THE BUDDHA FROM BROOKLYN -- BREAKING SAMAYA

Breaking Tantric samaya is more harmful than breaking other vows.  It is like falling from an airplane compared to falling from a horse.
-Tulku Thondup, in Perfect Conduct

The time passed quickly as Dechen continued the long process of earning her robes back. She did her chores, went to work. She did Vajrasattva. She moved out of her mother's house to an apartment of her own. She  felt a bit cut off from Poolesville life, and out of the loop, but happily so. In the mornings the temple was quiet and peaceful, now emptied of Jetsunma and her family, her attendants, and her entourage--who had all left for India. Little news of India found its way there in the month of March and the beginning of April, except that a movie deal had been signed with Turner Pictures. A documentary of the India trip was in the works; it would be followed by a feature film of Jetsunma's life.

Dechen passed the Monk on the temple grounds every so often. She noticed that he was smiling at her--a huge, open smile--but she looked away or looked down. And then one day in early June, Dechen heard that he had left Poolesville the way Sonam had left. Three months after the night at Ani Estates, the Monk slipped away in the middle of the night without telling anyone, even leaving some of his belongings in boxes at the monks' town house in Darnestown.

A week later he called her at home. "How are you?" he wanted to know.

"I'm great, " she said.

"You are?" he asked. "Really?"

"Really."

They talked for a long time. The next day they talked again. And the next. There was nobody like the Monk. He knew her. He loved her. He  had never meant her any harm, she realized. He had always cared about her, always been her friend. He'd been devastated when she sent those Tibetan texts back, he told her. And he'd tried so many times to catch her eye, but she was always looking down. Was she really okay? The Monk told her that he was willing to do whatever he could to get her out of Poolesville. He'd give her money. He'd find her another Dharma center. Anything. But she couldn't stay in that place.

Dechen could feel the doubts rising in her mind again, almost like bubbles that had floated to the surface. But she was also afraid. She called Ani Catharine Anastasia, her mentor, to tell her that she had spoken to the Monk on the telephone, that he had gotten back in touch with her--and she wasn't sure if that was allowed or not. "Whatever," Catharine Anastasia moaned. "I'm so sick of all this. I give up."

As Dechen kept talking to the Monk, the world began to seem larger again--it seemed to stretch well beyond the small town of Poolesville and the sixty-five acres of Kunzang Palyul Choling. The horizon seemed longer and full of possibilities. Dechen found herself full of questions all over again. Who should she believe? Who was telling the truth? She began to see that in Poolesville there had always been a choice between this world, samsara, which was supposed to be a dismal place of suffering and delusion, and the path that Jetsunma offered. Samsara or the path: This choice had always made Dechen feel vaguely desperate. She didn't really know very much about the outside world. She had never seen the ocean. She had no friends outside the monastery. She clung to the Guru Yoga practice, and lessons in devotion, as a way to push herself beyond the choice she didn't want to make, beyond the struggle, beyond samsara, and beyond her doubts about Jetsunma.

Was there really only one path? That was what everybody in Poolesville seemed to believe. There was Jetsunma, or there was misery and rebirth in increasingly lower realms. Were the other Dharma centers really so different? Was Poolesville really such a strange place? It was all she'd ever known.

***

After several months of retreat and time off in Sedona, Jetsunma returned to her big red chair in the Dharma room and began a new series of lessons that she called the Quest Teachings. She told her students that she had been in a phase of questioning and renewal, of strategizing and rethinking her life. She had felt constricted by her work at the temple and by temple life. She realized that she had been trying to squeeze herself into a role that felt unnatural and too tight.

She was in transition. Her transition was toward something even less traditional than before. "Don't be shocked if I start wearing Italian-looking clothes and big hoop earrings," she said.  She talked about trying to reconnect with her Italian heritage and wanting to put everything together her own way, not fit somebody else's idea of what a Tibetan Buddhist lama was supposed to be like.

Even the way she addressed the students seemed different already. The tension--a feeling of trying too hard--was gone. "There were profound  changes in Jetsunma after India," said Aileen. "And the most visible was how much more relaxed she seemed in herself, much more relaxed in her role. Before, there was much more of a sense of her sussing out the group and teaching what she felt they needed to hear," said Aileen. "She used to talk about putting on the chicken suit and having to dance for the lamas. None of that anymore.  After India, she just sat down in her chair with a purpose. There was a deep intensity to it....

"She wasn't trying anymore to be the perfect Tibetan Buddhist lama. She came back knowing what she was about-bodhicitta, compassion--and the teachings that followed were all about that."

In Sedona she had a new friend--a boyfriend--and he wasn't even a Buddhist. He was a Native American shaman. It was nice not being with a student, being with someone who was more of an equal, she told the students. And while she had been a bit skeptical of some of the practices her new boyfriend wanted to show her, she had found them very effective.

The students needed to learn to look after themselves in the same way. They were all responsible for finding their own way, too--their own path within Buddhism. Each of them had missing pieces and spiritual hungers that hadn't been met. She said that Tibetan Buddhism had everything required to fulfill those yearnings, but that the texts would never be translated into English during their lifetimes. The students needed to look elsewhere for a sense of completion and for spiritual advice. Jetsunma had begun using tarot cards again, she said, and she was relying more than ever on astrology. Whatever you needed to do to integrate your spiritual life into your culture, your daily life, your habits was a good thing. As Jetsunma had done, her students needed to nurture themselves and find ways to do this that were natural for them and their own backgrounds. She encouraged them to try new things and other traditions--Native American rituals, divination cards, yoga, or runes. She announced that she was going to arrange for an astrology class to be taught at the temple. And she was looking into having a few Native American sweat lodges.

"Start asking yourself more questions," she told them. What worked in their lives, and what didn't? What seemed to be missing? She told them that she had been questioning everything lately, even some of the Tibetan Buddhist teachings. The fundamental teachings of Buddhism call for a period of questioning. "We need to question everything, even the Dharma," she said.

***

Dechen sat in the back of the Dharma room, a small figure in the corner by a speaker and electronic equipment. She kept her head down and tried not to make eye contact with Jetsunma during the teachings. Four months had passed since the night at Ani Estates, and she was still cleaning the toilets and sweeping the floors. The other ordained still weren't speaking to her. How long was her punishment or purification meant to go on, and how long was everybody planning to shun her? How long was she supposed to sit in the back of the room with her head down? She had begun to lose hope she'd ever be able to earn her robes back.

Jetsunma seemed very different at the Quest Teachings. She seemed comfortable and in her element. She talked from her gut, confidently, candidly. Dechen hadn't seen her so comfortable with herself since before the summer of her enthronement. Dechen looked around the Dharma room and could tell that many people were feeling the same way Jetsunma was. There was almost an audible sigh of relief. The pressure was off, a pressure that they'd all felt for a long time now, to be perfect Tibetan Buddhists, to struggle up the mountain, to learn the practices and all the new words. This was a return, it seemed to Dechen, to the Jeremiah days. And while the other students seemed comforted by the new attitude, Dechen found it unsettling. It was what she had feared all along: We weren't really Buddhists. We were just some stupid New Age group.

This was the first time she had seen Jetsunma since her return from India. And the months had passed without seeing or hearing from Alana until just the week before. "Jetsunma is wondering how you're doing," Alana had told her. "Now, don't get scared, you're not going to die or anything, but she's a little worried about you. She wants you to see a doctor for depression."

See a doctor? Dechen explained that she was making payments to Palchen and had moved into a studio apartment of her own in Gaithersburg. She couldn't possibly afford therapy. A day or so later Alana called again, saying that she'd arranged for Ayla to pay for her daughter's sessions. Alana gave Dechen the name of the psychotherapist she was to see--a man she had seen several years before, who was now treating quite a few members of the sangha.

Dechen was a bit thrown off. Aside from being shunned by her friends and not being allowed to wear robes, she'd been feeling pretty good lately.  She was making payments on her debts, had repaired her old Ford Tempo, and, for the first time in her life, she had a home of her own. She was thrilled to be away from the other nuns--and cooking for herself, leaving her clothes on the floor, reading as much as she wanted. But it wasn't right to argue about this with Alana. If Jetsunma wanted her in therapy, then Dechen was going to follow her advice.

In the therapist's office she still felt puzzled. Why was she there? What was she supposed to be talking about? She was not allowed to discuss the night at Ani Estates with anyone. The main issues on her mind--how she'd been reprimanded by Jetsunma, how the other ordained were still not talking to her, how her step-father was furious at her for totaling the family car, and how the Monk had started calling again--were off limits. Dechen found herself telling the therapist the same old stories, mouthing all the things she'd always mouthed about herself in Poolesville. Jetsunma says I'm an approval seeker. Sherab says I'm willful. She started to think of these stories as something like "The Best of Carson "--reruns of the  dramatic highlights of her life. They didn't seem to lead to any self-discoveries. Nor did the doctor have any insights to share. He gave her a list of questions to answer, a multiple-choice test for depression that reminded Dechen of something in Glamour magazine, and he told her afterward that her score suggested that she was "moderately depressed" and might have some success with medication. At first Dechen refused. She disliked the notion of taking any medication. She didn't even use aspirin or Tylenol at home. Also, it just didn't seem very, well, Buddhist. But eventually she agreed to see another doctor, a psychiatrist who immediately put her on Zoloft.

But she hated the Zoloft even more than therapy.  "I was taking the tiniest amount," she said, "but it felt like champagne had been poured into my bloodstream. I got dizzy right away, and within a few days my hands were shaking. I couldn't sleep. I had this bubbly feeling. I couldn't concentrate. I couldn't even read a whole paragraph of text without getting distracted. And I couldn't practice."

As she sat in the back row at the first Quest Teaching, listening to Jetsunma encourage the students to find their own way--to nurture themselves, keep themselves spiritually alive, and ask questions--Dechen's mind felt like it was clicking into gear. Questions, ask yourself questions.  What did Dechen want? Where was she really heading? More than anything she wanted to be able to do more Tibetan Buddhist practice, live a traditional renunciate life, and eventually do a three-year retreat. She had to be honest with herself. Was that ever going to happen at KPC? She wasn't sure that tarot cards or astrology would really work for her. She already knew what did work: a traditional Tibetan Buddhist practice. And the rest of the students would know this as deeply as Dechen did if they ever bothered to sit down on their butts long enough and just do it. Maybe they wouldn't need therapy either--or antidepressants. What was a nun doing on antidepressants?

Question everything, Jetsunma told the students. Even question the Dharma. A huge, spontaneous smile took over Dechen's face. Question the Dharma? In the nondual Buddhist universe, the Dharma and the lama and the sangha are one, inseparable. The same thing. And if she was allowed to question one, she could question them all. She could question the sangha. And she could question the lama. Dechen felt an immense weight lift from her shoulders, and a feeling of great spaciousness inside her, a freedom, a feeling of breath, of energy, of life. Her mind was suddenly alive with ideas and thoughts, and all kinds of questions. She couldn't wait to write some of them down.

She was still smiling as she watched Jetsunma walk out of the Dharma room at the end of the teaching. Alana noticed her smile and smiled brightly back. "We were told to go out and buy a Quest Book, like a journal to keep," Dechen said. And when she got hers, she pulled out a pen, opened to the first page, and quickly wrote her first entry: "I don't believe the Mandarava recognition."

***

She was on fire for the next two months and never stopped writing. Dechen's private mission, her own spiritual "quest," was finally facing her doubts about Poolesville. Was life at the KPC monastery as hopeless and worthless as the Monk suggested--or was it salvageable? She made up lists, drew from memories. There would be no karmic consequences of having doubts, no broken samaya, no rebirth in Vajra Hell, since Jetsunma herself had instructed her to question everything. And once the door was open, it was impossible to close it. The doubts hurled themselves at her and flooded out from within her. They stampeded. They exploded. And they shouted so loudly she couldn't even think. How had she gone so long keeping them down? It had been exhausting always to be fighting something inside, always suppressing a part of herself.  If anything had made her depressed before, it must have been that. Doubts were a part of her, the  way blood was a part of her body and the air came and went in her lungs. And she was finally free--set free by Jetsunma herself--to let them flow out of her and to be herself: a person who was consumed by doubt.

First things first. She hadn't broken her vows--her root vows. She knew she hadn't. The Monk had called her at work and quoted to her the Vinaya teachings--the highest Tibetan Buddhist authority on the rules and regulations for the ordained. And the Vinaya said that if no orifice was penetrated, then no root vow had been broken.  Wasn't it wrong for Jetsunma to take her robes away from her? If no root vow had been broken, and the robes were still hers, she was still ordained.

Her years with the group came back to her with pristine clarity, as though she were revisiting every experience and looking at it closely again. She remembered the time she was called into a meeting with leaders of the ordained community--Alana and three others--and told that she was being kicked out of the retreat center for not doing her chores and being late on the rent. Dechen remembered how she tried to defend herselfand offered to pay her back rent immediately. Everybody had trouble doing their chores, she said. "They all looked sickened as I said this, like it was revolting to hear a criminal defend herself," said Dechen. "I was supposed to make my mind like a bowl and hold every ounce of the blessing of being corrected. I was supposed to feel lucky: Most sentient beings wandered in samsara helplessly with no teacher at all, or with a teacher who wasn't as compassionate as Jetsunma."

Losing the path, losing the guru... it was like the terror of an astronaut losing the lifeline to the ship and drifting away into black space, the void, the deep, empty nothingness, with no way to be rescued.

Dechen suspected that she was afraid of losing the path--and her connection to Jetsunma--because she had no idea who she was without them. She thought of herself only in the words of others. Jetsunma says that the problem with me is that I'm an approval seeker.  In Tibetan Buddhism the practices are supposed to bring you closer to your true Buddha nature. But in Poolesville the only true Buddha nature anybody talked about was Jetsunma's.

Dechen had spent years trying to adjust her thinking to be in alignment with something Jetsunma had said, or something Jetsunma had taught. Or something Alana had said that Jetsunma had said. After the sangha meeting about Karl, when Alana said he needed to be "broken like a wild mustang," Dechen had begun to feel differently about him. In the past she had always liked Karl and defended him. But after the meeting she drove him to the doctor's office one afternoon and found herself exasperated that he was taking so long. "Those meetings really worked, " she said. And she realized that the group's opinion had always mattered more than her own.

And from above "there was a constant implication--sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious--that we were inept, helpless, shallow, and stupid," Dechen would later say. The teachings Jetsunma gave were often entertaining, but they were a rambling miasma of unrelated topics, a mishmash of Tibetan Buddhism and New Age theories, which Jetsunma called "climbing over the mountain from ten different directions." Dechen finally admitted to herself that she didn't really understand Jetsunma's teachings and didn't believe anybody else did, either. She had noticed that if students raised a logical inconsistency in a teaching, they were called "superficial" or considered "Dharma dumb-dumbs. " If they insisted on thinking for themselves, they were "self-centered" and "arrogant." The will and the ego were poisonous things in Poolesville. Dechen felt they'd all been ground down--defeated by Jetsunma and her brand of Buddhism.

It reminded her of the game Wack-a-Mole at the carnivals and amusement parks on the Eastern Shore. People stood with big rubber mallets and waited for plastic moles to show the tops of their heads; the game was to clobber the moles as soon as they showed themselves. Very few students were allowed to show themselves. "It's a very subtle place, and you don't know how strong the current is until you go against the efforts to mold you," Dechen said. "The more you resist, the stronger the reaction becomes. And if you persist in going against the approved-of method, the reactions become stronger and stronger."

She found she was angry about the night at Ani Estates. It hadn't been a blessing. And it hadn't been just about Dechen and the Monk and their merit. It was a lesson in humiliation for all the students--a reminder, a warning, a theatrical presentation. And it was the result of years of decay. Dechen now saw the signs of decay everywhere. What had led a kind and generous group of people who wanted to do nothing more than make the world a better place to become in her mind a hateful, angry mob, comfortable participating in a lurid display of aggression?

A flood of questions overtook her mind. She questioned the way the temple was run and all the power that Alana had been given. They'd started out with good intentions. But the practices had decayed. The teachings had decayed. The finances had decayed. People didn't seem as happy. The prayer chart for the twenty-four-hour vigil was increasingly hard to fill. She sought out certain members of the sangha and asked them questions. In particular she approached Doug Sims and asked about the finances. Poor Doug. He seemed so beleaguered and down himself, so lost. He had tried his best to run Ladyworks and keep those books. He'd tried his best to find money for Jetsunma's business, but now that, too, had decayed. The Ladyworks business was seriously in debt, and Jetsunma was never going to be self-supporting. The temple would always be going broke trying to pay her salary and all her expenses. If the center was supposed to bring the Dharma to the West but the finances were untenable, then the Dharma was, too, which meant Dechen was wasting her time in Poolesville.

She sent an E-mail to Konchog, a monk she greatly respected, hoping to open up a line of communication with him so she could eventually talk about the future of KPC and ask him about the shedra, or monastic university,  that Khenpo was starting. Maybe if the shedra was happening and was financially healthy, there would be a place for Dechen in Poolesville. Her first E-mail to Konchog was an icebreaker, however; she recounted a joke she'd heard earlier in the week. But Konchog wasn't amused. He lashed out at Dechen in a series of angry replies. She was a flirt, he told her. And she had already brought one fully ordained monk to shame. He told her to stop trying to contact him. "I'm not going to walk around in guilt and shame forever, " Dechen wrote to him. "My punishment is over." But Konchog wasn't sure of that. "We hadn't gotten a sign yet from Alana or Jetsunma," he explained later, "and I guess I thought I was still supposed to shun her."

So by mid-August, after two months of investigation, Dechen felt more alone than ever--her "quest" had led only to more questions. At the heart of them sat the most colossal uncertainty of all: She doubted the wisdom and beneficence and compassion and goodness and divinity of Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.

"We all want to believe that the lamas are omniscient, she said. "But the truth is, Penor Rinpoche was duped."

She began to think of the ones who had left before her. In Poolesville they all told themselves that nobody ever left, that KPC had the lowest attrition rate of any sangha in America and was the most stable monastery. But if  you started to look around for them, former members were in the back of everybody's mind. They were out there in the world--good people who had once loved Poolesville and been happy there, people who had come with smiles on their faces and felt like they'd found their home and later woke up and felt differently. Why had they gone? Had they lost their way, lost the path? Had they all died of cancer and gone to Vajra Hell together?

***

Dechen found an old phone list of sangha members and saw that Rick and Chris Finney's number was still on it. She had worked with Chris on many sewing projects and temple projects, and in the gift shop. She had known Rick since he first showed up in Poolesville: he had given her early Tibetan lessons.

Rick answered the phone when Dechen called but seemed hesitant to discuss Poolesville with her. "I was guarded, and very careful what I said," he said later. "People have to reach some of these conclusions on their own." He asked Dechen why she wanted to discuss the center.

"I just have some questions," she said.

"What kinds of questions?" he asked.

"Well, I have a feeling," Dechen said, "that KPC functions like a cult."

Rick thought for a moment. "I think you better talk to Chris."

But Chris was also hesitant to discuss details and reach controversial conclusions--she had gotten calls from other members with doubts, and they tended to pour their hearts out, only to return to Poolesville. Even as Dechen mentioned the size of Jetsunma's salary, Chris found herself explaining, "Well, Jetsunma has a lot of expenses--her wardrobe and everything."

"Ten thousand dollars a month in clothes?"

Eventually, the Finneys invited Dechen to their house, where they could discuss things more freely. Sitting in their living room, Rick and Chris asked her how things were going for her in Poolesville. She was leaving, she told them. And she wanted to find another Dharma center where she could practice and still be a nun. But what about her robes? Rick reassured Dechen that she had not broken a root vow, and therefore she was still a nun. Then he told her something that she had long suspected from her own reading of the Tibetan texts: Technically, Jetsunma had no authority to take her robes from her. He brought out a manuscript copy of Perfect Conduct--which he had just finished copyediting--and opened it to page 55. There were five instances that called for losing one's robes: if they were given back voluntarily to the lama  who ordained you (in Dechen's case, Penor Rinpoche), if you broke a root vow, if you developed "two sex organs spontaneously overnight," if you stopped believing in cause and effect (karma and reincarnation), or if you died.

Next, Dechen talked to Richard Dykeman on the phone. He had left Poolesville in 1989 and had eventually become fully ordained in India and spent years studying with Tibetan lamas in  the United States. Richard was full of passion, reassuring Dechen that things were different at the other American centers. It was more Buddhism and less guru. He told her that he'd accomplished lots of things-many practices--at the other centers, and felt good about his time in them. She shouldn't worry about life after Poolesville, he said. After a while a day would pass and she would not think of Poolesville, and then she'd go a week without thinking of Poolesville, and then it would be a month or two. She would never be sorry she left, he promised her.

While talking, Richard never once used the title Jetsunma. He called her Alyce.

After their conversation Dechen found her orange plastic bottle of Zoloft and threw it in the trash. She walked into her bedroom, slapped Jetsunma's picture off her altar, and stared at it on the floor. Rick Finney  was right. Jetsunma had no authority to take Dechen's robes away. Richard was right about Jetsunma ... Alyce. She didn't care about Dechen. She had never cared about Dechen. She had cared only about feeling powerful, and about influencing people's lives, about making money and buying clothes and being attractive. She didn't care about the students and their spiritual lives, or even love them on a simple emotional level. She wasn't a compassionate mother to them, or even a nurturing soul. It had been an act to get everybody's devotion and win hearts. She collected them like shrunken heads. ...All the time Dechen had wasted, all those years. Jetsunma had told them all they were only years away from enlightenment--or at least one lifetime. Now Dechen saw how far away they really were.

"It was like a dream dissipated," she said. "I was always so proud that I had managed to do something with my life, that I had started so young. ...All those years that I worried I didn't have enough Guru Devotion, all those times we were told if we didn't practice enough that the world would deteriorate into suffering, and that the Dharma wouldn't make it in the West."

She called Sonam in Oregon and told her that she was leaving Poolesville. She tried to track down several others--Chris Olance and Don Allen, Sangye's father, who had slipped away quietly a couple of years before.

Her very last call was to Michael Burroughs. She had hesitated about calling him because deep down she still didn't trust him. For years she had blamed him for all the problems at KPC. But maybe she needed to rethink that, too. Through the grapevine of former KPC students, Dechen discovered that Michael was living in Colorado and still a Tibetan Buddhist. For years he had remained bitter about his time in Poolesville and felt his life had been largely wasted. He had done public relations for the Naropa Institute in Boulder for a couple of years, then drifted back into professional organ playing and choir directing. Dechen wanted to ask him about a Tibetan program at the Naropa Institute--maybe Michael could help her get in.

When Michael came on the line, she heard his familiar Tennessee drawl and realized, suddenly, how much she'd missed him. "They all call me," he said. "Everybody calls. And I help everybody get out."

"I'm already out," Dechen said.

They spoke briefly about the Naropa Institute, and about KPC. He didn't seem to have much to say, and spoke mostly in sound bites. "You know, her channeling was faked," he claimed. "She wasn't happy with the recognition as Ahkon Lhamo. It wasn't flashy enough."

Michael urged Dechen to write to Penor Rinpoche and detail some of the things she had seen over the years--particularly the night at Ani Estates. There were abuses in Tibetan Buddhism, but Michael reassured her that there were also some very good lamas around in the world that she could study with. "You can drag fame and girls and money in front of them and they won't even bite," he told her.

"I've wasted so much time, " she said.

"What about me?" he said. "I was married to her. I find it all really embarrassing."

Then, he asked for a favor. Michael had a letter he'd written to Atira that he wanted Dechen to deliver. He hadn't seen or spoken to the girl for six years, but he wanted Atira to know he still loved her. Dechen said she wouldn't be able to do this herself, but she had some ideas.

At the end of the brief exchange, he said, "You know, you are still a nun."

"I know, " she said.

That night she went home and saw the photograph of Jetsunma's smiling face on the floor of her bedroom, where it had landed two days before. She pulled the picture out of its frame and ripped it into tiny pieces. She flushed them down the toilet. She took her gau off her neck and pulled out the relics--little tufts of Jetsunma's hair. At first she planned to burn them, but she decided that was "too respectful." She flushed them down the toilet instead.

Then she shaved her head. She put her robes back on. And she bought a bus ticket to New York City.

She believed what Michael and Rick and Richard and the Monk and Perfect Conduct had told her--she was still a nun--and now she wanted to hear it from a higher authority, Khenpo Tsewang Gyatso.

***

Khenpo was giving a series of teachings from an apartment in the Bowery that had been converted into a small Dharma center. It was the last day of  teachings, and at first he seemed very happy to see Dechen--dressed in her dark burgundy robes. When she offered him a white scarf, she said quietly, "I'd like to meet with you, if I could."

Khenpo nodded. "After the teachings."

She waited for hours to see Khenpo alone. There were many students milling around the apartment and much conversation about a new Dharma center that Khenpo was helping to organize in New York. Eventually he caught Dechen's eye and led her to a small bedroom in the apartment, which he was using.

She came right to the point. "Jetsunma took the vows away from me, and I don't believe that she can do that, but I don't know," Dechen said. "I cannot read the Dharma texts, and this is a very dangerous situation for me. If I believed her that I was no longer an ani, then I could be breaking vows and not even know or have a chance to purify."

Khenpo had a strained and sad look on his face. The creases between his brows were wider than his thin black mustache. "Even the Buddha, even Guru Rinpoche," he said, "cannot take your robes away. "

Dechen nodded and tried not to show any feeling. She was relieved, though--not just for her sake, but because, in spite or her fears about how political the world of Tibetan Buddhism could be, Khenpo had told her the truth. "But perhaps," he said, "you should not wear the robes at the temple. People might be upset."

"I don't think I'm going back to KPC," she said.

"Okay. Study and practice on your own," he said.

He invited her to join a group of students who were going out to dinner that night. A few of them--members of a rich Taiwanese family--were sponsors of Penor Rinpoche's monastery in India, and others were sponsors of the center in New York Khenpo was helping to start. They would be holding a committee meeting later to discuss their plans. Over dinner Dechen was asked about KPC. She was a nun there, right? Yes, she said. The committee members seemed curious about Poolesville. It was known to be such a beautiful temple, and very successful. They hoped to use it as a model.

After dinner Dechen returned to the Bowery apartment with the other students, and, since it was too late to take a bus home, she was invited to remain there overnight. As she listened to Khenpo's students discuss how to start a new Dharma center, Dechen found herself wanting to contribute  some ideas. Rather than speak at the meeting, she curled up in a corner and wrote out a list of recommendations that ran for six pages. Her advice had not been directly solicited, but she felt it was important that this new center not run into some of the problems she'd seen in Poolesville. She was careful not to mention anything about KPC, but it would have been possible, based on her suggestions, to guess that her experience in Poolesville had not been entirely positive.  And quietly, when the committee meeting was over, Dechen handed the notes to one of the members, an American woman.

From across the room Khenpo watched Dechen hand the notes to his student. He looked alarmed. He asked to see her alone again, but the meeting kept being delayed.

She stayed another day in the apartment, waiting to see Khenpo again. There were many people around to talk to while she waited, including a few Tibetans she'd met in Bylakuppe. Finally, Khenpo gave Dechen an opportunity to speak with him, but not alone. He sat in the teaching room along with other Tibetans and asked about her decision to leave KPC. After she reassured him that she had great devotion for Penor Rinpoche, she made open complaints about Poolesville. Knowing how family-oriented Tibetans are, she made sure to mention how she'd been discouraged from being in contact with her father. She described how, when she was only eighteen, she had been removed from her mother's care and told to live with another sangha member. She was also concerned about her brother and wondered whether his involvement with KPC had been healthy for him. She felt Jetsunma had directly harmed her family, she said bluntly. The other Tibetans in the room, who couldn't help overhearing the story, nodded their heads in sympathy and looked horrified. Khenpo looked horrified, too--but mostly that Dechen would speak this way, so boldly and so negatively about a Palyul teacher in a public setting.

She continued. She told Khenpo about the KPC finances--the amount that Jetsunma was paid, and how money was raised for temple projects but spent on her instead. Khenpo shook his head and seemed speechless. She was planning to launch into her theories about how KPC wasn't a Tibetan Buddhist center as much as a personality cult, but she could tell from his face that she'd already said enough. "He didn't have much to say after that," she said, "and I got the impression that he didn't want me around anymore, either."

The next morning, as she prepared to leave New York, Dechen was told that Khenpo wanted to meet with her again--but this time he spoke angrily to her in front of many people, including several of the sponsors of the new Dharma center. "You need to purify!" he yelled. "You need to do lots of Vajrasattva, and learn more about your vows, and study the Vinaya!" To Dechen, the conversation didn't make sense--it was advice that Khenpo had given her days before but now in a different tone. She could only surmise that this was a political move to discredit her. Dechen had become too negative, too threatening. And it was possible that Khenpo believed she'd written damning things about KPC in her six-page memo. Soon afterward he arranged for her to be taken to the bus station by three of the Taiwanese sponsors, and he joined them in their Mercedes. As she got out of the car at the bus station, and was standing in the street, Khenpo got out, too. "I have more to say to you!" he yelled in a voice so loud that all the Taiwanese could hear. "You have broken your vows, and you need to study the Vinaya, and then maybe, in the future, you can retake vows."

It was during the five-hour bus ride back to Maryland that Dechen's rage and confusion multiplied. She had hoped that Khenpo would be supportive of her--and, at first, he had. But now she could see he would always protect the Palyul tradition and Penor Rinpoche and Poolesville. Somewhere along the way the truth had become irrelevant. There was nowhere to go to make complaints about Jetsunma. Nobody wanted to hear them.

She imagined what Khenpo would say about her in the future--how she'd be discredited. She imagined that before long nobody would believe there'd ever been a night at Ani Estates. It would be dismissed as gossip, as the wild delusion of an irresponsible girl. Dechen decided to do three things upon returning to her apartment in Gaithersburg: She would call Alana's voice mail to say she was leaving KPC for good, she would call her mother to say she was leaving of her own accord--and wasn't being kicked out. And then she would call the police.

That way Khenpo wouldn't be able to lie about what had happened to protect Penor Rinpoche. There was another reason, too. "I just wanted to make sure," Dechen said, "that Jetsunma never hit anybody again.

***

It is hard to know exactly how Jetsunma reacted when she was arrested by the Maryland State Police on charges of battery. Later on she would say, "Oh, I wasn't too frightened. The police have far worse people than me to worry about. I was more afraid for the Dharma."

Dechen only learned that Jetsunma had been arrested a day later, when her family was sent to her apartment. Alana had called Ayla Meurer and suggested that Ayla attempt some kind of "family" intervention with her daughter. Dechen needed to see the lack of wisdom behind leaving Poolesville and filing criminal charges against her root guru.

Ayla and Dechen had never really fought much--or ever struck each other--but the day Ayla came to the studio apartment, things became overheated quickly. Dechen pushed her mother, and then Ayla pinned Dechen against the wall. Scared by the intensity of their emotions, the two women soon sat down at the kitchen table and began to talk calmly. Ayla told her daughter that Jetsunma loved her, that Jetsunma was divine, and that the negativity Dechen was seeing was only a reflection of her own mind. Jetsunma was incapable of harming anyone, and her every action brought benefit to countless brings.

"If she was a guru at all, that would be true. But she's not."

"Of course she is! Don't say things like that."

"I've thought this over carefully," Dechen said, "and I consider KPC a cult. And Jetsunma is out of control."

Ayla seemed ruffled and embarrassed. "There are good cults and bad cults. Like anything in life. You're making a terrible mistake."

"Stay out of this. Mother. This doesn't concern you."

"Of course this concerns me," Ayla said. "This is my teacher you are talking about."

Hoping to ward off similar "interventions"--and to make sure her fellow ordained learned of the police charges she'd filed--Dechen began leaving  messages for sangha members on the temple voice mail system. She used the word cult, well aware of the impact it would have. She called Sangye Dorje and left a long message describing her strange encounter with Khenpo--in particular his early assurance that "nobody" could take her robes away. Her messages to Alana were hateful and angry, deliberately  intended to rile her. "The idea was to light so many fires that there'd have to be a major sangha meeting where the police charges would be discussed.

Within a few days Karl Jones showed up at the apartment to  try to reason with Dechen, but her landlords turned him away. Then the letters started coming. Some were hand-delivered outside her apartment door. Others were sent by certified mail. They were from sangha members who had received voice mails from Dechen. Each letter contained one particular sentence--"Stop leaving these slanderous voice mails or I will consider this harassment and file charges"--but the rest was often very personal. Sangye Dorje wrote her, telling Dechen that she suffered from "paranoia" and was "certainly a borderline schizophrenic." He recommended that she find a good psychiatrist. Bob Colacurcio urged Dechen to study Guru Devotion more. Alana's letter was beautifully written--and designed to nail Dechen deftly in a vulnerable place. "You have succeeded in your quest to take revenge against your mother. Your childhood rage now controls you, and you have now, indeed, broken her heart. Not just your birth mother, but your spiritual mother as well."

Alana offered to meet with Dechen privately, saying she was opening her hand and reaching out to Dechen because she had bitten the hand of all her teachers and, "having been there myself in the past, I know that sometimes you need someone to just say, it's okay, we can stop this now." At the bottom she said, "I don't think you want to end up institutionalized or on medications. Help yourself or ask for help."

Dechen moved into the Finneys' place for a few nights to escape what she feared might be a deluge. Ayla began calling the Finneys, asking to speak to her daughter, and, when they wouldn't hand over the phone, Alana called for Chris.

"I have a message from Jetsunma for you," Alana told Chris. "She wants you to know that she's thinking about you, and she's really worried because she sees that your karma is running out and great obstacles are headed your way."

Chris felt she understood what Alana was saying: You are going to die.

"I'm not sure what you need to do," she told Chris. "Maybe you can have some tsogs [purification prayers] done for you at Frederick. We could do some for you. You could pay some money to the ordained and they could do some."

"Okay," Chris said quietly. Then she suddenly felt something very unexpected. She felt bad for Alana.

"You take care of yourself, too. Alana," Chris told her. "And thank Jetsunma for thinking of me, but I'm doing really well."

Michael Burroughs called Dechen at work to talk about the charges she'd filed. He had heard about them from Rick Finney. His voice was full of mischief and amusement. It was "hilarious" and "wonderful," he said, but he wasn't going to get involved--he didn't want to get on Khenpo Tsewang Gyatso's "bad side." Michael told her that he had seen Khenpo recently in Colorado, in fact, and when the subject of Dechen's charges came up, Khenpo said he needed to get in touch with her. Could she take a call from him at work?

Khenpo had a deal to offer Dechen. He was worried about potential embarrassment to Penor Rinpoche if word of the police charges or some of the other activities he'd heard about in Poolesville became public. If Dechen agreed to drop the charges, Khenpo was willing to arrange a formal censure of Jetsunma, and she would be sent into retreat immediately. To discuss the details, both Michael and Khenpo called Dechen one afternoon from a speakerphone. The censure, according to  Michael and Dechen, included a demand that Jetsunma no longer call herself a Tibetan Buddhist teacher or a Palyul lama, and she would be asked to stop using the title Jetsunma.

"Michael did most of the talking," said Dechen, "and then Khenpo confirmed it."

But Dechen had stopped trusting Khenpo at this point, and she agreed to drop the charges only if the letter of censure came from Penor Rinpoche, was signed by Jetsunma, and then a copy of it was delivered to Dechen. None of them seemed to realize that, because the charges were criminal and brought by the state of Maryland, it wasn't up to Dechen to drop them.

Soon after, a letter censuring Jetsunma was drafted in Bylakuppe and approved by Penor Rinpoche. Two American monks who were visiting Penor Rinpoche's monastery during the fall of 1996, K. T "Thubten "  Shedrup Gyatso and Tenzin Chophak, were asked to assist in the wording  of the letter and to help clean up Khenpo's English. They also had long talks with Khenpo about  Poolesville, since Thubten had spent three months living in one of the monks' houses there.

"He's a very reserved guy," said Thubten of Khenpo. "But we had very relaxed conversations. and he spoke to me as openly as possible. He already knew exactly what was going on in Poolesville. Her salary was unheard of. Her monks were living in crummy conditions, and some were giving fifty percent of their salaries to her. Jon Randolph couldn't even afford a pair of new shoes."

The tone of the final one-page letter was "really harsh" and "scolding," according to Thubten, "the way a father would reprimand a naughty  daughter. " There was no mention that Jetsunma should drop her title or stop calling herself a Buddhist teacher. Instead, the letter admonished her for neglecting her ordained sangha. Penor Rinpoche wrote that his first priority was always taking care of his monks and nuns--making sure they were fed and housed and receiving teachings. Jetsunma, the letter scolded, was clearly not doing that. There was another complaint: She wore too much makeup and needed to "tone down her appearance."

But in the end it appears the letter was never mailed. It didn't have to be. The state of Maryland officially dropped its charges against Alyce Zeoli on November 8, 1996, and Penor Rinpoche no longer had a public scandal to worry about. The prosecutor called Dechen to tell her that the case was weak. The witnesses--the members of the ordained community in Poolesville--were considered "hostile." The Monk was uninterested in  testifying because he felt that Dechen's case might turn people away from Tibetan Buddhism. Dechen had even suspected that her mother would have testified against her.

In many ways Dechen was relieved. "I was just tired, " she said.  "And I had taken on a lot. I had very little support, with the sole exception of Rick and Chris Finney--neither of whom thought I should have filed the charges originally."

Two days later, on November 10--a crisp, clear day--Dechen packed up her Ford Tempo with all the belongings she could fit in it, within inches of the ceiling. She drove to her mother's and left a basket of flowers on the sundial in her garden. She put the basket on the point of north, as a way  to tell Ayla that she was heading north, to her dad's house in Toronto.

Ayla saw Dechen out front and stepped out to approach her. "It's a terrible thing to lose a daughter," she would say later.

Dechen waved good-bye from the car and drove off. She told nobody where she was heading. She left no forwarding address, no phone numbers. She drove through Pennsylvania and New York. She stayed in motels and at old friends' houses. She ate in coffee shops and at McDonald's.  Every night she called the Monk and told him where she was and described the day.

When she got to her father's place, she told him that KPC was a cult. "I know," he said. Together they drove to Detroit and spent Thanksgiving with his mother.  Dechen hadn't seen her grandmother for nine years. She saw her cousins, her aunts and uncles. Her father got out his guitar and sang folk songs. Dechen sat on the floor and played with little cousins she had only just met. Her grandmother pulled her aside and asked about her brother. Was there any way of getting him out, too?

Dechen headed off again, alone. In early December she found herself driving through the Badlands, the black hills of South Dakota. Late in the afternoon, as the sun began to set, she got out of her car and stood in the vast expanse of space in the center or the United States. She felt good and free and sure of one thing--what she was doing. She thought back on all her years with Jetsunma, all the teachings, the hard work, the  practice, the stupas, the beautiful prayer room. ..The time hadn't been wasted, not  entirely. Dechen could see that she'd made progress. And she'd done some remarkable things. Everybody there had. Perhaps that was the invisible reward of devotion. But in the end Poolesville wasn't what it appeared to be, or thought it was, and that was the saddest fact of all. It wasn't the Fully Awakened Dharma Continent of Absolute Clear Light  any more than Disneyland was. It was a fantasy place as powerful and  seductive and delusional as samsara, and just as corrupt. "It was  like the end of The Truman Show," Dechen said. "Me alone in the sailboat, breaking through that illusion." 

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