Читать книгу Enlightenment Town - Jeffery Paine - Страница 14
Оглавление3. “Gimme That Old-Time Religion!” Or Is the New-Time Better?
About religion, that most controversial of subjects, one question never goes away: Is religion a good thing, or is it bad, bad, bad?
The answer to this question must wait in line, however, while a prior one gets answered first. Since so many contrary practices go by that name, what is the common denominator — if there is one — that makes them all religion? My Sunday school teachers could have dispatched that question with ease. Religion for them was God “above” and moral behavior “below,” and where to find it would be inside a church or temple and when would be Sunday or Easter (or if you’re Jewish, Saturday and Yom Kippur). Now one could almost weep for such innocent simplicity, when God looked like Michelangelo’s portrait of him on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Faith back then was as simple as believing what the Bible or your clergyman said. And now? Now there are books bearing titles like Religion without Belief and even Religion without God, and in them God floats in a vapory cloud of abstraction. Rilke described God as a direction and Rabbi David Cooper, formerly of Crestone, said God was a verb. And if you are being religious at a Mass or a Shabbat service, what are you when you are grocery shopping or carrying out the garbage or texting?
Crestone is a made-to-order laboratory for investigating such matters, for here the old, the new, and the strange of religion jostle side by side.
Christianity
Father Dave Denny, a Carmelite monk in Crestone, was asked an unusual question, one he hadn’t heard before. A well-mannered tourist from Japan had traveled to America, and to understand this country before he embarked on his journey, he had read its holy book, the Bible. To this Japanese Buddhist, the Judeo-Christian book contained everything — mythology, morality, poetry, history — everything except one thing: Where, he wondered, where was the religion in it? For him religion was not miracles or moral commandments but working with your mind to transform negative emotions, to obtain enlightenment. Father Dave had to laugh, saying, “No, if you don’t think this is what religion is, then you may miss it in the Bible.”
To witness traditional old-fashioned Christianity, if not Crestone then the terrain around it is the right place to come to. “Seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be answered,” the Bible says. I didn’t have to. Christianity knocked on my door in Crestone one afternoon. Woke me up from a worldclass nap. Or was I still dreaming? At the door stood two unfamiliar African American women, more properly attired than anyone I’d ever seen in Crestone. Through the screen I wondered whether they could see me, for I was wearing only my underwear. Probably not — they weren’t running away, screaming in horror. In my groggy state I was slower than I should have been to identify these unfamiliar women. Jehovah’s Witnesses.
They were spreading the Good Word. Spreading it all the way from Fullerton, California, since the nearest Jehovah’s Witness church around here, the one in the town of Center, had only thirty members, too small to do much spreading. To bring the most valuable gift of all to endangered souls, those two brave women willingly endured personal sacrifices without complaint. Instead of complaining, they panted: the high altitude of Crestone was obviously a trial to their lungs, and that wasn’t the only trial. They had, unprepared, wandered into the land of — what were folks around here, Buddhists or Hindus? Everybody, they reported, was so polite to them, everyone courteous, yet they sensed they were not making much headway.
I took this as a challenge; I would make them feel good about sojourning among pagans. And it was a challenge. After reading sections from Revelations, they asked if I could envision that a time will come when there shall be no more death. “You know, I’m really not sure.” They foretold of the coming era when men and beasts shall dwell together in perfect harmony. I kept silent, not blurting out, “Better be soon, while there’s still some other species left.” Why was my (silent) reaction so churlish? If what they were describing was religion — man and beast and God all one in the immortality of forever — what’s not to like? And how their vision sustained them: aging, illness, misfortune, and dying will likely shatter them less than the flu does me. Why didn’t I convert on the spot, right there in my skivvies?
I found a clue as to why later that night. There was a party to welcome back Tsoknyi Rinpoche,1 Crestone’s brilliant and funny Tibetan teacher, from his teaching and travels. At the party Tsoknyi told about a wealthy Indian woman who had adopted his book Carefree Dignity as her personal bible and would stop at nothing, certainly not his wishes, to get him to come teach in India. “She is a tough lady,” Tsoknyi said, “but kind-tough, which is okay, not nasty-tough.”
“Tough lady?” challenged a woman at the party, obviously a tough lady herself, who suspected Tsoknyi of harboring antifeminist stereotypes. “Pray, tell us, Rinpoche, what you mean by tough lady.”
“A tough lady, like a tough man,” he answered, non-plussed, “is somebody who rolls over everything to get what she wants. Including other people. She talks, you listen.”
I was reminded of those mild women of Fullerton, every inch proper and demure, who were undercover tough ladies. They had talked and I had listened. Since all the Buddhists hereabouts puzzled them, I suggested that they might want to read Thich Nhat Hanh’s Living Buddha, Living Christ, which explains Buddhism in terms sympathetic to Christianity. But they obviously had no interest, and that merely begins the list of things uninteresting to them. Including me. I was a generic Homo sapiens container, and as such suitable for filling with Christianity, Jesus, and God. If Jesus was the Way, I was just in their way, the next person in line to receive their announcement of the Truth.
Though not Crestone itself, much of Colorado belongs to the Christian Kingdom. I entered that kingdom two days later, when I drove to the High Valley Stampede, Colorado’s oldest rodeo, in Monte Vista. That small town had swung into the saddle for the weekend and was enjoying itself immensely. From kids with chili-cheese fries to grandpas with oxygen tanks, everybody there knew one another. One event of sweetness was a lamb-riding competition in which pre-kindergartners held on for their dear little lives to bucking lambs. Another competition pitted against one another the fire departments from the neighboring towns, racing to rope, and put enormous ladies’ panties on, an indignant heifer.
But evidently one more item was required for that rodeo to be complete. The Messiah. The rodeo’s emcee, a beefy dude in cowboy duds, straddling an enormous horse, kept announcing through his hand mike, “Being good is good. But not good enough. Friends, recognize Jesus Christ as your savior. He was God’s greatest gift to us, so let us be our greatest gift to him.” I did not disagree, of course, but maybe it was the heat or my overindulgence in chili-cheese fries, for I had no idea what he meant. The most opaque words open to various interpretation — God, savior, our gift to him — were tossed around like tangible objects, like rope or saddle.
The emcee’s inspirational message was like a coded signal, meant for those who already knew the code. I looked around: What did Christianity have to do with any of this? Bareback bronco riding is as daring a feat as exists in sports, but to what does it correspond in the New Testament? The Jehovah Witnesses’ promise of God’s creatures living in harmony rules out rodeos in heaven. For a moment the rodeo vanished and in its place was organized cruelty to animals. A minute later, though, I got caught back up in its excitement.
Half a century ago, when I was a boy, the future of Christianity was thought to lie with thinkers like Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich, who used the meeting of Christianity and modernity to deepen our understanding of both. But the mainstream churches whose members once read such theologians are increasingly empty; rather, the pews are filled with fundamentalist tough ladies and gents like the Fullerton Jehovah’s Witnesses and the rodeo emcee. I decided, when I got back to Crestone, to meet a different kind of Christian, a “Crestone Christian.”
If that was my goal, I was told several times, Father Dave Denny was my man. “Father Dave,” so said the English filmmaker Mark Elliott (who will figure prominently in the narrative later), “he is what a Christian should be.” That was high praise, for I was surprised that Mark thought anybody should be a Christian.
I made some inquiries about this Father Dave, and if what people said was true, then he is that seeming impossibility: a completely good man. People who have known him for years cannot recall his ever once being mean-spirited. The worst display of temper anyone recalls is when an irritating woman was being willfully obtuse and Father Dave burst out, “Jeepers, Sharon!” Furthermore, so I was told, Father Dave was a completely devout Christian but not bound by what that had meant in the past. Hearing such reports, I did want to meet him — perhaps a new kind of Christian for a new century?
To seek out a sage, in mythological tales, the pilgrim must wind his or her way through unmarked trails, panting and stumbling, up to the top of a mountain. Father Dave, in fact, lives high up on a mountainside just outside Crestone. Since the chances of my successfully winding and finding were practically nil, Father Dave drove down to drive me up. I was greeted by a slim, trim, neat, bearded man, perhaps in his midfifties. He drove me to something equally trim and neat, his nine-hundred-square-foot house, a dot in that high-desert emptiness. A perfect cabin for retreat and contemplation. Father Dave hardly resides there as in a monastic cell, though, being busy in the world: he runs the Desert Foundation, promoting the desert as a source of spirituality; he serves as the chaplain at a distant college; he travels to raise money for a relief and development agency (Cross Catholic Outreach) that brings clean water, nutritional food, and shelter to the Earth’s downtrodden; and he takes care of his mother, who has Alzheimer’s.2
Father Dave’s story begins in a practically pastoral idyll in a bygone America. To say that Kokomo, Indiana’s thirteenth-largest “city,” resembled a Norman Rockwell small town sounds dismissive, but it did look like a Norman Rockwell painting. Farmers wore bibbed overalls to church, and their wives, starched spotless aprons. Cocooned in a large loving family, young Dave assumed that basic human goodness was a fact of life.
Religion in midcentury America, unlike today, occupied a fairly marginal place, for most restricted to Sundays and holidays. But then came the spiritual-questing sixties (which occurred mainly in the seventies). In the heady spirit of those times, Dave enrolled in a college course about a book largely unfamiliar to him: the New Testament. During that course he learned all sorts of surprising things, such as that there were still monks. In the twentieth century! Dave read about one monk, named Thomas Merton, who observed monastic vows yet was fully engaged in the issues of his time. If, in the spirit of the sixties (seventies), Dave decided to experiment by going on a group retreat, it was hardly odder then than going to the Apple store would be today.
At the retreat the other participants vied to sit next to him. Though Dave was funny and told jokes, and his fellow retreatants sensed him a pleasant person to be around, there was something more, a deep peacefulness, in him. Inspired by the retreat, Dave entertained a romantic hypothesis: to live fully, either become a monk, embracing a spiritual world, or be like Zorba the Greek, exuberant in this earthy one. The person leading the retreat, Father William McNamara, was a revelation to him: a monk and wild — a Zorba of faith. A few years later, inspired by Father William’s example, Dave himself took vows.
At his vow taking, Dave expressed gratitude to someone for a life-changing experience that had brought him to that moment. It caused surprise, especially at a Catholic ceremony, for the one Father Dave thanked was the Buddha. He appreciated that the Buddha emphasized experience over beliefs and that Buddhism itself required no more otherworldly metaphysics than did an experiment in physics: do A, and B will follow. Do meditation, and your mental world will be transformed. He wondered how many Christians could say the same about the effects of church attendance. Earlier Dave had gone on a Buddhist Vipassana retreat, and its effects surpassed his every expectation, but must he, he wondered, swallow Buddhism’s strange and unfamiliar pill? Or could he have the same (or better!) experience through Christianity? There was one way to find out. His taking monk’s vows that day was that way.
Father Dave thus became a Christian, but not one out to convert anyone else to his beliefs. As for our being God’s favored people, he says, this belief charges a Christian’s life with dignity — but he doubts any God’s validity who would choose one people over another. He can even imagine someone forsaking Christianity for Christian reasons: because it has become too much rote assent, a form of idol worship. Such an attitude will hardly ignite faith-based wars or allow shady politicians to hide behind a Bible. Father Dave’s measure of whether Christianity — or for that matter, any religion — is at work in your life is simple: Has it made you more alive, more loving, more capable of relationship?
Is there a limit to such ecumenical open-mindedness? For there are differences too deep to be simply waved away. In Buddhism nothing is permanent, while in Christianity one’s soul (which also doesn’t exist in Buddhism) is durable unto death — and beyond. Another difference: in Christianity, God is the creator of the universe; in Buddhism, no God, and no creation, either. I asked him, “How would you, Father Dave, go about reconciling Buddhism and Christianity, with their contrary claims?”
“I don’t. I can’t,” he answered mildly. “Each may be true, while you’re thinking about it, especially if thinking about it makes you for that moment a better person.” In the old Judeo-Christian worldview, he said, each person was considered a container, and each container/person could be filled with only one religion. He proposed a newer, more accurate metaphor: a map. Everyone has inside him or her a map or blueprint of all spiritual possibilities. Some people stay within the shaded area of the religion in which they were born, never venturing into the unknown white spaces. Still, the map or predisposition of other religious potentialities is latent within them.
We were sitting in Father Dave’s postage stamp–size kitchen, overlooking an endless, arid landscape of such ancient timelessness as to make the words infinity and eternity almost palpable. We drank tea and speculated about great matters — a not unpleasant way to pass the afternoon. We were bound to eventually come around to the subject of Jesus — bound to, because of course I brought it up.
“We could be entering a new era,” Father Dave speculated, “in which, perhaps for the first time, we are beginning to comprehend fully who or what Jesus was.” What a treat! Two thousand years passed before me, as it were, in four successive blinks of the eye — the whole history of Christianity in four movements. It begins with the period of Christ, when during his lifetime and for three centuries thereafter disciples attempted on their own — without the dictates and dogma of an official Church — to figure out who Jesus was and what his relation to the godhead was. This period yielded to Christendom, when in 380 CE the faith became the Roman Empire’s state religion, and for the next millennium earthly power and divine authority were practically interchangeable, each underwriting the other. Then in the Renaissance and Reformation commenced what Father Dave called by the familiar name Christianity, when it was no longer the official state religion yet Christ-as-God still shaped people’s thinking, the divine component of their overall worldview. But now, he said, we, or at least many Christians, are entering a new era of faith.
“As for a name for this new era,” Father Dave suggested, “it might not be Christianity but Christ-ness.” In it Jesus may be less a God to worship and more a model of how to incarnate divinity within yourself. He elaborated. “We have brooded too long on God’s omnipotence, which may not get us very far, and not enough on Christ’s love and perfect compassion, which radiates in us, too.” Before my eyes Father Dave was shifting the locus of Christianity/Christ-ness from orthodoxy to orthopraxy, from creed to experience. “Even now a consciousness resembling Jesus’s,” he said, “may be coming to fruition in ever more souls.”
When I mentioned the filmmaker Mark Elliott — a good man who was at times called “the king of Crestone” and is Buddhist to the core — Father Dave said that when looking at Mark he saw Christ. If I had Father Dave’s breadth of vision, would I have not simply been talking about Jesus with him but sensing his presence as well?
Later, after Father Dave dropped me off, something about that afternoon struck me. He had not made any argument in favor of Christianity. Though his Christian faith is everything to him, Father Dave voiced no claim for its superiority. Does that “noble silence” — that spiritual humility, that lack of religious jingoism — rare in the epoch of Christianity, characterize a new era of Christ-ness?
But why was Father Dave living all by his lonesome up in a mountain cabin and not — for he is a monk — in a monastery? He originally came to Crestone to join a Carmelite monastery, Father William McNamara’s Nada Hermitage, erected in the high desert’s void and vastness. The handsome monastery so architecturally suits the high desert as to practically materialize out of it. In its chapel glow two stained-glass windows depicting not the apostles but a black slave, a downtrodden woman, a suffering Vietnamese, a wounded animal, and other beings in travail, to remind the monks and nuns why they are here: to pray for and aid whoever sorrows. Indeed, the Carmelites quietly help people here in need, without broadcasting it. For Father Dave the years rolled by at Nada, the work went well, the monastics dwelt in harmony together, all was of a loveliness. Until . . .
Until it was discovered that the head of the hermitage, Father William, hardly the chaste monk he presented himself as, had seduced one nun after another. And this was the man who, if a monk and a nun at Nada fell in love and renounced their vows in order to marry, exiled them and pronounced them anathema. “At least,” Hanne Strong commented about his misconduct, “it wasn’t with children.” Father Dave did not have the luxury of such detachment. He had worked closely with Father William for thirty years, and what he once thought true now seemed a sham. Father Dave’s life work, his vocation, his belief in inherent goodness, everything he had trusted — the whole edifice — crumbled in an instant.
His days now began not with a psalm book in the chapel but with the question, “Can I get out of bed?” His body was shaking, he could barely eat. Barely talk. He felt that if he remained in the monastery he was doomed and that if he left the monastery he was doomed. Besides, how would he support himself (not many ads run “Freelance Monk Wanted”)? The chaplain of Colorado College tried to encourage Father Dave, telling him he had much to look forward to. Dave understood the words separately — me. . . look forward . . . something good — but how did they apply to him?
Needing to get away somehow, Dave rented Mark Elliott’s retreat cabin above Crestone. “Just one thing,” Mark joked. “Please don’t find God in a Buddhist cabin.” It felt good to be in a Buddhist atmosphere again and be reminded of its basic teaching of impermanence, that nothing, including his despair, lasts forever. That thought deepened into: if I want to be true to the essence, I may have to leave the form behind. The form had been his work at Nada with Father William, but the essence was faith in a goodness despite transgressions, at once within and independent of circumstances. With that realization, Father Dave moved to his new home, that cabin high on the mountainside, where the timelessness and impersonal emptiness of the desert — an experience of wordless existence beyond categories, beyond personal suffering — helped heal him. His was a Christian kind of story, of one returned from the dead.
A few weeks after visiting his cabin, I stumbled on a clue as to how Father Dave can wear his deeply felt Christianity so lightly. The clue came, oddly enough, from a Buddhist teacher who was visiting Crestone. During the retreat he was leading, he said — it sounded odd, coming from a religious teacher — that leaving religion behind creates a paradise for certain people.
This gentle teacher, Anam Thubten, described three levels to the religious life. The first level is belief: one assents to an ideal. At this level devotees “believe,” but their belief does not necessarily determine, or even much interfere with, their customary behavior (nor are they ruined if the belief turns out not to be true). This is religion as ideology, personal comfort, and grand thoughts.
The next level, Anam said, is religion itself. And religion is a very serious business. You have a lot to think about now: What’s the morally right thing to do? Is it in accordance with divine law? Do I have a good conscience? You are shouldering grave responsibilities — enough to hunch you over as you bear so much dogma, duty, and goodness. It’s a 24/7 job, with good works instead of vacations; it’s a school in which ethical satisfactions take the place of recesses, and the homework assignment is for all eternity.
The third level of religion comes after that, on the other side of Bible reading, temple attendance, and good works. Religion is not left behind, but your way of living now allows its truths or insights to materialize on their own. Sacred manuals are no longer necessary; you seem to know without trying to know. After continual striving and duty rendered, finally after age sixty, Confucius said, he could do what he wanted without going against the path. (How such a harmonious state of being comes about is investigated in part 3 of this book.) Father Dave appears today to be that kind of almost effortless Christian. As for Jesus’s teachings, they are no longer found only in scripture: effortlessly, automatically, they arise in his thoughts to meet whatever the situation is, and opening his eyes wide, he sees the teachings on display all around him. First thing after waking, Father Dave enters into contemplation, which is deeply gratifying, but for him the experience feels not all that different from when he cuts firewood or goes into town for groceries. Everything has become liturgy.
Does Father Dave — open-minded and inquisitive, undogmatic, recognizing his religion’s kindredness to other faiths — augur a better future for humanity?
Possibly not. Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds, particularly in Latin America and Africa, but often it is not Father Dave’s version but a narrower faith, shuttered against other possibilities, damning all forms of religious expression except itself. Dave attended a conference in the Northwest, where he was admiring a magnificent totem pole, a wondrous expression of folk art, full of potent mythic symbols, when a Christian delegate from the developing world sneered, “We should burn it to the ground. It’s the handiwork of Satan.”
Still, the future may not be solely a question of numbers, of statistical majorities. The religious cast of mind, as noted, wears bifocals: it sees the relative and the absolute, or the historically conditioned and the unconditional, or the daily and the eternal. From that double perspective, the quality of a Father Dave’s open-mindedness and open-heartedness may spiritually outweigh the quantity of intolerance elsewhere. A relevant story in the Bible: in the sinful city of Sodom, if one honest man could be found, God would spare the whole metropolis. And in the town of Crestone — since we are not even through with this chapter — we may find a few other folks like Father Dave who lace their faith with honesty and generous understanding.
Buddhism
The fire scorches you yet suffuses no light, so your dim eyes cannot distinguish day from night, and it is always night. . . . The fire, burning hot like the sun, was created for no other purpose than your torture, the just reward for your shameless and unspeakable sins. 3
To go from sampling the above hellfire and damnation sermon — once an ornament of Catholicism — to Father Dave’s accepting wide vision is like emerging from a claustrophobic cell into fresh daylight. Do other religions traverse a similar arc, too, from a somber older moralism into a more user-friendly contemporary ethos? What would, for example, a modern Buddhist be like?
Beginning in the late 1960s the first Tibetan Buddhist gurus arrived in America. Even if they had spoken English (which usually they didn’t), their teachings would still in effect have been in Tibetan. For example: “Consider that every sentient being in the universe was at one time your mother” was a traditional teaching given in many talks. At one talk, restless after hearing that platitude one more time, first in Tibetan and then in English, I did the math: millions of species, billions of spawn, trillions of creatures — the numbers were off. Besides, half that American audience probably suffered troubled relations with their mothers. The woman next to me whispered, “What is he trying to do? Bore us out of our interest in Buddhism?”
A generation ago the great Tibetan masters who traveled to America, Dilgo Khyentse and the 16th Karmapa, came to plant the dharma, but America itself did not really interest them. By contrast, our contemporary guru has something to give America but also something to gain: not wealth nor women nor fame but something even more intoxicating. Here was the chance to rewrite the age-old story of Buddhism in contemporary terms.
Crestone is the official residence (except when he is teaching elsewhere, which is usually) of such a modern rinpoche. He is in America because he wants to be, and he wants to make Buddhism at home here, too. He is trying to figure it out, what from age-old Buddhism stays and what in the twenty-first century goes. With no-holds-barred openness and playfulness, too, he is an example of a spiritual teacher à la mode.
It is Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, only in reverse. Tsoknyi Rinpoche III, reared in a monastery practically out of the Middle Ages, suddenly gets dropped into frenzied, futuristic America, knowing nothing about Americans and yet instantly having to plunge into teaching them. Something interesting was bound to happen.
It is now twenty-five years later, and for Tsoknyi every occasion, even a frivolous one like, say, a party, is an occasion to teach.
In fact, I first met Tsoknyi Rinpoche at a party held at Mark Elliott’s house. Crestone would seem an improbable residence for a professional filmmaker, and in my wishy-washy way I once asked Mark about it.
Me: Mark, did moving to Crestone have, uh, well, any effect on, you know, your career?
Mark: Do you mean was it professional suicide? Yes.
Not quite suicide, for we were gathered that night in his editing studio to view his current film in progress. Though eager to see the film, I was more curious to view a rinpoche viewing it.
The film’s subject matter was intriguing — the 17th Karmapa, who is only in his twenties but is considered the successor or unifying figure for Tibetan Buddhism, when the Dalai Lama is no longer with us. The producer who commissioned the film had proved treacherous, all charm on the surface, all deceit underneath. He would lie to Mark, blithely break his promises, and issue contradictory directives (“Make it traditionally Tibetan. But make it like Pulp Fiction.”), and then castigate Mark for whichever one he followed. Mark worried that the producer would not even release the film, to avoid reimbursing his expenses. Mark had invited Tsoknyi to get his opinion on the movie’s contents, but I suspected Mark wanted more than amateur film criticism. Such as the answer to, How do you handle a situation when the situation is impossible?
Anyway, I was excited. I had donned my finest finery, for I’d be meeting a rinpoche — lifetimes of wisdom in a single body! Perhaps I was expecting too much. Tsoknyi Rinpoche did not exude charisma. He did not utter profundities. He did not quote Buddhist scriptures. He did not bless anybody. Short, almost cuddly, with a round face sporting big, round glasses, he might have passed for a graduate student in electrical engineering — except engineering students don’t wear Tibetan robes and are rarely so at ease with themselves. If Hollywood ever made a movie about him, someone chiseled and seductive and not resembling Tsoknyi Rinpoche would be cast in the role of Tsoknyi Rinpoche. Yet I was not disappointed, and only later did I realize why.
After the film’s showing, everyone showered Mark with compliments. Except for Tsoknyi, who instead got straight to the point. “Will the producer let you make the film you want?” he asked. “Will he let you make the best film you can?”
Mark sighed: “Probably not.” Mark confessed that, utterly discouraged, he had thought of throwing in the towel and going on a meditation retreat. Meditation is in Buddhism the cure for whatever ails you. Surely Tsoknyi would approve of Mark’s plans to exchange worldly frustrations for Buddhist repose.
But Tsoknyi never once referred to Buddhism; instead he entered into Mark’s knot of travail and attempted to untie that knot. Should the situation become unbearable, Tsoknyi said, you may have no choice but to drop it — but only for a little while. If Mark could alternate, in a pas de deux of now-off now-on, he would slip through the producer’s grasp and get done what needed to get done.4
Besides, a little ordeal was worth going through to show to the world an inspiring, extraordinary being — to reveal to the world extraordinariness.
The talk in the room now meandered, as it often does at parties, into gossip. A rebel rinpoche in Crestone named Yongzin was reportedly threatening to write a tell-all memoir, to sweep all the dirt about Tibetan Buddhism out from under the carpet. “Did this Yongzin,” Tsoknyi asked Mark, “suffer psychological wounds growing up?”
Mark: As a matter of fact, he did.
Tsoknyi: And has he healed them?
Mark: As a matter of fact, he hasn’t.
Tsoknyi: Then he has nothing to write about.
Miserable childhoods revisited (Augusten Burroughs, David Sedaris, Jeannette Walls) are the stuff of bestsellers, but bestsellers were not Tsoknyi’s domain. “I teach one thing only,” the Buddha declared, “the overcoming of suffering.” That was evidently what interested Tsoknyi.
As mentioned earlier, I had dressed up: black trousers and maroon shirt (just for fun — maroon’s the color a Tibetan lama wears). As he was leaving, Tsoknyi stopped, straightened my collar, and suggested: “You should wash your shirts more often.” Oh no, I hadn’t noticed its subdued carnival of previous spills. “Outside and inside,” he said, “reinforce each other.” Though his words could have sounded harsh, Tsoknyi immediately changed their tenor by adding, “In Tibet you would be considered a natural yogi.”
That night Tsoknyi’s actions suggested to me what a contemporary spiritual teacher might be. He or she is not some God-channeling, holy book–interpreting, truth-expounding, morality-upholding minister whom many of us remember from our childhoods. For a contemporary spiritual teacher, psychological acumen may take the place of a theological text, and instead of dogma we have undogmatic attention to the person at hand — as Tsoknyi had attended to Mark. Tsoknyi appeared to place life before religion, for only in that way did it become religion.
It had not always been this way. When he first came to this country, a quarter century back, Tsoknyi taught in the traditional manner. At an early retreat of his, a young woman in a tie-dyed dress had poured out her endless troubles to him. She was on the verge of suicide, she wailed, asking what she should do. Tsoknyi told her to look beneath her disturbed emotions, into the basic clear nature of mind. (Probably not very helpful — if she could do that, she wouldn’t have needed to be there.) Today Tsoknyi’s answer to such a person might be, “Did you take your meds?”
Just as Father Dave has shifted a religious approach from right creed (orthodoxy) to right experience (orthopraxy), so Tsoknyi has changed the what of religion (right and wrong, ethics, eschatology, etc.) into how (how to handle problems, how to counter fear and depression, how to psychologically activate our better nature). If the various faiths enlisted enough Father Daves and Tsoknyi Rinpoches, religion might never be the same again.
Interlude: A New Mantra, Followed by Lunch at the Bliss
Should you become interested in contemporary spirituality, first thing, go out and buy a life vest. For you may soon be drowning in a sea of platitudes: “each moment be mindful” or “live in the present” or “be positive, no matter what” (which, even when sound advice, gets worn thin). Tsoknyi had been so refreshing at the party because he expressed things I’d never heard before.
For instance? At one point he announced that he had a new mantra. “What is it, Rinpoche?” people eagerly asked. “What is your new mantra?” Tsoknyi said, “Simply this: It is real, but it is not true.” Frankly, I was perplexed. Weren’t real and true interchangeable?
The next day, heading into town to have lunch at the Bliss Café (then the one restaurant/bar/hangout in town), I continued to mull over that real-versus-true difference. I could make a little sense of it. Real: every day (when it’s not overcast) we can see the sun rise and the sun set; true: as the Earth circles the sun, there is neither rising nor setting. Probably all religions rely on this distinction between real (or relative) truth and absolute truth, in order to counter momentary obsessions that at the time seem only too real.
Here is a personal sort-of example.5 In reality, Washington, DC, is a better place for me to live. Arriving back in DC from Crestone, I land in every creature comfort and necessity, in deliciously oxygen-laden air, in more civilized temperatures, in the most politically liberal city in America and architecturally its handsomest. Yet in DC many people might as well wear blinders, so blinkered is their view of what’s existentially permissible, and in that constricted atmosphere I wind tighter and the unvoiced part of me grows more silent. In truth, Crestone is a better place for me to be, for it supports a wider spectrum of what constitutes a legitimate experience, and in that atmosphere I gradually shake free enough to hold less and less of myself back. The better reality versus the better truth: What to do?
