Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [16]
Upon my return to the States, I discovered that another Tibetan lama, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, had arrived in this country and was beginning to teach. A brilliant, high-ranking lama with a complex personality, Trungpa Rinpoche had led a large group of his followers out of Tibet while he was still a teenager. But then his path took a unique turn. Instead of staying in Nepal or India, Trungpa traveled to the British Isles and enrolled, with a scholarship, at Oxford. After graduation, he started the first Tibetan monastery in the West in Scotland. Ultimately he decided, in light of Padma Sambhava’s prophecy, that North America would be his Buddha Field, his field of enlightening activity.
In the late fall of 1972, I traveled west to Colorado and onward to Wyoming to hear Trungpa Rinpoche give his first “Crazy Wisdom” seminar at Jackson Hole. Unlike most of the other lamas I had met, Trungpa was not a monk, at least not any longer. He had disrobed years earlier after a serious auto accident in Scotland. In fact he was married to an Englishwoman, and had a young family. Trungpa, who consistently taught that everything in life can be incorporated into one’s spiritual path, didn’t just sit on a mountain-top and meditate. He definitely knew how to enjoy himself, perhaps sometimes even to excess. Buddhists, at least in Boulder, were having more fun—but it would not last for long. The shadows of excessive abandon were beginning to gather beneath the surface even then.
Chogyam Trungpa was a Buddhist pioneer in the West. Although many have criticized him for his sometimes outrageous behavior and heavy drinking, no one can question his brilliance and his real achievements. He founded an accredited Buddhist university, the first in the West—Naropa Institute in Boulder. He taught thousands of students, and he wrote and published over a dozen books before his death at the age of forty-eight. Wearing Western suits and ties, he was a new kind of spiritual master—outrageous, iconoclastic, provocative, ironic, and artistic, as well as learned and traditionally trained.
As the summer of 1973 approached, I wanted to return to Nepal. To solve the immediate problem of money, I sold my possessions—typewriter, guitar, car (a 1968 orange Mercury convertible), and vacuum cleaner. It seems amazing now, but that was enough money to allow me to return to India and to stay indefinitely.
Some questionable Buddhist humor:
“Did you hear the one about the Buddhist vacuum cleaner?”
“It comes with no attachments.”
I was young, enthusiastic, carefree, and without wordly attachments. My original plan had been to go back to Kathmandu and Lama Yeshe for more instruction. But in the States that year I heard that Kalu Rinpoche, a greatly revered elderly Tibetan lama, had made a visit to the West in 1971 and, although he spoke no English, was willing to teach Westerners.
SONADA MONASTERY
“Make of yourself a light,”
I used to hear
from Buddha’s long-lost lips
each day as I woke before dawn
in this mountain hermitage.
The five-peaked jeweled mountain
Kanchenjunga
towers over the Darjeeling horizon
as I start a fire for tea
and prepare my morning prayers.
—DIARY ENTRY, 1973
Kalu Rinpoche was a legendary figure. After walking out of Tibet in 1959, Kalu Rinpoche, along with several other lamas, ended up in the town of Sonada, near the old British hill station of Darjeeling, in an old run-down monastery right above the train tracks. Kalu Rinpoche and the other lamas in his monastery were not jet-set gurus. They were hunkered down to stay in their Himalayan hills. There was a splendid view of the eternally snow-covered Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, but the monastery was without electricity, phones, or hot water. The only way to get there was by Jeep over a difficult single-lane road or by the old narrow-gauge train. The train, which had been left behind