|
THE BUDDHA FROM BROOKLYN -- WHAT A LUCKY CHILD |
|
Where there is
no belief in the soul, there is very little drama. At the end of the year Gyaltrul Rinpoche came to Poolesville, but he never heard a confession from the Monk or Dechen. At first the Monk had agreed with Dechen--they should go together to see the old Tibetan. But later he changed his mind. It would have been hard to see Gyaltrul Rinpoche in any case. He hadn't come to Maryland to see students as much as to minister to Jetsunma. In phone conversations she had told him that she had been down lately, feeling at sea. There was so much work to be done still. And she feared that her marriage to Karl was ending and wanted Gyaltrul Rinpoche's advice. The lama arrived around Christmas but soon after became very sick with a stomach virus. He stayed downstairs, in his quarters of the temple, and saw nobody. When Jetsunma came down with the same flu, Alana explained at a sangha meeting that the merit of the students must be awfully low to have caused such illness. What was causing this low merit? Dechen sat in her chair and began to worry. Later she asked the Monk again to show her the texts that said they didn't need to go to the lama and explain what happened. "Just do some confession on your own and Vajrasattva," he told her. "There's no need to go to anybody." *** After Gyaltrul Rinpoche's departure there were two sangha meetings to discuss the fallout from his visit and new developments at the temple. They were held on separate evenings. The ordained met in the prayer room and the lay practitioners in the larger Dharma room. As was usually the case, only a small circle of students who were close to Jetsunma had any idea of what was coming. Gyaltrul Rinpoche's visit was heard about secondhand, in whispers, if you were the sort who listened to the whispers or were around the temple enough to notice changes. The white noise around the temple in those days was mostly about Karl. He'd had an unhappy look on his face all year. While the inner circle had known that Jetsunma 's relationship with Karl had been stormy for months, that he had been living at the monks' house in Poolesville over the summer, the split between the lama and her consort was just now going public. As usual, before an actual announcement was made, Alana had been a subtle conduit for leaks that helped the students adjust. "Gyatrul Rinpoche pointed to Karl and said, 'You! Get back in robes!'" she told a few members of the sangha in passing. "He told Jetsunma that Karl didn't belong in her house anymore, but he didn't belong with the lay practitioners either. He is a strange case, neither fish nor fowl." Neither fish nor fowl. This had certainly been the sangha's impression, too. Nobody knew what to make of the young man Jetsunma had taken as her fourth husband--fifth, if you counted Sangye. Karl had always been a mystery to them, an unknown force inside Jetsunma's house, although more like no force at all. He rarely spoke to sangha members side from a mumble. And, increasingly, he had looked glum or brooding. Alana had told several close students that Jetsunma felt very bad about the ending of her marriage. Karl was young--way too young--and hadn't known how to treat her. Jetsunma had asked Gyaltrul Rinpoche why she'd been married so many times and why things never worked out. "You were damaged as a child," he had explained. "Give yourself a break. This is your compassion. It's like you can't help yourself. You see a bird with a broken wing, and you just go for it, you want to save it. Look at Michael. Spiritually, isn't he better off?" "Well, yes," Jetsunma said. "Look at Sangye Dorje. He's a geylong monk now. Isn't he better off?" "Yes." "Karl--is he better?" "Well, yeah." "So shut up!" Gyaltrul Rinpoche said, with a chuckle. "But I just go from one to the other?" Jetsunma asked. "Is this what my life is going to look like?" "So what?" Gyaltrul Rinpoche asked her. "They're all better off, aren't they?" "That makes me sound like some kind of machine. " "Well, you are," Gyaltrul Rinpoche said. "Why do you want to be like other women? Can they liberate beings? Take all these feelings, and meditate on the emptiness of them, the emptiness of everything including feelings. You have these feelings because this is your display--but they aren't really anything. And, yes, you are a machine. " *** Chris Finney got a phone call from Sylvia Somerville, one of her closest friends at the temple, telling her about a special meeting to be held following Gyaltrul Rinpoche's departure. From the urgency and seriousness in Sylvia's voice, Chris quickly guessed that the meeting wasn't open to all sangha members. It was one of those meetings, the dark meetings, the laundry-airing meetings. Over the years she had seen new students pulled out of the Dharma room and told--gently and kindly--that it wasn't really appropriate for them to be present. Lately Chris had been avoiding the meetings in Poolesville. She had two daughters now, and life was busier. Also, a shift had taken place inside her. She wasn't sure whether it was her and Rick, and what they'd been going through, or whether the place itself had changed. Chris kept her doubts about KPC to herself. She had found it easier simply not to raise the subject. And when anything about the temple came up, Rick seemed careful not to say too much. Fortunately, the attention paid to the Finneys' older daughter, Eleanore, now four years old, had died down. This might have been because a young boy had been found to be the rebirth of Dudjom Rinpoche, which would rule out little red-haired Eleanore as his reincarnation. But the Finneys felt that the meddling had continued. Over the summer, during Penor Rinpoche's visit, Rick had not attended teachings. He had looked after the couple's daughters instead. Chris was sitting on the front porch of the temple one afternoon, talking with Alana and Atara, when the two attendants began discussing Rick. "He really doesn't get it, does he?" one of them said. Chris didn't know what to say and felt defensive. A few days later Rick was approached by Atara, who said she had a message from Jetsunma. They stood on the porch for a few seconds; then Atara pulled him into the temple foyer. "Rick, " she said, Jetsunma is deeply concerned. If you don't pay more attention to your involvement here, when you die you're going to go further and further down, and your daughters will go further and further up. And you'll never see them again." When Rick relayed the conversation to Chris, she grew concerned. She felt strongly that it was Rick's business where he practiced and whether he accepted Jetsunma as his root guru or main teacher--but she also knew that sometimes couples at KPC were encouraged to separate. What would she do if she had to make a choice? Rick had been a student of Tibetan Buddhism for more than two decades already--in his twenties he had studied with Geshe Lobsang Tharchin, and later he had spent six years as a student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a gifted Tibetan lama who died in 1987. And Rick felt that he had seen what havoc a brilliant but self-destructive tulku could produce. Trungpa Rinpoche, although Rick admired him greatly, was a terrible drunk who lived a rather posh upper-class English lifestyle, and, albeit married, he slept with a large circle of students. And although Rick felt strongly committed to the dharma, in the past years he had given up on KPC. It was one thing to put up with some bad behavior from a real tulku and a qualified Dharma teacher, but Rick had come to suspect that Jetsunma wasn't even that. He had tried to keep his views to himself, and hidden from Chris, but suddenly, it seemed, Jetsunma had gotten bolder in her meddling. If it was no longer okay with Jetsunma that Rick wasn't taking the teachings in Poolesville, he worried that very soon it wasn't going to be okay that Chris was married to him. He also couldn't help but worry that Chris would leave him and take the girls with her. With his wife's approval Rick decided to write a letter directly to Jetsunma--hoping to clear up a misunderstanding about his lack of involvement at the center. He tried to be direct and honest and not disrespectful. He explained that he was supportive of Chris's involvement in Poolesville, but he had made a decision to hold another teacher of his, Khenpo Konchog Gyaltsen, as his root guru. He addressed the unresolved questions about Eleanore, too. On several occasions in 1991 and 1992, it had seemed to Rick that Jetsunma had wanted custody of her. Jetsunma herself had joked about wanting to raise her. Alana had asked Rick, "Will you give her to us?" Rick took the hints of a lama and her attendant seriously. And he felt he needed to tell Jetsunma that rather than pleased by these attentions, he and Chris had felt harassed. He enclosed a twenty-dollar bill with the letter and gave it to Atara. Rick and Chris had heard many times that if you wrote to Jetsunma it was appropriate to put some cash in the envelope. "We were told if there wasn't an offering in the letter--as a pro forma thing," said Rick, "that she wouldn't even consider it." Months would pass before the Finneys heard a reply. And as Chris waited, she felt a change in herself, a new feeling. Having a doubt about one's lama, or about the Dharma, according to the Buddhist texts, has serious repercussions. Chris thought if she doubted, she would lose her way, lose the Dharma. And she would lose her friends, her social life, her spiritual life. What would she have then? "In the past, I had thought that if I examined some of this," she said later, "I would almost disappear--like I physically couldn't keep integrated anymore." Chris worried about her samaya with Jetsunma. In Tibetan Buddhism a student makes a deep and lifelong vow to honor, respect, and obey the root guru, in exchange for the Transmissions of wisdom and empowerments to come. A broken samaya is a broken pledge of devotion, a dishonoring of the guru, a dishonoring of one's true nature, making further spiritual transmissions problematic. Early on Michael Burroughs had put a punitive Christian spin on the concept by telling students that a broken samaya could result in Vajra Hell--a bad rebirth. The students were supposed to train themselves to have utter faith in Jetsunma--as blind as possible. But the doubts were unstoppable for Chris that summer, like a bad taste she couldn't get out of her mouth. She suddenly remembered episodes that she had long since buried: the time that she had cried inside the temple and been told to leave the grounds because her emotions were "damaging" the crystals. She remembered how she'd been "Vajra-commanded" by Jetsunma to work at Tara Studios, even though she was pregnant and became allergic to some of the chemical compounds being used there. Why hadn't Jetsunma been able to foresee this? Then she caught herself. She tried to see things another way--to go around the mountain, as Jetsunma always taught, and see it from a different perspective. Chris remembered all the high lamas who had visited the beautiful temple rooms in Poolesville. The Tibetans were always so taken with the look of the place, with the appearance, and with the warmth of the students with big smiles and profuse bowing and humility. The lamas seemed almost misty-eyed when they came to Poolesville, as though the best of Tibet had been re-created there. Chris trusted their reactions--and wanted to keep trusting them. Penor Rinpoche, she kept telling herself, couldn't be wrong. Could he? Doubt was like a disease, or a weed, or an infestation. Chris remembered hearing Alana describe how she struggled with her own doubts. She used to say that one small kernel of doubt that lasted one moment could result in your leaving Poolesville six months later. Chris had watched Bob Colacurcio go through some bouts of it, and seen the strain on his face. She'd thought she'd seen it on Wib's face, too. But they had wrestled their doubts and come back even stronger. There was almost a sense of exhilaration that came with wrestling doubts and winning the fight. Rick had been told by Jane Perini once, "If you mistrust her, you distrust your own enlightened mind." Maybe that was all this was. Chris doubted herself--and therefore doubted Jetsunma. In late September, after three months of waiting, Rick received a phone call from Atara saying that Jetsunma had read his letter. Her response to him was in his file folder in the solarium--where messages were left for students. Rick drove immediately to the temple, sat in the pew in the foyer, and opened Jetsunma's note. The handwriting was sloppy, an angry scrawl. Jetsunma seemed to have been outraged by his letter to her. I don't know what Alana meant by what she said, why don't you ask Alana? her note said, according to Rick's recollection. I can't believe how many statements made by my students are attributed to me ... How self- important! How arrogant! How ungrateful! I won't even address the other questions. She also returned the twenty-dollar bill. Here's your twenty. I don't want your money. Rick read at the bottom of the last page. Give it to the stupa fund. Things were even worse than he'd thought. Rick looked at the note again, at the handwriting. "She's a total psycho," he said to himself. After a few days Atara approached Chris to ask if she and Rick had gotten Jetsunma's response. "Yes, we did, " Chris said. "What are you going to do?" Atara asked. "I don't know what I'm going to do about the letter," Chris told her. "I haven't decided." But lately when Chris did Guru Yoga practice in the evenings, instead of imagining Jetsunma over her head as the guru, she imagined the substantial and beneficent figure of Penor Rinpoche. Suddenly her mind became much calmer. *** It was a cold night in January--and four months since Rick had received Jetsunma's note--when Chris arrived a bit early at the temple for the special meeting. She was alone. Rick was home with the girls. Chris took her shoes off in the foyer and left her coat on top of a crowded rack. The Dharma room was packed already, and Chris found a cushion and took a place on the floor near Sylvia Somerville. Alana was standing in her robes in front of sixty or so students. Chris looked around and realized they weren't all old-timers--there were some fairly new faces in the crowd. Chris was surprised. And she wondered how some of them would react. Alana began by discussing Gyaltrul Rinpoche's visit over Christmas. The sangha needed to know that the Tibetan's illness was surely the result of the students' karma, their low merit. It was unlike her, but Chris found herself arguing with Alana in her mind. "Bullshit! We just built a stupa! Just the biggest, grandest thing ever. And it wasn't hastily done. It was done in all the right ways!" If there was truth to this merit business, Chris was thinking, then this calculation wasn't right. Alana moved to the main thrust of the meeting. Significant changes were taking place in Jetsunma's life. Chris noticed that Karl was on a cushion in the front row, at Alana's feet. Jetsunma was concerned that the students didn't realize how much she had suffered in her marriage to Karl, it was reported. Jetsunma had heard of people complaining. Poor Karl, poor Karl, and she felt that some students seemed sympathetic to him. But it was time for the students to become aware of a few things--to help them realize what Jetsunma had been going through these last two years. Karl was immature. He had bad role models for relationships. And while he had been sent through a Twelve-Step program and psychotherapy to help clear up some of these bad habits, he still was unthinking and inconsiderate, and continued to treat Jetsunma very badly. Alana recounted how one night Karl was watching TV with the family when Jetsunma began to feel sick. She went to the bathroom and began vomiting, and Karl kept watching TV--he never came to see how Jetsunma was. Chris could hear several students gasp in horror. "Karl's ego needs to be cut down," Alana said. "He doesn't seem to realize what he has. And he seems to think he can dominate her!" It was up to the sangha to break him, "like a wild mustang," Alana said. "Karl needs to be reminded who the lama is around here." Chris had a hard time looking at Karl. His head was down, and he was staring at the floor. She saw the back of his neck and his profile. He was twenty-five years old but suddenly looked much younger. She looked around the room--at all the people with whom she'd cast her lot for so many years. They appeared to be taking in this attack on Karl as though it were a new teaching, the latest instruction. And nothing seemed odd to them about it. "Each and everyone of us has to take it upon ourselves--whenever we see him doing something that isn't right--to break him," Alana continued. There were many Wendys in Poolesville, she told the crowd, the types who liked to help out Peter Pan and might feel compelled to take Karl under their wings. They should not do this. Chris found her mind racing. Had she been blind all these years? How many moments of insensitivity had she witnessed? How many misguided lessons in compassion? She couldn't believe that the spiritual center where she had spent so much of her life, and where she had uttered so many prayers, had so many dear friends, allowed this. "They were just nodding their heads like zombies," she said. The room opened up for comments, and people talked about Karl angrily. They were disappointed that he was treating Jetsunma so poorly. One after another students spoke. Chris watched as Wib and Jane said their piece. "We're just so clueless, all of us," Wib said. "We don't understand what a blessing Jetsunma is. And here Karl is, with the emanation of Tara, and he's not treating her appropriately." Palchen said, "People come into the gift shop and inquire about Jetsunma's marriage. What do I say to them?" "If you were doing Guru Yoga properly," Alana said sharply, "you wouldn't have to ask that question." Other people were ordinary and needed to keep vows and live more conventionally, Alana said. It was important to remember that Jetsunma was not ordinary and wouldn't be living ordinarily. "I know that some of you have been commenting on Jetsunma's sex life," she said, "and the number of partners she's had ... and seem to have judgment about that." She paused and looked around the room, as if singling out a few students with her eyes. "She should be able to have as many partners as she wants, and nobody should bat an eye," Alana said. "And just because Jetsunma is married didn't mean she couldn't have others. That is the nature of a consort relationship. It isn't necessarily exclusive ... "Whatever she does, you should accept it unconditionally," Alana said. "You should be prepared to have that kind of devotion to a lama. And, ideally, if you saw a dakini walk down the road and cut the head off a sweet infant child, your only thought should be, Oh, what a lucky child. " Chris waited a few moments, then rose. She stepped through the crowd to the door. Out in the foyer she felt suddenly better. It was going to be easy to walk out, she told herself. Very easy. She reached for her coat and quickly slipped on her shoes. How could she have missed so many obvious signs for so many years? How could she have lived that way--paying so little attention to the truth? There were two Poolesvilles. There was the one she allowed herself to see and the one that was hidden, the one she had never wanted to face. She could hear Alana's voice still, inside the Dharma room. The attendant had switched tacks and was asking the sangha for devotional stories--wanted to hear people talk about what a difference Jetsunma had made in their lives. There didn't seem to be any immediate volunteers. Rinchen stepped into the foyer from the solarium and smiled at Chris. "I'll have that brochure done soon," Chris told her--referring to an unfinished temple project she had been working on. What version of the night's events would Rinchen be telling herself in the future? How would this night look to them, all of them, when they thought back on it? Would they even remember it? When she got outside Chris turned around to look at the facade of the temple again. She took in the whole place suddenly, all of it, the large white porch and huge columns, the roof and the sides. It was as though she had never really seen it before. Her ears were ringing, the way one's ears ring after a concert, and she could still hear the talking inside, and Alana's voice, and the students mouthing their stifled words of devotion. She took in a breath, then exhaled. "I will never come here again," she said to herself. "Ever." The next morning she left a voice mail for Jane Perini. "Based on what I heard at that meeting last night, I won't be able to be a member here anymore, " Chris said. Soon afterward she got a call from Sylvia Somerville. "I can't believe you're leaving," Sylvia said. "You've been there right along with us, since the beginning. I feel like we're climbing a mountain together and you just let go of the rope. We were making progress going up the mountain ... we're going up and now you're going to fall." When Chris heard that--about going up the mountain and the rope being cut--she didn't imagine herself falling. She felt herself rising, flying, soaring. Can I ask something?" Sylvia said. "Yes." "Would it be easier to stay if you weren't married?" "No," Chris said. "It wouldn't be easier." The phone rang a lot after that, but Chris didn't answer it. She didn't want to talk to AIana, or hear about her broken samaya, or anybody's explanations, or one more thing about Jetsunma's compassion, ever. She new what she knew--and nobody was going to try to take it away from her again. *** The meeting for the ordained about Karl hadn't bothered Dechen too much. It felt like many meetings she'd been to before. She was more troubled by a chilly phone call she'd received from AIana soon afterward. Alana was exasperated that four months had passed since the Ani Farms household meeting and Dechen still hadn't gotten a part-time job. From what Alana had heard, all Dechen was doing these days was translating Tibetan texts with the Monk and Khenpo Tsewang Gyatso. That would have to stop. "You are no longer permitted to translate until you have gotten a job," Alana told her, "and have begun to make payments on the money you owe Palchen." Dechen saw the Monk later that day and immediately began complaining. "This is ridiculous," she said. "How can they do this? How can Alana have so much control over my life?" As she drove the Monk to a doctor's appointment, he urged her once again to find another Dharma center. Afterward they found themselves sitting in the parking lot of the Safeway in Darnestown for six hours, talking about KPC and the way it was run. Recently it had been discovered that Sonam had gone to Tashi Choling, Gyaltrul Rinpoche's center in Oregon. Wouldn't Dechen be happier there? There were many centers, lots of places where she could be an ani and not be told where to live or how to spend her time. Dechen was too upset to think about it, so upset and rebellious that she suggested to the Monk that they find another hotel where they could be alone together. So they did. Alana called again, a week later. "We need to meet with you," she said, "to discuss some things. Some problems." "A meeting?" Dechen felt a twist in her stomach. "Yes, Dechen. A meeting. On Saturday morning at ten o'clock." Dechen felt her heart pounding. She felt certain that Alana knew about her and the Monk. "What problems?" she asked, her voice becoming tight and dry. "We need to talk about Palchen and the money you owe her," Alana said. "Oh, that," Dechen said. "Okay." She was still shaking when the phone rang again a few moments later. "I heard something in your voice just now," Alana asked her. "Did you break your vows?"
|