Читать книгу Wisdom in Exile - Lama Jampa Thaye - Страница 12

Chapter 1

Meetings

It’s 21^st June 1974, and I’m standing in the doorway of the Buddhist Society in London, a big fine Georgian town house close to Victoria Station. On one side of me is a young Tibetan lama, Chime Rinpoche, and, on the other, is His Honour Judge Christmas Humphreys QC, the President of the Society, and an imposing figure as befits an Old Bailey judge. We are there to greet His Holiness the 41^st Sakya Trizin, the twenty-eight-year-old head of the Sakya tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, on his first visit to England. The Buddhist Society and the Tibet Relief Fund have organised a reception in his honour, and Rinpoche has told me I can tag along.

After a few minutes, His Honour turns to Rinpoche, wanting to check the title of the person he is to welcome. At that same moment, a car pulls up and out steps His Holiness with an easy smile. He’s accompanied by a couple of monks and two European ladies.

After we have shuffled upstairs to the reception room, Mr Humphreys delivers a speech of welcome, during which he highlights at length his part in the forming of the Society back in 1924 and his own unique role as the first person in history to discern the twelve essential principles of Buddhism. Discreet mention is also made of the President’s deep friendship with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, to whom His Honour had been able to impart much sage advice. As the speech goes on, my mind drifts back to my very first visit to a Buddhist Society function some three years earlier. An English monk, the Venerable Pannavadho, had presided over the celebrations of Buddha’s birthday, but, although Pannavadho himself was eminently serious and the Society’s members were obviously sincere, it didn’t seem like much of a celebration to me at the time. My companion’s head was exploding and we had to make it out of there fast. The place, all mahogany and boredom, was so stuffy, I could hardly breathe.

My English Literature teacher, Mr Campbell, had set me on this road. It was 1966, and I was fourteen years old, a pupil at a Catholic Grammar school in the northern English city of Manchester: a grey place in a grey time. It was still the aftermath of the Second World War. British society was only just emerging from the hardness of those years, but something was active in the culture that would, among other things, help open a door for Buddhism. It was at the end of a class on Julius Caesar when this mighty colossus of a schoolmaster told me that someone who admired Bob Dylan as much as I did would certainly like Jack Kerouac: and so it turned out. I entered the world of the ‘Beat Generation’ writers through his books like On the Road and Dharma Bums, immediately realising that Dylan had been there already. Even more importantly, although Kerouac’s work was tinged with a working-class Catholic sensibility with which I was very familiar, I discovered Buddhism there. I knew right away that I had found my way home.

While I was somewhat devout as a child, I already had a sense that the God of Catholicism was just too small. Whatever blessings and spiritual power had existed in the Church seemed to have evaporated long ago. Although in my early years I had felt repeated experiences of bliss and light, I couldn’t connect them with anything I heard at church or in school. As time went by, I started to have powerful experiences where names, thoughts, and even time itself, seemed to be utterly empty. It was a world – the real world – from which one might return as an exile to the shadowy world of everyday life, but which would always be there. I could barely speak of these experiences, and any attempt to articulate them was useless, although I tried.

After a while, I gave up trying. I didn’t expect anybody, whether my parents, teachers or priest, to understand, and they did not. Now, through Kerouac’s words, I heard of the luminous emptiness that is the heart of all things. At last I had some context for my experiences, and I would be a Buddhist from that moment on. Yet six years would pass before I would start to practise it seriously.

Instead, imagining that I might find Buddhism, I came in at the tail end of the Beat Generation. It was really long over, even in Greenwich Village, its original location, and San Francisco, the places you might find some fading echoes of the Beats, but I tried to pick up their trail in the coffee houses of Manchester. There were a few poets around, and a guy who was rumoured to sell peyote, but there wasn’t much else. By the end of 1967, I had made it as far as London, visiting the Arts Lab in Covent Garden and Indica bookshop on Southampton Row, ground zero of the ‘underground’ scene, where I bought a copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Right around the corner was a shop selling Japanese incense. In the back room there was somebody called Sangharakshita, who was busy founding his own school of Buddhism. I didn’t go in that back room, though – karma, I guess.

Although I left home and school a year later, still chasing the visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder and the other Beat writers, I never really found what I had imagined would be there. From time to time, I met people who were searching for the same things. A few of them are still around today, but, as the years slipped by, that world grew darker. Sooner or later, everything became drugs or politics, and, after a while, I discovered that I wasn’t really all that interested in either of them. Thinking back over this period of the so-called ‘Alternative Society’, it seems to me now that the same message that some heard as meaning that one should become ‘free from self’, others heard as indicating that one should ‘free the self’. One way leads to Buddha, and the other to Aleister Crowley or Mao Tse Tung. Perhaps it was easy to confuse them in those days.

Eventually, I had to admit that there was nothing truthful in those places: just the ravenous self-love that roars out today in the million locations that make up contemporary culture. Some of us may have started from the right spot, but we were now on a wide road that led only downwards. As for the Beats themselves, they were long gone. I would meet up with Allen Ginsberg, though, several years later. By then, he was a disciple of Trungpa Rinpoche, one of the first popularisers of Tibetan Buddhism in the United States.

It was in late 1972 that I came in from the wilderness and started to get serious about Buddhism. Initially I practised in the Theravada tradition, where I met the wise old-timer Russell Williams and the scholar Lance Cousins. However, within a couple of years, I had found the two Tibetan lamas who would be my masters for life: His Holiness the 41^st Sakya Trizin (1945– ) and Karma Thinley Rinpoche (1931– ). Thanks to them, over the next several decades, I received some of the elements of a traditional Buddhist education, primarily the contemplative and philosophical teachings of the Sakya and Kagyu schools.

In the meantime, my academic life began in 1973, when, two months after meeting Karma Thinley Rinpoche, I embarked upon a degree in Religious Studies at the University of Manchester. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it would eventually stretch to a BA, a PhD, and twenty years of teaching at the two universities in Manchester. I was trained there as a historian of religions by such eminent professors as Trevor Ling. However, I have to confess that academic work was just a way to support my Buddhist studies, practice and retreats. It’s not, incidentally, that I think that such academic scholarship isn’t worthy of respect, but I just didn’t want to get too caught up in it. I had other things to do.