I first met Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche in January 1970 in Bodh Gaya to ask advice for finding someone with whom I could study the Guhyasamaja Tantra for preparing my PhD dissertation at Harvard University. As Rinpoche did with everyone he met who was interested in Dharma, he took my interest seriously, although I was completely unqualified to study such an advanced topic. However, as a master of skillful methods, he did not tell me directly that I was not yet ready, but rather sent me to a retired abbot of Lower Tantric College for me to realize for myself that I was unprepared. I studied and wrote about lam-rim, the graded stages of the path, instead.
After receiving my doctorate degree, I returned to Dharamsala in 1972 to study and translate texts at the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives. By 1974 , my spoken Tibetan had improved enough so that I could visit Rinpoche without a translator. As Rinpoche demonstrated several times when I was with him, he had the extrasensory abilities to know the karmic potentials others had and the karmic connections he had with them. Like that, he seemed to know that I had the potential to be his translator, to eventually translate for His Holiness the Dalai Lama and to become a Dharma teacher myself. Because of that, when I went to visit him, he would invite me to stay in the room while he met with other visitors. During all the time I subsequently spent with Rinpoche, he never asked me anything about my personal life. It seemed as though he did not need to know any of that. The only focus in our relationship was the Dharma.
Seeing how kind and skillful he was with others and realizing my own shortcomings, I requested him please to help make a donkey like me a proper human being. Rinpoche just smiled and soon began to train me more intensively as a translator, explaining various terms he was using. At one point, he even had me start to go through the Tibetan dictionary and write a sentence with each word to show him that I understood its meaning. He would ask me to explain the connotations of the English translation terms I used for Dharma terminology and then, after explaining the connotations of the Tibetan terms, he would help me find terms in English that actually meant what the Tibetan meant. He said these connotations are very important and we should always “milk the meaning” from the words.
Soon I began to translate for Rinpoche when Westerners requested teachings and when he gave various empowerments and subsequent permissions. To train my memory, whenever I was with him, Rinpoche would sometimes stop and ask me to repeat what he had just said or to repeat what I had just said. If he sensed that I had not understood what he had explained, or had translated it incorrectly, he would ask me to translate it back to him. Even if it made all the students wait a long time, he would not let me proceed until he was satisfied that I understood correctly. Then, he would not let me write down what he had taught until the evening, when I returned home. I had to remember everything.
I remember once asking him what a term meant that he had just used in a teaching and he scolded me, saying, “I explained that to you seven years ago. I remember that, why don’t you?” In fact, Rinpoche scolded me every time I made a mistake or did something stupid, calling me by his favorite name for me, “idiot,” even when we were in a large group of people. Appreciating how he was helping me to lessen my pride, I never once got angry with him.
Except for Kalachakra, which I understood later that he felt I had a special connection with and would be able, in the future, to translate the initiation for His Holiness and write a book about Kalachakra, he would not teach me anything unless I was translating it for others. In this practical way, he taught me that my motivation for learning the Dharma must be exclusively to benefit others and that I must write down everything I learned so that I could pass it on to others in the future. Over the nine years I was with Rinpoche, he only thanked me twice. Like this, he taught me that my motivation for serving him and His Holiness must be exclusively for benefiting others and not for receiving a pat on my head so I could wag my tail!
Prominent among the Westerners who came to Rinpoche’s teachings was Alan Turner from England. Alan was intensely interested in Vajrabhairava (Yamantaka) and requested many teachings on it, all of which I translated. Some of these were discourses to groups of Westerners on the Vajarabhairava sadhana and some were private teachings for just Alan and me. These included teachings on the fire puja and self-initiation as well as the measurements and grid for drawing not only the two-dimensional mandalas of Vajrabhairava but also of Guhyasamaja, Chakrasamvara and Kalachakra. He had us bring large sheets of paper and draw them with him. Not only that, but he also taught us the measurements of the three-dimensional mandala palaces of each of these deities, modeling tsampa dough into the various architectural features to show us what they looked like.
Although Alan did not know Tibetan, he loved to sit in the protector room for many hours and listen to the ritual chanting. At his request, Rinpoche taught him the full protector ritual for Six-Armed Mahakala. For many years, Alan performed the Vajrabhairava self-initiation together with this protector ritual every day. Alan was such an intense practitioner that Rinpoche later referred to him as his “English yogi.” Because of that, Rinpoche stayed at Alan’s home during both his trips to the West in order to give him further private teachings.
One day, Rinpoche explained to me that it is impossible to have a lama explain to you, sentence by sentence, every text that you want to study. You need to be able to read the texts in Tibetan yourself and then ask a lama to explain the passages that you do not understand. Following this guideline, he guided me through my reading of several commentaries on Guhyasamaja, Kalachakra and Tantra Stages and Paths, all of which I translated as I went along. He even shared with me some of his insights, for instance that all emotional obscurations (nyon-sgrib), including seeds (tendencies) of disturbing mental factors, are disturbing mental factors and thus ways of being aware of something. He said they are not noncongruent mental factors, which are neither forms of physical phenomena nor ways of being aware of something, reasoning that even a seed of rice is still rice.
Soon I began also to translate teachings for His Holiness the Dalai Lama, first just summarizing them in notes I took while listening to the teachings and then reading them afterwards to the Westerners. Then I began consecutive translation, alternating with His Holiness as he taught, and, eventually simultaneous translation. At most of these, I would be sitting close to Rinpoche, who kept a very close watch on my behavior and scolded me whenever I acted against proper protocol. Rinpoche felt that most Westerners do not know how to ask questions or say too much so that it is unclear what they are asking. He always told me not to translate all they said, but just what the question is. Like this, at teachings of His Holiness when Westerners would submit written questions, he would go through them with me to sort out unclear or frivolous ones and would formulate relevant questions that would please His Holiness and be the most helpful to the audience.
Once, when I was in the middle of doing the Kalachakra retreat, I received a request from the Private Office to go to Manali to translate an initiation and teaching for His Holiness. Rinpoche told me to break my retreat and go immediately. The most important service anyone could do was to serve His Holiness. Sometimes I felt that Rinpoche had put so much effort into training me so that he could present me as an offering to serve His Holiness. I have tried as best as I can to fulfill Rinpoche’s wish.
Several times when I was with Rinpoche he demonstrated his extrasensory abilities. Once on our way to Tushita retreat center in Dharamsala, he told the driver to hurry, a fire had just broken out in the meditation room, and in fact it had. Another time, during one of the two tours I made with him to the West, when I was going ahead of him to Paris, he told me I would arrive a day later than planned, and because of a breakdown of the car, that in fact happened. Once, Rinpoche even revealed himself to me to be Vajrabhairava. I had asked him a question about the deity’s facial features and, all of a sudden, he transformed his face into an exact replica, with darting tongue and bloodshot, glaring eyes. It was terrifying.
When Rinpoche was invited to make two foreign tours to Europe and North America, I arranged all the visas and flights and accompanied him as his translator. I regarded all the letters I needed to write, all the applications I had to fill out and all the trips to embassies I needed to make as a part of my preliminary practices, my “ngondro.” During these tours, Rinpoche taught a wide variety of sutra and tantra topics. The most rare ones were the “collected mantra” rituals (bsngags-btu) of Vajrabhairava and Vajrayogini.
As always, Rinpoche was practical and down-to-earth throughout the journeys. Going to Delhi, he always preferred going by third-class train. He said that whether you go third class or first class, you get there just the same. He did not like people spending unnecessary money on him by taking him to fancy restaurants, but preferred to eat at home with the families we stayed with. He always ate together with the families and not alone in his room like other high lamas had done when they had been hosted. He taught me, by example, how to make people feel comfortable around you by always being informal and friendly, never acting haughty like an aristocrat. He told me that in the future, when I become a Dharma teacher and my students regard me as a Buddha, while I know that I am not at all a Buddha, this should never make me doubt that my own teachers are Buddhas.
Rinpoche taught me so many things by his example, which I have always tried to live up to. Whether he was meeting the Pope, being approached by a drunkard or speaking with a group of children, he treated everyone equally with the same respect, taking everyone’s interest in the Dharma seriously. No matter how difficult the travel was, Rinpoche would go to the most remote places, such as riding on a yak to the Tibetan army camps on the borders of Tibet, to teach people who had interest in the Dharma. Like that, after Rinpoche passed away, I tried to follow his example by travelling throughout the communist world, South America, parts of Africa and the Middle East lecturing on the Dharma at universities and, in the communist countries, to secret gatherings in people’s homes.
The last time I saw Rinpoche was in Spiti a few weeks before he passed away. Rinpoche had organized for His Holiness to confer the Kalachakra initiation there for the first time and I had organized for a busload of Westerners to attend. During the initiation, while I was translating simultaneously, I was extremely surprised when I was given all the ritual robes and accoutrements to wear during the procedures as a one of the principal disciples. I believe this was a parting gift from Rinpoche.
After the initiation, when I went to see Rinpoche before returning to Dharamsala, I asked him some technical questions about the initiation ritual. After answering, Rinpoche advised that for figuring out difficult points in the teachings, I should always rely on logic and reasoning. This was the last piece of advice that Rinpoche gave me. I have tried all the rest of my life to live up to the trust that Rinpoche had put in me and to follow all his advice and example as best as I can. When faced with any difficulty, I have always considered how Rinpoche would have dealt with the problem and then I know clearly what to do.
I believe that Rinpoche entrusted me with so many special teachings with the extrasensory powers to know that I would preserve them and transmit them to the world in the future. This I am trying to do with my website, studybuddhism.com. One of the rarest teachings I received from him was the oral transmission of the special lineage of Well-Explained Essence of Interpretable and Definitive Meanings (Drangs-nges legs-bshad snying-po that he had received from his father, Serkong Dorjechang, who had received it directly from Je Tsongkhapa in a pure vision. I had the unique opportunity, with His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s permission, to offer this back to Serkong Rinpoche’s reincarnation (Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche II) many years later and to further preserve the Serkong lineage by including his teachings as well on our website. In these small ways, I hope I can repay his immeasurable kindness and trust.