THE BUDDHA FROM BROOKLYN -- BALLY'S HOLIDAY SPA

We want to prove to ourselves that we are lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a bad job. -- C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Late in 1989, Jetsunma was heading into Bally's Holiday Spa in Bethesda one night, with Michael by her side, when she first laid eyes on Teri Milwee. Even from behind the counter Teri exuded a jaded good cheer. The associate manager of the health club had her big feet up on the front desk--and her arms folded behind her head. Her voice boomed out enthusiastically as she greeted the Burroughses and asked to see their membership cards. When she noticed that Michael had a cheaper membership than Jetsunma's, Teri immediately offered to get it upgraded. There was an employee contest at Bally's for signing up new memberships, and Teri wanted to win it.

Teri stood up. At six feet tall she towered over Michael and had the lean, strong body of a triathlete. She was androgenously appealing. She bounced with energy, and the mascara was very thick on her lashes.

"Come by the office later," she said in a deep voice, keeping Michael's card. "I'll see about an upgrade. I mean, don't you want a membership that's as good as your wife's?"

When Michael and Jetsunma dropped by Teri's office later on, they talked about their plans for getting Jetsunma in shape. She was convinced that she needed an exercise regime. She was sluggish and uninspired--and heavy--and had just turned forty in October. She told Teri that she wanted to change the way she looked, start bodybuilding and getting strong. "Of course, I'll never look as good as you do," she said. "But I can try."

When the couple told Teri that they "ran a Buddhist center out on River Road," they didn't mention Jetsunma's status within the religion. Teri didn't seem particularly interested in any case. "I was like, fine, fine," she recalled. "I'm an assistant manager at Bally's. You run a Buddhist center. It just didn't sink in."

But Teri felt a connection to Jetsunma--and an attraction. There was something in her dark eyes, her warmth. She had a sense of understanding, of knowing, that Teri kept thinking about. Jetsunma had really paid attention to Teri, really listened to her, really looked at her, and Teri had found it immensely flattering. Teri offered to help Jetsunma put together a workout program and gave the lama her phone number. When Jetsunma called the next day to set up an appointment to see Teri at the club, Teri was thrilled. She devised a regime in which Jetsunma would be lifting weights on the Nautilus machines and on the Universe gym equipment, then doing StairMaster and other floor work and cardiovascular stuff. Even though Jetsunma was out of shape, Teri was stunned by the amount of weight she could lift.

"We clicked, something clicked," Teri said. The two women became friends--very quickly, very close. "I remember looking at her," said Teri, "looking at her eyes, and going, Oh God, she can see right through me. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but she hooked me, fast and tight, pulled me in and stuck me in her hip pocket."

Teri told Jetsunma about her life--that after years of doing drugs, and dealing drugs, and indiscriminate bisexual sex, she had entered a rehab program in Northern Virginia. Seven years later, at thirty, she had settled into a steady relationship with a well-off professional woman and was happy. Teri admitted to Jetsunma that she had dreams of being rich herself and going into business. She had gotten some motivational tapes of Tony Robbins--and had been inspired by them. She was making sixty thousand dollars a year at Bally's but had plans for investments and real estate ventures.

Jetsunma was caring, and full of advice. She seemed touched by Teri's generosity and spirit, and the story of her life. Two weeks after they met, she gave Teri a large, emerald-cut garnet ring. "Wear this always," Jetsunma told her, "it will protect you and bring you blessings." Teri found herself studying the ring all the time. She couldn't stop holding it between her fingers. And she couldn't stop thinking about Jetsunma.

"I saw her as beautiful and loving and everything I'd want in a companion," Teri said. "And when I met her, I began to see how much was really missing in my life." Teri didn't want to allow herself to hope for too much. She lived in a world where it was still largely socially unacceptable to be a lesbian.

Knowing how much Teri wanted to win the contest at Bally's, Jetsunma brought her sons into the club to sign up for memberships. She brought monks and nuns, too, and made an announcement at a sangha meeting about a wonderful personal trainer she'd found. She wanted her students to think more about their bodies, and their health, and living longer--so they'd have time to practice, more time to help more sentient beings. Pretty soon Teri was joking that she'd signed up most of the Tibetan Buddhists in Montgomery County. At night she would catch the nuns before their workouts and ask them questions about Jetsunma and the temple. Why were they nuns? How did they decide? "I never thought about being ordained myself," she said later, "but I was so curious about who this woman was and how she had such an influence."

Jetsunma persisted in her transformation. As she lost weight she began wearing sexier clothes--and started working out in tank tops and in thongs worn over Lycra bodysuits. "She really turned herself into the sort of woman who would attract me," said Teri. "Really put on the chicken suit and danced." One night Jetsunma asked Teri out for dinner, and when the restaurant where they were supposed to meet turned out to be closed, she brought Teri back to her rooms at the temple, where the relationship became, as Teri later described it, "very personal."

After that, Jetsunma asked Michael to give her some privacy--space to be with Teri. The personal trainer was meeting up with the Dharma, Jetsunma felt certain. "She's about as interested in Buddhism as the man in the moon!" Michael exclaimed. As he grew more jealous and difficult, Jetsunma told Michael she was sympathetic and suggested that he place a personal ad in Washingtonian magazine to help him find someone special for himself. She and Teri became inseparable soon afterward--talking on the phone every day, going out to parties, shopping, and spending the night together at the temple. In one month Teri's life had completely changed. She moved out of her girlfriend's house, bought a condo in Gaithersburg, and started making friends in Poolesville. "I just turned around and walked away from someone I thought I wanted to marry," she said. "I just moved out. In the span of a month."

She began coming to the temple on Wednesday nights and Sundays to hear Jetsunma speak--and liked sitting in the front row. "I felt like I'd come home," she said, "like I knew these people, like this is where I belonged."

Sangha members took an interest in Jetsunma's new best friend and talked about all the attention their lama seemed to be showering on Teri. Clearly she was trying to hook Teri to the path. "Skillful, very skillful," they'd say. While Buddhists aren't really supposed to proselytize, lamas are known to be very crafty, and they use all kinds of techniques--flattery, promises, even lies--to expose a student to the Dharma. And it is thought to be an enormous blessing if a lama chooses to have sex with you. But the students in Poolesville thought Teri was just Jetsunma's new friend. "It was amazing to watch," said one nun. "When they were together," said another, "there was always a lot of energy in the room."

People were happy to see Jetsunma losing weight so quickly and feeling so good again. For nearly two years she'd been a recluse. Now she was going out at night, meeting Teri's friends, drinking and dancing. And in the afternoons she and Teri were often seen laughing together, their hands full of shopping bags. Jetsunma was buying new clothes to go with her new figure. And she had convinced Teri to change her style too, to wear more feminine clothes. Only a few members of the sangha suspected they might be lovers. "They seemed like best friends," another student would say years later. "And if it was more than that, then people assumed that Jetsunma was entitled to have any kind of relationship she wanted."

Not Michael, though. He'd grown increasingly nervous. It wasn't long before he guessed Teri and his wife had fallen in love.

"You said you were just bringing her to the path," he said to Jetsunma one night. "But you're having a love affair."

"I can't help it," Jetsunma replied, "if I'm enthusiastic about my work."

***

But the affair kept going on. Winter turned to spring, and Michael's frustration became hard to contain. Desperate for some help--and some semblance of an authority figure in Tibetan Buddhism to rein in his wife--he called Gyatrul Rinpoche in Oregon and told him what was happening: Jetsunma was involved with a woman who had become a student. Gyatrul Rinpoche, who felt strongly that it was a mistake for teachers to sleep with their students, offered to put a stop to the affair when he came to Poolesville in April 1990 to give a tsa-lung teaching. But when the lama came, Michael was stunned to see him being kind and supportive to Jetsunma and appeasing her. One night, while in the kitchen putting a bedtime bottle together for Atira, Michael overheard the two lamas talking on the other side of a partition.

"I don't know what to do about Michael," Jetsunma said. "He doesn't have Correct view."

"What? That big-ego guy? You don't need him," Gyatrul Rinpoche replied. "Get rid of him."

Later, when Michael confessed to Gyatrul Rinpoche that he was unhappy in his marriage, the lama said: "What is happiness anyway? The most important thing is to bring the Dharma to the West."

Jetsunma seemed to struggle for the next few weeks--not able to get rid of Michael, as had been suggested, or to give up Teri. But by May, Michael had come to suspect that Jetsunma was trying to precipitate his leaving. While driving to the beach on a family vacation to celebrate his thirty-seventh birthday, she revealed that she had invited Teri to come along.

"I thought we would go out tonight for your birthday," Jetsunma said, "and tomorrow night I'll go out with Teri."

Hurt and furious, Michael endured the weekend--and receiving a note from Teri: "Michael, thanks for sharing." But after another week or two he was gone--first moving into David and Sylvia Somerville's basement, then finding Tibetan Buddhist friends outside the Poolesville sangha to put him up. Every night he returned to the temple to read to Atira and put her to bed. He wrote Penor Rinpoche, hoping for some advice from the man he considered to be his root guru. He received a letter back telling him that his separation from Jetsunma was "definitely karmic" and that Michael should begin doing a great deal of practice to try to reverse things. Michael also wrote up a resume and found work as a substitute teacher. It was his first job in the outside world in eight years.

With Michael gone, Alana became Jetsunma's go-between and private secretary--in addition to personal attendant. She moved into the temple building, began delivering Jetsunma's messages to the sangha, and answered the growing number of questions about Michael with such finesse that nobody except the Somervilles really knew that the couple had separated. "Jetsunma just seemed very happy, and Teri seemed very happy," said one student, "and Michael was just an afterthought." And while Alana and Michael hadn't gotten along in recent years, and had often butted heads on the subject of Jetsunma's relationship with her former personal trainer, they were in silent sympathy. Alana was overcome with jealousy, too. "When Jetsunma is hooking a student like that, it's very intense," she said of her guru's affair with Teri. "And seeing them together reminded me of how Jetsunma had hooked me to the path--the drinking and going shopping together." The beach trip, which had been such a turning point for Michael, had also made Alana enormously uncomfortable. "So imagine," she said, "I'm a new nun and I'm watching Jetsunma have this grand time with her new playmate and I'm home scrubbing the toilets. It was very painful. And I had no compassion rising in my mind, only pride and arrogance."

In time Alana came to view Jetsunma's attentions to Teri as part of her job as guru and found a way to live with it. Michael never could. "It all came to a head over Teri," said Alana. "Michael just couldn't see Jetsunma's small window of karmic opportunity to bring a student to the path. All he could feel was threatened."

Over the fall, the rumors about Michael and Jetsunma escalated and the white noise of gossip around the temple grew louder. Michael's job "on the outside" surprised people. But he was still seen coming to put Atira to bed. By Thanksgiving the sangha was officially told that their lama and her husband were separating. It was explained that Michael had "obstacles rising" and "great negativity," not to mention dramatic problems with Correct View. They were told, in whispers and asides, that Michael had not been a proper and deserving mate to their guru--and the students found themselves feeling protective. When they were told that he had stolen money out of an account and was asking the sangha to pay him a salary for the rest of his life--both of which he later denied--they were dumbfounded. It seemed to them that Michael was even worse off karmically than they could have supposed. Eventually it was suggested to the students that any contact with Michael could be dangerous, that a conversation with him would poison their minds.

Jetsunma was the one who filed for divorce. "It wasn't like I kicked him out, exactly," she said. "But I told him that he could stay here so long as he stopped influencing my other students and talking badly about me. Michael has a very brittle, fragile ego. I left him, and ... lots of people could see why. He was kind of a rat."

They'd spent nearly a decade together, though, marked by incredible expansion and transformation of their prayer group and wild, magical moments. She had been singled out as a reincarnated saint. He'd been branded a supernatural heel. In the end their divorce was remarkably ordinary. Michael charged Jetsunma with adultery and alleged that she kept money hidden in secret bank accounts--cash she'd received as offerings--under the name of one of her nuns. Jetsunma denied there were hidden accounts. Their lawyers bickered over the usual assortment of ordinary things: money, possessions, credit card debt, and the custody of their daughter, Atira. As settlement Michael was given twenty-five hundred dollars in cash and a large crystal ball. By Jetsunma's decree he was never allowed to see his daughter again. The adoption papers had not been processed, it turned out, and Ani Catharine Anastasia was more than happy to give Jetsunma sole custody of her child. Legally Michael had no daughter. It was a loss he'd never overcome.

***

Just as suddenly as she had begun her involvement with Teri, Jetsunma ended it. "We've had fun playing," she told Teri, "but now I've got to buckle down and get back to work." Jetsunma stopped seeing her, talking to her, and returning her phone calls. Devastated, Teri began calling Alana to ask her to explain. "She was so heartbroken," said Alana. "She knew she wasn't going to be Jetsunma's consort in this culture, but she still had that ache. When you are close to Jetsunma, the love is so pure and strong and so unconditional. Who wouldn't want to be in on that?"

Eventually Jetsunma asked Alana to talk to Teri about the true nature of their relationship. Teri needed to realize that it wasn't a romance, it was work. It was about the Dharma, and about sentient beings. She needed to come to see Jetsunma as her teacher and not her love object. "It was very healing for me to be able to talk with her about it," said Alana. "Because I'd been through it so many times."

And at Christmas of 1990--one year after meeting Jetsunma in the lobby of the Bally's Holiday Spa--Teri Milwee was ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun. Her hair was shorn. She donned the burgundy robes. She received a new name, Sherab Khandro, and became the loudest, funniest, and most physically fit nun in Poolesville. When news of this development reached Gyatrul Rinpoche in Oregon, he responded in unlamalike amazement. "Noooooo," he said incredulously to Jetsunma over the phone. "She's become an ani? How do you do it?

"Rinpoche," she said, "I guess I just know how to pick 'em."

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