THE BUDDHA FROM BROOKLYN -- COME INTO THE FIRE

In Gandhi's case the questions one feels inclined to ask are:  to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity ... and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud?
-George Orwell, "Reflections on Gandhi"

That winter, while continuing my reporting in Poolesville, I prepared for the trip to India. Wib phoned my house almost daily with updates and news bulletins about Jetsunma's Pilgrimage, as the trip was now being called. An itinerary was faxed to me, along with helpful hints for travelers. The average temperature in India during our stay was expected to hover around one hundred degrees. Shorts and short skirts were not appropriate attire at Penor Rinpoche's monastery, in keeping with traditions of modesty, although sleeveless shirts were okay. For a small fee the monks would wash my clothes in a nearby river, although it wasn't polite to ask them to wash undergarments. When I told Wib that I had gotten the first round of recommended immunizations for the trip--diphtheria, tetanus, meningitis, typhoid--and pills to prevent malaria, I was stunned to learn that none of the Poolesville Buddhists were getting them. "We have a homeopath who is an herbalist," he said, "and we've been told the hepatitis shot doesn't work anyway." Really? I said.

"And Jetsunma's acupuncturist is coming on the trip, and she takes great care of us and protects us. She's a brilliant healer."

Wib's updates made it clear that Jetsunma had moved into another expansive phase. She was looking for a documentary filmmaker to record her pilgrimage, and Wib asked if I knew any. He was still trying to hire a helicopter to take Jetsunma to Maratika Cave so she wouldn't have to hike. He had written to the Dalai Lama's private office in Dharamsala, too, hoping that Jetsunma and His Holiness could finally meet. And, expecting throngs of Indian worshipers to follow the emanation of Mandarava wherever she went, Alana and Aileen were producing thousands of postcard-sized photos of Jetsunma--prayer cards--to hand out. ''It's finally starting to feel like a reality," Wib said. The entourage had grown to thirty, including the lama, her three children, two attendants, an acupuncturist and massage therapist, as well as Wib and myself.

Over the months I'd become familiar with the manic pace of life at KPC. Expansive dreams were always followed by enthusiastic planning, followed by round-the-clock building projects and praying. The six-month stupa project was immediately followed by a pilgrimage to India, and searches for documentary filmmakers and Nepalese helicopters and hopes for meetings with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Jetsunma also appeared to be entering an important new phase of her life--the Princess Mandarava Phase. "The recognition is really starting to manifest," Wib said.

"Things are in transition," Alana had warned me." Jetsunma's display is changing--the way she presents herself to the world. . . well, you'll see."

In the middle of the India planning, Ladyworks had reached another crisis point. Wib called to ask if I thought the temple needed to hire a $4,500-a-month public relations person in New York City to handle the Ladyworks account, which now included a line of shampoos and conditioners that Jetsunma had created. He also wanted his memory refreshed: Why did I feel Jetsunma should not appear in the infomercial herself? Ladyworks posed all the problems that a modern-day lama has in life now, Wib said. If people had trouble with Jetsunma and the infomercial, it was probably because Jetsunma didn't fit the idea they had of a spiritual leader. She was a pioneer, he explained, she broke the stereotype and "challenged" everybody to see a Tibetan Buddhist lama in a new way. "She's a woman, for one thing," Wib said, "and she's got this long hair, and she's an American. And she's started a business. It's hard for people to grasp all that."

He was being indirect, but when he talked about "people" having trouble with Jetsunma and the infomercial, I knew he meant me.

Did Jetsunma really want to become famous as the lama who hawks shampoo? I felt frustrated by her apparent lack of wisdom. Why was she so impatient to make money? And if she was perfect, how come she had such lousy taste? In a conversation with Ani Aileen--who I thought of as a sensible person and a fellow member of the media--l found myself venting a bit and was relieved to hear her response. "Don't get me started on that infomercial," she said. "I'm not stepping into that karmic morass again. . . . I've stopped trying to train them about the real world. They'll have to make mistakes and bump up against it and learn on their own."

***

It wasn't long after these conversations that Wib called to say Jetsunma wanted to arrange a dinner so that "everybody could talk." Wib, Alana, and Jetsunma were gathering at the Normandy Farm Inn. I was told to bring my "questions about India," but Wib also made it clear that we would be discussing Jetsunma's "PR options" and what I expected would come her way as a result of my book. "You can talk about what you see happening," Wib said vaguely, "and Jetsunma can talk about what she sees happening." I needed to discuss "my goals," and she would discuss hers. This seemed a bit weird to me, since I thought it had all been covered months ago--and the book's release was at least two years off. Wib also suggested that I should share my ideas and thoughts about Ladyworks.

"What do you mean?"

"We're still making some decisions. . . . Ladyworks might "come up."

"My thoughts about the infomercial?"

"If it comes up."

I met Wib first in the bar, where we waited for Alana and Jetsunma and had a drink. He talked about his life--his childhood in Rochester, his WASP upbringing, the country clubs and boarding schools and summers on Nantucket. He said nothing disparaging about his parents, or the way he was raised--"we're very close"--suggesting only that he and Jane were doing things differently. He had worked at the temple for eight years without a salary, and Jane supported the family with a successful graphic arts business. Their daughters were attending the Buddhist school at KPC and being taught about not killing bugs, not lying, cyclical life in samsara, bodhicitta. "In Poolesville, I'm sure they think we worship worms at the temple." He laughed. "Because every spring we take the school kids to the bait shop. We buy all the worms and then liberate them in the woods."

Jetsunma and Alana arrived--looking as odd a pair as ever, the lama in her designer pantsuit and nails, the nun in her shaved head and robes to the floor. In the first few minutes we discussed everything from the weather and India to Jetsunma's marriage to Michael Burroughs. "He's such a smart guy, really, and has so much going for him," Jetsunma said. "But he's got nothing to show for it, really. He always has just enough money to eke it out every month." Before I could question why Michael Burroughs's financial status should be a marker of his success in life, the conversation moved on, with tremendous swiftness, to Jetsunma's more promising future.

A documentary filmmaker had been found to join Jetsunma in India, Alana was thrilled to report. His name was Byron Pickett. He lived in Santa Fe and was the friend of a sangha member who had moved out West. He seemed to have big aspirations, too--the kind everybody in Poolesville liked. His documentary about Jetsunma's pilgrimage was going to be very high quality, shot on film, not video, and Byron was already talking about showing it at the Sundance Film Festival one day. The fact that he had no funding, or money of his own, didn't seem to bother Wib or Alana. In fact, they seemed to believe that it was their responsibility to pay for Jetsunma's documentary, and they were starting to wonder how.

Alana began asking me questions about my book--when might it come out? How many copies might it sell? And would Jetsunma be asked to make TV appearances to help sell it? A book tour together?

"You may not be happy with the book," I said, a bit uncomfortably. "And Jetsunma may not want to go on TV to talk about it. You know, as much as I like you all, I can't be writing it to please you."

"For some reason, I'm not worried," Jetsunma said. "I'm sure I'm going to like it, and I have a feeling it's going to do really well."

I thought of all the other predictions she'd made--the sure-fire successes. None of them ever seemed to pan out.

"I'm glad you have such confidence," I said, "but I'm not expecting much success."

"You aren't?" Alana asked, and her mouth dropped open. She looked at Wib with a concerned expression, as if my negativity revealed a questioning of Jetsunma's wisdom.

"I'm going to try to enjoy writing it," I continued, "and not worry about the outcome."

Wib and Alana smiled and seemed relieved. Then Jetsunma chuckled.

"You're sounding like a Buddhist," said Wib.

"You're figuring out attachment," Alana laughed.

"I can see," said Jetsunma, "we're starting to rub off on you."

Maybe it was true. Maybe I had started thinking more like them. Lately I had found myself paying great attention to the weather, as though it bore some message from the mystical world. I'd started shepherding bugs from my house rather than killing them. I had marked in my Filofax calendar when the planet Mercury would be "retrograde"--it was considered a bad time, astrologically, to write or travel or sign contracts. I had grown so fond of the Migyur Dorje stupa that I had taken friends out to see it, left little offerings of necklaces and rocks on the ledge of its base, and prayed many times there for my father, whose health was worsening. I had prayed for the world on occasion, then dedicated the merit of my prayers to benefit all beings. At one point I'd even called a real estate agent in Poolesville about farmhouses to buy there or rent. It was a whimsical notion, I suppose, but I had looked at a few.

I'd had a few weird dreams, too. In one Jetsunma transformed into a huge tiger--beautifully golden with thick, black stripes. She was hunched over a huge, bloody chunk of flesh. Over and over again I saw her ripping at the flesh, tearing off bits of meat, her mouth dripping with blood. And in another dream, soon after my first dinner alone with her, I dreamt that I was sitting at a table with her and her face kept changing, swelling, then growing thin, as if my vision were twisting and twisting, becoming distorted. I heard her say, "Wib and Alana are like my right and left eyes." The room began to breathe, in and out, the walls were breathing, exhaling and inhaling. I grew panicky, and a voice inside my head began to yell: "Run for your life! Run!"

Maybe I had started to enter their magical, spooky world and was enjoying some success with the concept of attachment, but what disturbed me was how much the Buddhists suddenly seemed to be living in mine. They were working out their public relations quandaries and getting deeper into debt. Money was constantly on their minds. Jetsunma didn't seem spiritual as much as driven. When I was asked what my "goal" was for the book, I said that I wanted to "tell a good story." Jetsunma's goal was somewhat grander. "I want to see Buddhism belong in America, as any religion belongs in America. I want to see it become another option, something that fits, suits us--not some exotic foreign practice, some cult that belongs only in the East."

***

It was probably the modesty of my goal and my lack of aspirational energy that led Wib to place the next phone call to me, a few days later, asking who owned the movie rights to my book. Had I sold them?

"That seems a bit premature," I said.

"Well, who owns them, anyway?"

I thought that I owned the rights to the book and Jetsunma owned the rights to her story. "But I'm not sure," I said.

Wib invited me to Jetsunma's house on the coming weekend. The documentary filmmaker was in town, and Jetsunma thought I should meet him. "He has some interesting ideas," Wib said. "And it would be great if the two of you could work together on some things." I could hear a hesitation in Wib's voice. As blue-blooded as he might be, he wasn't someone who could hide his anxiety.

"Has he found the money for his documentary?" I asked.

"We're still trying to help him with that," said Wib. "He seems like a nice enough guy--and Jetsunma has a strong past-life connection to him."

"Wib," I said, "can I just say something that's on my mind?"

"What?"

"You realize that if you guys pay for this documentary, it won't really be a documentary, don't you?"

"You mean if. . ."

"It's going to be considered another infomercial."

Wib called again the morning of my meeting with Byron and Jetsunma--wanting to bring me up to date on the latest developments. Byron was now actively trying to sell the feature film rights to Jetsunma's life in Hollywood, and a screenwriter named Andrea King had become very interested. She'd written a Rob Reiner movie, I was told, and something for Steven Spielberg--and her concept for the Jetsunma movie was "fictionalized" and a "romantic comedy with serious parts."

I wasn't sure what to say, but I think I managed a sound of acknowledgment that wasn't quite a groan.

"Byron came up with the idea," Wib said, "and Jetsunma got--we all got--very excited. And if he can sell the movie idea quickly, the money would help him make the documentary. And then the center wouldn't be involved."

The logic of this was somewhat skewed, I pointed out. If Byron was selling a feature film about Jetsunma to Hollywood, why would he bother with a documentary? Furthermore, did he really know what he was getting into? The story of Jetsunma didn't need fictionalizing--the truth was weird enough. And was America really ready for a romantic comedy about Tibetan Buddhism? More to the point, was America ready for Tibetan Buddhism at all? Suddenly things that had troubled me all along had become too glaring to ignore: Surely Jetsunma could have built a monastery with all the money that had gone into her houses or her wardrobe or simply the cash offerings she received for teachings. I couldn't help but think about the way her old lovers became monks and nuns to "keep the blessing intact." Would all that be in the romantic comedy, too?

***

Wib met me at the door to Jetsunma's house wearing his usual uniform of perfectly fitting blue jeans and a starched striped shirt. His friendly face was edged in stress. His brow was knitted, and there was a perceptible jumpiness to him.

Jetsunma was sitting on a sofa against a wall in the living room. She was wearing a black fuzzy sweater and dark pants, and, as I walked closer to greet her, I was stricken by the sight of her face. She had applied a startling amount of makeup, the amount an actress would wear for a theater performance. Rising above the dark red lips and colored cheeks. her eyes were raccooned by bright blue eye shadow. I'm not entirely sure why, but I felt afraid.

I joined Wib and Alana on the floor near Jetsunma's feet, and was introduced to Byron Pickett, a young guy with a mop of brown hair and big, earnest, dark eyes. He looked amazingly like the actor Robert Downey, Jr. He wore jeans and a work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he had made himself so at home--stretched out on the floor like one of Jetsunma's sons--that he seemed to have been living in her house his entire life. He also appeared to be very comfortable at her feet. The entire first hour was spent helping him solve his immediate money problems and containing his excitement over the giant movie deal before him.

"I feel like I've just won the lottery," he said, smiling up at Jetsunma.

"Andrea King can't wait to start," Alana told me.

"She's really hot," Byron said to Jetsunma, and his eyes grew wider. Jetsunma nodded and smiled excitedly. "And she's ready to just drop everything and do this."

"I can't believe this is happening," said Wib.

"I know," said Alana. "I'm pinching myself."

"Gosh," I said, pathetically trying to join in and seem enthused. "It's really something else."

Byron estimated that he needed $80,000 in order to go to India with a proper film crew; he'd use that footage to raise another $250,000 to finish the documentary. The first lump of cash was something he was hoping the Buddhists could give him--and he kept directing his pleas to Wib. "I only have one month to make all these arrangements," Byron said, "and I'll need to spend five days in meetings trying to sell the feature film, and another week to finish some editing I'm doing." I got the impression that Byron was one of those people who tended to make his problems everybody else's. When the conversation would veer away from his needs, he would return to them again and again. Finally, as he was pressing Wib for money for the third time, I asked if he'd considered the ramifications of having KPC pay for his documentary.

Byron looked at me blankly. "What ramifications?"

"Well, it's not journalism if the center pays you to make the documentary."

Byron just looked at me, like I wasn't speaking English. "Really?"

"Do you understand that if these people pay for their own documentary, it won't air on PBS or wherever you had in mind?"

"Really?" he asked again, then looked down at the carpet. He pulled out two photographs that he wanted Jetsunma to see. They were pictures of the stupa, apparently taken on the day the lama and the documentary filmmaker met. "This was the day we talked and walked around the stupa," he said to Jetsunma. "And look there. . . in the sky. Doesn't that look like a rainbow?"

A hush fell over the room. Alana's and Wib's heads swerved to see Jetsunma's reaction. Ahhhh . . . a rainbow. It was Byron's final trump.

Jetsunma squinted at the picture. "It sure does. Yep," she said, nodding with great approval.

"Well, that's a good sign," said Alana.

"Very auspicious," said Wib.

"I was lying on the beach once," Jetsunma said, "and looked up, and there was a Dharma wheel made of clouds over my head--and another time, a lion-headed dakini."

The picture was passed around. I had a hard time seeing the rainbow--which perhaps said more about my state of mind than about the rainbow's actual existence. Byron didn't have a dime to invest in this project, and he had little experience, but he had a rainbow.

"Gosh, I just can't believe this is happening," Jetsunma said.

I looked up again at Jetsunma. Her blue eye shadow was glowing at me like a giant neon sign that I had refused to see all along. They called it aspiration, but it looked like desperation. They called it desire to help sentient beings, but it was just desire--in all its human glory. They talked endlessly about the danger of grasping and ego clinging, but how was this different? There was no patience, no calm or peace, no sense of a long view in that living room. There was no emptiness. There was only frenzy, rushing, reacting. They'd convinced themselves that they were saving the world, putting an end to suffering--and a plan as grand as that dwarfed all the obstacles and information and good sense that stood in their way.

She'd been a regular woman once--modest and kind, open-hearted and well meaning, by all accounts. But now, since Penor Rinpoche had come along, she wasn't just a gifted teacher, she was an infallible saint. Every thought she had was pure, every desire sprang from a divine place. The "recognition" had brought Jetsunma many things--but it had also brought her here: She was enthroned on a sofa wearing a mask of makeup while her dearest friends had to sit on the floor at her feet. She was removed from life and kept from intimacy, from equality, from the delicious ordinariness of daily existence. Even her children had to prostrate to her in the morning. She was kept from having a real relationship or a real marriage to an equal. Suddenly, I felt an aching compassion for her, a kind of empathy--and a great sadness. Had she been ruined by all the bowing, the prostrating. the worshiping?

Pretending you are special is the most human thing of all, I thought. And it is that very urge that keeps people separate and unhappy. Being ordinary and accepting it is a great accomplishment. Doesn't Buddhism teach that?

Byron broke his lingering eye contact with Jetsunma and turned to me. "They love your title," he said. "Everybody loves it. 'The Buddha from Brooklyn.' It was the first thing that Andrea asked--if we can use it for the movie."

"Use the title to my book?" I asked, incredulously. "No, you can't."

"Maybe once you read the screenplay, you'll relent," said Alana.

"I can't imagine that," I said.

After Alana left to make coffee and tea, I looked up at Jetsunma again. Now that my own property--my book, my title--was threatened, I was experiencing a surge of territorial boldness, or something close to it. "Don't you want to be a little more patient about this?" I asked.

She looked back at me with a mysterious smile.

"Are you sure you want a documentary and a book and a movie all coming out at once about you?" I continued. "Aren't you concerned that this is too much?" I was thinking about the Ladyworks infomercial, too, but I didn't mention it. And I was thinking about all the things that I had learned about her--how the money for the Amitabha statue was raised in Taiwan, then used to pay for her new house. How her salary was half the operating budget. I thought about Michael Burroughs: he was out there somewhere, surely, with a story to tell. Hollywood pictures have a way of drawing all the darkness forward.

"It will bring a great deal of attention to you," I said, "probably not all of it positive."

"I'm a trusting person, and I'm not worried," she said, finally. "I have a connection with you, and I trust you. I have a connection with Byron, too, and I trust Byron. I think you both have tremendous potential, and I believe in you. I've always lived this way, as a trusting, positive person, and not worrying about things that aren't controllable. . . or being scared and cautious."

She mentioned her astrological chart. "This very week begins an inevitable public cycle," she said. "I apparently have the karma to become very famous--and there's really very little that I can do to stop it. This appears to be true for the next seven years. And my chart indicates that nothing I am involved with publicly during this period of time can hurt me."

"Well, then," I said. "I guess we can all breathe a sigh of relief."

Wib and Byron chuckled.

Alana was entering the room with a tray of mugs and said, "Anyway, if they don't make a good movie about Jetsunma, I sure wouldn't want to be them--with all those Dharma protectors around. They'll all start dropping dead of heart attacks."

***

I spent many hours trying to recover from the night at Jetsunma's house before I realized that I might never recover. I was angry at first, then, as a few days passed, I found that I was mostly sad and disappointed. And I felt silly. I had wanted to believe in Poolesville. There was so much that I had ignored, for many months, so many things too obvious to mention--things that a normal person, any journalist, would have been suspicious about from the beginning. For a long time I'd been intimidated by the newness, the strangeness, the exoticism of Tibetan Buddhism--by the beautiful and beckoning prayer room and by the lilting chants and by the magical stupa. I was a cynical person, but something about Poolesville had made me lose my cynicism. I was confident, but somehow I had lacked confidence. And I hadn't wanted to use my own judgment.

Four days after the meeting at Jetsunma's, I called Wib to tell him that I wouldn't be joining everybody in India. There were a number of reasons for this: one was that I didn't want to be out of the country for five weeks. My father was much worse, and I didn't want to be away from him. It was the truth, but only part of the truth. Most of the truth was still inexpressible: I couldn't go to India in good faith, and therefore I didn't want to go at all. The funny thing was, if I were worth anything as a journalist--a real member of the newsroom tribe--I would have wanted to go more than ever. But perhaps I didn't belong in the newsroom any more than I belonged in Poolesville.

Wib was stunned, of course. We talked for a brief time, then he called me back thirty minutes later. He'd just gotten off the phone with Jetsunma. "She says she is just rocking back on her heels with this news," he said. She offered to have the sangha do a puja, or prayer service, for my father. That was very generous, I said.

"She feels that you and she have entered into a great adventure together and now you are missing out on India," he said. "From her standpoint, it's the culmination of all kinds of personal changes. She said to tell you that her childhood is important, but what she's going through now is more important, and this trip is more important. She says that her entire reason for being is this trip to India."

I didn't know what to say.

"She understands the conventional wisdom standpoint of your dilemma, but she has a different take on the world."

"I realize that," I said. "But I have a take on the world that says my father is more important than whatever book I'm writing. And I don't have much longer to be with him. I need to be honest. . . you see, I'm not sure I believe I'll have another chance to be with him in some future lifetime."

Wib was quiet for a moment. "She wonders if there is something else bothering you, another reason you aren't coming."

I liked Wib. He'd been good to me, patient with me. It was hard not to be honest with him. "Well, I suppose I wasn't exactly looking forward to the entourage, the logistics. . . and now, with a documentary being shot, a film crew. It was becoming too much. I was turned off by all the new developments. Byron and the movie deal."

"I know what you mean," Wib said. "But she trusts him."

"I know."

"She's just looking for a big net--not fame or fortune," he said. "She is looking for the biggest net to scoop up human beings and liberate them from samsara."

Later that day he faxed me a copy of Jetsunma's long life prayer, written for her by Penor Rinpoche at the time of her enthronement. Jetsunma herself had asked Wib to send it to me--and suggest that I give it to my father. Sitting in my office, I watched the white pages come out of the fax machine, and I left them there.

***

I enjoyed my self-imposed exile from Poolesville during February and March. Aside from a lunch with Wib and Alana--during which Alana handed me a mysterious poem that Jetsunma had written, called "War Cry"--I heard nothing from the Buddhists. As soon as spring began to arrive, I threw myself into garden work and planting. And, again, I headed out into the countryside to look for a place to move.

While the group was away in India, I spent several weeks visiting my father in San Francisco. We watched movies and talked, and in the afternoon I sat alone in his quiet living room poring over a stack of books I'd bought on Tibetan Buddhism. They were written by various masters and monks--teachers of great renown, lineage holders with fabulous pedigrees and exotic names. Each book seemed more enticing than the next. They were slim, smooth, and had glistening jackets in vibrant colors-- brilliant oranges and yellows and pinks. The face of the Dalai Lama looked out from several of them, with his shy and jolly smile.

Inside, the words were calming. The prose was clear and graceful. Suffering was discussed dispassionately, rather the way a doctor might discuss cancer, and the terrible troubles of samsara were tossed lightly about. There was a feeling of buoyancy in the pages, a spaciousness, as the Buddhists would say, and also a feeling of depth and clarity, as though the reader were swimming in the deepest ocean and seeing the bottom perfectly. I devoured the books and enjoyed this sort of armchair Buddhism. The books were like seductive postcards sent from a sunny and relaxed state of mind--a pure land you could only hope to visit one day. And by their example Buddhism seemed like something rational and reasonable, an unemotional and unmessy philosophy of kindness. There was no sense of struggle in the texts--none of the fumbling and bumbling that I'd seen out in Poolesville and none of the confusion and anguish that I had sensed around Jetsunma.

Perhaps these books were written from the mountaintop, I told myself, and what I'd witnessed at KPC was the dire climb to get there. . . the ugly battle toward selflessness, the ego's forced surrender, the unaccountable desires of the guru, the razor's edge. It was hard to imagine what Jetsunma's students had been through all these years, and none of it from an armchair. Their spiritual training had been brutal, almost cruel at times. They'd been lied to, manipulated. They'd been squeezed for money. Yet their devotion seemed profound. What was really going on in Poolesville, and what were they getting in return for their devotion?

***

Stories of the India trip came my way eventually. As with so many events in the life of Jetsunma, I put the puzzle together as best I could based on dribs and drabs, whispers, overheard remarks, and full-blown accounts over dinner and lunch. It had been a difficult pilgrimage--for some an absolute misery. Byron kept his film crew in a constant state of upheaval and confusion. Jetsunma seemed beleaguered and emotional. Alana described the five weeks as "lots of hardships. . . but the spiritual purposes were met."

The weather in Bylakuppe, where the group spent nearly two weeks at Penor Rinpoche's monastery, was so hot and dry and dusty that, as Aileen would put it, "we didn't know whether to open or close the windows, so we kept doing both all day long." Byron and his crew followed Jetsunma around with cameras and convinced her to wear her black leather jacket in the hundred-degree heat as a visual symbol of her "Westernness." During the day the group attended long empowerments in the main temple--all in Tibetan. And at night Penor Rinpoche invited his American students to join him on the patio of his cottage, to watch installments of a fifteen-hour videotape production, The Life of Guru Rinpoche, that his monks had put together themselves. It was shot in a warehouse using one camera and one microphone, and the monk who played Mandarava wore a pair of halved coconuts for breasts.

Gyaltrul Rinpoche--who was also visiting Bylakuppe at that time--kept elbowing Penor Rinpoche whenever Mandarava would appear onscreen. "Ugly! She's so ugly!" He laughed with his big, gap-toothed smile. And all Jetsunma's students tried to laugh, too.

But the visit to Penor Rinpoche's monastery was, according to Aileen, "something of a courtesy call." The true purpose of the trip was for Jetsunma's students to accompany their guru as she visited the famous Mandarava's pilgrimage sites in Nepal. The group numbered thirty-two, counting the film crew and a monk sent by Penor Rinpoche to accompany the travelers, and logistics were complicated. So that Jetsunma could meet up with Mandarava's spirit or mindstream, the entire group flew from Bangalore to Delhi, then took another flight to Kathmandu. After seeing the sights in small groups and circumambulating the great stupa of the Kathmandu Valley, they jammed themselves into two buses--Jetsunma alone had twenty-one pieces of luggage in India (her students were allowed one bag each)--and traveled to Pharping, where Guru Rinpoche had practiced in a cave.

Helicopters took them over terraced farms in the Himalayan foothills to Maratika Cave, where Mandarava had practiced with Guru Rinpoche centuries ago. The cave was enormous, with a wide mouth. Inside, it was dark and dank, and there were so many bats that the students had to cover their heads with hats and plastic to keep dry amid the showers of bat urine and guano. Byron and his crew set up a generator and cables and were able to flood the dark cave with eerie streams of white light. Jetsunma slowly walked around the edges of the cave, trying to connect with Guru Rinpoche and his consort--feeling for a sense of them, their spirits, their energy--and leaving white scarves in the spots where she did.

They flew again to Delhi, where another long bus trip took them to a lake that had been created when Guru Rinpoche and Mandarava had been set on fire. It was on a visit to a small grotto called Mandarava's Cave that Jetsunma finally felt a true merging with the young princess's mindstream. The place was well-kept and marked with a plaque; a lama was even living and praying and maintaining an altar there. A handprint of Mandarava's still existed on the cave wall, and after the lama pointed it out to Jetsunma, she reached up and put her hand inside the print. It fit exactly.

On another excursion to Mandi, the group tracked down the "pit of thorns" where Mandarava had been thrown by her father. But the pit didn't appear to be a highly venerated pilgrimage site. Located in a bad section of town, at the end of several crooked streets and an alleyway, it had no signpost and no indication that it had been visited by any worshipful followers for years. The pit was at the bottom of a small, dirty staircase, and inside it was tiled like a public toilet and lit with harsh fluorescent light. Jetsunma fell against Byron when she saw the state of the site and began sobbing and moaning. It seemed the Buddhists had simply forgotten this place--or, worse, had forgotten Mandarava. Taken back to her hotel, she was inconsolable. In the morning she told her students that she had cried all night. The "sacred energy" of the pit, she explained, was nearly gone because of neglect.

Of all the stories that came home with the pilgrims to India, perhaps the most puzzling was that, despite Wib's valiant efforts, the Dalai Lama was not available to "receive" the Poolesville group or able to meet with Jetsunma in Dharamsala. I had to wonder why the Dalai Lama didn't have a moment to meet with emissaries from the largest monastery of Tibetan Buddhists in America. Or why, in all his visits to Washington, D.C., he had never ventured to Poolesville or ever stood for a photo op with Jetsunma, the only woman tulku teaching in the West. What had the Dalai Lama heard about her? What was her rap in the larger world of Tibetan Buddhism? It wasn't as though Tibetans are so spiritually advanced that they never gossip among themselves about various tulkus and recognitions. In fact, the ones I'd met seemed endlessly fascinated with the subject.

Months after she'd left, the monks in Bylakuppe couldn't get over the brash American woman who had arrived at the monastery with her cadre of nuns and her black leather jackets and her film crew, all her makeup and luggage and helicopter rides. Jetsunma was strange, controversial--and a subject of unending speculation. It was said that she ran a "personality cult, " that she "thought she was a movie star." She was a "laughing-stock" in Bylakuppe, according to K. T. "Thubten" Shedrup Gyatso, an American monk who visited the monastery the following year. "She made an amazing impression," he said: "a bad one."

***

My own oasis of serenity did not last long. At the beginning of April, just a few days before the group was due home, my phone began ringing with news from another distant, magical land: Hollywood.

I grew up in Los Angeles and still have friends there--some of whom work in the movie business, some in journalism. They called to alert me to a movie deal that had been recently signed. Daily Variety, the trade paper for the entertainment industry, had run an article announcing that the screenwriter Andrea King was being paid four hundred thousand dollars for a feature film idea that she had pitched to Turner Pictures. It was a dramatic comedy "based on the true story about a Jewish-Italian woman with long fingernails and big hair who was raised in Brooklyn and was proclaimed a reincarnation of a Buddhist leader." Her movie was tentatively titled "The Buddha from Brooklyn."

At first when talking to my friends, I found myself defensive of Jetsunma and the movie deal. These were good people, I said, but misguided. It hadn't been intentional misappropriation of my title, just more bumbling. But as I struggled to be generous, a bad mood descended upon me. Hadn't I made it clear to Byron that I didn't want to "share" my title with him? I became overwhelmed by a vicious sort of territoriality, something journalists are taught if they don't have it naturally. And as I waited for the entourage to come home, my possessiveness about my title grew into an obsession. My title, my book. The days passed with this ugly feeling inside me growing. Having just read a pile of books on Buddhism didn't help; it only made me feel worse. I was now fully aware of my egocentrism but felt powerless over it.

Several days after Wib's return, I faxed a copy of the Variety story to his house along with a letter complaining that my title had been "stolen." Surprisingly, it was Alana, not Wib, who called me the next day. She was cheerful but impersonally so--as though she'd drawn a line in the sands of her mind about exactly how cheerful she could be.

"How was your trip?" I asked.

"There were a lot of hardships," she said. "We are certainly glad to be back in the U.S., where it's clean."

She'd read my letter, and discussed its substance with Jetsunma, who was a bit "taken aback" by my concerns and accusations. They'd all been traveling in India for five weeks--how could she know what title Andrea King was using? This wasn't her concern, and, furthermore, why didn't I just pick up the phone and call Andrea King myself? Looking back, I'm not sure why I didn't.

We scheduled a meeting with Jetsunma for the following week, but when the day came I received a call from Alana saying that Jetsunma was "having a hard day" and couldn't possibly get together. Unlike Wib--with whom I tended to chat for a while, Alana was abrupt. Trying to get her to chitchat about temple developments was like trying to sweet-talk a wall.

Soon afterward Alana set up another appointment for me to see Jetsunma, but this one was also canceled at the last minute. Jetsunma was feeling "lost and foggy and weird," Alana said. She was having a hard time "reintegrating" to America after being in India so long.

And rather than hanging up quickly, as she had done in the past, Alana dropped a few pieces of new information. These had the feeling of prepared remarks, not a casual conversation. Jetsunma and Byron were having "some problems," Alana told me. There were some papers to sign still regarding the movie deal, and Jetsunma was reconsidering whether to give Byron the rights to her story. He needed to "shape up," Alana said rather mysteriously. In India, Jetsunma had made several overtures to Byron, trying to get him to "come closer," but he had balked.

"Overtures?" I couldn't help but wonder if they'd been romantic.

"He said to Jetsunma that he needed to have journalistic distance."

"Huh."

"We've seen this many times," Alana said. "Being around Jetsunma brings out the worst in people, and sometimes the best. You never know which."

"God only knows what it's done to me," I said.

Alana laughed--something I was grateful for, to be honest--and her voice became deeper and sort of hushed. "There's a real story to get, Jetsunma wants me to tell you. And the person who comes into the fire, who gets closer in, will get it. Jetsunma says, 'So far only Martha seems to have the balls."

In the following weeks Alana arranged two more dinner appointments with Jetsunma; both were canceled at the last minute. When I called Alana to set up others, I heard nothing back for a long time, then she left a voice mail one day saying Jetsunma was "unavailable until at least August."

The Buddhists were always talking about impermanence, but around Jetsunma impermanence was even more impermanent. It was a whole new era all over again. As the weeks passed I found myself missing the old stupa days. I missed Wib and how he used to call every few days with news and friendly updates.

I left a message on Wib's answering machine. He phoned me back a week later. "Why am I dealing with Alana?" I asked him right away. "Where have you been?"

His voice sounded rough and tired, as though he'd been up all night. "I've been through six weeks of utter hell and change since India, " Wib said. "It was a total lesson." When I asked specifics, he said he wasn't really "able to talk about it." In any case, he was looking for a job in the real world, which he needed, he said, "for my self-esteem." He was also "getting out of the temple businesses, and out of the inner circle."

There was more. He and Jane had "separated," he said, something that Jetsunma had advised them to do. Wib was no longer living at his cozy house in Potomac with his wife and two daughters but in an apartment complex by himself. "Jetsunma thinks we need some time apart."

"Oh, I'm so sorry," I said. And I felt a sadness descend on me. Wib and Jane were separated? Jetsunma suggested it?

"You can always call me," Wib said, "about anything. But I'm so out of the loop now, I'm not sure how much help I'll be."

"It's been kind of weird, the last couple months."

"I feel sort of responsible," he said. "I got you into this deal, didn't I?"

"Sort of."

"Hey," he said, "whatever happened with your book title?"

"I'm going to Los Angeles next week to work on that," I said.

"That was so gross of them to take it. "

***

I didn't just look into the title when I was in Los Angeles that spring. I also began another mission, scrounging around for some other writing assignments about spiritual life in America. I had a feeling doing so might help answer some of my questions about Jetsunma and what I'd seen in Poolesville. What attracts certain people to certain leaders? More than anything, I wondered why spiritual leaders arc always getting into so much trouble. Are they simply held to a higher standard--do we expect too much of them? Are they corrupted by power? And why is it that if people are charismatic enough, it seems easier to overlook their glaring faults--and the fact that they don't practice what they preach?

In an introduction to Tibetan Buddhism written by the Dalai Lama, I came across several pages devoted to the importance of finding a pure teacher when one begins to study. The tone is cautionary. "It is frequently said that the essence of the training in guru yoga is to cultivate the art of seeing everything the guru does as perfect. Personally, I myself do not like this to be taken too far," the Dalai Lama wrote.

The problem with the practice of seeing everything the guru does as perfect is that it very easily turns to poison for both the guru and the disciple. Therefore, whenever I teach this practice, I always advocate that the tradition of "every action seen as perfect" not be stressed. Should the guru manifest un-Dharmic qualities or give teachings contradicting Dharma, the instruction on seeing the spiritual master as perfect must give way to reason. . . .

Make a thorough examination before accepting someone as a guru, and even then follow that teacher within the conventions of reason presented by Buddha.*

There were similar references to this perspective in books by Gyaltrul Rinpoche and Patrul Rinpoche.* But I had to wonder how a new student who knows nothing about Buddhism could be expected to distinguish a pure teacher from an impure one. How was anyone, even a seasoned student, to feel sure she was in the presence of "the real thing"?

Charisma, according to the Dalai Lama, has nothing to do with it. I wondered if it was like choosing a husband or anything else--you either fall in love at first sight or it takes years to reach a decision, and even then, it is an intuitive one.

I looked into writing profiles of other spiritual leaders and gurus as a way to explore this subject more, I explored practices and disciplines other than Buddhism. Frauds and saints seem to arise in every religion. I looked for leaders who were controversial, who'd tried to bridge religion and popular culture--and whose personalities and lifestyles were perhaps a bit too large.

In Palm Springs I had lunch with Tammy Faye Bakker. She wore a big, floppy straw hat; a long, white dress; and six-inch heels. Her hair had been shaved down to an inch--the length of Sherab Khandro's--and her eyelashes were so long and so fake and so coated in black mascara that each lash stuck straight out like a little black hand-dipped candle. I couldn't help but like Tammy Faye. She was fun and openhearted. And, despite the fact that she'd been recently diagnosed with colon cancer, she seemed to have only four modes of being: upbeat. bubbly, superbubbly, and sobbing bubbly. In their heyday she and her ex- husband, Jim Bakker, raised one million dollars every other day. They reached thirteen million viewers a week via satellite. She had a new book out, a memoir, so to speak, and I was struck by her accounts of the pace of her life building a ministry. She'd been driven, worked seven days a week, and focused entirely on acquiring new members, fundraising, and building a large, impressive compound in North Carolina called Heritage USA. There was a certain need for an extensive wardrobe, and increasing amounts of makeup. Deep down, she said, she felt lonely and unloved. The environment at Heritage USA was full of judgment, and the larger world of fundamentalist Christian ministers was a snake pit. I read with disgust her accounts of being blackmailed by other preachers, of the politics and posturing.

These spiritual people weren't like everybody else, I said to Tammy Faye. They seemed worse.

"I know," she said. "Very terrible."

Why did spiritual leaders run into such problems? I asked. She batted her heavy lashes at me. "Let me tell you something," she said. "I think the devil can use a Christian more than he can use somebody who isn't. He's always working them."

"Why?"

"He doesn't have to spend his time on people he already has."

When I proposed that spiritual leaders tend to set themselves apart, think of themselves as good, as devoting their lives to important work--and therefore don't question their personal ethics enough, she started looking off into the next room, where lunch was being served.

"That could be true," she said. "But I don't know. Let's just turn off this tape recorder and eat!"

In Los Angeles I interviewed Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the radio talk- show shrink. Dr. Laura had brought a strict moral code and Orthodox Jewish teachings to the airwaves and was known for verbally abusing her callers. Her harsh edicts didn't seem to deter many people--in fact, they seemed to attract them. The small blonde was a black belt in karate and poised to become the most popular radio host in America. After sitting in the studio with her for a couple of hours, I started to notice that, in person and up close, she had an intensity that reminded me of Jetsunma's. Her overwhelming confidence in her message gave her a tremendous air of authority, which I had a hard time questioning. It was as though a bubble surrounded her that was impossible to pierce. She was tough and tightly wrapped, and I found myself trying to please her and compliment her in order to get her to settle down.

Far more relaxed and gentle was Renee Taylor, a legendary yoga teacher in Southern California. She was in her eighties but still teaching, and still wearing colorful floor-length saris and glamorous turbans. In the 1930s she was a screenwriter who started teaching Hatha yoga from her Beverly Hills home, and in the 1940s and' 50s she was a pioneering health food advocate. She made pilgrimages to the Himalayas and wrote books about the small fiefdom of the Hunza, who she felt were the true lost people of Shangri-la. In high school I had taken yoga classes from her and had never been able to forget her soft, lilting accent--she sounded a little like Bela Lugosi--and her accounts of her exotic travels. But Renee was determined. She had come to the United States from Belgium to flee the Nazis and created a life for herself--mostly alone. Her work and teaching had influenced countless people, and she had created a little yoga empire, though it was now on the wane. In her eighties she was still driving herself in a huge red Cadillac convertible, despite the fact that she was nearly blind.

Renee tried to sell herself as soft--and there was a true softness--but she was also competitive and difficult. "I am very willful," she admitted with a laugh. When I mentioned wanting to talk to another yoga teacher, she threw out a rash of criticisms against her, and finally dismissed her technique as fraudulent. It isn't the most selfless and ego-free people who seem drawn to the role of spiritual leader. In fact, as I talked with Renee and Dr. Laura and Tammy Faye, and thought of Jetsunma, I began to suspect that it might be the most willful people who turn to spiritual measures and solutions, as a means to control and channel their own strong desires. It is a way to manage their gigantic egos. And they seem to use whatever gifts they have--charm or threat or softness--to set about refiguring the world their way.

On another trip to San Francisco, I met up with Dean Ornish, the famous heart specialist who has proven in several studies that meditation and yoga, along with a strict low-fat diet, can reverse heart disease. Dean had dark curly hair and a sweetly sad expression that made him immensely likable. Rather than being larger than life and alluring, Dean's charm was his self-effacement. He seemed genuinely modest, too, aside from the fact that the trunk of his car was loaded with copies of a People magazine issue that carried a flattering story about him. He and I took a hike in the Marin Headlands and later, over lunch at my father's house, we talked about his work and his story. Like Jetsunma, he had suffered a breakdown of sorts in early adulthood--at nineteen he had been depressed and suicidal before hearing Satchidananda speak. By incorporating his spiritual lessons into his medical career, Ornish came to believe that the epidemic in America wasn't physical heart disease, it was emotional and spiritual heart disease as well. He'd taken Eastern teachings and made them American.

Soon afterward I had dinner with another medical doctor who had brought Eastern philosophy to mainstream America--and made a fortune with it. Of all the gurus I had encountered, Deepak Chopra was by far the most charismatic and fun. He had a loud and generous spirit that filled a room and an amusing way of questioning his own theories and always coming up with new ones. He had begun his work as a disciple of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation, but eventually left the organization to write his own books and develop his own theories. Fame came to him in the early 1990s, with his book Quantum Healing. He has published many best-selling books since, raced around the globe several times over giving seminars and conferences and retreats, and, like Tammy Faye Bakker, he had an infectious kind of energy that I found irresistible. But, unlike her, he found any one religion too small to accommodate his own giant spirit.

"Religion strangulates, suffocates, confines, imprisons," he told me over dinner in La Jolla. "And yet, spirituality is all about liberation. It is about freedom." All religions are based on "authentic spiritual experience," he thought, but because they are about control and largely intolerant of other beliefs, they have caused enormous damage to the world. "It's just control and drama and a form of politics, you know. It's the biggest con job of civilization," he said.

"But what's really interesting to me is that it doesn't matter what your belief system is, or how outrageous you are, there are followers."

"It does seem that way," I said.

I couldn't help but think about Catharine and Michael Burroughs, and their basement in Kensington stuffed with students. In staid Washington, D.C., of all places, they had been able to attract a group of disciples--people who sat glued to every utterance of Jeremiah, who talked about negative entities living in outer space, and who believed they'd all been together many, many times before in previous lifetimes.

"Why do certain people link up with a leader?" I asked him. "What is that attraction, do you suppose?"

"Well," Chopra said, "anytime you are attracted to someone, no matter who they are, it is because you find traits in them that you want in yourself. You just don't know this on a conscious level, So you feel kind of completed by being in their presence."

What did people see in Jetsunma that they wanted for themselves--and what was being completed? And what had I seen? What had propelled me toward Poolesville?

Turning toward Buddhism again, I began a series of long conversations with Martin Wassell, the British filmmaker who had first told me about the existence of Jetsunma and her sangha in Poolesville. Martin was protective against misunderstandings of Tibetan Buddhism but also full of savvy advice--and laughter--as I complained about having to wait endlessly to see Jetsunma. He had been involved with many Tibetan Buddhist film projects, including producing a classic documentary called Heart of Tibet. He knew what it was like to wait weeks, months, even years. "Many Buddhist projects are like this," he said. When dealing with Tibetan lamas, he warned me, changes and broken promises are frequent but not personal. "A lama can change his or her mind about something, and that's it--no apologies or explanations are required." It was even possible, he said, that I'd never talk to Jetsunma again.

And just as I had almost given up, Alana called one day in late June. Her voice sounded cool and certain, as usual, and as Martin had predicted, there were no apologies for the delay.

"We're in Sedona," she said." Jetsunma needed some downtime--just to get away and relax. She says she's been thinking about you lately, and wondered how you were doing. Would you want to just talk with her on the phone?"

***

We spoke for an hour and eleven minutes. Jetsunma's voice sounded small and meek, and kind. She did that gentle thing that Renee Taylor had perfected. She asked many questions about my father and how he was doing. When I said that he seemed the same but in very good spirits, she said, "That's perfect, just perfect. Because really it matters a lot how the person feels at the time they pass. The general feeling of happiness or regret-- whichever--so that helps a lot."

"How about you?" I asked.

"I'm doing pretty well," she said. It's funny, but I think I'm having an official midlife crisis."

"Well, you're probably entitled to one."

"That's what I figured," she said. "The worst part about it is that no one expects it of me. And if you took an opinion poll"--she laughed--"which we won't be doing, most people think I shouldn't have one. But I think it's natural and it's happening."

She was taking some time off and thinking about things, she said. She was strategizing about the future, too. Looking back, she could see that she had been trying very hard for the last eight years to find her place within Tibetan Buddhism, she said, and "trying to figure out just who I was." Early on, after the recognition, she had wanted to be more of a traditional lama--and so she wore chuba skirts and burgundy. Then she "swung to the other side" and wore business suits. "I was always just trying to figure out where I was," she said.

"Lately I'm thinking things like, well, I was born a Westerner, and if I was supposed to be a Tibetan, I would have been. And if things were supposed to be exactly the same as it was with my predecessors, then time wouldn't have moved. The truth is, you are where you are. And you are who you are. And I'm trying to move forward from that point."

She wanted to incorporate the best of everything into her teaching--and her plans for KPC. "I would never go against the traditions and what my gurus or teachers have given me, or anything to defame this lineage that I helped start. It's my home and it's my heart," she said. "And at the same time, I have to find a way to start from where I am, and take a step from the place I'm actually at. And I have to take into account that I'm a Western woman and I have certain personality traits that, you know, we just can't I dismiss our personality traits. And when we try to, we get locked into something that doesn't feel quite real or right."

I found myself almost hypnotized by how her thoughts flowed. They never seemed prepared and ordered as much as tossed together, and there was a sense of freedom to them, a spaciousness, I guess. Listening to her was like sitting in a canoe on a river and having no idea where you were going to wind up. I enjoyed the looseness, and how she didn't seem to bother guarding her very own ordinary thinking.

We talked about the Tibetan Buddhist books I'd been reading, and how they explained some things and left out others. I was asking a lot of questions. What made sense to me about Buddhism, and what didn't?

"It's interesting that you should say that," she said, "because this is how the foundational Buddhist teachings are taught. At first, you are supposed to think through it absolutely logically. Like you are never supposed to accept a teacher until you've logically determined whether that teacher will benefit you. The Buddha lays down these foundational teachings, and his advice is to not accept them until they are logical to you, work them out, like equations, in your mind."

I was trying out a few fundamental practices, too, I said.

"That's a good idea," she said. "And I was telling Byron Pickett this. . . . For this story, you can't stand outside and just look at it. It's like trying to report on fires and you go to a place that's been burned by a forest fire three days before and you give a report on burnt trees. It's not the same thing as putting your hand in the fire and feeling the heat. It's not the same thing."

Byron had told her he was a "documentarian," Jetsunma said, and he needed distance. He was afraid of becoming a student of hers. "And I said. 'If you don't want to make magic or touch hearts, if you don't want to tell a story inside out--the whole story, the feel of it, the taste of it-then keep going the way you're going. But if you really want to know fire, you have to feel fire.'

"I'd say the same thing to you. You're enough of a professional. If you move in and feel the fire, don't think for a minute that you won't be able to pull your finger out if you don't like it."

She was giving two retreats in the fall, she said, a Guru Yoga retreat and a compassion retreat. "And I think," she said, "you might like to come.

***

It wasn't until the late summer that I heard anything about Dechen and the Monk. I was having lunch with Wib, who was talking about his new job. It got me wondering if anybody else, besides Michael Burroughs, had been in the inner circle and gotten out. And I'd started wondering whether many nuns and monks had given up ordained life and left KPC altogether.

"Not many," Wib said. "We have a pretty stable ordained sangha, compared with most Dharma centers. A very low fallout rate."

When I pressed him for specifics, he said that "years ago" a couple of monks had left. "Testosterone cases," he said. "Monks with motorcycles." I knew he was referring to Richard Dykeman--and another young monk named Chris Olance.

"Nobody recently?"

He stopped for a second. Earlier in the year, he said, a nun had "given back her robes" after breaking vows with a monk.

"Broke her vows with a monk? Wow, " I said. "That's pretty serious."

"Very serious," Wib said.

"What did Jetsunma do?"

"She took it very seriously."

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