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January 19, 2004
Tiger Lily said:
"I'm just starting to realise how
terribly painful and confusing that must have been to receive such gross
sexual advances from men you were wanting to see in a pure fatherly light.
I understand your anger at coming to
a forum where you felt people weren't listening or not caring about your
pain. Not caring about you. I think if you give us time, we are all here
for you.
How you must loathe the very word
Dakini that has been so misunderstood by western practitioners and the
Lamas who played around with their sex, projecting a deluded Dakini vision
onto a woman and so invalidating her as a woman in her own right."
Hi dear Tiger Lily,
Hmm, it's nice to be challenged
to think about things in new ways I think, when the intentions behind the
challenge feel well-wishing and if genuine consideration has gone into the
challenge. I appreciate what you said to me in that light and have been
mulling over what you said.
Human beings live in a continuum
of time. Who we were as children, what culture was our background, our
language, family history ... it and our individual response to what we
were born into, our reactions and actions, all go into who we become as
adults and what we are attracted to, what we choose to do or feel
compelled to do with our lives.
I was attracted to the 4 Noble
Truths because as a 10-year-old I sensed the hypocrisy in the pill-box
hatted, white-gloved, Stepford wife, Jackie-Onassis-as-a-role-model that
was being dished out to females in 1963. The pill-box-hat reality did not
feel sane, safe or good to me at the core. I don't know why but it didn't.
Maybe it was because I grew up in a privileged environment and at the same
time suffered serious abuse in that arena. Rich and white became something
to hate for me but I had no ideas about any other life that could possibly
be a Good Way To Live And Think.
The 4 Noble Truths leapt off the
page of my history book and burned into my child's mind as a possible way
out of my suffering that came with fancy trappings. I was being badly
abused at home. I'm lucky to be alive, it was that bad. It was my
biological mother who was the abuser. My dear father, who was a scientist,
had abandoned us kids and left, after he’d tried to handle his violent,
psychopathically-traited wife, who I learned about 7 years ago has
Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Here was somebody, the Buddha, in
this 4th grade history book, talking about suffering, and a path out of
that suffering, not just trying to white-glove it away. So I went to the
local museum and looked at the stone heads and statues of the Buddha, with
their serene expressions, simple, dignified postures, and yearned for what
seemed to me like wise composure in the face of openly knowing about
suffering.
But at that time I had NO idea
how to learn about Buddhism. I went to book stores and read koans, but
what could I get from the idea of one hand clapping? Zip. Where was the
understanding there? It made no sense at all! And I sensed in those books
some sort of smug ridiculing knowing about anything or valuing the mind or
life. It felt nihilistic to me. Nope, Zen was not for me.
Then Evans-Wentz' book on the
bardo ... that made a different kind of NO sense to me, some
anthropological fascination with views on death? What good was that to me?
None that I could see.
Years later I read Cutting
Through Spiritual Materialism in the winter of 1974, just after I turned
21 and went to live in Rome, in a room in an apartment with an elderly
woman landlady. Reading that book affected me so profoundly, I went into a
sort of fevered delirium I'd never experienced in my life. Maybe I got
some sort of bizarre illness that lasted 3 days with no other symptoms
than a raging fever ... whatever it was, I spent 3 days in bed, with my
landlady bringing me soup in the afternoon after I spent 23 out of the 24
hours in some nightmare dream state. The dream was about the realms of
suffering, the earth covered with misery in a Boschian purgatory. What
could be the way out of that endless suffering?! That book gave me no
answers. I had no idea that Trungpa was Buddhist or that there were living
teachers. I thought Buddhist teachers had all died out. I really did. I
thought there was no way out of all this suffering and I just didn't want
to live any more.
It cast me into suicidal
depression. After packing my belongings and saying goodbye to my kind
landlady, I rented a hotel room in Albergo Paradiso, fully enjoying the
irony in the name of this squalid flea pit of a hotel, that looked out
over the statue of Giordano Bruno, the alchemist who had been burned at
the stake in that plaza, Campo Dei Fiori, in Trastevere.
I didn't die; I couldn't razor
blade deeply enough. My squeamishness kept me alive, and I left Rome in a
depressed daze to live on a tiny island in Greece, by myself, to work on
being a writer there in the olive orchards. I realised that I knew nothing
about life really, wasn't capable of being a writer, and never wrote
anything but letters again. It was from there, half a year later, that I
mostly hitched to India over 2 months, arriving in MCloud Ganj in October
1975, just after seeing the Taj Mahal in the Dusshera full moon, floating
there in the mist, at the hour of the cow dust, in the twilight. I fell
deeply in love with India.
It was while in that dreamy
ecstasy that I think can be experienced by people who are attracted to
India's multi-layered, kaleidoscopic chaos, that I stayed at the Library
of Tibetan Works and Archives, managing to live in India for 5 months on
70 dollars. Here, I thought, I would be living near and around genuine
Buddhist monks who would teach me something I'd wanted to know about for a
decade, how to work on the cessation of suffering. I was willing, able and
interested.
In my first 5 months in India,
there was a Bhutanese 'monk' who attempted to rape me as I walked back to
my lodgings in Bodhgaya, where I went on pilgrimage to see the Bodhi tree,
and where Sakyamuni was said to have attained enlightenment. As a result,
I blamed my long blonde hair as to why this 'monk' was induced to try and
rape me. So, after smacking this 'monk' in the face with a resounding
crack that left me feeling guilty for years, I escaped from his muscled
grip and ran back to the tourist bungalow and cut off most of my hair, and
later wore clothes that would be best described as tent-like. Back in the
USA, it was with my cut-off hair and in my almost floor length, made in
Calcutta, dark brown tent dress that I went to see Sogyal. That was when
he assaulted me.
After the 4 or so months I knew
Sogyal in the USA, anything that smelled like an excuse to abuse people
sexually, like so-called Tantric sex and so-called using 'dakinis to get
'energy', and most of the ritual elements of TB, repelled me.
Yes, my having been sexually
abused as a child and turning to lamas as loving parent figures, who took
advantage of that sexually, was very traumatizing. When Geshela asked to
see my breasts I tried to write it off as just curiosity, a monk who
hadn't seen a white woman's breasts before. I was trying to accept that
maybe what I needed was to talk with a teacher who was MARRIED and had a
family, a more worldly-wise lama, which prompted me to think in 1980 that
Sakya Trizin would be a man to talk with about my feelings of existential
aloneness. He had lost his parents when he was a tiny child, and been
brought up by an aunt who had recently died. I thought maybe he could
understand my own sense of loss, not having a family.
Since he had been giving me
private teachings on the Dzogchen meditation part of my yidam practice,
seeing the unawakened states as the flip side of the same awakened states,
I asked him about how it was that lust and compassion were related. He
said like water and ice. That water and ice are the same substance in
different forms.
That seemed so wise to me! Like
water and ice! Compassion is the free-flowing aspect of love and lust is
its arrested, 'frozen' mode. Ah, how beautiful that seemed. Back I went to
the meditation cushion with delight! This added a new dimension to ‘going
with the flow’.
A week later he said he had a
vision of him yab-yum with me as Dorje Phurba. Immediately I felt
suspicious, but at the same time somewhat shocked and also flattered that
this His Holiness person included me unconsciously or consciously as part
of his 'path'. But moments later, as I got up to leave our hourly lesson
in meditation, he said he had this vision and wanted me 'do it' with him.
I said "You must be joking". He became visibly, audibly angry with me and
scowlingly said, "No, I want to come to your room tomorrow morning when I
go for my walk and do this."
My blood went cold. This lama I
had come to trust over the months I'd spent studying with him, thinking I
could respectfully share my doubts, worries, meditation questions, needs
to understand certain texts. It all seemed to be finally happening, a
quiet, simple rapport with a Buddhist teacher. No rituals, no bs, just
working on meditation practice.
Then, bam, it was in that instant
shattered. I didn't listen to my inner voice that wanted to say no. I
didn't say no. I said alright but my heart was cold and my stomach sick.
What if maybe this was it, the actual transformation of a worldly activity
into a yogic practice? Like the Tibetan lamas said in the books and
everything! What if I were passing up this possible chance with my teacher
because of my fears stemming from being sexually abused in childhood?
Maybe this was a chance to transcend that, to let go of the
attachment-revulsion pendulum, to alchemize the worldly into the gold of
awakened activity?
So I said ok.
The next morning he came up the
steps to my rented apartment across the street from the Sakya property on
Rajpur Road. He quickly snuck in, closing the door behind him and came to
my bedroom. He sat on the bed, mumbled something in Tibetan, and told me
to think that what we were about to do was for the benefit of all sentient
beings I folded my hands in prayer and prayed, and then he lifted his
skirt. Below his large belly, he put on a condom which hung off his acorn
like a windsock on a windless day. Wondering what was going to happen
next, and if anything could actually take place, I offered him oral sex. I
sincerely didn’t think he could actually function sexually. That was when
he said he was afraid that oral sex would make me pregnant. He also said
that he thought that was unclean. He asked me to lie down, he lay on top
of me, grunted in about 5 seconds and then ran for the door, carrying the
condom with him, and really I hardly felt anything at all except somewhat
numb with remorse.
So maybe he wasn't endowed enough
to actually have sex except maybe for himself? Maybe this was something
that was supposed to be my disciple's gift to him and I should just lump
it, get over it with detachment. Maybe I should just laugh at the cosmic
ridiculousness and keep on doing my meditation!
So I took a deep breath and
thought, I'm just not going to think about this, and whatever it is, well
that's what it is. But the next time I went for my class, ALL Sakya Trizin
could talk about was the sex act. That's it. He seemed highly lascivious,
amused, and wanted to do it all again. So I let him do it again. Was this
a test? I was attached to feeling remorse? Was this going to cure me of
thinking about sex as something important, and help me see the transparent
folly of being hurt by sex?
Sakya Trizin had told me at the
beginning of our meditation classes some weeks prior, to see everything as
sacred, that he was to be seen as the yidam, the world as pure, all sounds
as mantras, so I focused on that, that this was an 'enlightened'
experience.
It was my trying to make lemonade
out of lemons.
Then when I went to study with
him, all he could talk about was sex, wanting me to swear that I would
always tell him where I was in the world, and be available to him for sex.
When his dignified, beautiful wife walked into the room that day, he went
into a sort of cold-shouldering me that seemed like he was worried he
might have been talking too loudly, and might have gotten caught by her
talking about this with me. From then on he whispered to me.
It is widely known he married for
political reasons: "In order to maintain the tradition of the Khon family
lineage, in 1974, H. H. Sakya Trizin married Dagmo Kusho Tashi Lhakyet,
the daughter of the Minister of the King of Derge." So I thought maybe his
life was compartmentalized: political marriage here, “sang-yum” there,
mother over there, and maybe he needed a person with whom to 'do' his yab-yum
yidam practice and I was just a handy orifice who was also a dedicated
disciple. I was to be used but not somehow included in this process???? I
could see I got nothing out of these 2 encounters except confusion,
remorse, some shame. But I had faith that he must know what he was doing
because after all, he was a Holiness, and everybody held him in high
esteem. My doubts must be out of ignorance, selfishness, kleshas.
He made me promise not to talk
about 'it' with anybody; it would be our secret.
When I tried to discuss
meditation with him over the next 2 years after I left Rajpur and returned
occasionally, he didn't have time. All he DID have time for was wanting to
talk about sex. When I went out to the Sakya center once for a wang given
by the Dalai Lama there, and another time hoping to continue the actual
meditation classes we used to have, he cold-shouldered me. One time he
stood holding his wife's hand, which is highly unusual for any Tibetan,
and I felt like I was somehow a pariah, had done something wrong, simply
by doubting him in the privacy of my mind, my wanting to study meditation
instead of just giving into being an orifice for him. I knew over time
that our meditation class relationship had vanished and would never
return.
I went into a 5 month retreat.
When I came out of that retreat I house-sat for my old friend when she and
her husband were away for a few days. When I returned from the bazaar they
had returned, and the woman, who had found my diary, read it, burned it
full of holes with a stick of incense without telling me. I discovered the
burned pages a day later, asked her why, and her venom was really painful
to me, blaming me for endangering His Holiness Sakya Trizin's reputation
by writing what I did in my diary! I had told nobody! I had written it in
MY diary!!!
So now she knew. I felt ashamed,
reviled by my old, dear friend, who blamed me for "smiling too much," and
THAT was why the married Sakya Trizin had used me like he did; I'd broken
the code of secrecy by accident, leaving my diary around for her to pry
into, and so I decided to leave Rajpur.
When Sakya Trizin came to New
Delhi a few months later, he asked to see me, nudge nudge, wink wink, make
sure I'm alone so he can do the yab-yum thing again privately in his room.
I just couldn't go again.
That was the end of my connection
with TB, of any trust, any faith. I stopped my practice with fear, regret,
sadness, shame, loss, grieving the loss of my sense of community.
In the next 4 years I tried to
discuss what happened with both a Gelug nun and a Kargyu nun who I'd known
well for years. They both told me to not discuss it but keep it all
secret, and if I saw/thought something wrong it was my fault. During that
time I had a large apartment in New Delhi, where many guests, old Buddhist
friends of mine, stayed when they came to town. We would be having
breakfast or dinner on the verandah and out would come their own stories
of bad experiences with various Tibetan lamas, which they begged me to
keep secret, to "protect the lamas and the dharma".
Somehow the revelations of the
truth never budged from the level of gossip. There was no clarity about
what was going on or any sense of what direction to take, how to sort this
mess out. The code of secrecy had us all paralysed. There was no talking
openly, so no clarity of purpose, intention or feeling.
Whoever I discussed this Tibetan
lack of morality with would invariably say that "THEIR" lama (Kalu
Rinpoche, Karmapa, Khamtrul Rinpoche) would NEVER do "such a thing". Then
how come these lamas were SURROUNDED by sexual abuse and nothing was done,
or it emerged that really their lama DID do such a thing!???
My polite disinterest in the
Tibetan culture ended for me when I heard my old 'dharma sister' friend
from the Library days had committed suicide by burning herself alive as an
offering in a retreat. Then that disinterest turned into outright disgust
mixed with horror.
This was after it became public
knowledge that Geshela had masturbated for years between the legs (common
monastic practice as a way of not breaking the FULL vow of celibacy but
only committing a 'misdemeanor' by not committing the monk's vow felony of
full penetration) of a South American nun he'd ordained. She had stood up
in his class at the Library and told the open-jawed room full of 30+
students what Geshela had been doing to her for 2 years.
My dear Geshela did THAT!!! And
his old disciple had suicided after that???!!!
It was too much pain, too sad,
too wrong!!! And then Geshela went to New Zealand with that randy twerp of
a zhebzhi, Khedrup Tharchin, who always used to feel me up while I did
korwa around the Library if I didn't run fast enough away from him???!!!
No responsibility? No punishment for this breaking of vows? WHAT hypocrisy
all this was AND THE DALAI LAMA KNEW ABOUT ALL THIS AND DID
NOTHING?????!!!!
My faith shattered. The sense of
samaya anything snapped.
I went to Delhi and got a job in
the fashion clothing business because of my facility with
Hindi/Punjabi/Urdu, which are all linguistically intertwined in colloquial
Hindustani.
Yes, after that, any adoration of
tormas, dakni anything, yab-yum anything ... it made me feel sick. I got
to know the Tibetans in New Delhi over the next 4 years, the more worldly
ones, and understood their deep contempt for all the foreign 'injis' who
came East to worship the lamas. The young, non-monk, non-Dalai Lama
Administration Tibetans really know almost nothing about their culture,
history, and philosophy. All this bowing and scraping to lamas for
anything other than "blessings", or in a medical emergency, or to appear
traditional, is nuts to them.
The Tibetans who were born in
India, or who came over as little kids from Tibet in 1959, they grew to
love India as an expression of Bollywood. Their cultural frame of
reference is the amazingly kitch, bizarre, New Indian culture, with
Amitabh Bachan (India's answer to Arnold) as a culture hero. These
Tibetans never got to know under-the-surface India, like an Indian kid
would. All the New Tibetans know about India is the thin veneer of the
commercial pop drek.
It would be like somebody coming
to America from Tibet and thinking that Dallas and Dynasty TV shows from
the 1980's are documentaries, really ARE the REAL America and dressing
like that, talking like that. So the New Tibetans have this strange
culture that came out of Bollywood, which came out of Hollywood. The lamas
to this new generation are about as real and meaningful as Santa Claus.
There is incredible contempt for
Westerners among the Tibetans. They don't like anybody who isn't Tibetan,
although with the New Tibetan kids, I did see admiration for New Taiwanese
kids because there was a sense of similar features and similar
materialism.
Before leaving Clement Town and
going to live in Rajpur, I went sweater vending several times with my
neighbors in Clement Town just for fun. Because I speak both Tibetan and
Hindi I sat with them observing their business transactions. The Tibetans
would say in Hindi as they held up the wool sweaters that were sent by
Americans to India as part of the charity to Bangladesh, "This is the
best, most pure," and in Tibetan they would say "shit" or "straw". The
Indians thought the Tibetans were saying "wool" in Tibetan because almost
no Indians speak any Tibetan, but almost all Tibetans living in India
speak some Hindi.
The Tibetan business traders were
all making fun of their Indian customers in this devious, nasty,
contemptuous way. All done with a smiling face! There was this mask of
friendliness and warmth and then the reality of ridicule and seething
anger underneath. That was shocking to me. This was not a one off
experience, this was one in a thousand such experiences with Tibetans over
a ten year period.
The next 4 years, from 1981 to
the end of 1985, I lived and worked in Delhi and knew many working
Tibetans there from all over the subcontinent: from the South, from
Darjeeling, from Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Dharamsala, Manali ... and there
was this ongoing contempt for Westerners' adoration of the lamas, of
Westerners period, who were denigrated as hippies if they didn't look like
John Travolta and his dancing partner in Saturday Night Fever, which is
what the young Tibetan kids aspired to, and if a Westerner did dress well
they were spoken about as whores or somebody to try and get as a
"sponsor". This contempt for Westerners and no curiosity about Western
culture in any way, was echoed by many lamas I spoke with, like the
administrator ‘rinpoches’ at the New Delhi Tibet Center.
At the same time, young Tibetans
who lusted after polyester pants a la Travolta, were somewhat horrified
when Westerners were interested in wearing yak herder boots! LOL!
So ... all this mess over a
decade added up to a deep distaste for Tibetan anything, thankas, cultural
symbols. How could I feel comfortable around people who have so much
contempt for everybody else, while they kept their hand out for everybody
else's money and real estate, and adoration? These people EXPECTED to be
worshipped, pitied, pampered, cared about, paid for, idolized, when they
were just greedy takers, who sneered at those who gave to them!
So, if you talk about "Dakini
Day" with some sort of reverence, and think it's just because the lamas
betrayed my trust due to having been sexually abused as a kid, and that's
why it isn't something I like or value, no, I learned on MANY levels over
30 years not to like Tibetan culture.
To me, you had a feminist
get-together in a kind of New Age ceremony. That kind of thing's not my
cup of tea really. I really don't like anything spiritual in any kind of
group. Something catalytically happens in a group which just doesn’t feel
healthy to me as part of my sense of the 'spiritual', whatever that is.
If a bunch of women want to get
together to grok the cosmic nature of the universe, or have a sort of
ceremony, okay, I wish you enjoyment. But to call it "Dakini Day" isn't
something I like. It makes me feel uncomfortable to talk with you about
it because it is something that IS meaningful to you. That's your thing.
What pleases me is privately
connecting with what I think of as a "truth path", which has been formed
in part from my studies of Buddhist teachings I received in person and
studied further in private, as well as 17 years studying Western
psychology. That truth path also means for me enjoying conversation, art,
walking, being in nature quietly, studying science, reading, occasional
meditation, resting my mind in a loving awareness that is democratic,
non-theistic, part American, part Buddhist, and when I can remember to do
so, being in the moment, feeling deeply connected with the universe.
Phew. All this came pouring out
this afternoon. I didn't expect to go on such a long ramble. It feels
healing to get all the gory details out, to speak about this really and
also start to think about what I think is the baby not to be thrown out
with the bath water. For me the whole Dakini thing was flushed down the
toilet. It’s not even in the bathwater, LOL! What is the bathwater to me
is Tibetan culture.
If I've bored the daylights out
of you Tiger Lily or anybody else here with my verbosity, my apologies,
this has been a sort of purging, getting it out in words, healing for me.
all the best,
AmLearning
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