Читать книгу The Buddha Book: Buddhas, blessings, prayers, and rituals to grant you love, wisdom, and healing - Lillian Too - Страница 8

Since then I have embraced Lama Kyabje Zopa Rinpoche as my spiritual guide and teacher. It was a meeting I should have anticipated, but when you really do not know anything about lamas and past lives, this is not something you could realize.

There had been many signs, but I was blind to them. Most telling had been my dreams, of which the most significant was one of two white tigers, which I later discovered were in fact snow lions. These heralded the appearance of the guru into my life, although I was unaware of this. Then there had been the continuous mental images that came to me – images of some distant time, up in the Himalayan mountain range and on the stone-cold floor of a monastery. Later I would understand them to be flashes of memory, but when they first came into my consciousness they meant nothing to me. It was only when I saw pictures and actually went to the Solu Khumbu region in the Himalayas that I recognized the place. Those revelations blew my mind, but even then I bent over backward not to “reach” out. I kept dismissing the coincidences as fancy imagination on my part – until I met Rinpoche, and felt the momentous impact of that up-close moment.

For a year after that personally historic meeting, I flew around the world chasing Buddhas – I went from India to Taiwan to the United States, and eventually to Kathmandu and the Himalayas, to the high mountains of the Solu Khumbu region and a village called Lawudo. I am now convinced that in a past life I lived there with Rinpoche – at a time when he was the Lawudo Lama, a living Buddha who manifested as a meditator-teacher living in retreat in a cave in the high mountains. Few knew him for what he really was, until the time came for his passing on.

Only at his death did the Lawudo lama reveal the enlightened mind that had resided in his enlightened body. For twelve days and nights the signs appeared – rainbow clouds, blue skies, and the sounds of angels singing. After he had been cremated, nothing of the bones of his holy body remained among the ashes, save a precious jewel. This sparkling jewel was subsequently returned to his family … and then the people of that region came to regard the Lawudo lama as an enlightened being. But there was much more to his kindness, for the stunning sequel of that magnificently divine passing was his reincarnation: the Lawudo lama came back.

He reincarnated into the body of the young Zopa Rinpoche, and from the moment he could talk he made known who he was, persistently pointing to the old Lawudo lama’s cave and insisting that was his cave. Buddhists know that “divine happenings” always occur as if they are common-day occurrences, with little excitement and no fanfare. That is how it happened with the Lawudo lama’s reappearance in the human realm – but, instead of coming back as a meditator living in a remote cave, this time he took the form of a humble monk. He easily passed all the tests that eventually led to his recognition and enthronement as the reincarnation of the Lawudo Lama. As a young tulku (reincarnate lama), Rinpoche spent some years in Tibet getting a monastic education, before being forced to flee to India when the Chinese invaded in 1959.