I Never Knew I Was a Bell
Taking “refuge” is the first step in becoming a Buddhist, and if you are lucky, the last as you leave this life. “I take refuge in the Guru, in the Buddha, in the Dharma, and in the Sangha. Big thoughts for a novice who barely knows what these words might mean or what such a refuge might offer or even from what it was meant to save you. Thoughts so big that even 48 years after meeting the man who became my first refuge, I struggle to understand them more deeply. And time is growing short.
Some of my favorite words from anything I have ever read were those of Annie Dillard describing her first experience of spiritual breakthrough in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She was 29 years old. Her book won the Nobel Prize for literature. “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” Truly, meeting a spiritual teacher with whom you have a real connection can be such an experience. It was for me.
48 years later, I remember only a little of the first lecture I received from the Tibetan lama, Thubten Yeshe. What I do recall, vividly, is the overwhelming effect it had on me. My first impression of the wry, laughing man who sat in front of that lecture room in Westwood CA was simple curiosity. Lama Yeshe’s English on that first visit was barely serviceable, just a few steps above sign language, yet his ability to speak directly to the hearts of young westerners was already spot on. For long minutes he would sit in silence, eyes closed, and then return to the room with a roguish smile and a fierce loving gaze that raked the room, finding us one by one. I have never been the same.
In metaphorical phrases and gesture, he spoke of dissatisfaction, of the suffering of our restless lives, and how every thing and every one we add with such effort to our life must, in the end, be lost. Ergo, placing all of our hopes for happiness in them makes no sense. “I love this flower!” He would say, holding up an imaginary blossom and pretending to swoon with delight. Then his face would fall into melodramatic sorrow as the visualized flower wilted. Following his gaze, we too could see the deconstruction of an aging flower as if it were real, the loosening petals, dark stains spreading over the bright color, the scattering fall. Then he invited us to think of our own lives as no different in their impermanence than this flower. Shock. Impossible to believe fully at twenty-something, but we tried.
He talked of a path out that can lead one out of suffering, loss, and dissatisfaction, one he would walk with us if we dared trust him. “Never believe because I tell you to believe,” he said. “Argue with this monk your whole life. Check up. Examine the teachings for yourself and see if they are true like people check gold before they buy.” Yet he also dared us, steeped in scientific agnosticism as most of us were, to try out belief and faith for the parts we could not yet accept. “If, after checking you still have big doubts, put them on the shelf for now,” he urged us. “Examine, think critically, but also give yourself permission to try out the teachings as if everything I say were true. Experiment. Give yourself a year, two years, pretending they are true, and see what happens.” It was exactly the key I needed to unlock my ever-skeptical mind and experience something new, unimagined in my culture. When the talk had finished, I drove to the nighttime Redondo beach where two years before I had started my exploration of Buddhism. I had come to the end of my signposts. My whole body was humming. Indeed, I felt, like Annie Dillard, that body and mind had been lifted and struck. I rang like a bell.
The course at Lake Arrowhead began days later and I found a way to go. The lamas - Lama Yeshe and his spiritual “son” Lama Zopa Rinpoche whom he had been given to care for in their exile in India and with whom he always traveled - began presenting Tibetan Buddhism on their first visit to Los Angeles very much as they had received it in the monastery of Sera near Lhasa. This was no gentle course in relaxation and spiritual glitter, no promise of instant enlightenment in a single weekend for a large fee. What they taught was unfiltered Lam Rim, the stages of the path, first brought to Tibet by Atisha in the 11th century from the Indian monastic university of Nalanda, refined and expanded by the founder of the Gelugpa sect Tzongkhapa in the 14th century. It began with Four Noble Truths: Life is inevitably unsatisfying, and constantly vulnerable to real suffering. This suffering has causes. There is in fact a way to go beyond suffering forever. There is a path that can take you there, step by step. This is the beginning of that path.
I had no such overview when I began. Rather I was in that state that Zen Buddhists like to laud as “beginner’s mind”. Every smallest detail of the course at Arrowhead left me entranced or confounded or hugely upset. For starters, tradition said we should make prostrations as we entered, full length, on the ground, and not just a neat little European bow. I had seen westerners doing this once in Nepal and recoiled from the idea. How unAmerican could you get? Yet at Arrowhead, I tried prostrations out and found them calming, a ceremony of beginning that aided in collecting the mind. And I was reassured to see the lama also prostrated before he began - to the chair he would occupy, representing Buddha’s true gift, his teachings. We prostrated to “bodhi” the possibility of “waking up.” I took my first objection off the shelf.
I sat crosslegged without much difficulty in those days, though a full double lotus has ever been beyond me. I loved the sense of three-point balance as my knees pressed the ground on either side, my back opened in a gentle arch, my head balanced unstrained on top of an erect spine, chin and eyes lowered. The slow creeping complaints of tendons and sinews that came after a quarter-hour or so plagued us all, however, and there was much twitching about. Almost no one sat in chairs in those early days and we secretly studied each other for leg-crossing prowess, or at least stoicism. Now in old age, I am grateful centers have moved past insistence on customs more cultural than essential, along with all that twitching and enduring and relief - or pride - when you have made it to the end of a session without running out of the room in humiliation. The point is, after all, to concentrate while keeping your back straight. Sit how you like, or even lie down.
The lamas came twice a day for long teaching sessions and their assistants, the ordained Australian doctor Rick Ribush and the American nun Thubten Wangmo, skillfully lead us in meditation sessions afterward to try to visualize what had been taught in more detail. It was not all smooth sailing. The first themes of a classic Lam Rim course for beginners in need of motivation to practice are about as far from the happy talk of the Age of Aquarius as one can get, a direct assault on all our favorite fantasies in the seventies. We soldiered our way through impermanence, all the ways we have been suffering even if we hadn’t yet noticed. We worked through the stages of our inevitable death, and then through all the realms in which one can be reborn starting with the hell realms, searingly hot or cold. Hard to take in, especially the one filled with obsessed soldiers who hack or stab each other to death every day and rise the next morning whole enough to do it again, a dystopian Valhalla. These fun births, we were informed, result from anger or killing and last eons. We, meditated on the delights of being born as a hungry ghost, a being suffering from past greed, who wanders a desolate world looking for anything at all to eat yet can barely swallow and always suffers from heartburn if he or she manages even a crumb. Or we might make it to the realm of animals, beaten, overworked, hunted and nearly always dying young, house cats excepted of course. Then there is the realm of the Titans, richer and more powerful than humans (think Game of Thrones) but living a life of privileged paranoia, absorbed in ceaseless jealousy and plotting. And above them, the long-lived gods of the desire realm, good-looking and rich without effort (the Kardashians), frolicking in a life sprinkled with rose petals. But do you really want to be born there, the lamas challenged? Long life gods never have incentive to improve themselves and are doomed to slowly use up the good karma that got them there. They suffer terrible fear at the end, as they begin to sense the great fall back to the hell realms that lie directly ahead of them.
But then there are we, lucky humans, right in the middle, with life just frustrating enough to want to improve it, but not so horrific for most of us that we can’t focus beyond survival. Further, among humans there are those few, those very few, endowed with all the qualities of the precious human rebirth, born at a time and in a place where the teachings of the path to Enlightenment are accessible, healthy, with enough wealth for some leisure and freedom of choice. Not a slave or a prisoner or a cripple. Not raised by barbarians and favorably inclined toward wisdom when we hear it. Lots of requirements actually, and we have met them all, we are here sitting on our cushions in front of a fully qualified lama. It took eons of good karma to get here and we must not waste it.
All of this news was alternately upsetting and exhilarating of course. People like me went on long walks to sulk and thrash it out. Some left. A very few, like Cherie Green sitting just to my right, sat still as master meditators from first to last, their faces radiant, their hearts instinctively filled with their answer: “Yes, now and forever yes.” Cherie was newly married, newly graduated, newly employed as a successful preschool teacher, from a well-to-do Jewish family. She went home, I later learned, and told her stunned husband she needed a divorce in order to become a Buddhist nun. This took a long while, for the lamas insisted she get the permission of her parents and ease out of her old life with the least pain possible for others, but within a year she was ordained, and, brilliant, energetic woman that she is, has gone on to become the teacher and author Thubten Chodron, one of the leading lights in the expansion of Buddhism to the West.
For me, it was only the overwhelming presence of Lama Yeshe, and later of the Dalai Lama, that held me in orbit for the long years of assessing the teachings themselves. I did get flashes of that feeling, “Yes, now and forever”, as I worked through the meditations and new ways of seeing. There was so much here I never wanted to lose, but many ideas also that I found medieval or dubious at first. Some I still do. My shelf was groaning. Were we in a cult? Going through this experience has given me a certain sympathy for those who join cults. There is some hunger in all of us to touch magic, to find that special person with answers and directions to follow, a loving super parent who promises not to abandon us even past the lonely outposts of old age and death. The passionate feelings generated in “finding religion” are as strong as they come. Indeed, they have led to some of the greatest flowerings of civilization and kindness and the worst and ugliest of conflicts. People who are sure they are working for the higher good can be dangerous. In my lifetime I have also watched many fall under the spell of religious con men, those who would waken these secret hopes only to manipulate and use them to make easy money or experience the thrill of power over others.
So had I found a real refuge? Where is the line between religion and cult? “Check the one who would be your teacher for even twelve years or more,” the Dalai Lama warns newcomers to Buddhism - if indeed you really feel you must convert at all. “Before committing to be a disciple to someone,” he advises, “consider the person only as a spiritual friend.” He then lists the requirements: A true teacher must follow his or her vows of morality and practice what he or she preaches, and, if not enlightened, at least know considerably more than you. A true teacher does not make up sensational new teachings or focus on profit. He or she passes along a lineage of teachings that can be traced to the Buddha, teachings that have been tried and found true and expounded upon by generations of meditators and debaters, although they may add the surety of their own experiences. He or she should not be interested in becoming rich, or admired. Nor should a teacher praise him or herself, nor ever take advantage of disciples sexually, but only work sincerely for their welfare. If people wish to argue or to leave there must never be pressure not to do so.
I was not aware of this list of teacher qualifications when I began my long involvement with the Buddhist path, and looking back, I would have been vulnerable. I have seen other groups come to grief on one point or another of His Holiness's warnings, not to mention countless con men swooping in to fish in the tide that is Buddhism coming to the west, not excluding some Tibetans. There is also the phenomenon of those who get a taste of genuine egoless spiritual experience, and then miss the moment when ego has run around to the head of the line again to take credit for everything. Why, look at that. I have experienced an extraordinary moment. I must be special to have had such an experience. Follow me, friends, the special one. (And leave large bills in the donation box). Last but not least there are those who are sincere but never took time to learn the path fully and teach a partial or garbled version. Gratefully, in half a century now of careful observation, though I still have arguments for them, I have never encountered any of these faults in the teachers I chose. They knew what they were teaching well. They were sincere. They acted from compassion. They have taken me on an extraordinary journey.
At Lake Arrowhead California, in 1975, that journey had just begun, but I had, at last, found my first teacher in Lama Yeshe.
