THE BUDDHA FROM BROOKLYN -- WHISPERLAND

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable.  But there it sits, nonetheless, calmly licking its chops.
-H. L. Mencken

Like two of the monks and three of the other nuns in Poolesville, Dechen had been a student of Jetsunma since she was young. She was the smallest nun, and the youngest. She was just five foot one and weighed eighty-seven pounds. Her shoes were size four. When she bought regular clothes, she shopped in the children's section. She had pretty  features, large brown eyes and smooth skin and a wide toothy smile, but  she kept herself mousy and invisible, smaller than life. She was shy, modest. She liked to sew. She liked to read. Before she'd become ordained, she'd liked playing the piano. She had taught herself. Dechen was a virgin and just twenty when she became ordained in 1988- that long, hot summer when His Holiness was yelling every night.

Dechen's mother, Ayla Meurer, was divorced and working in Michigan as a sales representative for McGraw-Hill when she met Catharine and  Michael Burroughs in late 1984. Ayla was a kind woman, a loving  woman, but busy and overcommitted. Her spiritual pursuits and daily involvement in est seminars took up much of her spare time and passion.  Her two children, Kyle and Michelle (as Dechen used to be called), were left alone a great deal--and often fed themselves dinner at night. When Catharine Burroughs entered their lives as Ayla's new spiritual teacher--coming to Michigan once a month to give lectures--things began to change for the better. Catharine seemed genuinely interested in the children and tried to connect them to a growing family of her other students, in both Michigan and Maryland. And when the Center for Discovery and New Life turned toward Tibetan Buddhism in 1986, both of Ayla's children were enthusiastic converts. In 1987 the family relocated to Maryland--as had Richard Dykeman, Bob and Carol Colacurcio. and several other Michigan students--and joined the KPC mission to help bring the Dharma to the West.

While Dechen could remember her life before Jetsunma--nights alone with her brother while her mother was at church and est seminars--she couldn't imagine her life without her. Dechen's devotion to Jetsunma was unquestioned. And when Jetsunma told her in a private consultation in 1987 that her mother was the source of her spiritual and emotional problems--that Dechen and Ayla had been involved with each other in a  troubled way over many lifetimes--she believed her. When Jetsunma told her to move out of her mother's house and live with another sangha member, Dechen did. When Jetsunma suggested her father wasn't the best influence in her life, Dechen stopped calling him. When Jetsunma  told her that she shouldn't worry about going to college--because  eventually there was going to be a monastic university in Poolesville and a three-year retreat center--Dechen felt sure this must be true. And when Jetsunma told her that she had trouble with "needing approval" and described her as a "hothouse flower," Dechen came to think of herself that way, as rare and delicate and not a strong person. Several years later, when Jetsunma revised her opinion of Dechen and publicly called her a brat, Dechen had to admit that she did act rebellious and bratty sometimes. To Dechen, there wasn't anything Jetsunma had ever uttered that wasn't true or a promise she hadn't kept. 

At first Dechen had taken the ordination name Penor Rinpoche had given her in 1988: Zomchi. But later, when Jetsunma  complained that Zomchi sounded like "donkey," she was given a new name, Dechen, pronounced DAY-chin. It means "great bliss."

She lived in the retreat center after taking vows and held various outside jobs over the years, as a receptionist, a secretary, and a systems tester for a computer programmer. For a while she drove a lunch wagon that sold meals to construction workers all over Potomac. When she pulled up in the van, the men yelled, "Hey, it's the flying nun!"

For many years her first thought every morning was of Jetsunma and the temple in Poolesville, and of her fellow sangha members there. She  drove to work playing a tape of Jetsunma's teaching. When she met new people, she made a point of discussing the temple with them, told them funny ani stories--about Aileen or Sherab--and tried to leave them with a positive impression of Jetsunma and the Dharma. Kunzang Palyul Choling was her entire life and intertwined with everything else.  She had wanted to be a Tibetan Buddhist nun from the moment she had heard there was such a thing, when she was seventeen, and she  wanted to devote her life to ending suffering and praying for the world and doing no harm. Coming home from work, like most other members, she got out her mala and said prayers as she drove.

She had a good mind, and her memory--an important quality for a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner--was astounding. In school she had always tested well, but her grades were often poor because of a lack of discipline. She excelled, however, at Tibetan Buddhist practice. It  engaged and nourished her. While practicing she was able to recall even the most intricate details of a long visualization in proper order without effort. At first students tend to learn the visualizations quite generally;  with more practice they're taught to add more details. Each detail carries great meaning and has its own blessing or benefit. So the more details you can remember, the more blessings received. It bothered Dechen sometimes that she hadn't gone to college--it felt like, not a mistake exactly, but perhaps Jetsunma hadn't understood Dechen completely. Was that possible? To feel more challenged mentally,  Dechen began studying Tibetan in 1990--with Rick Finney or with visiting Tibetan lamas and khenpos. She liked academic work, but this, as well as a few other things about Dechen's personality, seemed to rub Alana the wrong way. Because of this, living in the retreat center wasn't easy. Alana complained that Dechen read instead of doing her chores, and that she was behind in her rent. Once Alana complained so bitterly about a pair of black sneakers that Dechen wore with her robes--black was a "demonic" color, Alana told her--that Jetsunma got sick of hearing about it and bought Dechen a new pair of shoes herself.

And it was Jetsunma who suggested that Dechen go to India to study at Penor Rinpoche's monastery in 1992, when the nun had told her in a private consultation that she wanted a career as a translator of Tibetan  texts. It was at Namdroling that Dechen first encountered monastery life outside Poolesville. She was surprised by how different things were there. After she was paired with a seventh-year shedra student to help her study Tibetan, she was free and on her own. Nobody complained if she didn't pick up her clothes. Nobody cared if she read too much. "I  was left alone to study--and it was startling to realize that this was not just acceptable, it was respected." The main focus of the monastery was its shedra, or university, and an atmosphere of scholarship and learning prevailed. By comparison, KPC seemed like a place where only group activities were highlighted. It was a small, insular village where everybody knew your business. The emphasis was on not knowledge and study but emotion. "Everyone was supposed to talk about what was on their minds, and reveal things," she said, "and people invaded your mind and thoughts and privacy."

In this new freer environment Dechen came under the spell of a charming young Tibetan monk who was thought to be a tulku. He had come with Penor Rinpoche to Poolesville for Jetsunma's enthronement in 1988, and he had been as naughty and rebellious as the other young monks. Now, four years later, he was more mature but still a bit of a troublemaker. Dechen liked his personality. And she was impressed by his tulku status. "I believed  what Jetsunma had always said, that tulkus could do no harm," she said.

He was a monk, but the young tulku seemed interested in Dechen and flirted with her. She found herself flattered by this, and while she had  brushed away the advances of many other young Tibetans in Bylakuppe, she did not brush this one away. He was an enlightened being, and, Dechen said to herself, he could do no harm. When he told her it was okay to swim in a nearby pond with him and some other monks, she believed he was telling the  truth. And on an overnight trip to Bangalore, when the young tulku told Dechen that it was okay for her to share a hotel room with him and some other monks, she also believed him.  And when he said that she should sleep with him in one bed, while the remaining monks shared another, she did. "He was a tulku," she told herself, "and it was okay." Once the lights were out he whispered to her, "Ani, don't tell anybody." And he rolled over on top of her in the dark and began kissing her. And then he made love to her.

"What's going to be the result of this?" she asked him, after it was over.

"I have no mistake," he said. "But you have mistake." Dechen left the bed and closed herself in the bathroom. Panicked, she began laughing uncontrollably. She had broken a root vow--sexual intercourse. The nonvirtue she had created could cause great harm. "I felt I had sent millions of sentient beings to the lower realms because of my broken vow ... And I thought, like Alana, I was going to get brain cancer and die on  the spot."

The next morning, against the wishes of the young tulku, she called the temple in Poolesville. Rinchen answered the phone and told her that Jetsunma was at the beach. The next day Dechen was able to get through to Alana and eventually have a conversation with her guru. Dechen expected she would be thrown out of KPC for her actions, but, instead, Jetsunma seemed sympathetic. "This is a violation on his part," Jetsunma said. She seemed careful not to use the word rape. She instructed Dechen to discuss the incident  with Khenpo Tsewang Gyatso, the head of the shedra at Namdroling, and use the word violation--and when she did Khenpo was very kind but troubled by the  fact that Dechen had called Poolesville already. This meant he would be  forced to tell Penor Rinpoche what had happened, and the repercussions for the young tulku would be very grave. The tulku had been brought there as a young boy because he had been difficult to raise. Over the years Khenpo had taken a fatherly attitude toward him and had hoped to look after him until he grew up. But he had guessed right. After he told Penor Rinpoche what had happened, the young  tulku was sent away. Dechen felt partly responsible, but she didn't know what else to do. Was violation too harsh a description for what had happened? It was true: she had flirted. She had encouraged him.  Dechen felt overwhelmed. Everything seemed unclear. She wanted to go home suddenly, very badly. Before she left Khenpo said, "Tell no one what happened."

In Poolesville, Jetsunma was very comforting to Dechen. It was agreed that what had happened to her in India would remain largely a secret, but in order to purify the negative karma that had been generated by a breakage of the celibacy vow, Jetsunma told Dechen to temporarily give back her robes and enter solitary retreat. First in an upstairs temple room, later in a bedroom in her mother's house, she began doing  Vajrasattva, the purification practice, sixteen hours a day. There was an early morning session, then breakfast, a late morning session, then a rest,  followed by an afternoon and an evening session. She did not leave her  bedroom for five months. Her mother brought meals to the door.

It's a confessional practice," Dechen said. "At the beginning of Vajrasattva, you are taught to examine everything, leave no stone unturned. You bare all your worst things, while doing prostrations and  the mantra. There's nothing like Vajrasattva to make you feel like the lowest. Later on, you are purified and it's very gentle."

During the retreat Dechen completed eight hundred thousand Vajrasattvas: eventually she finished one million. The numbers aren't as important as the method--which is called the four powers or the four potencies. The first potency is recognizing that you have done  something wrong, the second is remorse, the third is confession, and the fourth is the promise never to do it again. But after five months Dechen  begged to be let out. She had gotten to the part of the practice where  she needed to examine her relationship with the guru, and she found that she couldn't. It was very strange. "You have to be very honest and  accept responsibility," she recounted later. "And you see things you don't like. When I saw things I didn't like about Jetsunma, I wanted to stop."

Even after she had returned to regular life, had retaken her ordination vows and moved into Ani Farms, Dechen found she had difficulty understanding exactly what the nature of her relationship with Jetsunma was--and what a tulku really was. There was a discrepancy between what was taught in Poolesville and  what was written in the Tibetan texts. In the traditional book on Ngondro, it said that if a lama told a student to do something wrong--or, as the Tibetan Buddhists say,  nonvirtuous--the student would still suffer the karmic consequences of that act, regardless of having been instructed to do it. Dechen began to wonder. Why would a text even suggest that a tulku could cause harm if tulkus were perfect?

***

It was the summer of 1995 when he arrived in Poolesville--a man who can  only be called the Monk.* He came to meet Penor Rinpoche and to receive the Nam Chu empowerments and teachings, then stayed for a while. It was a rare opportunity to take  these teachings in America, and the Monk arrived with great hopes that, at long last, he might have found a monastery to call home. He had lived at many Dharma centers. He was an American, a famous practitioner, a former rock musician who had become a monk more than a decade before, learned Tibetan, read  Tibetan, and done three-year retreats, a rare accomplishment in the West. He was so tall that he towered over little Dechen--and  he was so homely that she found him almost adorable. He was very traditional. He was excruciatingly honest.  He was never out of his robes. He slept on the floor. And when he looked at Dechen--as they began to work on some translations together--he saw something that the others in Poolesville had missed. He  didn't see an insecure approval junkie or a hothouse flower or a brat. When the Monk looked at Dechen, he saw how refined her beauty was, and how refined her mind was. She was smarter than any of them, he told her. The clarity of her mind and her ability to translate Tibetan would surely surpass his in no time.

They began driving to the Library of Congress together to work on texts. And in the car they would talk. The Monk had a chronic health problem and was often unwell. Dechen found herself worrying about him and wondering if he was being taken care of properly, if he had enough to eat and the right medication. She also began to think about how she might get him to stay in Poolesville permanently, instead of wandering from Dharma center to Dharma center. Why was he always  wandering around? She respected him, admired him, and liked the way he treated her.  She never wanted him to leave.

As her friendship with the Monk grew, she found herself having a harder and harder time at Ani Farms, where she had been living for a year and a half. The nuns were always on her case about something--her messy room, the hours she spent on the phone. "If I left a book bag on  the stairs, that was a huge problem"' Dechen said. Her domestic habits, she was told, were affecting the "energy of the house." She didn't enjoy sitting around, the  way they did, psychoanalyzing students who weren't present, and she felt she had become the subject of the psychoanalyzing with  greater frequency. It was true that the other nuns discussed her when she wasn't there. As Sherab would explain several years  later, "I think it was difficult for her because a real maturation process had not taken place ... she seemed to need people's attention and approval. And she was always trying to act like a big girl, but she  wasn't. There was a lot of door slamming and curling up like a ball on her  bed and not coming out of her room."

About two or three months after they had become friends, Dechen became more open with the Monk about Ani Farms. It was hard being a nun, and having a job, and living in a group house where nobody seemed  to like her. Over the summer all the ordained had gathered at Ani Estates and been asked to sign a paper that released KPC from the responsibility of taking care of them in sickness or old age. When Dechen signed the paper, she felt as though she were "signing away" her life. What kind of monastery was this? She had dreams of renunciate life, but why  bother being a nun if you weren't going to have time to practice or go on retreats? Signing this legal document seemed like the  death  knell: Dechen would have to work as a secretary for the rest of her days, come home to Ani Farms and do housework and temple jobs, have the other nuns griping about her book bags on the stairs, and try to fit in practice somewhere. Apparently Dechen wasn't the only one who was upset--when the papers were collected by Tashi at the end of the  meeting, one of the monks had returned his document unsigned with "fuck you" written across the  top.

Dechen had given up a secretarial job to attend the month-long Nam Chu empowerments. She had saved some money but was living off a dwindling supply. A month after the empowerments were over, she still  hadn't found a new job, hadn't even tried, and in August her rent check to Palchen--whose name was on the lease--bounced. In September her rent went unpaid again, and the atmosphere in the group house grew icy and bitter. The household held an emotional meeting in September 1995  at which Dechen and Sonam, another young nun at the house who owed money, were informed that their debts were "intolerable" and "anti- Buddhist." They were both expected to find part-time jobs to repay  their debts. Alana had suggested that Dechen get a job at McDonald's  and that Sonam find something at 7-Eleven.

One night soon after the household meeting, Dechen woke up and saw  that the lights in Sonam's room were on and the furniture was gone. She heard a window closing and the front door pulled open. When Dechen went downstairs to investigate, she found Sonam sitting in the front seat of a large airport shuttle  van, which was taking her and all of her belongings away.

Dechen was devastated that Sonam was leaving. Sonam was one of the few people she got along with. And Dechen was stunned that Sonam  would sneak off in the middle of the night. It wasn't a good thing to leave that way--or to leave at all. Without the protection of Jetsunma, she  would get sick, suffer obstacles, wind up in Vajra Hell. But looking at Sonam's determined face and her halo of stubby red hair, it didn't seem the right time to say any of that. Dechen could see that Sonam just wanted to be left alone.

"I guess you won't be coming to any more meetings," Dechen said. "No, I guess not," Sonam said.

Sonam left her bed, a lamp, and a phone. Dechen was never sure why. She left her car, too, and arranged to rent it out to another nun as a way to pay off her debts to Ani Farms. She never came back to Poolesville. Her departure was unimaginable to Dechen--and it left her even lonelier. Sonam had been her only friend, except for the Monk.

As she grew more miserable, Dechen confided further in the Monk-- mostly on the phone. In the past her complaints about  Poolesville had been  minor, that the nuns seemed to be micro-managed by Alana while the monks were left alone. But she found when she became braver, and started to talk more generally about the temple and how it was run, her friendship with the Monk began to blossom. And he took her into his confidence. He had his own concerns about monastic life in Poolesville. It was weird how the monks all had jobs, went to work during the day, and  came home and watched The Simpsons on TV, and how Rinchen always seemed to be watching soap operas in the temple office. The building of the Migyur Dorje stupa was a fine thing--the prayer room was full of bags of rice and beans and cedar chips--but it seemed the students were geared only to building and painting and  sewing. There were very few really strong, sit-down practitioners in the traditional Tibetan Buddhist sense. The Monk liked many of the students and had a good feeling about them, but they seemed to be racing around on the outside and  stagnant inside. "Normally you go through lots of upheavals and changes  in a Tibetan Buddhist community," he said. "You change or you leave." He  found himself questioning: "Are these people progressing?"

He felt that Dechen needed to know that other Dharma centers in the country weren't anything like this--weren't run like Poolesville and didn't  feel like Poolesville. In fact, there was something a little creepy about KPC.

Dechen always defended the temple and her fellow ordained. This was a new kind of Dharma center, she said, and the students were pioneers. Why should it be like anywhere else?

Little by little, as they grew closer, the Monk revealed that he had questions about Jetsunma, too. She didn't act like other Dharma teachers and tulkus, he told Dechen. Her actions were so far off the  map that it was hard to explain them. Why didn't she direct her students' devotion away from her and toward the teachings, the way the other lamas did? It was natural for students to fall in love with their teachers  during an initial "honeymoon phase," but why had Jetsunma allowed them to worship her in such an overboard way? She might be the real thing, a true bodhisattva--the Monk was always willing to entertain that possibility because he believed in Penor Rinpoche and Gyaltrul Rinpoche--but her teachings were untraditional. They were often tinged  with New Age thinking, and Jetsunma made bizarre claims.

It was highly unusual, for one thing, that she promised to meet up with  students in the bardo. And it was unheard of that she or any of her students would claim that Jetsunma was a  ninth-level or tenth-level bodhisattva, a profoundly realized being--because Mandarava was supposed to be. "To speak of one's spiritual attainments is to lose them," the Monk told Dechen. As for her past-life memories and knowledge of the past lives of her students--even if they were real--they would ordinarily be kept to herself. No other lama he'd ever known talked  this way. The Dalai Lama had often joked that he couldn't remember things that happened last month, let alone in another lifetime.

But even stranger was the emphasis on money. At the other Dharma centers it was discussed one day a year, usually around tax time--and students were never browbeaten about giving. The Monk had been  upstairs in the temple office over the summer and found a printout of the  budget. Did Dechen know how much money Jetsunma received every month? Close to ten thousand dollars in cash. Tax-free. Dechen was stunned by the amount. "She has all kinds of expenses," Dechen said at first. The Monk  wouldn't hear of it. This was an unheard of amount for a lama to be paid, he told her. Penor Rinpoche owned just his clothes. Gyaltrul Rinpoche lived very simply. Tibetans in general are frugal and financially cautious people. They don't have lifestyles that include huge wardrobes and beach vacations. And whatever money they get, they give to their Dharma centers. In India, Penor Rinpoche raised money to support and feed thousands of monks and nuns. He provided for them, not the other way around.

The Monk remembered how, at the Nam Chu, he'd been told by Wib that the sangha had given Jetsunma the same amount of money as Penor Rinpoche--twelve thousand dollars--even though she hadn't been teaching. Didn't anybody know that His Holiness was supposed to get more than she did, or the entire offering? And traditionally an offering  made to a lama for a teaching was immediately given back to the center, not kept. Where did all Jetsunma's money go?

As more time passed the Monk made another revelation to Dechen. Did she know that Jetsunma was shopping around for a new consort? That Karl was on the outs? Dechen hadn't known anything about this, except that Karl had told her once that Jetsunma had slugged him one  day--so hard that he was knocked over a piece of furniture. And that Gyaltrul Rinpoche had told him that being beaten by Jetsunma was a "great, great blessing."

"New consort? Who?"

The Monk believed that Jetsunma had shown an interest in him. One day, in front of many students, she had walked right up to the Monk and kissed him flush on the mouth. She had praised his translations and told him she wanted him to stay and teach. A number of times he had felt her eyeing him--putting out a certain seductive vibe. And one of her attendants had come to him, asking if the Monk could personally give Jetsunma the Dream Yoga practices and other high Tantric teachings. Since she hadn't done the requisite retreats and purifications, he had  refused.

The funny thing was, while the Monk wasn't interested in Jetsunma he did seem interested in Dechen. He always found ways to tell her that she was special--delicate and subtle and intelligent and aware. He showered her with praise. "I had never been  treated so well by anybody," she would say later, "and nobody had ever said the things he did to me. "

In late October, over the phone, the Monk admitted that he was falling in love with her.

"I know," Dechen said.

They were quiet for a while. "You aren't going to leave me now, are you?" she asked.

"I should," he said. "I should break this off."

"I have nobody left but you," Dechen said. "Sonam's gone ..."

She had no romantic feelings for him, she told him. He seemed to accept this, and Dechen was sure the subject would never come up again. It was a crush, she told herself. It was fleeting. And he had been  a monk for so long that he surely knew how to deal with these things. But on Dechen's birthday in November, the Monk took her to dinner in Bethesda and to see Carrington, an Emma Thompson movie about a celibate love affair between two Bloomsbury bohemians. Before the movie he handed Dechen a poem that he had written for her. She read it and was stunned. It was romantic, emotional, and very physical. "It had a lot of imagery," she said, "and was a praise of every part of me."

She reread the poem in her bedroom, later that night, then  crumpled it up and threw it in the trash. The next morning she fished it out again and flattened it. And she called him. 

"You can't do this, you're a monk," she told him.

"I thought you'd never call me again," he said.

"I shouldn't," she said, "and don't write any more poems."

"Okay."

They were driving home from the Library of Congress one night in the car, and after a tender conversation they began to kiss. "It was stupid of me, but I didn't see it coming," said Dechen.  They pulled the car over to the side of the road and continued their embrace. The Monk told Dechen that he loved her. He wanted to marry her. He wanted to take her away from  Poolesville. Dechen grew quiet, and the Monk drove her home.

The next morning she felt once again that her friendship with the Monk  had to end. But almost as soon as she'd decided that, she  called him. They had to be friends. Who else did she have? Also, she felt herself on the verge of something. Was it love? She began to allow the Monk's fantasies to bloom inside her. She began imagining the possibility of not  being ordained, of marrying him and living side by side, two lay practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism. "And he told me about all these other Dharma centers we could visit," she said. "But I still didn't really want to be anywhere but Poolesville." 

Just a few nights later, a stranger came to Ani Farms, a journalist who  was writing a book about Jetsunma. Most everybody  had heard about the book, and there'd been some tittering in a meeting about it. The sangha had been wondering when the rest of the world would begin to recognize Jetsunma and the miraculous work she had been doing for  years.

The night I came to the farmhouse, Rinchen knocked on Dechen's door and told her to come to dinner. Dinner? Usually the nuns didn't eat meals together, and lately they hadn't been speaking to Dechen, much less allowing her to eat out of the general food supply, since she was not contributing her share of money.  When Dechen said she wasn't coming to dinner, Rinchen explained she had no choice.

The dining room was dark, and Dechen felt odd and uncomfortable. She sat down across from me, as she would recount two years later, and witnessed the unfolding scene. She remembered noticing that I had long dark hair and was almost as tall as Sherab. She remembered that Sherab and I acted like kindred spirits. We were comfortable with each other, made jokes, and seemed like old friends. We had been up in  Sherab's room talking for hours, too. Dechen remembered how the other nuns nodded their heads--and acted like they had dinner together every night. It wasn't an act, really. Dechen understood how it was. When outsiders came you wanted things to seem a certain way.

Dechen was thankful when the phone rang and it turned out to be for her. She stood in the kitchen for the remainder of the meal and talked with the Monk while her dinner grew cold. Finally I left.

They were always talking on the phone in those days, and the Monk was always saying that he wouldn't leave Poolesville without her. Ordained or not, she couldn't remain in that place, he said. She needed to find another Dharma center where her talents would be appreciated and understood and she'd be left alone to practice and do three-year  retreats. A healthy place. A good place. But he had to admit to himself--when he thought of the Dharma in the West and his own experiences--there were few if any good places.

There was Tibetan Buddhism, and the actual teachings of Buddha, and there were people, human beings, and all their accompanying needs  and habits. There was Tibetan Buddhism, and there was a system that was employed to teach it. That system wasn't Tibetan Buddhism. And the politics within that system weren't Tibetan Buddhism. And the Tibetan tulku system wasn't Buddhism, either. It was just another system, created by people. Democracy had no place in it. Someday things would be different, he told Dechen. But probably they wouldn't live to see it.

Dechen found herself pondering the Monk's words and wondered if he was right. She also wondered if he was telling the truth about wanting to marry her. Down deep, she didn't believe him. And when she searched through her own feelings, she decided that she didn't love him.  She didn't feel sexually attracted to him. But she felt it was possible that over time they could make a life together built around the dharma and grow to love each other. And she might be able to practice more that way than as a nun at Ani Farms.

She decided to test him, and herself.

The Monk went to New York for a few days, and he called her from the train on his way back. Dechen told him that she would drive into Washington, D.C., and meet him at the station---even though the city was shut down in a snowstorm. The Monk was surprised and seemed to have a sense of what the meeting was about. At the train station they  were reserved in their greeting, but each knew what was coming next. Dechen had already gotten them a room in a D.C. hotel. They checked into a one-hundred-dollar-a-night room in their burgundy robes.

The next morning Dechen sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the Monk. He looked very sad. And she felt sad, too. She didn't want to give up her robes. And she felt strongly that he didn't, either.

I don't want to give up my robes," she said.

"I know," said the Monk.

"And I don't think you want to, either."

"Really?"

"You seem sad."

"Yeah," he said, sighing. "It's hard."

"Yeah."

There was silence for a while between them. but not for long. They had grown into each other's lives, become best friends. They had much in common, felt on the same wavelength. And what they had together, they found they could not give up.

Not long afterward Dechen told him that she wanted to go to Jetsunma and confess. This was the only proper thing to do.

"Jetsunma? No fucking way," the Monk said.

"How about Gyaltrul Rinpoche? He's coming at the end of the month."

"Maybe. Let's talk about it later."

She had learned, when she had broken her vows before, that if one confesses to a breakage--rather than being discovered--the offense, the bad karma that had been generated, is rectifiable, o, as the Buddhists say, purifiable. The Monk insisted that this wasn't necessarily so.  Essentially, they had just touched bodies and kissed. He had read the  rules very carefully, and this wasn't a "root vow breakage"; it was  considered less serious, a "branch" or remainder vow breakage." He had been very careful when they'd been together and had not entered any orifice of her body. Their breakages were only as serious as  masturbating, he told Dechen, and because the root vows of ordination were not broken, they were not technically required to confess. It had been wrong, and unwise, he admitted, but they had been careful.

The Tibetan custom, he told her, is to handle these lesser infractions  privately. You pick yourself up, do purification practices, and go on. And in his lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, this is true. But the Monk also new that in Dechen's--the Nyingma school--it is not. He told Dechen that, technically, it would take a jury of five monks who had held robes as long as the Monk had to weigh in on the situation. But there were no such monks in America.

He and Dechen went over and over the same ground. It became the daily argument--with Dechen pushing him to talk about it again. The Monk claimed to know what was in the texts and how things were done  traditionally. Dechen knew only what had happened to her before, in India, and how important it seemed that she had come forward on her own. But the days passed, and the argument between them went on.  

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