Auspicious or Inauspicious?

The day before yesterday my car suddenly started making a terrible noise while I was cruising around the farmland of the Valley.  I made it into a small town--what was the name of that place?--after hours, and some kind people helped me hook up with a mechanic.  I was surprized to find that my 99 Chevy Tracker with 75,000 miles on it was given a terminal diagnosis.  I limped back to my hotel, and started home the next day, hoping to make it to Oakland on prayer power.

I didn't.  But I did almost make it to auto dealership row in Vacaville.  My old car found a lovely place to die, with plenty of helpful people, and lots of wildflowers.  I got a ride to the local Honda dealership and they agreed to take me out to get all my stuff out of the old car, tow it in at their convenience, in exchange for me buying a new one on the spot.  That's right, I bought a new car that way!  A powder blue Honda 2008 CRV.  Put all my stuff in it, and off I went!

When I got back home, I found I was needed here. Lama Pema Dorje Rinpoche and his family are coming back from Asia on Friday, and I need a bigger car and time to get ready.

So, was this all auspicious or inauspicious?  I would say the later.

Lama Tharchin Rinpoche's Magic

I don't know how many of you know my main root lama, Lama Tharchin Rinpoche.  He was ill for many years, and not really teaching much publicly.  Above is a 2006 photo I found online.

The aspect of Rinpoche's life story that has been on my mind lately is from his youth.  He had completed many years of retreat under Kyabje Dudjom Rinpoche in Tibet, culminating with him serving as a teaching assistant in the final group three year retreat.  He realized when he was about to come home that, as the son  of a respected lama, and someone who had completed extensive retreat, he would be treated with great esteem by people in his home area.  He knew he had not yet defeated his ego clinging, so after reuniting with his beloved mother, he told her he needed to go wander and practice in areas where he would be a complete nobody.  She said she understood, and told his father.  His father said "Good boy." His father --a fierce mahasiddha who was the ancestral spiritual leader of a community of non-monastic yogis (ngakpas) in Rekong (now Tongren, Qinghai)--had left his home for similar reasons.

Anyway, soon afterwards word came that things had gotten too bad politically to remain in Tibet to stay.  He escaped over the mountains to India.  He always jokes that the Chinese set up exactly the kind of situation he had been seeking.  He became one among many refugees, eventually settling in Orissa in Dudjom Rinpoche's refugee camp there.  There he became successful--as a very effective beggar.

Rinpoche remains the most stubbornly humble high lama I have ever encountered.  Without his guidance, I am sure that myself and countless others among his students would be real egomaniacs by now.  It is apparently easy to fall into this trap as practitioners of teachings that are said to be exalted.  Then one can undermine the whole process by wantonly engaging in the most seductive afflicted emotion there is--pride.  So hard to see in oneself, so poisonous

So the best news is that Rinpoche is healthy now, and teaching a lot this year.  Please see his teaching schedule at the Vajrayana Foundation website and the Jnanasukha website.  He has said quite often that he doesn't need new students, doesn't have any personal need to give empowerments and so forth.  All the more reason to become his student and receive as many teachings and transmissions as you can from him.

The pool of great lamas training in old Tibet is shrinking annually.  If you are alive today you are among the last people alive who will have access to such masters.  Please don't squander it by thinking they will always be there and you will meet them after you make some money and retire.  I regret so much how I squandered my first 30 years on silly dualistic political obsessions, and could have easily met Dudjom Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse, 16th Karmapa, and Trungpa Rinpoche instead.  

Close of Shambhala Program

Today was the last day of our teachings in Berkeley.  This was our most well-attended program with Rinpoche ever--looked like about 100 people to me.  The amazing part was that they stayed until the last session, and some beyond.  I think Rinpoche only covered a few pages of the massive text this time, and plans to pick up where he left off next year.  Actually, you rarely get this incredibly detailed commentary on a text in our Nyingma school.  Every word explicated, wow.

Once again Rinpoche proved me wrong.  I thought we would loose our shirts offering a teaching-only program (no empowerment ceremonies) for two and a half days.  These events are quite expensive to put on, hosting three lamas, airfare, rent and so on--the budget is mind-boggling sometimes.  I didn't think the topic would attract all that many people.  Boy, was I wrong on all counts.  I didn't do registration, but I am certain we must have at least broken even.

Rinpoche met with us afterwards, and said we students would eventually write Dharma-related books, and he would check them for accuracy.  He told us in the group that we could have a (big) center like the Shambhala Center, and reiterated this to me again in private--saying we would have a center like that.  I said "Do you really think that?" and he said emphatically yes he did.  Something about a turning wheel or circle would increase power more and more.  He is very impressed with our lack of pride (that means humility) in our California group.  He tells other groups this--it could really go to our heads!

Well, it's time to hit the sack.  Guess where I am going tomorrow.  Another teaching retreat?  You betcha.  Tomorrow I leave for the Lotus Land of Pure Light.

Tara Mandala--a vital growing retreat cnter

The Community Building, added a year or two ago.

The stupa, based on a series of dreams of Nyala Pema Duddul, a great adept of the Dzogchen lineage, this was put up in the late nineties.

From December 14 to the 24, I was on retreat at Tara Mandala.  Rinpoche has been leading a sequential program of teachings over several years there, related to the pinnacle teachings of the Nyingma tradition known as the Great Perfection, Dzogchen in Tibetan.  

Tara Mandala is a 700 acre piece of land we used to call wilderness.  Now, with a stupa, two large buildings, and one on the way, I guess we could call it one of the greatest Tibetan Buddhist retreat centers in the U.S.  Founded by Tsultrim Allione, an American Dharma teacher and visionary, in 1993, outside of Pagosa Springs, Colorado in the Western foothills of the Rockies--it is a stunning representation of what sticking to a clear and ambitious vision statement and pure intention can wrought.  I remember in about 200- being struck by seeing the architect's diagram of what Tara Mandala would become in the small yurt bookstore near the stupa in the summer of 2000, after a night of being kept up by wolves frolicking by my tent.  A community building, a temple, a three year retreat, environmentally responsible design principles.  Right!  My home Dharma center was in a circus tent at that point and it was headed by a Tibetan Dzogchen master, how was this woman and her crew of college students on work-study going to do that!  

Actually, I could see clearly that she would.  Tulku Sangngak Rinpoche later said that TM is a pure land of Tara, and she met Rinpoche a few years later who confirmed it is a "Ney" of Tara and many people will attain enlightenment in the future there.  Rinpoche is now the guiding light of TM and comes annually.  

Tsultrim has always emphasized mainly the practice of Chod (hint, you begin to approximate the pronunciation of this word by dropping the D, the o is pronounced as like it has those two dots over it) in her teaching.  She resides at TM and travels widely, helping bring Dharma to the west, and fundraising for TM.  She became well known through her book Women of Wisdom, a collection of biographies of some of the female meditation adepts of our tradition, turning on an interest in TB for western women who would not be magnetized by men in red robes sitting on thrones (which for some reason works for me, even though I have a radical feminist background).

This summer Tsultrim went to Nepal and Tibet with her large retinue, and was officially recognized by two different lamas as an "emanation" of Machig Labdron, the 11th century female meditation master who was the first native Tibetan chod practitioner.