Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [15]
In the winter of 1971–1972, my teacher Lama Yeshe made a pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya, the village in the desert of northern India where the Buddha reached enlightenment while sitting under the bodhi tree. Taking a bus, a train and, yes, an oxcart too, I followed him. In Bodh Gaya that winter, I was lucky enough to be able to participate in several ten-day silent Vipassana (insight) meditation retreats led by S. N. Goenka and A. Munindra at the Burmese Monastery and Meditation Center.
These days provided a wonderful opportunity for us Westerners to train in meditation. We didn’t think about it then, but the bridge that would help the Dharma cross from East to West was being constructed right before our eyes and under our noses. I met many Westerners there who today teach Dharma all over the world. Many of them remain among my closest friends and colleagues, men and women like Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Dan Goleman, Christopher Titmuss, Fred Von Allmen, Tsultrim Allione, Christina Feldman, Stephen Batchelor, and Ram Dass.
I returned to Nepal to study further with Lama Yeshe in March 1972, but I was running out of money. I mined another month or two of sustenance out of my backpack by pulling out my jean jacket and selling it in the Freak Street Bazaar in Kathmandu to someone who wanted to look like an American. Finally, by late summer I knew I had to go home. Not only did I have to attend a family wedding, I was also totally broke.
But before I left Nepal, since I was traveling near Dharamsala, Lama Yeshe asked me to bring with me hundreds of sticks of incense as a gift to the Dalai Lama. Carrying all this incense wrapped in black plastic along with a letter of introduction, along the way I fell asleep in the luggage rack in the third-class compartment of an overnight train through India. When I woke up seven hours later I discovered that the railway car had been unhooked, and I was in the wrong city. A group of men were pointing at my incense bundle and whispering that I must be with the CIA, carrying collapsible equipment and radio antennae. How our minds can speculate. As I got off the train, I found myself at the head of the Ganges in Haridwar with a gathering of Hindu holy men celebrating a huge Hindu festival.
When I finally arrived two days later for my appointment with the Dalai Lama, he shook my hand in the most friendly manner and sat me down on a couch in his simple motel-like villa and we talked. His Holiness—as he is called—struck me as the kindest, most humble and egoless person I had ever met. This is the effect he has on just about everyone. He turned out to be very interested in my Jewish background because he thought the Tibetans, who were now without a homeland, could learn a great deal from the Jewish experience of survival in exile; he was very impressed by the ability of the Jewish people to maintain religious and cultural traditions for centuries without a country or homeland.
The Dalai Lama seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the foreigners who had recently come to Buddhism; he said he thought Americans and other Westerners had an affinity for Buddhism because they didn’t believe anything until it was proven. The Buddha, he reminded me, told people not to follow anything blindly, for Buddhism is not based on belief so much as rational experiment. If, like a scientist, you replicated the Buddha’s experiment, you should get the same good results—enlightenment.
His Holiness said that he very much respected the new students who were spending so much time in spiritual practice—particularly since he felt that his time to practice and study was limited because of the plight of Tibetans and his diplomatic role as head of the Tibetan government-in-exile. As I left, I felt both moved and empowered. The Dalai Lama made me, a Jewish guy from Long Island, feel as though I could be as Buddhist, and even as enlightened, as anyone else.