Dr. Alexander Berzin: Study and Training in Dharamsala, India

After getting settled, I had a private audience with His Holiness. He instructed me, as a preliminary practice for my work and studies, to repeat the mantras of Avalokiteshvara and Manjushri 600,000 times each and explained the practices to do with them. While reciting the Avalokiteshvara mantra, I should generate and stay focused on compassion and on the wish to be of benefit to others as my motivation for studying. While reciting the Manjushri mantra, I should generate a clear and focused state of mind as the necessary tool for understanding the teachings and for knowing how to benefit others. I happily followed his instructions. Although His Holiness never called it a “ngondro,” this was in fact the start of my preliminary practices.

I also sought his advice about translations. I was fed up with all the tedious work that went into compiling footnotes that would be of interest only to a few people at most. Also, in the papers I had written at Princeton and Harvard, I had always used highly academic, arcane words, unintelligible to most people, and had arrogantly sprinkled in foreign terms, without English translation. I was always rewarded with high grades for doing so. I realized myself how arrogant that was. His Holiness advised to write as if explaining to my mother. The main point was to make the text as clear and as readable as possible, not to make it purposely obscure. If I wished to help the scholars, I could add notes at the end. I have tried to follow his advice in my subsequent work.   

Until Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey left Dharamsala in 1982 for an extended world lecture tour and eventually moved to New Zealand, I studied with him at the LTWA. During those years, students from the Commonwealth countries did not need visas for India, while Americans and Europeans could easily get long-term student visas for study at the Library. Many of us stayed on for years, and some couples even had children while there. Most lived in cold, damp concrete rooms in a block of rooms next to the Library, while some lived in Indian shacks around the mountain like Jon and I did. Conditions were primitive, but we shared them together and became a close-knit community. 

Our next-door neighbors from New Zealand, Brian and Marie Beresford, had two babies while they were there. Jon and I helped take care of them while Brian frequently traveled to Afghanistan to buy and export carpets to support them. In fact, with Sonam Norbu’s help, we brought Marie to the hospital in the middle of the night during the heavy monsoon rains to deliver Dolma, their eldest child. She had been in heavy labor for two days and was in great distress. Brian was away, and she needed emergency care. When Dolma grew up, she became the director of Meridian Trust, a British organization that collected and preserved the early audio and video recordings of the Tibetan lamas who had trained in Tibet. 

We had two Dharma classes each morning, five days a week, plus one day of meditation classes. Geshe Dhargyey led Lama Chöpa (Guru Puja) pujas twice a month and occasionally visiting great lamas, such as the Karmapa and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, gave us guest lectures. Trijang Rinpoche lived just down the road from the Library, and many of us dropped by, now and then, to have tea with him. It was an idyllic place to study the Dharma.

Since many of us were there for years, Geshe Dhargyey was able to teach year-long courses on the major texts. These included Bodhicharyavatara (Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior), Abhisamayalamkara (A Filagree of Realizations), Madhyamakavatara (Engaging in the Middle Way), Abhidharmasamuccaya (Anthology of Special Topics of Knowledge), Suhrllekha (Letter to a Friend), Lam-rim chen-mo (Grand Presentation of the Stages of the Path), Ngag-rim chen-mo (Grand Presentation of the Stages of Mantra), as well as shorter courses on lorig (Ways of Knowing), various lojong (Mind Training) texts and several other works. In addition, Geshe Dhargyey gave us tantric initiations and long discourses on the associated sadhanas. After a few years, his disciple, Geshe Sonam Rinchen, came to share his teaching load. I received from him year-long courses on Abhidharmakosha (A Treasure Trove of Special Topics of Knowledge) and Madhyamaka Catuhshataka (Four Hundred Stanzas on the Middle Way), plus several other shorter texts. 

Although we did not study any of these texts in the same depth or with debating as in the Geshe training at the monasteries, we covered all the material in them. There were no discussion classes or even question and answer sessions. It was up to each of us to contemplate and digest the teachings on our own initiative. This style suited me very well and I was grateful for my university background as it gave me the basis for working with all this material. As I had been trained, I took extensive, thorough notes in all the classes and prepared rough translations of the texts as we went along. The broad basis I gained in sutra and tantra helped me greatly with my future work and practice. 

Several other students in the classes, who went on to become Dharma teachers or translators, also received part of their basic Buddhist education at the Library in the 70s. They included Thubten Chodron, Alan Wallace, Stephen Batchelor, Karma Lekshe Tsomo, Glen Mullin, Michael Roach, Ruth Sonam, Gavin Kilty, Ian Coghlan, and Michael Richards. It was a vibrant community, and we all became friends. I also pursued some of my non-Dharma interests during those early years in Dharamsala, and so I studied Western astrology with Karma Lekshe Tsomo, who later went on to become a professor at the University of Hawaii. This proved very helpful when some years later I studied Tibetan astrology to supplement my Kalachakra studies.

Throughout this period, His Holiness continued to give us various texts for me to translate with Geshe Dhargyey and, until they left for the West, with Sharpa and Khamlung Rinpoches and, until he also returned, with Jon. They were published by the LTWA as part of the establishment of their Translation Department that I was informally associated with. 

At Harvard, I had been trained to translate into what is called “Translationese” – English that replicates every grammatical feature of the original language. The result was very awkward English, which nevertheless, indicated that you understood the grammar. Now, in our initial translations, we went to the other extreme. Jon and I took great license with some of the texts, especially those that were in verse, and rendered them into more poetical language and in a meter that made them easier to recite. Years later, I have tried to find a middle ground – keeping faithful to the original wording and grammar, while also making the English as smooth-sounding as possible.    

His Holiness and Geshe Dhargyey never encouraged me to become a monk, and I was not inclined in that direction. This was the case even though my lifestyle was very much like that of a monk. I went to all-male universities, and in India, I kept the company mostly of monks, especially Geshes and Rinpoches. With very few exceptions, I never went to parties during my university days. Nevertheless, I thought I could be of more service to His Holiness as a layperson. 

Sharpa Rinpoche explained that the main reason to become a monk was to gain discipline and devote oneself to the Dharma. I was already extremely self-disciplined and devoted to the Dharma. I didn’t need further support for that. Also, as a monk I would need to attend daily group pujas, which were chanted slowly and lasted long. Although I had no difficulty attending them at the Library twice a month, I have always preferred studying and doing my meditation practices privately on my own, at my own fast speed. To be a plain-clothed monk not living in a monastery made no sense to me, and to live in a monastery would cut me off from society just as universities had.

Once I became Serkong Rinpoche’s disciple, he would jokingly tell me I was like a bat. When with birds, the bat would say he’s not a bird, he’s a mouse. When with mice, he would say he’s not a mouse, he’s a bird. Similarly, throughout my time in Dharamsala, I studied with the Tibetans but lived among the Indians, never being just one or the other. I was the same when with monks and with laypeople. In fact, I was also a bat when with Asians and with Westerners and, nowadays, when with Germans and with Americans.

Even before learning about the selflessness of persons and their lack of having a self-established identity, I have always instinctively shunned having a fixed, solid identity with any group – for instance, with a Buddhist organization or Dharma center or even with someone else as a couple. Although I have been inclined to seek and receive emotional support from some of my good male friends, having missed receiving it from my father as a baby, I have never been comfortable with the idea of being in a couple relationship, whether with a man or a woman. I didn’t even think of myself in terms of being a member of my family. No matter whom I was with, I was always the bat.

I was not only never encouraged to become a monk, but I was also never encouraged to study debate, and I avoided it on my own. Although I appreciated its value and had studied a text on logic at Harvard, I knew that if I went in that direction, I would become a “debate monster.” I would be unable to turn off the debate mode whenever someone said something illogical. Also, since a young age, I have never wanted to compete with anyone, not even at cards, let alone chess. I did not like at all the mentality of striving to defeat an opponent, and I imagined that I would need to have that aggressive mentality in order to be successful at debate. I also didn’t like to have to defend myself and I avoided conflicts whenever possible. For example, I have never agreed to write a review of anyone else’s work.

The Library also offered Tibetan language classes. The teacher, Narkyid Ngawang Thondub, who later became His Holiness’s archivist and biographer, had prepared a manuscript of a textbook for learning the spoken colloquial language. Although I could already understand a lot of what people said, there were still many holes in my spoken Tibetan. Ngawang Thondup asked me to help him with the text and, through that, I greatly improved my spoken language. 

Equipped now with a more acceptable spoken Tibetan, I started to visit Ling Rinpoche. After receiving from him the Vajrabhairava initiation once more in Bodh Gaya in January 1973 and starting my first daily sadhana practice as one of the commitments, he always kindly answered questions I had about the practice. After that, I occasionally translated for him during subsequent winters in Bodh Gaya when he taught visitors in his room. 

During these early years in Dharamsala, I attended all the public teachings His Holiness gave and slowly started to understand more and more of his sophisticated, eloquent Tibetan. As the years passed, His Holiness even permitted me to attend the advanced, “by invitation only” teachings he gave on the grounds of his residence.

The major event during this period was the Kalachakra initiation that His Holiness conferred in Bodh Gaya in January 1974. Over a hundred thousand people attended, coming from all over the Himalayan region, with many looking like they had just emerged from medieval times. Some of them still practiced animal sacrifice, so His Holiness addressed them quite strongly, admonishing that this must end. 

With such a large crowd, hundreds of Indian beggars and lepers flocked there as well and lined the one street. I had never seen people in such poor condition, even worse than during the famine that first winter I had been there. Added to that atmosphere, there were no public toilets. Everyone did their business in the fields, with absolutely no privacy. Very soon, there was a plague of flies. A contingent of us Westerners came from Dharamsala to attend. We crowded together in the dormitory rooms at the PWD Guest House and cooked together in a more distant field. The comradery we shared was wonderful.   

Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche had been at the Kalachakra initiation, having arrived in Bodh Gaya from an extended stay in Nepal. But with such an enormous crowd and the chaos all around, I had not seen him there. Back in Dharamsala, however, he conferred the Vajrabhairava initiation in May for us students at the Library, and then Geshe Dhargyey taught us the sadhana. 

Shortly after that, Jon and I returned to New Jersey to visit our families for the summer and to avoid the Indian monsoon rains. While there, we visited Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa, who were in New York at the time. Jon invited Lama Zopa to visit our hometown and give a teaching to some of our friends, which he did at my Aunt Sarah and Uncle Irving Weinberg’s home. 

When we returned to Dharamsala in the fall of 1974, I visited Serkong Rinpoche, now able to speak directly with him without a translator. He seemed to sense that I had the karmic connection to become his personal translator and eventually a Dharma teacher, and so he took me under his wing. Whenever I went to see him, which was often, he had me sit to the side of his room while he spoke with the various people who came to see him. Wanting me to learn how he dealt with people, he would explain what he was doing and some of the words he had used that I hadn’t understood.

In this way, without needing a verbal confirmation, I became his disciple and started a medieval-style apprenticeship. I requested him, using a traditional Tibetan formula, to please make a donkey like me into a human – teach me how to relate to others and how to help them. He just smiled, but after this, no matter how many people we were with, if I said or did something foolish, he would honor my request by loudly calling me an idiot. In fact, “Idiot” was his name for me. In response, throughout the nine years that I was with him nearly every day, I never once got angry or even felt annoyed when he scolded me like this. My usual response was a nervous laugh. I understood why he was calling me that – I had asked him to. In addition, despite all the work I did for him, translating, writing letters, arranging and managing his world tours and so on, he only thanked me twice. Everything I did was to help him benefit others and not to get a pat on the head and wag my tail, as he used to explain. 

Although this classic Tibetan way of training serious disciples would not suit most Westerners, especially those with low self-esteem, it was the perfect method for me. Serkong Rinpoche was indeed a master of skillful means. I had come to India as an arrogant young man, who had always been at or near the top of my class, even at Harvard. I needed to develop humility and social graces. In comparison to the great masters such as His Holiness, his tutors and the great lamas, I wasn’t even in kindergarten, and based on the way I acted, I was indeed an idiot. For example, once when I was translating for Rinpoche a few years later, my pen ran out of ink, and I had asked a woman sitting near me to loan me one. At the end of the teaching, she held out her hand to receive it back. Thinking she wanted to thank me for translating, I shook her hand. Rinpoche roared at me, “Idiot, give her back her pen.” I was very grateful for Rinpoche’s kindness to train me in this way. It was exactly what I needed. 

Rinpoche took great care to train me to be a translator. In hindsight, I believe he was training me as an offering to His Holiness to translate for him. He was unbelievably devoted to His Holiness and knew the skills I would need. For example, he started by training my memory. Whenever I was with him, he could stop the conversation at any time, and I would have to repeat word for word what he had just said or what I had just said. I had to learn to always stay alert and always to have my internal “record button” on. Once I asked him what a word meant and he replied sternly, “I explained that word to you seven years ago. I remember that, why don’t you?” He then told me that he remembered everything he had ever studied. He was in his late sixties at the time. I found this extremely inspiring. I wished to be able to do the same.

Soon, other Westerners started to visit Rinpoche to request teachings, especially on tantra. Rinpoche felt I was sufficiently prepared now to translate them and so we began the fall of 1975. The most enthusiastic person who attended these teachings was Alan Turner, a young Englishman who was also attending the classes at the Library. Alan had come to India being strongly drawn to tantra practice and wanted to learn everything about it. He later became one of my closest friends but sadly suffered a massive heart attack in 2009 and passed away, leaving behind his Brazilian wife and two children. Because he practiced so intensely and sincerely, Rinpoche nicknamed him his “Inji yogi (with “Inji” referring to Brits but also used by Tibetans to refer to foreigners in general).” 

Earlier that year, in June, His Holiness had given Sharpa and Khamlung Rinpoches, Jon and me a Sakya “parting from the four clingings” text, a Karma Kagyu mahamudra text and a Nyingma dzogchen text, and asked us to translate them for the Library to publish. We were able to start as a team on the two sutra and tantra chapters of the Nyingma text with Geshe Dhargyey, but as it turned out, it became my responsibility to find a Nyingma teacher for the two remaining dzogchen chapters and Kagyu and Sakya teachers for the other two texts and then to translate them on my own. The next year, Sharpa and Khamlung disrobed, married and moved to Wisconsin, while Jon moved to Nepal to study with Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa. Jon went on to become an international Buddhist teacher and author, marry a Dutch student also of Lama Yeshe and raise three children.

Actually, it was not very difficult to find these teachers. In fact, the first of them found me. As usual, I went to Bodh Gaya that winter of 1975-76; Ling Rinpoche was once more conferring the Vajrabhairava initiation and giving a discourse on the practice. Jon went to Nepal, instead, to attend a Kopan course. While in Bodh Gaya, Beru Khyentse Rinpoche, one of the group of young Karma Kagyu tulkus personally trained by the Sixteenth Karmapa, contacted me and asked me to translate two jenang subsequent permissions he was giving to a group of young Westerners. I agreed and was impressed by his explanations and the depth of his knowledge. I therefore requested that he teach the mahamudra text that His Holiness had wanted translated. There was no time that winter, but he agreed to do that the next winter in Bodh Gaya. 

I then returned to Dharamsala, as did Jon, to continuing our studies at the Library with Geshe Dhargyey, and I continued my training with Serkong Rinpoche as well. That summer of 1976, Jon and I returned to New Jersey once again to visit our families. This visit coincided with Dudjom Rinpoche, the head of the Nyingma tradition, and Dezhung Rinpoche, one of the Sakya teachers of His Holiness, both being in New York. Matthew Kapstein, a friend of mine and student of Dudjom Rinpoche, was also back in New York from India visiting his family at the time. He was familiar with the Nyingma technical vocabulary, which I had never studied, and so we went together to visit Dudjom Rinpoche and requested that he give us a commentary on the Nyingma text. Dudjom Rinpoche kindly agreed, but there was only time for the third chapter, the most difficult one. Kapstein helped translate. We then went to see Dezhung Rinpoche and made a similar request for the Sakya text, which he also kindly gave us. Kapstein went on to become a professor at the University of Chicago. 

After this visit to our families, I returned to Dharamsala at the end of the summer. Since Jon had moved to Kathmandu, I now shared the cottage just with Sonam Norbu, who continued cooking for me for the next few years. I went back to studying at the Library and to training with Serkong Rinpoche. 

Late that fall, a young Swiss French woman, Catherine Ducommun, arrived in Dharamsala, having finished medical school the week before. She would soon become a close friend and important person in my life. She was a childhood friend of George Dreyfus who had introduced her to Tibetan Buddhism, and she had become very close to Madame Anne Ansermet who had invited her to visit. Both Dreyfus and Ansermet were also from the French part of Switzerland. Dreyfus was studying in Dharamsala at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics and went on to become the first Western geshe and a professor at Williams College. Madame Ansermet, the daughter of the world-famous orchestra conductor Ernest Ansermet, had become a Buddhist nun at the time of her retirement from nursing. She had learned English in her sixties and was very close to His Holiness, not hesitating to give him advice about his health. Catherine went on to become a psychiatrist. Besides her clinical work with psychiatric patients and especially very disturbed youths, she not only became a Clinical Associate Professor of couple and family therapy at Drexel University in Philadelphia, but also an international lecturer on contextual therapy.

One day in December, Catherine knocked on my door to deliver a book she had brought for me on behalf of mutual friends from Geneva. Shortly after that, Madame Ansermet contacted me. She did not feel strong enough to accompany Catherine for a pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya but was very worried about her traveling alone. When she found out that I was going myself, she asked if could take her with me, and I agreed. 

First, we took the bus to Delhi, but instead of following my plans of where to stay, Catherine went to a cheap guest house that someone had recommended and soon discovered it was dangerous to stay there. Fortunately, she was able to reach me, and I rescued her from her mistake. I took my mission very seriously to keep her safe during the trip and looked after her in Bodh Gaya as well. The strong connection I felt with her was strengthened by finding that we were intellectually very compatible. Instinctively, I felt a deep commitment to look after her welfare beyond this journey and this has lasted ever since, somewhat like the commitment my father had to look after the well-being of his mother and his wife.  

While in Bodh Gaya, I translated for Beru Khyentse Rinpoche, who gave a lengthy explanation of the mahamudra text His Holiness had recommended as well as of the last chapter of the dzogchen text. I went on to translate for him the next winter in Bodh Gaya as well, when he taught not only other mahamudra and dzogchen texts but also explained the Karma Kagyu presentation of ways of knowing. This opened my eyes to a common mistake that I shared with many other students of Buddhism. That mistake is to believe that the explanation of some topic they had received from the point of view of the particular Buddhist school they were studying with was the explanation accepted by all of Buddhism in general. In fact, there are variant presentations of most topics discussed in Buddhism. After all, Buddha taught each disciple slightly differently to suit their backgrounds and needs.

After an intensive spring furthering my studies and training in Dharamsala, I traveled in August with Alan, Dreyfus and Madame Ansermet to Gyume Tantric College in Hunsur, South India to receive the Guhyasamaja, Vajrabhairava and Chakrasamvara initiations that His Holiness was conferring there. While there, Thupten Jinpa came to visit us. Madame Ansermet was his sponsor. At that time, he was a teenage monk at Zongkar Choede Monastery next to Gyume and had just recently taught himself English. Little did we suspect that he would go one to earn both a Lharampa Geshe degree at Ganden Shartse Monastery and a PhD at the University of Cambridge and to become the main Dharma translator for His Holiness. 

That winter, Catherine returned to Dharamsala for a visit after having finished one year of internship in general medicine. While there, she was asked to work as a substitute doctor for the Tibetan Children’s Village to cover the absence of the attending doctor who had been called away. Through her work, she built a special relationship with the Tibetan community that has continued for the rest of her life. It is during this second visit that we became close. I knew that she had had an interest in me, and not having had a girlfriend since Bernice when I was at Rutgers, I felt I should give a new try to a couple relationship despite my bat-like attitude and my lack of interest in a married life. So, I invited her to visit Dalhousie with me. After she returned to Switzerland to pursue her plan to become a psychiatrist, we maintained a long-distance, part-time partner relationship for almost a decade, meeting from time to time in India, Europe or America.

Eventually, she got discouraged by the mixed messages of my bat-like behavior. As a result, she left for America to marry her mentor, Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, a Hungarian American psychiatrist, one of the pioneers of family therapy and the founder of contextual therapy. Subsequently, she became known as Catherine Ducommun-Nagy. Her marriage didn’t stop our contacts or my commitment to look out for her welfare. I developed a good relationship with her husband and had many interesting exchanges with the two of them. Over the years, I have learned a great deal about contextual therapy and its core concept of relational ethics from that contact. After Boszormenyi-Nagy passed away in 2007, Catherine and I started to spend time together again, and once more we became de facto part-time partners. 

Once I turned seventy, we started traveling together on vacations. Before that, I had never traveled simply for a holiday. But even when on vacation, both of us still do some of our work. In addition, I help her with her writing projects, and she helps me with some of my ideas. As a product of these discussions, we collaborated on an article for the Study Buddhism website, “Dependent Arising of the Self in Terms of Relations with Others,” using the principles of contextual therapy to analyze the guru-disciple relationship. We hope to do more in the coming years. 

[See: Dependent Arising of the Self in Terms of Relations with Others]