68 Billy

At first I felt defensive and I expressed skepticism regarding Billy's own involvement first with Chögyam Trungpa and then with Ösel Tendzin. Billy briefly summarized his years of practice. First with the help of books there were eight years of practicing daily zazen on his own; then, after reading The Myth of Freedom and Way of Meditation and hearing two talks by its author, Billy had begun the hinayana path; in 1986 he participated in a dathun, a month-long group meditation retreat; he took the vow of refuge and later the bodhisattva vow for the mahayana path. In 1988 he attended seminary, a three-month period of study and meditation practice. There he received the vajrayana "pointing out" instruction and began thirteen years of Tibetan ngöndro preliminary practices—prostrations, vajrasattva mantra, mandala, and guru yoga—and in 2001 he received the abhisheka for vajrayogini practice. Billy has since completed the recitations for that sadhana practice and his current Buddhist practice, he has informed me, is the chakrasamvara sadhana.

By comparison how simple seemed Zen—

Be kind and good.

Just sit.

In 1999 I was at a loss with his special vocabulary—ngöndro, dzogczen, visualizations, color projections, mahamudra—and online when I researched these new terms and concepts I was inundated by what seemed to be numberless stages, levels, obstacles, antidotes, and techniques. The Tibetans carried a huge toolbox, I learned, and soon I suffered from a painful sense of inferiority and wasted time. Indeed, I was distraught. All right, then, I would find a teacher! For the first time in twenty-five years I was in a hurry.

We corresponded about teachers.

Gurus.

"What do you think about the idea of devotion to the guru?" Billy asked me.

I was wary.

He had been reading The Rain of Wisdom, he said, a collection of ancient poems, songs, and dohas with a devotional tone—"a crying to the guru from afar" Billy called it—and he had found it touching. In his guru devotional practices, he said, he had found himself weeping. I hardly ever cried—thanks to my conditioning by my father when I was a child—for any reason.

In 1975 I had once wept for joy.

Enough.

"Devotion shows us our loneliness," Billy guessed.

He explained.

"At the same time it gives us the courage to explore that loneliness."

The discovery, he explained, is that everything, all experience, becomes guru mind. Billy said that he had met teachers who touched him deeply but that he felt he always held something back, a reaction related to his habit of deferring to the opinions of others. Either way, he thought, there was a neurotic quality to it.

"There is no comfortable place for me to rest," he said.

Billy wondered what I thought of all this—

Of his crying, too.

Hmm.

I did not know what to think.

I had not cried but two or three times in forty years, once during my awakening and once, unnaturally forced and awkward, because I thought I should cry when my father died.

My father had taught me not to cry.

"Stop that sniveling!"

But I had known many teachers, Billy himself was one, who I knew could inspire me to tears of gratitude and love if only I permitted myself such an indulgence and many friends and family, too, to whom I felt profoundly indebted. The fact was, however, that I had no official guru, no teacher of the kind to whom Billy referred. Just his confiding in me like this, however, so openly, so honestly, was an intimacy that now brought tears near my own eyes.

"The path of devotion seems to require letting go completely of your own thing," Billy wrote, "but how do I let go of my own 'precious' opinions without letting go of the direct intuition of my heart of hearts?"

I did think the religious or mystical experience required total surrender to something.

To what I was not sure.

Hmm.