THE BUDDHA FROM BROOKLYN -- APPROACHING THE NONDUAL

Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

I had moved out to the country by the time of the compassion retreat in late September 1996. My boyfriend and I had gotten engaged and found a house in a quaint and well cared for little village in Virginia called Waterford. For years I had been telling myself it was time to move on, to withdraw from city life, from the crowds and noise, the smell of money and politics, and the sight of lobbyists sitting around big dinner tables at expensive restaurants. I wasn't sure that I believed that my life on earth was samsara--a place of delusion and suffering--but existence in Washington, D.C., came pretty close.

The funny thing was, as much as I had moved farther away from D.C.--and in what seemed to be the opposite direction from the state of Maryland--I was now closer to Kunzang Palyul Choling. Alana had called to ask if I needed a place to stay in Poolesville over the four-day retreat and made arrangements for me to use a spare room at a sangha member's house. But after the first commute I realized that this wasn't necessary. About eight  miles from my house was a small ferry that crossed the Potomac.  It left from a little wharf tucked into the side of the river--and was marked by a hand-painted sign that said, WHITE'S FERRY, with an arrow; it shuttled three cars at a time. Once on the Maryland side of the river, I found myself in the farthest reaches of Poolesville, at the end of River Road. The rest of the drive was poetic. Traveling along a narrow country lane, passing woods and fallow fields and open farmland, in just ten minutes or so I found myself at the driveway to the temple. I had returned again to the land of the Tibetan Buddhists, to the big white plantation facade, to the wind chimes, the flapping prayer flags, and all the friendly faces I had come to know. I hadn't moved far away, it seemed, but come full circle.

It had been nearly three months since I'd talked to Jetsunma or visited much with her students, except by phone.  My summer had been spent settling into a new house and hand-wringing about my book. I had talked to theologians and religion professors and other Tibetan Buddhists. I had read up on everything from crystals and cults to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I had been trying to figure out the difference between a cult and a religion--and had decided it was only two things: A matter of time and conformity.

The prophet who began the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, received revelations from a white salamander on a rock. In these visions he claimed he was told how the universe worked, how heaven was arranged--the ideas and stories that became the foundation of a new religion. Smith and his followers seemed like strange people when The Book of Mormon was first published in 1830 in Palmyra, New York, and Smith himself was later sent to jail and then lynched. The Mormons were driven west to Salt Lake City to escape persecution and prospered there. Of course they were seen as a cult, and a group of fanatics who didn't smoke or drink coffee or liquor, hoarded food in their basements, and believed they would become gods of their own kingdoms someday. Smith's successor, Brigham Young, had twenty-seven wives. But over the last hundred years their church had matured and become an elegant cruise ship of a religion. It is the richest and most successful church in America. It owns the most land, has the most stable membership: it had built the most temples and attracted the most new followers. And it had joined the mainstream by carefully abandoning certain practices not in sync with society's norms. Polygamy, for instance, was dropped overboard along the way.

If KPC was a cult, maybe it would mature beyond that. It sure looked like a cult and smelled like a cult--and was often managed the way cults are. But the tulku system was long established in Tibet, where the divine lamas seemed to be a law unto themselves. In the East there are ways of dealing with abuses--gossip and  quiet ostracizing, and other correctives that are too subtle and imprecise for Americans. We expect accountability, open books, and fewer secrets from our religious leaders. As the Monk had told Dechen, and would ultimately tell me, democracy is a very good thing, and Americans expect it, deserve it. Wasn't there a way for Tibetan Buddhism to comply with these ideals?

There would always be determined people like Dechen who would tell their stories. Others--people like Kathy Coon, Bonnie Taylor, and Bob Denmark--would be quieter victims of a bad system, would leave peacefully and try to figure out for themselves why they were ever in Poolesville. Bonnie Taylor left in 1996. She had given nearly two hundred thousand dollars to KPC in five years and found herself pressured to donate another one hundred thousand to Ladyworks.

Kathy Coon and Bob Denmark would leave in 1997, after serving on a financial committee and seeing the budget for the first time. When the committee sent a letter to Jetsunma asking her to take a reduced salary from her sangha, she refused. She claimed that great negative karma would be caused by rescinding an offering to a lama, and the temple would fall to ruin.

In 1996, Kathy transferred a hundred thousand dollars in stocks and bonds to the temple, with a specific written request that the money be restricted to helping build a monastic university in Poolesville. But it never went to the shedra. According to Konchog Norbu, the shedra administrator, it went into the giant pot that paid for everything. And Kathy received a thank-you card from Ladyworks. "From the point of view of intention, I got what I wanted, I guess," Kathy said. I gave money and wanted power--wanted to buy power--and I did." Ultimately, Kathy came to believe that Jetsunma was corrupt and that the monks and nuns involved with KPC's board and finances were breaking their vows by misleading people.

If KPC was a cult and not Tibetan Buddhism at all--as some of its detractors suggest--it would surely die with Jetsunma.  But I had hope that wasn't going to happen. I had hope that eventually the books would be opened, amends would be made, a new board of directors would be elected and not appointed. Monks and nuns would stop fund-raising--and strong-arming potential donors. The children of members would receive immunization shots, not be discouraged from attending college--or ordained before they were mature enough to handle the vows. There wouldn't be secret sangha meetings. The manipulation tactics, and the desperation would end. Jetsunma would support her monks and nuns in the traditional way and not the other way around.

Somebody would step in, I had to think, and save these decent people from themselves, from Jetsunma, or from an imported medieval system that surely could work better. Maybe Khenpo Tsewang Gyatso would step in--although he would tell me eventually that he had no interest in doing that. Running a Dharma center was a headache and too political. As for the problems in Poolesville, "What problems?" he said. I liked Khenpo and enjoyed talking to him. He was a traditional Tibetan monk and saw things from a traditional point of view. I could see his hands were tied. And while Buddhists are not supposed to lie, he explained to me that it was okay to lie if you were protecting your teacher. "If this comes from devotion," he said, "and pure motive, then it is okay."

Maybe Penor Rinpoche himself--the man Khenpo protected so purely-would step in. Maybe Penor Rinpoche would publicly apologize for the ethical violations that had occurred at a Palyul center under his guidance--something many former students at KPC would appreciate. But in the three interviews I conducted with him, he revealed no such plans. He was an optimist. All new Dharma centers have difficulties, he explained. And this was America, where the Dharma is in its infancy and "pride is a big problem." But he spent a great deal of time with me and was encouraging about my book, which was perhaps his way of dealing with these things. Besides, he was a very busy man. Penor Rinpoche had monasteries to run, and eighteen hundred monks to feed. And, like all good Buddhists, he had a long view of beginningless time--a few squabbles and problems didn't add up to much. He also had his hands full talking to reporters after 1997 --kindly and delicately trying to explain his recognition of the Hollywood action-picture star Steven Seagal as the reincarnation of a Tibetan terton.

The moon was rising when I arrived at the temple the night before the retreat. I parked my car on River Road, took the shortcut into the woods, and found the narrow dirt road that led to the Migyur Dorje stupa. Over the years, I could see now, I had become the sort of person who needed to know the worst about a place--or an individual--before I could balance it with the best. Maybe that is what journalists do for a living. We live in the mess and ugliness, look for problems and weakness, for things that need to be improved. An experienced Tibetan Buddhist would strive to have a nonjudgmental perspective. Penor Rinpoche and Khenpo, they lived in the sunshine. What problems? When they looked at something, it was neither good nor bad. They saw goodness and perfection, the Buddha nature.

As I began to walk around the stupa, I thought about Jetsunma. "The lotus has its roots in the mud," one of the lamas had once said to me, when we were talking about KPC. You could add up all the negatives, all the worst things that could be said about Jetsunma, and, still, that wasn't the whole story either.

"I see this as a pattern of mine," she had said to me on the phone, earlier in the summer. "I am a religion builder and I tend to build structures that others can use. It's like an archetypal response I have. It's like being a natural-born teacher or a maternal type, personality-wise. And what happens to me is that a lot of times I will build a structure that really works and it's useful and people seem to move into that structure. But at some point I find that I'm carrying it on my shoulders and I'm kind of weighed down by it. ...So I'm feeling. ..a little buried under it. You know?"

She presented her central dilemma quite lightly but made no attempt to hide it: She had started a religion and now had to run it.

***

Each morning of the retreat began with an hour of traditional prayers. Otherwise, I had been told that the four days would be an assortment of assignments and workshops created by Jetsunma in her "nontraditional" mode. As usual when Jetsunma was teaching, there was a line of cars parked along River Road the next morning. I caught sight of Wib's mane of white hair across the temple foyer, and when he saw me he smiled and made his way through the crowd. "I hoped you'd come," he said. He was tan and rested, looked handsome in a dark denim shirt. We hugged and laughed and shared news. He asked about my new house--and carefully inquired about the title of my book. "Oh, don't worry," I said with an embarrassed chuckle. "I took care of that.

"What's going on with you?" I asked. Wib closed his mouth and winced slightly. He and Jane were thinking of writing a letter to Jetsunma, asking her blessing to start repairing their marriage. Wib wanted to move back home. Not only had he grown tired of living by himself, away from his family, but he was already disenchanted with a corporate marketing job in Northern Virginia. "I miss being at the temple all day," he said.

"Really?' I asked. "You'd come back and fund-raise and all that?"

"The real world is overrated," he said with a shrug. "At least here I'm doing something meaningful with my time."

I took my seat inside the Dharma room. It was filled to capacity--maybe eighty or one hundred people--and there was a buzz of anticipation. Jetsunma had been even more than usually elusive of late. Wib confirmed my suspicion that she was beginning to pull away from Poolesville--talking of going into a permanent "semiretreat" and spending a large part of the year at her house in Arizona. Her public teachings had become very rare.

She entered wearing a head-to-toe burgundy outfit, but not official robes. The room of students all rose and began finding places on the floor to prostrate to her, three times. I stayed in my chair.

She looked different--altered in some way. She was thinner than ever before and seemed very toned. Since India, according to Wib, she had started working out ninety minutes a day. There were signs of muscles under her tight velvet knit top, and her burgundy wraparound skirt was fitted against a flat stomach. The rigorous exercising had even changed the planes of her face. She had visible cheekbones and a slightly sunken look underneath them. Her eyes looked different, too--very different. But from the back of the room it was hard to say why. For one thing she appeared to be wearing hardly any makeup.

The weekend was about bodhicitta, she said, after the Seven Line Prayer was finished. It was about compassion. And this meant that mostly the weekend was about suffering and the exploration of suffering and our reactions to suffering. She didn't want people to sit passively for four days. "You aren't here to just watch movies and listen to teachings and be entertained." This was a weekend for work, for digging and questing and brutal self-honesty, she said. She also wanted students to "resist the temptation to think of this as some kind of quick fix, a patch-up job on your spiritual life. And resist thinking you are going to come away from this weekend feeling good, on some kind of high.

"The way to understand other people's suffering," she said, "is to first recognize your own." We tend not to want to think about these things. We make an enemy of suffering.  But the point of Tibetan Buddhism is to learn how to take the negatives of samsara and the failings inside us and transform them. You can use your suffering as a way to ascend--to build character and depth, so that the suffering becomes your mentor and your blessing. Or you can see it ''as a way to become angry and bitter and jealous and a victim--as though suffering was uniquely yours alone--and no one else experiences it.

"People say that Buddhism is a downer religion," she said, "but I just think it's realistic. It teaches the full equation. It teaches that cause and effect are interdependent, one giving rise to the other. We have funny superstitious notions that if we do something nonvirtuous that we'll be punished immediately. ..this lifetime. And in fact, there is no delay. The cause and the effect arise together, interdependently, but because of the way we see time, we think there's a delay."

She drew a diagram on the board, a "time and space grid," she called it--and explained how karma ripens.  "If you are handicapped in this life, you had a nonvirtue of the body in the past. Mental illness and mental trouble, or neurosis and instability and depression, is from nonvirtuous mental activity of the past," she said.  "There's no magic about this."

I thought about how unfashionable all this was, this talk of suffering and punishment, the tough explanation for the handicapped: They deserve it. And the psychotic: They deserve it. And the poor: They deserve it, too. I had grown used to it after a year of coming to Poolesville, but it had nothing to do with the notion most Americans had of Tibetan Buddhism. We only knew what we knew by looking at the cheerful face of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. And when he said, "My religion is kindness," we had gotten it into our heads that Tibetan Buddhism was just niceness. If we did a little meditation and held some brown beads like Richard Gere wore on the cover of Esquire, maybe we could smile like the Dalai Lama, too. But the truth is, the Vajrayana path is brutal and the struggle to surrender one's ego can seem endless. If the Tibetan lamas seemed cheerful and giggly all the time, it wasn't because they held a view that life is fun. They laughed because there was almost no choice.

"Christopher Reeve, it turns out, really is Superman," Jetsunma was saying. "He has turned this experience of suffering into a way to help others and a vehicle for his life to become truly meaningful. How meaningful is being a movie star and an equestrian? Suffering alone is not important. How you react to suffering is. Making the choice is the important thing-- whether you suffer from a big splashy accident or tragedy or just from moment-by-moment sorrows--you must realize you have a choice. And the choice begins by experiencing suffering and allowing yourself to feel it."

Afterward I dropped in on a lesson that Ani Rene was giving in the prayer room--a sort of introduction to Tibetan Buddhism for newcomers, about Ngondro and the Four Thoughts that Turn the Mind. I wanted to listen to Rene describe these concepts, and, frankly, I just liked hearing the sound of her voice and being in the same room with her. She was an accomplished practitioner--revered by all in Poolesville and by those who weren't anymore. She exuded intelligence and precision. She had a wonderful air of warmth mixed with detachment. If anyone had achieved a feeling of egolessness--without losing a sense of self, strength, and inner direction--it was Rene.

She stood in her dark burgundy robes with her back to the altar and, in a soft and gentle voice, described the purpose of prostrations and led the small group in a test run. Rene was in her midforties, I guessed, and her face was round and held very wide cheekbones. Her eyes were green and gray and brilliantly clear. As I watched her demonstrate a prostration--lifting her strong, bare arms to the crown of her head, to her throat, to her heart, then down to the ground--I realized that I had never once tried to do a prostration. What a funny oversight on my part, I thought. How unprofessional and weird, after one year of coming to the temple. These people have done hundreds of thousands of them, and I couldn't be troubled to do only one. And I found, as I wobbled through a few, that they are physically hard to do--something like a multi-stepped yoga pose called the Sun Salutation. You were up, and you were down, you were stretching, and you were bending. And after just a few, it was odd, but I felt loosened up, kind of flowing.

***

Jetsunma talked about her childhood in the evening teaching, and she pondered the question I had been asking myself for a year now. What had a greater impact on her life and behavior now: her lousy, abusive childhood--the cigarette burns on her body, being beaten with a radiator brush--or all the past lives she had spent praying in a cave?

"My pedigree is long and impressive--but that's not what gave me my strength," she said. "My empowerment came from seeing the suffering of others. .. and when people say that tulkus know how to choose their next reincarnation, I think, What fresh hell I picked. But I wouldn't trade it. It was empowering, a training ... and I know suffering so well now that I can see your own suffering even when you can't see it.  And I can see you try to rise above it. I can see you go into the zone, hanging on to some idea of happiness that you think you could have.

"I can walk into a situation, a room, and get it just like that," she said, snapping her fingers. "My teachers tell me that's because of my lifetimes of practice, but I don't know that's true. My days as a child were unbelievably long, maybe never-ending."

The effects were still with her, the results of years of being hungry and being beaten, of being told she was ugly and worthless. And, apparently,  even the lama hadn't found a way to heal herself. Nor had the big white house in the woods that she'd dreamed about as a child--the house that was perfect and beautiful and safe, where she promised to take her little brothers someday--been an answer to her problems. "I'm still scared," she said. "I'm afraid all the time."

And she often felt fragile and worthless. "It wasn't until the last few months that I decided that I wasn't half bad looking," she said. "Before, I thought I was a troll or a dwarf or something. ... It's taken me this long to feel I'm worthy, that I'm okay-looking, that I can be confident in rooms full of people and feel capable."

She didn't like her job as lama, she admitted. "I don't like being the authority, being in front of you, being in charge. I don't like this chair and the clothes that go with it. ...But I have a need to be of benefit to sentient beings. And if you'd been empowered as I have, there's nothing you would rather do at any moment of the day than care for the suffering of sentient beings ... and every night and every day you have to remember that there are people who have hopes of you, who are waiting for you."

***

 The next morning there was a sign taped to the glass window in the temple door. It was a warning of obstacles arising, a lesson in non attachment and impermanence, and a reminder that at KPC the unexpected regularly happens:

Jetsunma is experiencing muscle spasms in her back and is receiving treatment. .. sked has been changed.

While I tried to decide how to spend the next couple of hours--either watching Dead Man Walking in the Dharma room or "self-questing," I browsed in the temple gift shop and loitered in the foyer. I noticed for the first time that there were baskets everywhere I looked, with little signs asking for money for one worthy cause or another. One basket said, BROWNIES FOR THE TEENS.  Another said, ALYCE'S RESTAURANT.  Another sign said, HELP BUILD A STUPA, another basket was for "KPC," and, finally, there was a basket on a pedestal by the door to the Dharma room with an index card that read: WE SENT JETSUNMA TO THE BEACH THIS SUMMER.  NOW HELPUS PAY FOR IT.

It was a sad assortment of pleas. And it made me feel sort of sorry that Alana had arranged for me to attend the retreat on an "editorial waiver" and skip paying the $140. As I hovered around the baskets, I realized that I had always felt vaguely bad about not giving the Tibetan Buddhists much of anything for their time and generosity and kindness to me--the hours of interviews they'd endured, the transcriptions of teachings they'd E-mailed me, the books and ideas they'd shared. They'd been generous with me--and answered all my questions with unfailing honesty. I'd bought them dinner and lunch when I could. I had shown up at their houses with flowers and cookies--and at Christmastime sent Jetsunma a few novels, which I was never sure she'd actually gotten. (One monk confessed to me that he found his ordination day offering to Jetsunma--one year after he'd given it--still wrapped and stuck in an upstairs temple closet.) Looking, around at the baskets, I pulled out my wallet, wrote a check for two hundred dollars, and dropped it in the beach-fund basket.

As I watched Dead Man Walking, it was touching to hear the nuns giggling and laughing at all the nun jokes--and even more so to hear them sobbing at the end. Afterward I ran into Alana on the front porch.

She didn't seem to be at the workshops or movies that weekend--or doing much self-questing at the stupa. She was busy attending to Jetsunma, who, I would discover later on, had been arrested only days before on battery charges for hitting a nun who had broken her vows. When I caught Alana she was wearing a pair of burgundy jeans and a burgundy T-shirt and clearly between errands of some kind. She had just returned from taking Jetsunma to the acupuncturist and now carried a few envelopes and papers in her freckled hands. Realizing that we might not find a chance to visit again over the weekend, we decided to sit for a few minutes inside, where it was warmer.

The solarium was a large, glassy room that led to the kitchen and community room. Bulletin boards were covered with announcements and pictures of new ordained. Four round tables were set up with chairs, for lounging and eating meals--for people who'd been crowded out of the dining room. A few cardboard boxes filled with old newspapers and magazines had been dropped on the tables. The boxes contained library books, too--mostly oversized coffee table books, travel books, picture books.

"What's all this?" I asked Alana.

"An idea of Jetsunma's," she said, "part of tonight's teaching."

Alana looked tired but relaxed. Her blue eyes still twinkled with some kind of energy and readiness. I realized that she always had this look--vaguely tired, vaguely pleased, like the way the mother of the bride looks the day after the wedding. I wondered how much work the retreat had been for her.

"You have a hard job." I said.

"I guess I do," she replied.

We caught up on some things, and then I asked her a few questions about Michael Burroughs.  I was going to be calling him, I said.  There were things that needed to be cleared up, accounts to confirm--his side of the story needed to be heard. She sipped on a Diet Pepsi and took a deep breath. "I suppose you have to," she said. "Just be careful about what you're hearing."

I said I would.

"I think about Michael a lot," she said, then sighed. "And he's a good teaching for me. I used to be more like him. I know for sure that five years ago I was more like Michael."

"Hard on students?"

She nodded. "Gyaltrul Rinpoche said to me recently, 'Take care of yourself. You're the pricker point.'  'What's that?' I asked. 'People don't get mad at her,' he said. 'They get mad at you. And you have to be careful not to get angry in return--because the negativity will shorten your life.'"

There were things that Jetsunma's students weren't supposed to resent Jetsunma for--the mothering vibe, the control they'd granted her over their lives, the money they'd given over the years, the failure of Ladyworks and the other temple businesses. Deep down, people must have been ambivalent about her. Many times I had heard students suggest that the inner circle was responsible for the problems at the temple. Sometimes it was Wib and Jane who were blamed, or Tashi. But most often it was Alana.

"When Michael left," she said, "nobody was sorry. Not one person. That's sad. I can't imagine leaving here and having nobody miss me."

She had thought about leaving. This seemed inconceivable to me. "We joke about my being a Virgo with Scorpio rising," Alana said, "a perfectionist with a sting. But, actually, I've had people say how much I've improved these days. They used to refer to me as Ice Maiden. But Jetsunma has softened me, really has softened me. I am a little bit more compassionate than I used to be," She laughed. "But mostly, you know, I just can't stand people. But I'll do anything for them. It's a strange kind of personality that I have.

Her personality didn't seem as strange as her relationship with Jetsunma. She seemed capable of unfathomable devotion. She had once been Jetsunma's closest friend and lover and was now her servant. She wasn't just the go-between and gatekeeper, she was Jetsunma's private secretary, housekeeper, and cook. Along with Atara and Ariana, she made all the appointments that Jetsunma would eventually cancel, made airplane reservations that Jetsunma would cancel, and then, when she rescheduled the appointments and airplane tickets, Jetsunma would cancel again. "On all levels everything is stirred up when you're around her," Alana said. She did Jetsunma's laundry, her Christmas shopping, her mail-ordering, her grocery shopping, and she sent out all the flower arrangements to students on their birthdays or when their parents died or their children were born, with a card that said, "Love from Jetsunma."

"Being a nun wasn't a natural fit for me," she said. "Not like it's been with some of the others. ... I look at my daughters' lives, their little town houses and their husbands, and sometimes I still long for that. ... I have days, lots of days, when I just want to get a town house and play with my grandkids and forget all this ...

"And it's hard sometimes. .. well, you know it'd be nice to just have someone to hold. I have that want, that skin hunger, or even the intimacy of being really good friends with somebody. I've been instructed not to weigh Jetsunma down with emotional problems. That's not what the guru is there for--mundane living. She is supposed to lead us on a spiritual path. ... But as a sentient being, I have ups and downs. But I don't want to burden her, or distract her. So I'm not as open."

When I asked Alana how she thought she'd spend the rest of her life, she smiled sort of wistfully.

"Think you'll stay with Jetsunma?" I asked.

"Forever, I hope," she said.

***

In the evening Jetsunma's face looked swollen and waxy--like a flesh- colored mask she'd put on. She began talking about how people lose compassion, how they stop having an open heart. The teacher's role in Tibetan Buddhism is "to help the student understand the enlightened mind," she said. Her way of helping her students was sometimes to share her experiences.

When she was younger and living in North Carolina, she said, she began praying for the continent of Africa. She became obsessed with Africa for a year or so, and started buying African clothes and African music and put pictures of sad-faced African kids on her refrigerator to remind her about the suffering there. Eventually her life changed because of this  practice. She realized that if you pray for something that intensely, with your whole heart, you can begin to feel different inside. It was as though you were becoming the thing you were praying for. You could feel it in your bones. And it stayed with you, with every breath, every thought, everything in your day became that thing you were praying for. And it took you beyond ego and self to a place where you became unseparated from the rest of the world. It was a way to approach experiencing things as nondual. 

"Emotion is just ego and conceptualization," Jetsunma said. "Compassion is way more fundamental, and unconnected to ego and negativity."

Each of us had to find a place to pray for, she said. This was our assignment. The boxes in the solarium were there to help us with ideas. We were to pick a subject that was dear to us---not necessarily something big or important or really current like Bosnia. It didn't have to be a place, either. It could be an issue or a cause, like rain forests or toxic waste or abortion. "Find something that moves you deeply," she said. "Something that will motivate you--because you will need that kind of emotion and energy to keep focused."

Afterward Ani Rene described a meditation and visualization--a "practice"--that was meant to accompany our praying. We began by doing three prostrations, and by reading the Bodhisattva and Refuge vows three times. Then we closed our eyes and imagined ourselves with the subject of our prayers. We visualized a lotus blossom in the middle of a lake before us, and a bodhisattva on the blossom, and then a sky of buddhas and bodhisattvas with their dakini consorts before us. We imagined that we were gathering all the earth's treasures, and all the treasures of all the universes, piles of jewels and riches, and, along with our subject, we made an offering of all this wealth to the bodhisattvas and dakinis.

"Stay deeply focused," Rene said, "and feel utterly and completely responsible for this place you are praying about--as though you would exchange your life for theirs, gladly."

We were to say om while we visualized inhaling all the suffering and misery  and discontent of our subject and ah while we meditated on the absolute Buddha nature, pure wisdom and emptiness, then hum as we made an exhalation of bliss. We had inhaled the suffering of our subject and purified it. "Your exhalation should pour out like nectar," Rene said softly. "Bliss going out into the world."

***

We took our new practice out to the stupa the next morning after an hour of prayer in the prayer room. Jetsunma arrived in casual clothes--black jeans, cropped beige sweater, and boots--and led the group across River Road to the woods. We each brought pieces of fruit to make offerings at the stupa, and I fumbled with an apple and orange and tried to be solemn, beginning to realize how uncomfortable I felt with the enormity of Jetsunma's ambitions for saving the world. Others in the group approached the stupa with great confidence and intimacy, reverently bumping the tops of their heads up against the concrete and clutching their prayer beads. I bent over to begin a prostration in front of the stupa but found, in the open air and in the company of Jetsunma, I was unable to. I was worried about falling over, or doing it awkwardly. And I was too proud.

Afterward we watched a documentary of animals being tested in labs, kittens being injected with flea spray, monkeys struggling against restraints while medical researchers smashed their skulls with a giant cow puncher as a way to study head trauma. After that there was a movie about lambs being slaughtered.

At the night's teaching Jetsunma arrived and quickly began, as though she had so much to discuss she might run out of time--or lose track of all the things she was keeping in her head. The teaching was long and meandering.  When she was done, going way over the scheduled amount of time, she got up from her throne, and I saw that she had a stripe of dark sweat bleeding through the back of her burgundy dress.

She spoke of the "practice of bodhicitta" as it is viewed in traditional Tibetan Buddhism. There are several levels to the practices, each one bringing a deeper and subtler understanding of the Buddha nature. It is a recurring theme in Tibetan Buddhism--this need to separate students on the path by their ability with the material, by the level of their understanding. There is a hierarchy in place at all times, which says that some are better, more evolved, more enlightened, and presumably closer to realization and Buddhahood. But, essentially, everybody is a zero on the rungs of this well-defined ladder compared with a fully realized master.

"When I went to India this last time, Penor Rinpoche said to me that he normally doesn't establish and enthrone tulkus who have not been trained," she said, "but he said in my case he was willing to do that because, from the first moment that he met me, he knew that in the past I had been a very great bodhisattva and that I have truly mastered bodhicitta so that I had truly expressed bodhicitta in every way. He said that ... it would be an impossibility that I would appear in the world unarmed and unable to be of benefit to sentient beings, that I would always be able to teach sentient beings and lead them on the path of the bodhisattva into enlightenment. He said that he's always had that confidence in me, and so even though I was not trained, he did the unheard of. He enthroned me and recognized me and made me, in fact, not only enthroned but very public because he had full confidence in the bodhicitta that I would express."

She talked about Mandarava 's Cave near the lake at Tso Pema, and how she had encountered a lama there who was "greatly moved" by a meeting with her. He had "tears in his eyes and could hardly speak," she said. "He couldn't believe that the day had come when he had met Mandarava's reincarnation."

Once she was alone in the cave, Jetsunma's mindstream and the mindstream of Mandarava met and "became like one river," she said. "I felt her, her mindstream, what she was. I felt that everything that was said about her was true. ... She really was like a living Buddha. She had all the major and minor marks. She really was like that. And I felt her relationship to me. I understood it very well, in a way that I never understood my relationship with any of the other predecessors that I have been recognized as ..."

She came to understand that "Mandarava's blessing was everywhere"--every time a child was nurtured, every time someone who was sick was healed, every time some mental disturbance had been pacified."

Finally she brought the lesson around to its point. The story of Mandarava was the story of just one great bodhisattva with great compassion, she said. There were many others.

"What will your story be?" she asked the students. "How will your compassion express itself? ... In some future life, I hope and pray that I will have the opportunity to read stories of the modern Ahkon Lhamo and her disciples. And to hear these great stories about the enormous deeds of her disciples and even further down in the future to realize that her disciples have been reborn great bodhisattvas that single-handedly, armed with courage and love, brought about the end of suffering. ...

"I think it's time to start writing your story, and it's time to stop being little children who are looking to me to supply your happiness and to supply your motivation and to supply some way of making your path easy. Now it's time for you to look within your heart and fan the fire of love until it is greater than anything you have ever known, even greater than your own self-absorption."

I closed my eyes. I couldn't look at her anymore--or listen anymore. And I found myself instead drifting off into the meditation that Ani Rene had taught the night before. I thought about my subject--the place dear to my heart, the place I would be praying for night and day.

I began to imagine myself at the entrance of a long driveway. It led to a large plantation house with white columns. I walked through the doors at Kunzang Palyul Choling and sat down in the Dharma room. I was surrounded by monks and nuns, by the First Wavers and the new faces. I was with the ones who'd been brave enough to stay and with the ones who'd been brave enough to leave. Jetsunma was standing with us, too. And in my meditation we made our offering of great riches to the buddhas and bodhisattvas and dakinis. ... Om. I inhaled the suffering and misunderstanding and sadness of Poolesville. Ah. I meditated on the feeling of emptiness and wisdom and open space. Hum. I made an exhalation of pure bliss. As Rene had instructed, I imagined myself responsible for the plight of my subject. And I felt as though I would gladly exchange my life for theirs. Somebody had to be looking after these people who spent so much time worrying about everybody else.

***

On the last day of the retreat, coming over on White's Ferry, I put the windows down in my car and stared at the river water rushing on either side of me. The water was dark and gray and muddy, and I realized that I would never know the truth about Jetsunma, whether she was a good leader or a very bad one. And I realized I was sad. Someday, maybe not tomorrow or next month, or even next year, but someday, I would have to stop going out to Poolesville. Someday it would be over, and that already made me sad. And as the water swirled and the shore of Maryland grew closer, I thought about devotion and what it means. There is nobility in sacrifice--any sacrifice. And as much as I didn't want to admit this, there is in fact a sort of ladder that people seem to ascend in order to be liberated from self-concern and experience themselves as part of something larger. And sometimes people do ridiculous things to get there.

Inside the warm temple foyer I ran into Sherab, and we visited a bit. It was funny how the retreat was nearly over and we'd not seen much of each other. "I haven't been out and about, exactly," she said, and laughed. I noticed that her eyes looked swollen and red. She admitted that she had been crying all weekend. "This has been a rough one," she said. "I'm kind of a wreck. Call me Ani Basketcase." Later, after a showing of Leaving Las Vegas, I saw her sobbing in the hallway.

On my way into lunch I saw Doug Sims and stopped to say hello. His strawberry blond hair was cut short, he was thinner, and his freckled face looked drawn. When I asked him what he was up to, he said, "I got a job in the real world. I needed it for my self-esteem." I remembered how he'd looked just a year before, a giant sunbeam of a man who was painting the tree of relics behind the prayer room during the golden days of the stupa. "Why hasn't the stupa been painted yet?" I asked. "Don't ask me," the accountant said a bit sourly. "They ran out of money."

I stood in the lunch line with Bob Colacurcio, and he asked how things were going. He was a big friendly bear, a former Jesuit who had moved his family from Michigan to be closer to Jetsunma. Anytime I wanted to call him or come see him, he said, he'd be happy to help explain things. Help me see how it was. "You know, the mind wants to understand things simply. And the conventional mind wants to understand things even more simply," he said. "And it's not easy to get out of a comfort zone. But on the Vajrayana path, it is my understanding that the teacher is supposed to do whatever he or she can to get the student from the comfort zone. And the teacher would use any means to get this to happen--for the student's own benefit."

At the end of the lunch line, I found Eleanor Rowe collecting money for lunch. And I found Kamil, the monk from the Virgin Islands, serving. I looked around the room and saw Sangye eating with Jon Randolph and David and Sylvia Somerville. I saw a cluster of nuns, and the great yardage of burgundy fabric hanging on them. I overheard Rene saying, "It's funny, but I didn't identify with her as much as the Sean Penn character. Watching the movie, I really felt the angry little man inside me."

I found a table and sat next to Wib's wife, Jane Perini. We talked about "flow,"--how sometimes things just seem meant to be and go smoothly, almost as though you've tapped into some current you were meant to ride. I told Jane I was sorry about her and Wib, and her eyes filled with tears. When we said good-bye she gave me a hug. Afterward Jon Randolph and I bumped into each other on the front porch. The tall thin monk had always seemed puzzled by my job of writing about KPC.  "You could make Jetsunma look pretty bad, if you wanted," he said.

"I know."

"Because people don't understand."

"I know."

We agreed to talk later on, and have lunch. And then he said, "You're a part of this, Martha. Can't you feel that?"

It seemed an unimaginable crime, if Jetsunma wasn't going to lead these people to liberation--if she wasn't able to meet up with her students in the bardo like she promised. Jon Randolph looked into my eyes, and I looked into his. It was the kind of prolonged soul-searching exchange that I usually avoided, and was embarrassed by. But something inside me felt different, sort of open and unscared, and as though the monk were taking me somewhere I was suddenly ready to go.

***

Jetsunma took the throne for her last teaching of the retreat.  I stood up and found a free spot on the floor where I could try out a few prostrations in public. It wasn't that hard or embarrassing, really. In fact, it was kind of a thrill.

The weekend was shaping up to be important, Jetsunma said after we were all done. She had seen some very auspicious signs in the sky. "Did you see that little rainbow around the moon last night?" she asked. There are nagas or nature spirits who exist on earth and communicate with us through rainbows, through certain-shaped clouds and lightning. "Virtue does manifest itself in the world," she said.  "And our compassion and caring has been noticed by these natural spirits."

As she was talking I remembered an old Tibetan Buddhist story called "Miraculous Tooth." There was an old woman whose son was a trader. He often joined caravans and traveled on business to far spots in India. When his mother learned that her son was going to be near Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha became enlightened, she asked him to bring her a relic  from there--something she could use as a focus for her devotion. Her son went to the holy place, and when he returned to his mother, he realized that he had forgotten her request. Seeing a dead dog on the street, he tore a tooth from its mouth and wrapped it in silk.

When he presented the tooth to his mother, he told her it was one of Buddha's canine teeth. It was a true holy relic. The old woman put the tooth on her altar and began praying and prostrating before it. Soon the tooth began to emanate countless tiny pearls, and rainbows bounced about the room. The old woman, for the first time in her life, found the unshakable peace of mind that she had always sought. And when she died soon after, an aura of rainbow light surrounded her, a sign that she'd attained enlightenment.

Jetsunma was making an announcement. Something about the people in the audience who were going to be taking Refuge and Bodhisattva vows-- the initial pledge to become a Tibetan Buddhist. They needed white scarves, she said. I walked out of the Dharma room and pulled Rene aside. What did the Refuge and Bodhisattva vows really entail? What was one committing to?

"Have you read the vows?"

I nodded. "But is this a promise to start practicing?"

"I hate to tell you, " she whispered, "but you already are."

I returned to my seat at the back of the room and felt a rush of heat into my face. I had a feeling that was on top of another feeling that felt more  important than a feeling. It was an urge or drive--something like an instinct. It wasn't rational--it didn't have anything to do with actual thinking. It wasn't a choice as much as something that simply happened. And it didn't come from a place where doubt exists or where one spends an enormous amount of time wondering what the lama is being paid or whether she buys too many clothes. It is a generous place. An unselfish and forgiving and unconditional place. It is not the place where I am a journalist. And, I hate to admit it, but it's a nicer place to be.

The vows are simple. Anybody could have said them, and we did, in fact, all say them together. A commitment to living things and life, to kindness and selfless efforts to end suffering. These are things that all people would hope for themselves in their better moments. We walked in a line toward Jetsunma's throne. And we filed past a large clear bowl of water with a flower floating in it.

I handed Jetsunma the white scarf that Wib had lent me. She took it in her hands and held it up to her forehead. And then returned it to me. Up close she looked really pale, sort of nude, without all her makeup. And something else was different about her--something about her eyes. They weren't brown anymore. They were bright blue. She was wearing colored contact lenses.

She handed me a folded white piece of paper. I smiled and turned toward Rene, who was standing next to me. Rene reached up and began tying a blessing cord around my neck. It was a string of red thread, tied with a blessed knot in the middle.

Rene's head bent close to mine, and I looked down on her hair, cut short but thick and clean and rich, speckled with gray. She finished tying the cord and looked at me.

"So you did it," Rene said.

"I did...

Her eyes were so green, so naturally green and so gray. Her face was so open and gentle and kind, so beautifully plain.  It would break your heart, the kindness in that face. And it was everything to me in that moment, and made me feel the way I always felt about the stupa, kind of humbled and encouraged and uplifted at the same time. Rene's face gave me hope. And many times since I have thought, maybe Jetsunma isn't the real Buddha. Maybe it's Wib or Jane. Maybe it's Sherab or Sangye or Alana. But more often than not, think, Maybe the Buddha is Rene. Jetsunma is the dog's tooth, the decoy. The one who draws the fire. The one who throws her weight around. The one who can be loud and demanding and get attention. The one who has the nerve to ask for money.

I opened the piece of paper that Jetsunma had given me. It was my new name, Karma Drolkar. For a long time I kept it in my desk, half forgotten,  and then late one night when I was on the phone with Dechen--we were sort of laughing and talking together about Poolesville--I asked her what the name meant.

"Literally, it means, 'action of White Tara,'" she said. "But that's not a very poetic translation. Really, it's something like 'the wisdom of the emptiness of all phenomena.'"

The wisdom of emptiness. Despite all I knew, liked that.

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