retreat, was the spiritual equivalent of the tough training that I went through in Vienna. He was creating an uncomfortable space for himself and other people, an almost ruthless space where you constantly felt groundless -- you have the ground pulled out from under you so that you realize what life is about at the most fundamental level. Eventually, you might realize what buddhanature is, the heart of enlightenment, stripped of all pretenses and concepts. But while you are going through the process, you totally lose any reference point to a goal. This process is very, very uncomfortable.
Sometimes people ask me what meditation practices Rinpoche himself did, and I realize that, in some respects, it's a strange question. In a very real sense, everything he did was practice. This may be a dangerous thing to say, because if students were to take this to mean that they don't need to do formal meditation practice, that would be a big mistake -- encouraging self-deception. However, I do feel that for Rinpoche, especially in the later years, his life was his practice. From time to time, he joined his students in the sitting practice of meditation, and he took part in the major practices he gave to people, such as the Sadhana of Mahamudra, the Vajrayogini Sadhana, and various Shambhala practices. But in general, his practice was his being, or vice versa. Very early on, in 1971, a student asked him if he ever meditated, formally. Rinpoche's response was: "That seems to depend on the situation -- but formal sitting, in terms of imposing it on oneself, somehow doesn't apply anymore." The student said, "Apply to whom?" And Rinpoche responded: "To whom. That's it!"1 I think his response here is another way of expressing the groundlessness one encountered at Mill Village. For Rinpoche, there was really no contrast between practice and everyday life, and there was nobody there to ask the question. For most of us, sharing that space was unsettling, sometimes deeply so.
Before going to Mill Village, I spent time studying the Vajrayana teachings that Rinpoche had given us to help prepare myself for the abhisheka. Rinpoche had phoned the Vajradhatu ambassador to Europe at that time, Steve Baker, and asked him to tutor me before I left Germany. The more I read, the less sure I felt about what I was about to do. I had a lot of questions and, one could almost say, doubt during this period of time. I didn't feel through and through that I was necessarily ready to take on this commitment. I wanted to understand what I was getting into if I took this transmission. I wasn't sure that I would be completely genuine if I took this empowerment without complete conviction. In my own way, even before I arrived at Mill Village, a spiritual crisis was growing within me, which seemed to be exactly what Rinpoche was provoking in everyone there.
When I got to Mill Village, Rinpoche said that I had to do twenty-one prostrations, twenty-one vajrasattva mantras, twenty-one mandalas, and twenty-one recitations of the guru yoga mantra on the day of the abhisheka before he would give me the transmission. I had never completed my preliminary practices. Traditionally, people do a hundred thousand of each of these practices, so he was letting me off pretty easy! However, I still resented him telling me what to do. I did the first three parts of the practice, but when I got to the guru yoga mantra, I had to visualize Rinpoche as my teacher. I was totally angry with him at that point for insisting that I take this abhisheka. I was conflicted about Rinpoche being both my husband and my guru. I found it difficult to reconcile these two things during this period. I thought to myself, "What the hell am I visualizing here?"
I was pushing the boundaries, wanting to discover for myself what made sense, what worked and what didn't. I had never had a chance to have a teenage rebellion, in a way, because I had married Rinpoche so young. I thought, "Why on earth am I in the shrine room doing this stuff?" So I came out and I said to him, "This is ridiculous." He got really angry with me. He screamed at me and started pounding his hand, saying, "Go back." He told me to go back and finish the practice. I was pissed off, but I went back and completed it.
I was also uncomfortable with the fact that in giving me the abhisheka, he seemed to be presenting Vajrayana as the highest reality. I was feeling that there were other valid positions in the world and that we were isolating ourselves as a community if we didn't acknowledge this. I was having a meltdown. The abhisheka was going to take place later that night. I wrote him a letter asking, "Aren't there other truths? Aren't there other realities?" In response, he wrote me this prose poem on the night that he gave me transmission:
I don't know if this will speak to others as it did to me. It was one of those times that Rinpoche was talking directly to my heart and my intellect at once, and he completely disarmed me. My hesitations dissolved on the spot, and I realized that my seeming irritation was actually more a reflection of my connection to him and longing for him. So I wrote this poem in reply:
Does it seem odd that we wrote poems to one another? I suppose in a way it is, but it also was a way of reconnecting with him. In particular, I supplicated him in the poem to prolong his life because I felt that he was beginning the process of dying while at Mill Village. No one else seemed to realize this was happening at the time, which was one thing that made it so difficult for me during this period.
We proceeded with the abhisheka, which I felt as a breath of fresh air in what I experienced overall as a hot, crowded room. After giving the abhisheka, Rinpoche gave a little talk. There were several other people who received the abhisheka, and he gave a lecture to all of us about the principle of Vajrayogini and how to regard the practice.
During the remainder of my visit to Mill Village, I felt anything but receptive to the environment. I couldn't relax there, and I found that Rinpoche wasn't there for me in the way that I counted on him to be. It was very difficult.
During the last years of his life, Rinpoche intensified the training of a number of his close, older students -- including me. I, like many others, was to be left with many unfinished lessons to work out in years to come. The story of two great figures in the lineage, Marpa and Milarepa -- which I referred to much earlier in this book -- involved Marpa setting impossible tasks for Milarepa, asking him first to build and then tear down building after building. This was part of purifying Mila's karma. Marpa would often be drunk and abusive when he dealt with Milarepa. These stories of surrendering are colorful when they refer to events in the past, but when they are about something that happens in your own life, it's much less easy to accept or understand. The atmosphere at Mill Village evoked those classic tales and was anything but easy.
Altogether, I was there for a week or so, and I became incredibly claustrophobic. I felt a lack of personal space; things seemed to be closing in on me. I had Ashoka with me, and that made being there more difficult. If Rinpoche slept for twenty-four hours and then was up for twenty-four hours, it was completely incompatible with being with a young child. So at one point, I said that I would like to go into Halifax and stay at the Court on Dutch Village Road for a few days. This was a house that had been recently purchased for us. Rinpoche was planning to spend an extended period of time in Halifax, probably beginning in 1986, so this house was purchased with the idea that it could be his residence at that time. In the meantime, some sangha members were living there and fixing it up, and Rinpoche stayed there when he was in town. He told me that it would be fine if Ashoka and I went up there. I left as quickly as I could pull my things together! When we got to the house, I spent a nice evening there. Ashoka stayed in bed with me, and we had a bath and watched movies on television together and went to sleep early.
The next morning, around seven o'clock, a kasung walked into my bedroom and said, "Rinpoche is on his way down." I couldn't believe it. I finally had found a corner of privacy and space, and now he was coming there. The Sawang was staying at Mill Village at this time, also, and he arrived in the car with Rinpoche at the Court. We all gathered in the living room. By then it was close to 8 A.M. Rinpoche wanted to play a game that he loved, called the "qualities game," in which people would ask him questions about the quality of something they were trying to guess. They would ask questions such as: "If the subject of the game were a meal, what kind of meal would it be?" And he would say something like, "It would be a hot dog." Or "It would be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding." You could get a good idea about what you were guessing from the pattern of a number of answers. A British monarch might be described as roast beef, while Rinpoche was more likely to describe an American president as a hot dog.
That was the traditional way that the game was played. But starting in this era, frequently there was no subject. In other words, there was no correct answer and therefore no end to the game. Rinpoche would just give answers, and they weren't related to guessing anything. The game ended when he wanted it to end. Period. This was heightening my sense of being trapped and uncomfortable.
More broadly, I was increasingly upset because I sensed Rinpoche was going into another realm at this point, and I didn't know how to reverse things. He often didn't seem responsive or grounded in the way that I was used to. I felt that everything was spiraling out of my control.
I once asked His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche why, when you had these descriptions of how far out Vajrayana experience was, the great teachers like himself were all so kind and ordinary. He said to me, "It's that way on the outside, but if you could see into my mind, it might look completely crazy to you." So Rinpoche, in a sense, was letting people see into his mind and into their own -- with nothing covering up anything.
Mill Village was the last intense opportunity he was to have to train the people around him, and he didn't let up for one moment. He didn't even say, "Now, I'm training you and this is going to be really uncomfortable." He just was the way he was, and you had to deal with it. It was outrageous in a whole new way; this time, it wasn't glorious outrageousness. It was really tough. The point seemed to be to push people in the environment until they couldn't hold it together anymore -- then see what happens. He didn't relent until people lost it in some way.
At one point during this retreat, a person visiting Rinpoche asked him why he was being so tough on one particular staff member. Rinpoche had been relentlessly breaking this person down, waking him up over and over again during the night, criticizing him, and on and on. This visitor was in a car with Rinpoche and the person Rinpoche had been tormenting, so to speak. The visitor asked, "Why are you being so hard on so and so?" Rinpoche said, loud enough so he could be overheard, "I have to make him feel as bad as I possibly can." Somehow this made the person feel a little bit better. Later Rinpoche indicated that this person was really very close to him -- he wasn't mad at him or anything. He just was trying to get through the facade and work with what was there.
Again, this was very familiar to me. What Rinpoche was doing at Mill Village had a similarity to the tactics at the Spanish Riding School, where they push people to such an extreme that a person discovers what he or she is made of. The difference in what Rinpoche was doing was that his approach was not based on aggression but was using aggression, turning it on its head, to break through the fundamental aggression. This is similar to how he worked with the Dorje Kasung discipline. It is both the heart of his brilliance and often the most misunderstood part of his teaching.
On the morning Rinpoche arrived at our home in Halifax, when the qualities game mercifully ended, I went upstairs to escape, but Rinpoche followed me. I encountered him in the upstairs hallway. He was standing with Osel, leaning on his arm. I said to him, "This situation is terrible. It's really awful. You are getting completely crazy. You are getting completely out of control, and you're killing yourself. You're drinking yourself to death." And he said, "Well, do you know what's the matter with you? You're a punk." (He was referring to my hairstyle; I had had my hair cut short and spiky in Germany.) I came right back at him. I said, "I may be a punk, but I'm not drunk." With that, he tried to hit me, but he missed.
From my perspective as his wife, which I think is different from a student's perspective, I felt that the whole thing, my whole life, was falling apart. In earlier years, when people were having difficulty accepting Rinpoche or his latest campaign, they would come to me and ask, "Is everything okay? Is everything going to be all right?" I could always say, with complete conviction, "Everything is going to be fine." I had so much faith in Rinpoche and what he was doing. But in the later years, I would have had to say, "I don't know. I really don't know."
As Rinpoche's wife, my role seemed to be to nurture him and help to keep him on this earth, in some ways. To see him sacrificing his body and going beyond the bounds of good sense in terms of his health was excruciating. Maybe that was a lesson in itself. One of the stories about Milarepa is that the last time he was with Gampopa, his dharma heir, when they parted, Mila lifted his cotton robe so that Gampopa could see his emaciated body covered in scabs and sores. "This is the dharma. This is the truth," he said. The end of Rinpoche's life had some of that aspect to it.
When I look back at this period of time now, it still makes me incredibly sad. Yet I can see now that Rinpoche was still doing an amazing amount during this final era. Things actually weren't falling apart. During the year that he was in Mill Village, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior was published, and it was a great success. Rinpoche continued to work closely with Shambhala Training, and when the administration faltered, he moved forcefully to make changes so that the project would remain strong. During this period he also directed a group of students to upgrade the facilities at RMDC, overcoming hesitations within the board of directors, so that we could hold the seminary and Kalapa Assembly on our own land starting in 1985. There were a number of projects like this, which he kept in touch with and moved forward during this period. He was also working on what I can only call a nonconceptual level in terms of planting seeds in Nova Scotia. I don't know how else to put it. He was feeling out the energy of the place, and he was putting parts of himself into the environment there. It was something like that. But as his wife, seeing that he was less and less in his body and less and less healthy, it was heart-wrenching. Sometimes, I think that he kept me away, at arms length, during this era because he knew that he was going to die relatively soon, but he just had to go forward.
Rinpoche at times was like a typhoon, or a hurricane. Viewed from afar, a hurricane appears orderly and beautiful; from inside, it is dangerous, chaotic, and difficult to endure -- unless you are in the eye. The eye of the storm is absolutely still and calm. I think that for much of my life with Rinpoche, I could find the empty center, which was calm and open. I could feel the brilliance and the power, but I wasn't buffeted around by it. However in the later years, I felt that I was part of the swirling chaos. Rinpoche threw everyone into that whirlwind. I think that was deliberate on his part. After his death, I could begin to see the larger pattern again, its power, beauty, and meaning. I realize now that the immediate chaos, though painful and excruciatingly real, was a passing confusion. I find that what endures is the big picture, the vast vision that Rinpoche communicated.
Around the time that I was in Mill Village visiting Rinpoche, Mitchell and Sarah decided to separate after what had certainly been a very difficult time for them. When I left Mill Village, I went back to Boulder, where Mitchell and I were able to spend time together. The Regent and Lady Rich were living in the Court at Eleventh and Cascade. I was supposed to have stayed in Germany for the whole time that Rinpoche was in Mill Village, so we had given them the Court for the year. Rather than try to move in with them, which really didn't appeal to me, I got my own apartment, where Ashoka and I stayed. (Gesar was in Nova Scotia for the rest of the year.)
The next month I found out that I was pregnant again. Once again, it happened while I was using contraception. It was, of course, another big drama, but this time there was no question about whose child this was. David, my second son with Mitchell, was born in August 1985.
At the time of David's birth, Rinpoche was conducting the Magyal Pomra Encampment again. He asked me if I wanted him to be present at the birth, but I told him it was not necessary. My mother, however, actually came to the hospital. Somehow, she was able to accept my unconventional relationship with Mitchell, and she was delighted to have more grandchildren. Mitchell's mother was also there. The two grandmothers waited in separate rooms during my labor, as they were not overly fond of one another. After the baby was born, they both were ushered into the room. When Elaine, Mitchell's mother, saw David for the first time, she remarked, "Another Jewish doctor is born!" My mother countered, "The best part of this child is English!"
Rinpoche had the Dorje Kasung at MPE fire off the big cannon to celebrate David's birth. Rinpoche was very sweet to David when he was an infant, but Rinpoche didn't live long enough to spend much time with him. David was just eighteen months old when Rinpoche died. Rinpoche's hope was that we would name the baby Yung-lo, after the Chinese emperor who built the Forbidden City and was a great warrior-king. Rinpoche felt that this child would have a particular connection to martial energy and that this name would be very appropriate for him. Rinpoche said that this child would be the next Kasung Kyi-Khyap, the commander of the Dorje Kasung. I wanted to call my son "David." Emperor Yung-lo was also a ruthless tyrant who killed many people before converting to Buddhism, so I thought it was a strange name to saddle my son with. However, after thinking about it, I realized that all of our children had Shambhala names and that I trusted Rinpoche's inspiration. My son's birth certificate reads Yung-lo David Mukpo.
In the summer of 1982, not long after the Sakyong abhisheka, I moved up to Nova Scotia with Gesar and Ashoka. (By this time, we had concluded that nothing was going to change with Taggie. The monastery in Sikkim was willing to have him return, and Rinpoche felt this would be the kindest environment for him at the time.)
Rinpoche was talking about moving to Nova Scotia at some point in the future. He had toured the province again in 1979, and at the end of 1981, he had spent several weeks there, culminating in a seminar at the Keltic Lodge in the northernmost part of Nova Scotia, on the island of Cape Breton. He became more and more enthusiastic about the place with every visit. Beginning in 1979, a few of his students moved there from other parts of Canada and from the United States. When I arrived, there was already a small dharmadhatu in Halifax.
I thought that the sanest thing for the children and me would be to move up ahead of him and get a farm there, where I could have horses, and the children could have a more normal life. I bought a farm in Falmouth, near Windsor, Nova Scotia, which we named Willowstream Park, after the farm that my parents had owned in South Africa. I brought several horses up there, including Warrior. I had also purchased a young stallion at Gronwohldhof when I'd been in Germany the previous year. I bred him to more than twenty mares in Nova Scotia in the spring of 1982.
Rinpoche was excited that I was going to live in Nova Scotia. He saw me as pioneering the development of the Shambhala world there. For me, it was both an attempt to participate in furthering the vision that he was trying to promote and a way to have a personally sane existence. Being married to Rinpoche was sometimes like being married to a cosmic force rather than a human being. As time went on, this was more and more the case. I felt the need for a more ordinary human existence, which I thought the situation in Nova Scotia would provide.
Rinpoche had asked Jane and Tom Ryken, two senior and trusted students, to live on the farm with me. They were very committed to us and helped the family a great deal; we had quite a pleasant household for most of the year that we were there together. A student of Rinpoche's from Australia, Geoff Martin, also joined us and was a great help. We had a large vegetable and flower garden, and I used to do a lot of pickling and canning. Ashoka was happy running around on the farm, and Gesar enrolled in King's Edgehill, an excellent private school in the neighborhood.
DAY / BOARDING / INTERNATIONAL BOARDING
SCHOOL FEES / $17,750 / $41,750 / $54,500
-- 2017-18 Tuition Fee Schedule, by King’s-Edgehill School
Rinpoche used to come and visit periodically, and Mitchell also came up a few times.
There was an indoor arena a half-hour from the farm where I could ride, and I started competing Warrior in a number of local shows. I received excellent scores competing at the lower international or FEI levels, and I was invited to ride in a clinic in Toronto with the Canadian Olympic coach at that time, Johann Hinnemann. At the end of the clinic, Hinneman told me that he liked the horse but felt that he would do better at Prix St. Georges, the first international level, than at the Grand Prix level, the highest level of dressage. Hinneman suggested that I sell Warrior.
After going to Toronto, I seriously got the riding bug again, and as my opportunities were so limited in Nova Scotia, I decided to move back to Europe in early 1984, to continue training and find a horse with more potential. I sold Warrior and moved over to Germany with Gesar and Ashoka, intending to stay for the whole year. After looking around a bit for a new horse, I went back to Gronwohldhof, Herr Rehbein's facility. There was a horse there, Poseidon, that I had known about for several years, that had always appealed to me. When I rode him, he was a beautiful mover and gave me a good feeling. I thought that I should purchase him.
Hinnemann was skeptical. He called and said, "If the horse is already eight years old and he hasn't been successful competitively, there's something wrong and they shouldn't be selling him to you." I called Herr Rehbein at that point, who was furious that someone was saying these negative things. I had suddenly ended up in the middle of a political upheaval. I decided to trust Rehbein, so I went ahead with the purchase.
After several months training at Gronwohldhof, I began to have doubts. Poseidon was very big, and he proved to be spooky and quite difficult to ride. Later, I learned more about his medical history -- had I known these details earlier, I would not have purchased the horse, because the prognosis was not good. In retrospect, I don't think Herr Rehbein was malicious in selling me the horse in any way. He took an educated gamble. He was trying to help me find a good horse that I could afford. In the end, I lost on that gamble.
After riding the horse for more than six months, I found that he was getting more and more difficult to ride. The difficulties with my horse coincided with the time that I was supposed to return to North America to visit Rinpoche, who had begun a year's retreat in MillVillage, Nova Scotia. So in the fall of 1984, I went to MillVillage, and then I spent time in Boulder. This provided me with time to think about whether Poseidon was the right horse for me. I decided to sell Poseidon. I phoned Rehbein at that point and asked him to sell the horse. For months, I continued to call Gronwohldhof to ask if he had been sold. Every time I called, I was told, "No, No, he hasn't sold yet." This continued for almost a year.
During this period, Vajradhatu experienced severe financial problems. Most of my own financial affairs were handled by the organization. I kept asking if my bills at Gronwohldhof were being paid, and I was told that they were. It turned out I was almost a year in arrears, without my knowledge. The people at Gronwohldhof had basically repossessed the horse without saying that was what they were doing. Then Poseidon went lame. He was no longer worth anything, and Vajradhatu had let the insurance lapse. It was a fiasco.
In some quarters of Vajradhatu, there was resentment about the expenses connected with my riding, and I started to question whether it was worth going through all the negativity, especially when nothing seemed to be working out. I became depressed about my riding career. I was also quite worried about Rinpoche's health at this point, so I decided to stop riding. As it turned out, I didn't resume my career for four years, until after Rinpoche's death. Today, I find that I have more enjoyment and love for my discipline than ever before in my life. But at that particular time, that four-year hiatus was necessary.
I left Germany in the fall of 1984 and went to Nova Scotia, where Rinpoche was in retreat. He had contacted me and told me that he wanted me to come over to receive the Vajrayogini abhisheka from him in retreat. After all these years, I still had not had this transmission, and Rinpoche seemed to feel that this was extremely important at this time. He was planning to confer another important empowerment, the Chakrasamvara abhisheka, after his long retreat, and he wanted me to be able to take that as well. Chakrasamvara is the consort of Vajrayogini and a very important yidam in our lineage. Vajrayogini represents the wisdom aspect of the teachings, while Chakrasmavara represents the practitioner's skillful action and compassion. Since wisdom and compassion are indivisible, Vajrayogini and Chakrasamvara are joined in union in the iconography. These are some of the most profound and important teachings that Rinpoche could transmit to the West. Looking back now, I feel that he knew that his life was coming to an end, and he wanted to be sure that I received these transmissions from him.
The house he was living in was an old sea captain's house about two hours outside of Halifax. There was a large kitchen on the main floor, and people would hang out around the kitchen table at odd hours of the day and night. Near the kitchen there was a shrine room where the staff, and occasionally Rinpoche, would practice. There was a spacious dining room where Rinpoche ate at all hours of the day and night -- his schedule changed a lot -- and a large living room. The main cook, Joanne Carmin, who we called Machen (which means "chief cook" in Tibetan) also had a room at the very back of the house on the first floor. She spent the entire year in retreat with Rinpoche. There was always at least one attache, and one kusung on duty, and Rinpoche had a number of other guests who came and went. There was also a little guest bedroom on the first floor, where Gesar stayed when he visited his father for several months. Upstairs, Rinpoche's bedroom was a large room with a walk-in closet and a separate bath. Other bedrooms for the staff and visitors were also on the top floor.
The year before he went to Mill Village, Rinpoche had been on a schedule that was often totally turned upside down. He got into the habit of staying up all night and sleeping during the day. During the all-night sessions in this era, he began teaching his students elocution with an Oxonian accent, the English accent of a person educated at Oxford University. He wrote exercises that his students practiced with him at all hours of the day and night, and he also wrote a novel about life in the Shambhala Kingdom, which he liked to have read aloud in Oxonian, sometimes at three or four in the morning.
By the time he got to Mill Village, his schedule of activities was even stranger. He would often stay up for twenty-four to forty-eight hours straight, and then he might sleep that long. No one knew when he would be awake or when he might be sleeping. Sometimes, he would eat dinner three times in a day; sometimes, he would hardly eat at all. It was not very easy to be part of his staff or his household at that time.
Rinpoche's approach to retreat was quite different from the approach of a group retreat where everyone feels good and relaxes and communes with nature or with God. Rinpoche's retreats were more like the trials of Christ wandering in the desert or what ascetics in various traditions went through in their caves. Altogether, retreat in the Buddhist tradition is meant to be very tough. It is an undistracted opportunity for a student to work on unraveling ego and neurosis at a fundamental level. Rinpoche was both doing that for himself and he was also working with his students. The situation he created for himself and others in retreat was stripped bare of the conventions of everyday life. He was free to be exactly as he was, without any pretense. Even beyond the personal and interpersonal level, he was working on the karma of his whole community in North America, trying to liberate what was stuck both now and in the future.
I felt that his approach, how he worked with himself and with others in retreat, was the spiritual equivalent of the tough training that I went through in Vienna. He was creating an uncomfortable space for himself and other people, an almost ruthless space where you constantly felt groundless -- you have the ground pulled out from under you so that you realize what life is about at the most fundamental level. Eventually, you might realize what buddhanature is, the heart of enlightenment, stripped of all pretenses and concepts. But while you are going through the process, you totally lose any reference point to a goal. This process is very, very uncomfortable.
Sometimes people ask me what meditation practices Rinpoche himself did, and I realize that, in some respects, it's a strange question. In a very real sense, everything he did was practice. This may be a dangerous thing to say, because if students were to take this to mean that they don't need to do formal meditation practice, that would be a big mistake -- encouraging self-deception. However, I do feel that for Rinpoche, especially in the later years, his life was his practice. From time to time, he joined his students in the sitting practice of meditation, and he took part in the major practices he gave to people, such as the Sadhana of Mahamudra, the Vajrayogini Sadhana, and various Shambhala practices. But in general, his practice was his being, or vice versa. Very early on, in 1971, a student asked him if he ever meditated, formally. Rinpoche's response was: "That seems to depend on the situation -- but formal sitting, in terms of imposing it on oneself, somehow doesn't apply anymore." The student said, "Apply to whom?" And Rinpoche responded: "To whom. That's it!"1 I think his response here is another way of expressing the groundlessness one encountered at Mill Village. For Rinpoche, there was really no contrast between practice and everyday life, and there was nobody there to ask the question. For most of us, sharing that space was unsettling, sometimes deeply so.
Before going to Mill Village, I spent time studying the Vajrayana teachings that Rinpoche had given us to help prepare myself for the abhisheka. Rinpoche had phoned the Vajradhatu ambassador to Europe at that time, Steve Baker, and asked him to tutor me before I left Germany. The more I read, the less sure I felt about what I was about to do. I had a lot of questions and, one could almost say, doubt during this period of time. I didn't feel through and through that I was necessarily ready to take on this commitment. I wanted to understand what I was getting into if I took this transmission. I wasn't sure that I would be completely genuine if I took this empowerment without complete conviction. In my own way, even before I arrived at Mill Village, a spiritual crisis was growing within me, which seemed to be exactly what Rinpoche was provoking in everyone there.
When I got to Mill Village, Rinpoche said that I had to do twenty-one prostrations, twenty-one vajrasattva mantras, twenty-one mandalas, and twenty-one recitations of the guru yoga mantra on the day of the abhisheka before he would give me the transmission. I had never completed my preliminary practices. Traditionally, people do a hundred thousand of each of these practices, so he was letting me off pretty easy! However, I still resented him telling me what to do. I did the first three parts of the practice, but when I got to the guru yoga mantra, I had to visualize Rinpoche as my teacher. I was totally angry with him at that point for insisting that I take this abhisheka. I was conflicted about Rinpoche being both my husband and my guru. I found it difficult to reconcile these two things during this period. I thought to myself, "What the hell am I visualizing here?"
I was pushing the boundaries, wanting to discover for myself what made sense, what worked and what didn't. I had never had a chance to have a teenage rebellion, in a way, because I had married Rinpoche so young. I thought, "Why on earth am I in the shrine room doing this stuff?" So I came out and I said to him, "This is ridiculous." He got really angry with me. He screamed at me and started pounding his hand, saying, "Go back." He told me to go back and finish the practice. I was pissed off, but I went back and completed it.
I was also uncomfortable with the fact that in giving me the abhisheka, he seemed to be presenting Vajrayana as the highest reality. I was feeling that there were other valid positions in the world and that we were isolating ourselves as a community if we didn't acknowledge this. I was having a meltdown. The abhisheka was going to take place later that night. I wrote him a letter asking, "Aren't there other truths? Aren't there other realities?" In response, he wrote me this prose poem on the night that he gave me transmission:
To Lady Diana Mukpo on the Occasion of Receiving the Abhisheka of Vajrayogini
Why so?
Cheerful birthday once again.
You are my only eyes, heart and life as well as my breath.
Nonetheless, we haven't been together for a while.
Thinking of you is like a sudden flash of lightning in a cloudy night time.
Remembering your smile and your face relieves my pain.
Now and in our previous lives, we have been bound together by the chain of karma.
This letter was written with a combination of sadness and joy.
The reason why we are together in this lifetime is only due to the buddhadharma and the guru.
The little I have been able to help others is because of meeting the only authentic guru.
It is by the blessings of the guru that I am not insane.
However, these days, many people are insane.
Two world wars and nuclear weapons and other chaotic situations have occurred.
Your practising the dharma is not just for me, in the same way that taking of medicine is not for the doctor.
It is in order to cheer up others and blossom their lives.
The Vajrayana teaching is the highest of all.
It is the greatest magic that Buddha has ever taught.
Just as you need a mother to begin with as an infant, Vajrayogini practice is very necessary.
If one realizes the importance of that, one would understand all the Vajrayana teachings.
It is necessary to develop eyes in order to see the brilliance of various flowers.
Then one can develop an understanding of both spiritual and temporal ways.
This is not just thought up by somebody.
It is 2,500 years of wisdom.
I am presenting the ghanta, dorje, and damaru [bell, scepter, and hand drum] as a birthday gift.
They are like a horse and saddlery.
One might say: "Is this the one and only way? But we have become civilized and no longer act as cavemen."
Obviously, everyone would agree that the sky is blue.
One might ask: "Aren't there other truths, other ways?"
There might be, but mathematics must begin with zero.
One might say: "I don't want to buy any (one) else's viewpoint."
In this case, one is not buying others' viewpoint, but trees have to grow up from the ground.
They never take root in the air upside down.
But in any case, one is not buying somebody's view.
The Communists might say: "Lenin's view is the only way."
There are things with view and opinions.
There are also other things without view and opinion, which, as we know, is shunyata [emptiness] and is free from opinion and concept.
Vajrayogini herself represents nonthought.
There are ways to experience that, free from skandhas [ego] and fixed opinions and so obtain universal freedom.
That is why we have the story of the arhats [Buddha's disciples] who died of heart attacks when for the first time Buddha proclaimed the teachings of shunyata.
Once Nagarjuna said: "I have no axioms; therefore what I present is without dichotomy."
I would like to invite you into this enlightened world.
Once more, I would like to express that you remain as my greatest inspiration and companion.
With profound love and thanks,
From your best friend,
Chogyam2
I don't know if this will speak to others as it did to me. It was one of those times that Rinpoche was talking directly to my heart and my intellect at once, and he completely disarmed me. My hesitations dissolved on the spot, and I realized that my seeming irritation was actually more a reflection of my connection to him and longing for him. So I wrote this poem in reply:
Chogyie to the Rescue
Your kindness and brilliance go beyond conceptual mind.
Your generosity has transformed my life.
I was lost in the clutches of confusion
Searching for sanity and reference point
And along came Chogyie,
The first genuine person I'd ever met.
You demonstrated that the phenomenal world is merely a playground
To be captured with kindness and skillful means.
Your heart is unsurpassable.
You have taught me to believe in myself.
Your awakened mind is the source of my loyalty to you.
You nurture your students with loving kindness and include them in our Mukpo family.
I'm so glad I met you.
Please prolong your life for the benefit of others
I love you.
Your devoted wife and student.
Diana3
Does it seem odd that we wrote poems to one another? I suppose in a way it is, but it also was a way of reconnecting with him. In particular, I supplicated him in the poem to prolong his life because I felt that he was beginning the process of dying while at Mill Village. No one else seemed to realize this was happening at the time, which was one thing that made it so difficult for me during this period.
We proceeded with the abhisheka, which I felt as a breath of fresh air in what I experienced overall as a hot, crowded room. After giving the abhisheka, Rinpoche gave a little talk. There were several other people who received the abhisheka, and he gave a lecture to all of us about the principle of Vajrayogini and how to regard the practice.
During the remainder of my visit to Mill Village, I felt anything but receptive to the environment. I couldn't relax there, and I found that Rinpoche wasn't there for me in the way that I counted on him to be. It was very difficult.
During the last years of his life, Rinpoche intensified the training of a number of his close, older students -- including me. I, like many others, was to be left with many unfinished lessons to work out in years to come. The story of two great figures in the lineage, Marpa and Milarepa -- which I referred to much earlier in this book -- involved Marpa setting impossible tasks for Milarepa, asking him first to build and then tear down building after building. This was part of purifying Mila's karma. Marpa would often be drunk and abusive when he dealt with Milarepa. These stories of surrendering are colorful when they refer to events in the past, but when they are about something that happens in your own life, it's much less easy to accept or understand. The atmosphere at Mill Village evoked those classic tales and was anything but easy.
Altogether, I was there for a week or so, and I became incredibly claustrophobic. I felt a lack of personal space; things seemed to be closing in on me. I had Ashoka with me, and that made being there more difficult. If Rinpoche slept for twenty-four hours and then was up for twenty-four hours, it was completely incompatible with being with a young child. So at one point, I said that I would like to go into Halifax and stay at the Court on Dutch Village Road for a few days. This was a house that had been recently purchased for us. Rinpoche was planning to spend an extended period of time in Halifax, probably beginning in 1986, so this house was purchased with the idea that it could be his residence at that time. In the meantime, some sangha members were living there and fixing it up, and Rinpoche stayed there when he was in town. He told me that it would be fine if Ashoka and I went up there. I left as quickly as I could pull my things together! When we got to the house, I spent a nice evening there. Ashoka stayed in bed with me, and we had a bath and watched movies on television together and went to sleep early.
The next morning, around seven o'clock, a kasung walked into my bedroom and said, "Rinpoche is on his way down." I couldn't believe it. I finally had found a corner of privacy and space, and now he was coming there. The Sawang was staying at Mill Village at this time, also, and he arrived in the car with Rinpoche at the Court. We all gathered in the living room. By then it was close to 8 A.M. Rinpoche wanted to play a game that he loved, called the "qualities game," in which people would ask him questions about the quality of something they were trying to guess. They would ask questions such as: "If the subject of the game were a meal, what kind of meal would it be?" And he would say something like, "It would be a hot dog." Or "It would be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding." You could get a good idea about what you were guessing from the pattern of a number of answers. A British monarch might be described as roast beef, while Rinpoche was more likely to describe an American president as a hot dog.
That was the traditional way that the game was played. But starting in this era, frequently there was no subject. In other words, there was no correct answer and therefore no end to the game. Rinpoche would just give answers, and they weren't related to guessing anything. The game ended when he wanted it to end. Period. This was heightening my sense of being trapped and uncomfortable.
More broadly, I was increasingly upset because I sensed Rinpoche was going into another realm at this point, and I didn't know how to reverse things. He often didn't seem responsive or grounded in the way that I was used to. I felt that everything was spiraling out of my control.
I once asked His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche why, when you had these descriptions of how far out Vajrayana experience was, the great teachers like himself were all so kind and ordinary. He said to me, "It's that way on the outside, but if you could see into my mind, it might look completely crazy to you." So Rinpoche, in a sense, was letting people see into his mind and into their own -- with nothing covering up anything.
Mill Village was the last intense opportunity he was to have to train the people around him, and he didn't let up for one moment. He didn't even say, "Now, I'm training you and this is going to be really uncomfortable." He just was the way he was, and you had to deal with it. It was outrageous in a whole new way; this time, it wasn't glorious outrageousness. It was really tough. The point seemed to be to push people in the environment until they couldn't hold it together anymore -- then see what happens. He didn't relent until people lost it in some way.
At one point during this retreat, a person visiting Rinpoche asked him why he was being so tough on one particular staff member. Rinpoche had been relentlessly breaking this person down, waking him up over and over again during the night, criticizing him, and on and on. This visitor was in a car with Rinpoche and the person Rinpoche had been tormenting, so to speak. The visitor asked, "Why are you being so hard on so and so?" Rinpoche said, loud enough so he could be overheard, "I have to make him feel as bad as I possibly can." Somehow this made the person feel a little bit better. Later Rinpoche indicated that this person was really very close to him -- he wasn't mad at him or anything. He just was trying to get through the facade and work with what was there.
Again, this was very familiar to me. What Rinpoche was doing at Mill Village had a similarity to the tactics at the Spanish Riding School, where they push people to such an extreme that a person discovers what he or she is made of. The difference in what Rinpoche was doing was that his approach was not based on aggression but was using aggression, turning it on its head, to break through the fundamental aggression. This is similar to how he worked with the Dorje Kasung discipline. It is both the heart of his brilliance and often the most misunderstood part of his teaching.
On the morning Rinpoche arrived at our home in Halifax, when the qualities game mercifully ended, I went upstairs to escape, but Rinpoche followed me. I encountered him in the upstairs hallway. He was standing with Osel, leaning on his arm. I said to him, "This situation is terrible. It's really awful. You are getting completely crazy. You are getting completely out of control, and you're killing yourself. You're drinking yourself to death." And he said, "Well, do you know what's the matter with you? You're a punk." (He was referring to my hairstyle; I had had my hair cut short and spiky in Germany.) I came right back at him. I said, "I may be a punk, but I'm not drunk." With that, he tried to hit me, but he missed.
From my perspective as his wife, which I think is different from a student's perspective, I felt that the whole thing, my whole life, was falling apart. In earlier years, when people were having difficulty accepting Rinpoche or his latest campaign, they would come to me and ask, "Is everything okay? Is everything going to be all right?" I could always say, with complete conviction, "Everything is going to be fine." I had so much faith in Rinpoche and what he was doing. But in the later years, I would have had to say, "I don't know. I really don't know."
As Rinpoche's wife, my role seemed to be to nurture him and help to keep him on this earth, in some ways. To see him sacrificing his body and going beyond the bounds of good sense in terms of his health was excruciating. Maybe that was a lesson in itself. One of the stories about Milarepa is that the last time he was with Gampopa, his dharma heir, when they parted, Mila lifted his cotton robe so that Gampopa could see his emaciated body covered in scabs and sores. "This is the dharma. This is the truth," he said. The end of Rinpoche's life had some of that aspect to it.
When I look back at this period of time now, it still makes me incredibly sad. Yet I can see now that Rinpoche was still doing an amazing amount during this final era. Things actually weren't falling apart. During the year that he was in Mill Village, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior was published, and it was a great success. Rinpoche continued to work closely with Shambhala Training, and when the administration faltered, he moved forcefully to make changes so that the project would remain strong. During this period he also directed a group of students to upgrade the facilities at RMDC, overcoming hesitations within the board of directors, so that we could hold the seminary and Kalapa Assembly on our own land starting in 1985. There were a number of projects like this, which he kept in touch with and moved forward during this period. He was also working on what I can only call a nonconceptual level in terms of planting seeds in Nova Scotia. I don't know how else to put it. He was feeling out the energy of the place, and he was putting parts of himself into the environment there. It was something like that. But as his wife, seeing that he was less and less in his body and less and less healthy, it was heart-wrenching. Sometimes, I think that he kept me away, at arms length, during this era because he knew that he was going to die relatively soon, but he just had to go forward.
Rinpoche at times was like a typhoon, or a hurricane. Viewed from afar, a hurricane appears orderly and beautiful; from inside, it is dangerous, chaotic, and difficult to endure -- unless you are in the eye. The eye of the storm is absolutely still and calm. I think that for much of my life with Rinpoche, I could find the empty center, which was calm and open. I could feel the brilliance and the power, but I wasn't buffeted around by it. However in the later years, I felt that I was part of the swirling chaos. Rinpoche threw everyone into that whirlwind. I think that was deliberate on his part. After his death, I could begin to see the larger pattern again, its power, beauty, and meaning. I realize now that the immediate chaos, though painful and excruciatingly real, was a passing confusion. I find that what endures is the big picture, the vast vision that Rinpoche communicated.
Around the time that I was in Mill Village visiting Rinpoche, Mitchell and Sarah decided to separate after what had certainly been a very difficult time for them. When I left Mill Village, I went back to Boulder, where Mitchell and I were able to spend time together. The Regent and Lady Rich were living in the Court at Eleventh and Cascade. I was supposed to have stayed in Germany for the whole time that Rinpoche was in Mill Village, so we had given them the Court for the year. Rather than try to move in with them, which really didn't appeal to me, I got my own apartment, where Ashoka and I stayed. (Gesar was in Nova Scotia for the rest of the year.)
The next month I found out that I was pregnant again. Once again, it happened while I was using contraception. It was, of course, another big drama, but this time there was no question about whose child this was. David, my second son with Mitchell, was born in August 1985.
At the time of David's birth, Rinpoche was conducting the Magyal Pomra Encampment again. He asked me if I wanted him to be present at the birth, but I told him it was not necessary. My mother, however, actually came to the hospital. Somehow, she was able to accept my unconventional relationship with Mitchell, and she was delighted to have more grandchildren. Mitchell's mother was also there. The two grandmothers waited in separate rooms during my labor, as they were not overly fond of one another. After the baby was born, they both were ushered into the room. When Elaine, Mitchell's mother, saw David for the first time, she remarked, "Another Jewish doctor is born!" My mother countered, "The best part of this child is English!"
Rinpoche had the Dorje Kasung at MPE fire off the big cannon to celebrate David's birth. Rinpoche was very sweet to David when he was an infant, but Rinpoche didn't live long enough to spend much time with him. David was just eighteen months old when Rinpoche died. Rinpoche's hope was that we would name the baby Yung-lo, after the Chinese emperor who built the Forbidden City and was a great warrior-king. Rinpoche felt that this child would have a particular connection to martial energy and that this name would be very appropriate for him. Rinpoche said that this child would be the next Kasung Kyi-Khyap, the commander of the Dorje Kasung. I wanted to call my son "David." Emperor Yung-lo was also a ruthless tyrant who killed many people before converting to Buddhism, so I thought it was a strange name to saddle my son with. However, after thinking about it, I realized that all of our children had Shambhala names and that I trusted Rinpoche's inspiration. My son's birth certificate reads Yung-lo David Mukpo.
