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nothing to force,

nothing to want,

and nothing missing—

Emaho! Marvelous!

Everything happens by itself.

—TRANSLATED AT DAKPO KAGYU LING IN DORDOGNE, FRANCE

EPILOGUE: TOWARD A

WESTERN BUDDHISM AND

CONTEMPORARY DHARMA

What is important? The past is past; the future is important. We are the creators. The future is in our hands. Even if we fail, no regrets. We have to make the effort … to contribute to others rather than to convert others. Motivated always by the altruistic bodhicitta, you in the West should be creative in adapting the timeless essence of the Dharma to your own cultural times and circumstances.

—HIS HOLINESS, THE DALAI LAMA

In the 1970s, I went to Asia, learned the Tibetan language, and haunted monasteries in the Himalayas for ten years, accosting innumerable lamas with questions and requests for teachings. When I returned to this country, I only came as far as helping to establish a Tibetan monastery in Woodstock, New York, and then turned right around and lived for nine more years in a cloistered Tibetan retreat center in the forests of southern France.

When I first left the United States, I could not have imagined that by the time I returned twenty years later, the Dharma would have fully arrived in the West. My first inkling of this occurred during a short visit back to America in the late seventies. At a family gathering, I had a conversation with my great uncle Max, who was born “in the old country,” as he put it. At the advice of his physician, he had taken up meditation—twenty minutes every morning and night. He had learned how to meditate at a local “Y” in Brooklyn.

“I can’t live without it, Jeffrey,” he said to me in his middle European accent. “Now I understand what you have been doing for all these years.” My great uncle Max was an unlikely harbinger of the future.

One of the best examples of the spread of Buddhist philosophy in the West is found in the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn who has taken the meditative practice of mindfulness out of the religious setting into the health and healing field, where it has proven effective in dealing with chronic pain and stress. Who but the enlightened Buddha could have imagined a time when mainstream medical doctors would regularly prescribe meditation as a treatment for a wide range of medical problems including stress, asthma, hypertension, and migraines? Who could have imagined the extensive, meaningful work being done in conscious dying at Western hospices and hospitals? Who could have imagined that yoga, tai chi, and meditation would be taught at the local “Y,” synagogue, church, senior facility, and adult-ed class? Who could have imagined flourishing spiritual bookstores and bookclubs, graduate programs in Buddhist studies, and more than two thousand Buddhist centers in the United States alone?

THREE GREAT TRADITIONS, ONE

CONTEMPORARY WESTERN DHARMA

It has often been pointed out that historically whenever Buddhism has entered a culture, it has not only changed the culture, it has also been changed by it. This is the nature of Dharma translation and transmission. The Dharma is always able to retain its essence while reinventing itself anew in order to remain applicable, accessible, and relevant.

At the first Western Buddhist Teacher’s Conference a group of Buddhist meditation teachers met in Dharamsala, India, to discuss the transmission of Dharma in the modern world. At one point during this conference, about thirty of us were sitting on chairs and couches in a circle in a room in the Dalai Lama’s one-story house. Outside the windows we could see the towering white snow-clad Himalayan peaks.

At first glance, we probably appeared to be a fairly disparate group of men and women. Some of us were in sweaters and jeans, some in sports jackets and ties, some in dresses, some in Kashmiri shawls, some in traditional yellow, orange, maroon, gray, and black monastic robes. Coming from twelve Western countries, the group included senior teachers from most of the major Buddhist traditions. We came from different cultures; we had been trained