175 Rosalie

I had kept my old friend, dharma brother, and teacher Billy informed of the many ups and downs of my relationship with the master. But, like my son Michael, and like my nephew Adam, too, Billy had not been as sympathetic as I had hoped and wished. In theory, at least, I knew Billy expected one on the path to be willing to risk both death and madness for the truth and, in theory at least, I imagined myself so willing. In November 2005 I received from Billy an excerpt of an interview by Andrew Cohen of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, a teacher in Shambhala, the organization founded by Chögyam Trungpa. The original source of the interview Billy had not cited but its title in the subject line of his message was "The Hired Assassin."

To the excerpt Billy added a note.

"I've always been interested in Dzongsar Rinpoche," Billy wrote, "although I have never been comfortable around him."

I read.

"What is the role of the guru and why is it so vital?" Cohen asks Dzongsar Rinpoche.

"You give up everything and then hire him to destroy your ego."

"You say the process that crushes your pride is something you ask for?" Cohen inquires.

"That is the idea—to dismantle your identity, everything," Dzongsar explains. "This is actually beyond abuse. Abuse exists only if you are clinging to transitory phenomena as real. If you don't, there's nothing to be abused. But it's difficult, really difficult."

"Some of the greatest gurus have the reputation for being the most fierce," Cohen suggests.

"Yes, they could do it because they had no agenda. They did not care what other people said, what other people thought. They cultivated this. But who has it today? No one. I may be a teacher but I do not have that kind of courage," Dzongsar admits, "because I love my reputation."

"Are you saying, then, that you hold back with your students?" Cohen asks.

"I do—always."

"Many western students are struggling with notions of hierarchy and authority and even with their faith in the possibility of enlightenment itself," Cohen remarks.

"In Eastern cultures there may be blind devotion," Dzongsar explains, "but the students do have an expectation. In Western cultures the students may be skeptical but there, too, there is expectation. Everybody wants to be happy," he says. "Enlightenment has nothing to do with happiness or unhappiness. That really is the source of all the misunderstanding."

"The goal is to be free from happiness and unhappiness?" asks Cohen.

"Yes—and it's really difficult."

Hmm.

Was this what I had done by asking the master to be my teacher—hired an assassin whose job was to crush my pride and destroy my ego? The master often explained and defended himself by saying that he was simply being fully and spontaneously himself.

I had to say, though, I told Billy, that for the master I thought that this—like his frequent remark that to him everything was a matter of life and death—was more aspiration than reality. To the master his reputation was very important, I told Billy, and I did mean reputation in the conventional sense. I cited another of the master's favorite sayings.

"Ordinary beings look at buddhas and see ordinary beings."

That's half.

Then—

"Buddhas look at ordinary beings and see buddhas."

Yes.

I liked this observation, too, I said, but I didn't think anyone at the temple would say that the master was a man who looked at ordinary beings and saw buddhas. Potential buddhas, yes, but that was a much different matter. Yet all of this kind of discrimination, I conceded, was of course clear evidence that I was hopelessly lost in samsara and, I acknowledged to my old friend, I was really not nearly so interested in the issue of the enlightened teacher as I had been just five years before. The master had never in any way ever suggested that he was himself a fully realized buddha; he'd never suggested even that he himself was enlightened—indeed the master had done his best to define entirely out of existence the whole concept of an enlightened being—and his own ordinariness seemed to me in fact his great strength. Think not of enlightened beings, the master often advised, but of enlightened acts, a helpful view indeed, though the literature is replete with references to enlightened beings.

Masters.

Hm.

I liked the guy.

But—

The war and the killing go on and on, I wrote, more to myself than to Billy, and not I, not my dear friend Billy, not Kudo, not the Sakyong, not the Dalai Lama, not Thich Nhat Hanh, not all of the buddhas and bodhisattvas past, present, and future, not the devas, not the angels, not the saints, not the living Jesus himself, I said, are able to stop it nor, it often seemed, even to slow it down. One guru I read a while back—I forget which—said that the industrial killing did not matter and that it did not matter even if a nuclear holocaust did occur and millions more were killed; and an understanding similar to that—life and death are a dream—did appear to me to be the perspective of a fully enlightened being.

Twain:

These things are all impossible except in a dream. They are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, they are a dream and you the maker of it. There is no god, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you and you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.

But when an ordinary Joe like me felt that way, I feared, it was just plain old ordinary nihilism. Just a few years before—or had it been five—my wife Ruth and I had visited my Aunt Rosalie in Littleton and one night, as I remember, I was talking Buddhism and Ruth was talking Catholicism while Rosalie just sat and listened. Finally my aunt announced:

"My religion is be kind and my church is whoever I'm with."

Ho!

"I've probably told you that story before," I apologized to my friend Billy.

I tell it often.

"I go round and round in the same old circles these days," I added.

"Is your aunt accepting new students?" Billy inquired.

Months passed.