Dr. Alexander Berzin: Dissertation Research in Dalhousie, India

When I arrived in the small mountain town, I stayed at a hotel and, finding out where Sharpa and Khamlung lived, went to see them, not really knowing who they were. It turned out that in 1962, His Holiness had sent Sharpa and Khamlung to the United States along with Geshe Lhundup Sopa and Lama Kunga Thartse Rinpoche to live with Geshe Wangyal in New Jersey for several years to learn English. Thurman, who was living and studying with Geshe Wangyal at the time, had been their English tutor. Sharpa and Khamlung had returned to India shortly before I had met Geshe Wangyal. The connection was just too incredible to believe. Geshe Sopa went on to teach at Wisconsin University and Lama Kunga started a Sakya center in Kensington, California. 

I found out later that Sharpa Rinpoche was the son of one of the highest noble families of Tibet, the Rampas. Back in Tibet, both his father and uncle had been ministers in the Dalai Lama’s Government. Khamlung Rinpoche was the reincarnation of the brother of the Dalai Lama’s Junior Tutor, Trijang Rinpoche. Years later, Trijang Rinpoche, after passing away, was reborn as the son of Khamlung’s older brother, Sonam Tobgyal, who lived with Sharpa and Khamlung in Dalhousie. Khamlung was my age, and although Sharpa was four years younger, he was a natural leader and the more outgoing one of the two.

Sharpa and Khamlung kindly invited me to stay with them for a few days while they arranged for a Tibetan monk, Sonam Norbu, to live with me and take care of me. Sonam was a few years older than me and had been trained in Tibet as a master chef. He was also a master chant leader and had a magnificent deep voice able to sing overtones. His father had been a local weatherman, able to read the signs of upcoming weather from the clouds and signs in nature, a skill that Sonam had also learned. Like many other monks during those first years in exile, Sonam had been working at times on road construction in the Himalayan foothills – a difficult and dangerous task. Taking care of me, although completely unusual for a monk, he received a good salary, ate good food and led a much easier and safer life. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. 

Once everything was settled, Sonam and I moved into the cottage. The two tulkus would also find me a Tibetan language teacher. So, within less than a week of arriving in India, everything fell in place with absolutely no effort on my part. I felt as though my life up to then had been like a conveyor belt leading me to this point, and I felt totally at home. The Buddhist teachings on previous lives and karma started to make more sense. All the hard work I had put in at Princeton and Harvard were not enough to explain what was happening.

The wooden cottage Sherab Tharchin had offered me was built during the British Raj. It was situated high on the mountain behind Dalhousie bazaar, in the middle of a thick forest and with a spectacular view. It had no water and no toilet – just the Indian dry system and a teenage sweeper who came to empty it each day. There were no telephones, no newspapers, just the BBC foreign service on a shortwave radio. It took a month for a letter to reach the States and another month for the answer to come back. To make a telephone call, you had to book a “Grand Trunk Call” at the post office a few days ahead, usually wait several hours on the day of the call until you were connected, and most of the time, the connection was filled with static or inaudible. It was like being in the British colonies. Despite having to keep my woven rope bed away from the walls to avoid giant wolfspiders from crawling on me in my sleep and having to shake out my shoes before putting them on so as to remove any scorpions that had crawled inside, I loved it.

There were just a handful of other Westerners there in Dalhousie or nearby – mostly early pioneers of Western Buddhism like Joseph Goldstein (who went on, together with Jack Kornfield, to start the vipassana movement in America), the first Western Buddhist nuns like Tenzin Palmo (who went on to do a twelve-year solitary retreat in a cave in the Himalayas and later founded Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery) and Ani Jinba Palmo (who went on to become the translator of the great Nyingma lama Dilgo Khyentse Rnpoche). Others who were there included a former girlfriend of Bob Dylan and a former manager of the Rolling Stones. This was shortly before the wave of hippies had arrived in India. Marijuana grew all over the mountain, and like most of my Western neighbors, I too partook of “side-of-the-road” grass at night.

The Young Lamas Home School down the road had just recently closed. Started by Frida Bedi (the sponsor of the Sixteenth Karmapa), this was where young tulkus like Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Tarthang Tulku, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, Akong Rinpoche, and Gelek Rinpoche had first learned English. Frida Bedi’s husband, Baba B.P.L. Bedi, a prominent Sikh intellect and author, was also living in Dalhousie. I often visited him to listen to his stories about the British Raj and how they had caused division among the Sikhs in order to weaken their community and avoid any threats to their rule. Dalhousie was indeed a very special place in those days. 

Sonam Norbu spoke no English, and I spoke no Tibetan, but we could communicate by writing notes in Tibetan. He went down the mountain each day to the market to buy food, filled a few buckets with water from a pump, gathered wood in the forest, cooked delicious Tibetan food in the fireplace and prepared Tibetan butter tea in a wooden churn. We got along just fine. 

I quickly started my spoken Tibetan lessons. There were no textbooks, so there was no particular structure to my lessons. Each day, my teacher wrote down useful, everyday phrases in the colloquial language, including the honorific forms. My first task, however, was to figure out the sound structure of the language, like an anthropologist in the jungles of Borneo. My Chinese background allowed me to identify the tones, and Sanskrit helped me to identify the aspirated and unaspirated letters. Then I had to figure out how these sounds fit the spellings. I loved solving challenging puzzles, and so I found this all to be great fun. I made quick progress. 

I spent a lot of time with Sharpa and Khamlung and their young tulku friends, who frequently visited to chat and drink tea. Unlike many of my classmates at Princeton and Harvard, they joked and laughed a lot. I learned a bit about their studies and started to see how extensive their training and knowledge were. I got the idea that it would be great to start a translation bureau with them to translate the texts they were studying. 

At Sharpa’s advice, I commissioned a large thangka of the Guhyasamaja mandala. It would help build up the positive potential (merit) to ward off obstacles to my study of Guhyasamaja. When it arrived the next year, I offered it to Sonam Norbu’s monastery, Ganden Jangtse, which I learned was responsible for preserving the rituals of this tantra. 

After a few months, I went to Dharamsala to have an audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He was just thirty-four at the time. Dharamsala during this period was completely undeveloped and mostly covered with thick forest. McLeod Ganj had just a tiny bazaar and one restaurant with a few bedbug infested rooms to stay in. High on the mountain behind the bazaar, an hour’s hike away, lived Mr. Hallet, who had been there since the days of the British Raj. He had a small guest house, and with no other acceptable alternatives, this is where I stayed. His Holiness’s residence and temple had just been completed a few months before. 

My audience, which lasted over an hour, took place partly in Tibetan and partly in English. I was encouraged to find that I could understand about half of what His Holiness said in Tibetan and could likewise express at least some of what I wanted to discuss. I informed His Holiness of my studies at Harvard as a classmate of Thurman, my meetings with Geshe Wangyal, my present connection with Sharpa and Khamlung Rinpoches, and the thesis I had hoped to write on Guhyasamaja. These apparently were the right connections and credentials, and so His Holiness took me totally seriously. He endorsed my plans for a translation bureau and explained that the problem with previous translations of tantric material was that the translators lacked the prerequisite studies, initiations and personal practice. He approved of my studies up until then and gave me permission to study further at the two tantric colleges in Dalhousie when I would be ready.

He told me that Chinese would not be of much help in my future studies. My most urgent task was to gain fluency in Tibetan, obtain a deeper education in the Dharma, balance the wisdom side of the Dharma with the compassion side, and gain some experience in Buddhist meditation. When I was properly prepared, he would give me the necessary initiations in Guhyasamaja. He informed me that, in the meantime, he would be conferring the Kalachakra initiation in March the next year and told me that Sharpa and Khamlung should take me to receive it and prepare me beforehand to understand what would be going on. As a start for a future translation bureau, he gave me a short text by Tsongkhapa, The Prayer of the Virtuous Beginning, Middle and End, and asked me to translate it with Sharpa and Khamlung. He would have it published when it was done. His Holiness ended the audience with a short teaching on voidness.    

Meeting with His Holiness was a pivotal moment for me. At Harvard and other American universities, Tibetan Buddhism had been taught as if it were a dead subject, like ancient Egyptian studies. The language of the tantras was figurative. It intentionally concealed the deeper meaning and, although the texts could be translated literally, they made little sense. Any attempt to explain what they meant was merely speculation. But here, meeting with His Holiness, I saw proof that Tibetan Buddhism was a living tradition. Here was someone who actually knew what the texts meant and who was willing to give me access to the colleges where these texts were studied and presumably put into practice. I had started to realize that tantra was a living tradition already from my talks with Sharpa and Khamlung. 

Since finding out in London that the Guhyasamaja Tantra was already being translated, I knew that I would need to change my topic, but I still wanted it to be about Guhyasamaja. During the course at Harvard where we compared the Chinese translation of a Sanskrit text on logic with the original Sanskrit, I had been particularly interested in how the Sanskrit technical terms had been understood and translated. So, I decided to modify my thesis topic to a study of the Sanskrit terminology used in tantra and how these terms were understood and translated into Tibetan. The study would focus on the Guhyasamaja Tantra and would be based on the oral tradition of the teachers at the two tantric colleges.  

A few weeks later, I left for Varanasi (Benares) which, at this time, was a city exclusively of bicycle rickshaws and no Western-style buildings. I wanted to check out Sanskrit scholars and Hindu gurus. I stayed with Sherab Tharchin, who introduced me to several of them that he knew. The Sanskrit pandits spoke in Sanskrit, which I found fascinating. I tried to follow and to learn a bit, but just as an intellectual exercise. It would not be of help in my Guhyasamaja project, since they were not interested in Buddhism. As for the Hindu gurus I met, I did not find them inspiring as role models. Also unappealing were the sadhus – the Hindu renunciates who lived by the Ganges River and, from what I could see, spent most of the day smoking hashish and begging. From what I had read at Harvard about the Vedic use of the psychedelic soma and about Shaivism, I had imagined that I could learn about great bliss in tantra from these Hindu gurus and sadhus, but I was sorely disappointed. 

I then spent a few weeks in Kathmandu, which was still a medieval city of mud roads, no sanitation, packs of mangy street dogs, prehistoric-looking black pigs, and nothing Western. Only about a hundred meters of roads were paved, and if you wanted to go anywhere in the city or in the country, you had to walk. I stayed with a small group of Sherab Tharchin’s friends who had been receiving teachings from some lamas there. But like the wave of hippies that would soon follow, they seemed to be more interested in smoking marijuana and taking psychedelics than in Buddhism. 

The marijuana in Kathmandu was stronger than anything I had ever smoked. One puff was enough to put you in an almost catatonic state, lost in your mental fantasies. Seeing a group of them at a party just lying on the floor, not interacting at all with each other, completely turned me off.  

While there, I attended, at Swayambhu stupa, the first public Black Hat ceremony that the Sixteenth Karmapa gave in exile and a few jenangs (subsequent permissions) that he conferred. Only a handful of other Westerners attended besides myself and the people I was staying with. The Karmapa gave no explanation of what he was conferring, and that approach did not appeal to me. 

Having satisfied my curiosity about Benares and Kathmandu, I met Sharpa and Khamlung Rinpoches in Bodh Gaya. Bodh Gaya in January 1970 was completely undeveloped. It had just the stupa and bodhi tree, five weathered temples, a few chai stalls and shops, and more street dogs with mange and prehistoric-looking black pigs. There were no hotels. There were only two places to stay, neither of which had Western toilets or a reliable supply of water. It was always wise to have your own plastic bucket and to fill it to use for washing. One option for staying was the mosquito infested dormitory rooms in the PWD (Public Works Department) Guest House. Each of the rooms had eight to ten bunk beds, so privacy was out of the question. I always stayed there and, one winter, even shared one of these rooms with Geshe Wangyal who was visiting. The other option for staying was the few concrete rooms in the Burmese Vihar or the tents in its courtyard or up on its roof. 

There was a famine that year in Bihar and there were dozens of deformed, filth-covered beggars and lepers lining the street by the stupa, sticking their hands out at you and moaning to give them a few pennies. Wherever you went, a horde of emaciated, unwashed children, dressed in rags, surrounded and followed you, pulling on your clothes and begging for food, chanting “Memsahab basheesh (Madame, alms)” even if you were a man. The stupa next to the bodhi tree where Buddha became enlightened was like a holy spot in the quiet eye of a category five hurricane. I was deeply moved by all that I saw and thought over the course of my life while circumambulating the stupa. 

Sharpa and Khamlung Rinpoches took me to meet Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche, the Master Debate Partner and Assistant Tutor of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Despite his high position, he was staying in a tiny concrete room a few meters from the toilets at the back of the Tibetan Temple. I told him about my audience with His Holiness and asked his advice about whom at the tantric colleges I should study Guhyasamaja with for my thesis. Like His Holiness, he took me totally seriously. He advised to study with the retired abbot of Gyuto, Upper Tantric College, Khenzur Yeshe Dondrub, who would be finishing a three-year retreat in Dalhousie in the spring. Meanwhile, I should work further on my spoken Tibetan and, when I was ready, he would help me with my studies. 

Little did I know that it would be many years before I would be ready to study Guhyasamaja and that it would, in fact, be Serkong Rinpoche himself who would teach me about it. But first, I needed to realize myself that this thesis topic was way over my head. Rinpoche’s advice to study with the Abbot was his skillful way of leading me to realizing that for myself. 

After this meeting, then with Sharpa and Khamlung, I attended the final days of a discourse on Tsongkhapa’s Grand Presentation of the Graded Path (Lam-rim chen-mo) that His Holiness’s Senior Tutor, Yongdzin Ling Rinpoche, was giving, followed by several jenang subsequent permissions. I was struck by the difference in style from what I had witnessed in Kathmandu. Ling Rinpoche explained each step of the jenangs as he conferred them. This was the style I much preferred.

After Bodh Gaya, I joined Sharpa and Khamlung on a pilgrimage to all the main Buddhist sites. Except for Sarnath, the others were almost totally deserted at that time. We traveled by third-class train and bus, sometimes hanging on for dear life halfway out the door when, for fun, the young men inside would not let us in. Occasionally, we had to sleep on benches on railway platforms, being devoured by mosquitoes. Pilgrimage was never meant to be easy or comfortable. Along the way, the two Rinpoches explained to me the steps of the Kalachakra initiation. This was how my study of Kalachakra began. 

We ended the pilgrimage in March, back up in Dharamsala, in time for the initiation. This was to be the first Kalachakra initiation that His Holiness conferred outside of Tibet. Besides me, there were only a handful of other Westerners there. We sat on the roof of Namgyal Monastery. I didn’t understand enough to be able to translate for the others. I could merely follow where we were in the ritual but had no idea of the deeper significance. I wanted, however, very much to know it more deeply and decided to expand the scope of my thesis to include a study of the tantric terminology in Kalachakra as well. This decision was also based on my having had an extremely auspicious dream when, at the end of the first day of the initiation, the disciples are given strands of kusha grass to put under their mattrass and instructed to examine their dreams for signs of success with the practice.

Realizing how much time I would need to even begin the research for my thesis in earnest, I made a brief trip to Delhi before returning to Dalhousie. I went to the Fulbright office and explained what had happened so far with my project. I then requested an extension of my fellowship for a second year, and they kindly agreed to grant it.  

Back in Dalhousie, I resumed my Tibetan language lessons. As preparation for my future studies, my teacher focused now on the classical Dharma language as found in lam-rim texts and how they would be orally explained. He wrote a few typical passages and then we went through them. The problem was that he didn’t speak English, and I couldn’t ask questions like, “How do you say ‘because.’” So, I invited Rinjing, a young Sherpa I had met in Dharamsala and who knew English, to come live with Sonam Norbu and me. The agreement was that he would speak with me only in Tibetan, but when I didn’t understand something or know how to say something, he would let me know in English. This worked out very well. 

Meanwhile, Sharpa, Khamlung and I completed translating the prayer that His Holiness had asked us to prepare. We sent it to the Private Office, and they quickly had it published. This was the start of a long series of texts that His Holiness gave us to translate over the following years. 

When Gyuto Khenzur Yeshe Dondrub finished his retreat, I went to see him and requested teachings to help me prepare to study Guhyasamaja. He smiled and gently said to me, “Wonderful. After a few days, I am starting a three-year Guhyasamaja retreat, would you like to join me?” No one needed to tell me that this would be impossible. I realized myself how completely unprepared and unqualified I was. I had not even received the Guhyasamaja initiation, and so I politely excused myself. Since I had received the Kalachakra initiation already and had no idea when a Guhyasamaja initiation would be publicly conferred, I decided to limit my study to the tantric terminology found in the Kalachakra texts. I had no idea that this was an even more difficult topic than Guhyasamaja terminology. 

The question, now, was how to prepare. Sharpa and Khamlung suggested we go to Dharamsala and ask the advice of His Holiness’s Junior Tutor, Trijang Rinpoche. We went and Trijang Rinpoche suggested studying lam-rim, the graded stages of the path to enlightenment. This would be the place to start. In my Tibetan class back at Harvard, we had read a few passages from Lam-rim chen-mo but only had analyzed them linguistically. Despite listening to a few sessions on the text at Ling Rinpoche’s teachings in Bodh Gaya, I had no idea of what the actual contents of lam-rim were. Nothing had been translated and published yet. 

In fact, at that time, none of us Westerners had any idea of the scope and content of the enormous range of teachings the Tibetans held and transmitted. My Buddhist education at Princeton and Harvard had been excellent with regard to its history and its main teachings, main sutras, and main schools. It provided me with a sound foundation for being able to go further in my studies. But aside from having learned, on a superficial level, a few details about tantra, I knew very little about Tibetan Buddhism. Although the Harvard library held several editions of the Kangyur and Tengyur, the collected Tibetan translations of Buddha’s words and their Indian commentaries, no one had documented or studied their full content. 

The prevalent, uninformed myth at the time was that “Lamaism” was a degenerate form of Buddhism. Intuitively, I had always suspected that there was much more there than “degenerate Buddhism,” especially after spending some time with Geshe Wangyal. After meeting His Holiness and his tutors, however, I was even more convinced than before. It would be an exciting adventure to go deeper into this world. This was the time when Carlos Castaneda’s books about his training with a Mexican shaman were becoming popular. The few of us Westerners who were there with the Tibetans at that time felt that we were Castaneda’s counterparts. 

Sharpa and Khamlung spoke with their teacher, the Lharampa Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey, about teaching me lam-rim and he generously agreed. Being a highly learned and respected teacher, he had seven tulku disciples that he was training; I would be his first Western student. Even studying lam-rim and analyzing the sutra terminology in it turned out to be a vast topic, and in the end, I changed my thesis topic yet again to a study of the oral tradition of lam-rim. Geshe Dhargyey taught it with passages he chose from an assortment of lam-rim texts, supported by quotations from the Buddhist classics cited in them. Sharpa wrote out for me Pabongka Rinpoche’s outline of the Fourth Panchen Lama’s lam-rim text so that I could follow the structure.

Geshe Dhargyey lived with his attendant, Sherab Tharchin, in a cowshed made of mud and stones and infested with flies and vermin. His room was absolutely tiny, with just enough room for his bed and a little space on the side where Sharpa and Khamlung Rinpoches and I sat on the floor for the sessions. Sherab Tharchin slept in the even tinier kitchen space by the door. Another of Geshe Dhargyey’s tulku students, fifteen-year-old Jhado Rinpoche, joined our lessons most of the time. When he grew up, Jhado Rinpoche became the abbot of Namgyal Monastery and then of Gyuto.

Geshe Dhargyey spoke with a heavy, obscure Khampa dialect of Tibetan, which I never managed to understand well. With Sharpa Rinpoche translating, we went through the entire lam-rim and discussed how best to translate the technical terms. Geshe Dhargyey often dictated passages and quotations cited in the texts, which Sharpa wrote down in Tibetan and I translated when I got home. I had purchased a few Sanskrit texts in Delhi and, making use of the Sinology research methods I had learned at Harvard, I located the Sanskrit originals of the quotes and compared the Tibetan to them. Each evening, I would type up my notes on a mechanical typewriter I had brought with me from America. When the electricity failed, which was a frequent occurrence, and it was very cold, I had to work by candlelight at night, wearing every piece of clothing I had. This was the way that I did the fieldwork for my dissertation.

Soon after starting to study with Geshe Dhargyey, I took upasaka lay vows. They entailed avoiding taking the life of any creature, stealing, lying, drinking alcohol and indulging in improper sexual behavior. I had never liked alcohol, so there was not much to give up with that vow, and keeping these vows made perfect sense to me as guidelines in life. I also started a daily meditation practice and have never skipped a day since then. I realized that the only way to understand what the Buddhist technical terms actually meant was to do the practices and try to personally experience what they were referring to. It was completely inadequate to just base the translations on the terminology coined by the Christian missionaries. 

When we reached the initial scope teachings in the lam-rim of working to avoid worse rebirths, I saw how central the issue of rebirth was in Buddhism. Although I was not convinced about the existence of past and future lives, I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and see what followed in the rest of the lam-rim based on it. For example, if rebirth is true, then maybe I’m the reincarnation of my brother Joel. That would explain why I had felt that I could only have been born if he had died. Or, to put it another way, he had to die in order for me to be born. I would remain open-minded.

It was around this time that S.N. Goenka arrived in Dalhousie to teach a vipassana meditation course for the first time to Westerners. I attended the first day of the retreat, but did not continue any further. Not only did I have my lessons with Geshe Dhargyey, but I did not find this style of meditation suited me. 

In June, His Holiness laid the cornerstone of the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives (LTWA) in Dharamsala. After learning about this, I had the idea that it would be wonderful to link it with Harvard on the model of the Harvard-Yenching Institute that had been established in 1928 between Harvard and Yenching University in Beijing. On one of my visits to Delhi, I discussed my idea with Stein. He had been the architect for the Canadian High Commission and the Ford Foundation in Delhi and made the contacts for me at both. 

First, I met with James George, the Canadian High Commissioner. He had been working with His Holiness to arrange the resettlement of Tibetan refugees in Canada. He was supportive of my ideas and encouraged me to seek the support of the Ford Foundation. I presented my plans to one of Stein’s friends at the Foundation, and after several discussions, I was given a grant to return to Harvard for a few months that fall to hold exploratory talks. The officials at the Fulbright office even gave me permission for a short leave of absence from my field work. But then I learned of the cuts to federal funding for higher education that the Nixon administration would be imposing, especially on Harvard, in response to the anti-war protests of the previous years. Realizing, sadly, that this was not the appropriate moment to try to arrange a new institute, I turned down the grant and cancelled my plans. 

I learned a lot about academic diplomacy from this experience. It helped me greatly in later years when I was negotiating with academic institutes, universities and government ministries in Eastern Europe and the USSR for establishing programs with Dharamsala and arranging visits there of His Holiness.

Early in the fall, Bob and Nena Thurman, together with their two-year-old son Ganden and their newly born daughter Uma, arrived in Dalhousie. Thurman had also received a Fulbright Fellowship to work on his thesis. It was nice having them living once more down the road from me as they had at Harvard.

After completing about half of the lam-rim and Dalhousie having become too cold to continue with my lessons, I went with Sonam Norbu to Bodh Gaya in December 1970. Ling Rinpoche would be giving the Vajrabhairava initiation and teachings there next month. The commitment from receiving the teachings was to do a one-year Vajrabhairava retreat, and although Sonam was keen to do that, I decided it would be too much for me, and so I did not attend. While there, however, I circumambulated the stupa each day and thought about the teachings I had received and tried to connect them with my life. 

Ever since first learning about Guhyasamaja at Harvard, I was always intrigued by the imagery. I started to think about Vajradhara embracing Vajrasparsha, the figures mentioned in the small portion of the text we had read. Although I had no idea of the deeper meaning of the couple or of any of the deeper tantra teachings, I knew that Vajradhara represented the mind that understands voidness and Vajrasparsha represented the physical sensation of touch. In other words, the couple represented the voidness of the sensation of touch. All of a sudden it dawned on me how this imagery might relate to me.

During my student years, I had struggled with the feeling that I was only a mind and not a body and, at times, the feeling that I did not exist at all. These disturbing feelings possibly arose in connection with my use of marijuana or with my difficulty breathing because of asthma, and possibly they were related to my not having received the attention needed as a baby. In any case, I had tried to derive my existence from external objects and from other people. I had gotten into the habit of touching the windows of stores I was passing by on the street as a form of reassurance. While circumambulating, I realized that, by touching those store windows, I was trying to establish and prove that I truly existed and that I had a body that could feel physical sensations. I started to understand that, in terms of voidness, this was absurd; how could touching something prove anything? Seeing how beneficial even my superficial understanding of voidness was, I was determined to go deeper.  

Meanwhile, I had invited my childhood friend Jon Landaw to join me in India and to attend my lessons next year with Geshe Dhargyey. They were too good not to share with him, and my fellowship was generous enough that it could support us both. After a brief trip to Delhi to meet him, we returned together to Bodh Gaya to await the arrival of some British friends, Paul and Marie Thoroughgood, with whom we were going on a sightseeing tour around South India. Meanwhile, Jon and I visited all the sacred Buddhist sites nearby.

Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Zopa had come down from Kathmandu to receive this initiation from Ling Rinpoche. Lama Yeshe was giving a talk one evening and so I went with Jon. Lama Yeshe spoke in what I called “hippie English” to a ragtag group of hippies. Although Jon was extremely moved by the encounter and eventually went to study with Lama Yeshe, his style of teaching did not appeal to me. I preferred the scholarly style. 

Once my British friends arrived, we set out on our tour down the east coast of India and back up the west. Meditating at the Sun Temple at Konark, Odisha, I had a powerful experience. Having no idea of what I was doing, I had tried to invoke in my central channel the “kundalini” energy described in the Shaivite Hindu, Neo-Daoist and Tantric Buddhist texts. All of a sudden, I felt my energies run wild and got very scared. But then I remembered the teachings on refuge and imagined the Gurus, the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, one on each side of the central channel, containing the energy. It worked; the energy came under control and subsided. 

This experience convinced me of the power of the Triple Gem and of taking firm refuge in it. I was totally convinced now that, with Tibetan Buddhism, I was on the right path. I vowed to myself that I would never again attempt any advanced tantric practices until I was properly prepared, and I resolved to follow the Buddhist path, step by step, in the traditional way. Years later, when I became a Buddhist teacher and people asked me about tantric practice, I would always strongly advise against attempting it without sufficient preparation. 

After returning to the north, Jon and I went up to Dalhousie and my lessons resumed. I had rented a tin shack for Geshe Dhargyey to live in, which was a little bit roomier than the cowshed before. We moved our lessons to there and Jon now joined us. His Holiness continued to send us short texts to translate for publication. We followed the traditional model for a translation team, with Geshe Dhargyey as the master who explained the texts, Sharpa and Khamlung as native Tibetan speakers who knew English, and me as a native English speaker who knew Tibetan. Jon, who knew no Tibetan but was excellent in English, read through our translation in the end to make sure that the text flowed well and made sense in English. 

What I found the most useful in all the teachings we were receiving were the bodhisattva vows and the lojong mind-training teachings. I was overjoyed to learn that Buddhism offered guidelines of what to avoid and what to develop in my behavior so that I could better relate to others. Before this, I had no idea that the teachings contained this. 

Jon’s six-month tourist visa expired at the end of June and so he had to return to New Jersey, but I stayed on. That monsoon season there was a cholera epidemic in India. As a preventive measure, His Holiness sent Serkong Rinpoche to confer the Hayagriva initiation to the Tibetan communities around North India, since Hayagriva practice protects against infectious diseases. Rinpoche came to Dalhousie in August to confer it. This was the first initiation I received from him.

We completed the lam-rim teachings in October 1971. Geshe Dhargyey, Sharpa, Khamlung and I then went to Dharamsala to receive the Guhyasamaja and Vajrabhairava initiations that were being conferred by Ling Rinpoche and the Chakrasamvara initiation by Trijang Rinpoche. His Holiness was the main disciple and sat on a low throne in front of the higher main throne for his teachers. I sat with Sharpa and Khamlung in the alcove to the side of the thrones where the large Guru Rinpoche statue later would stand. I was the only Westerner there. Sitting like this with His Holiness and his tutors a few meters away, I could see, at least on the surface level, what it really meant to receive an empowerment. 

The initiations were followed by a lengthy discourse by His Holiness on the combined four commentaries on Guhyasamaja. It was incredibly impressive how His Holiness effortlessly switched between passages in each of the commentaries, never failing to find his place. At the end, His Holiness, holding the four texts in his outstretched hands, bent over from the throne and touched it to the head of each of the several hundred members of the audience as we filed by him. It was a superhuman feat.

By this date, the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives that His Holiness had commissioned was nearly complete. After the discourse, His Holiness asked Geshe Dhargyey to be the teacher there for Westerners and Sharpa and Khamlung to be the translators, as the three already had the experience of working with me. At a private audience, I asked if I could be of help as well. His Holiness said yes, but first return to Harvard, submit my thesis and get the doctorate degree. 

I then made a formal offering: If His Holiness would provide the circumstances for me to receive the full Buddhist training, I would serve him for the rest of my life to help preserve the Dharma. His Holiness kindly agreed. As a result, with letters of guarantee from his Private Office, I never had a problem in being granted resident visas to stay in India till I moved back to the West in 1998. I have spent the rest of my life fulfilling His Holiness’s trust in me.

Back at Harvard, Professor Nagatomi told me it was unnecessary to prepare the entire lam-rim teachings for my thesis. Just the initial and intermediate scopes would be enough; I could complete the rest later. After all, he said, a PhD thesis is just a student’s exercise, not the final published book. Working with my mechanical typewriter and carbon paper at my mother’s dining room table, I wrote up the thesis over the next few months. When I finally submitted it, Nagatomi asked if I would mind if we skipped the oral defense, it was just a formality. I had no idea why he said that, but I happily agreed to his proposal.

I had always aspired to become a university professor and, as I mentioned earlier in this text, “Professor” was my nickname in elementary school. Nagatomi had arranged a possible starting position for me at Cornell University; all I needed to do was go for the interview. Similarly, he had arranged a starting position at Amherst College for Thurman, who also completed his PhD work that same year. Thurman accepted and went on, years later, to become a professor at Columbia University. But unlike him, I thanked Nagatomi and politely declined. I told him I was going back to India, where I would continue my studies and would help with translations at the LTWA. 

Nagatomi and all my friends thought I was crazy; but given the choice between studying further with masters like the Dalai Lama and his tutors, who knew what the texts meant and who embodied the teachings as role models, or working with professors, who were merely guessing what they meant and who were not the ideal role models for me, my path seemed obvious. Although I had studied at Princeton and Harvard with some of the most learned and famous scholars of the day, none compared to the Dalai Lama and his tutors. 

Also, I felt that I had gained as much as I could from the academic world. I was just developing intellectually but had no social graces. If I were to grow further, I needed to learn how to interact better with others. For that, I needed to renounce the academic world and return to India. But first, Thurman and I, with both our mothers, Nena and the kids, celebrated together our receiving our doctorate degrees. We held a small party at his newly built house in Woodstock, New York. It was a lovely end to this chapter in our lives.

Shortly after that, I left for India. Jon joined me for the first four years, also with a letter of guarantee from the Private Office. This time, he financially supported both of us, as I had done in Dalhousie. The cost of living there was very low and, having worked that year teaching English to immigrant children in a school, Jon had the means to do that. 

In fact, I have been unbelievably fortunate and privileged my entire life. Living a life dedicated to the Dharma and living very modestly without ever owning a car or a house or having a family to support, I have somehow managed to get by without having to work a salaried, nine-to-five job for even a day. Either I received offerings for translating at teachings or for giving teachings myself, or I received grants from foundations for my work and my travels, or very generous patrons offered their financial support. It is through the incredible kindness of others that I have been able to accomplish what I have in this life.