Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  Every day I would take a walk down Ten Mile Road, a dirt road that led from the main square away from the other side of town where the Himalayan Hotel was set, and I found out that Tharchin lived on that very road. Of course he was well-known locally, so he wasn’t hard to find. I found the best time to visit him was right at teatime, about four in the afternoon. He had a fairly large house above Ten Mile Road, where one of his housekeepers would open the door and let me into his bedroom. He would be napping in a large bed with two or three dogs and again as many grandchildren. Once we had met, this kind of informality between us was normal. He would wake up the moment I was in the room, the dogs and children would scatter, and he would pick up a conversation we had been having the day before as if it had hardly been interrupted by yesterday’s departure and today’s arrival. He certainly knew a lot about Tibetan politics and history, and he had been with Bernard every minute of the latter’s time in Tibet.

  Tharchin added his own personal slant to what appeared in Bernard’s books and journals. Bernard had disappeared somewhere in the area of Ladakh in 1947 on one of his many pilgrimages. I asked Tharchin for any details he might know. It was during the violent days following the partition of India into India and Pakistan, and it seemed clearly a case of Bernard’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, there was some doubt about his death: his body was never recovered and no reliable eyewitnesses were found at the time. Tharchin told me that he got in touch with the local police where Bernard had last been seen. They claimed to have his belongings, clothes, and some personal effects, and they believed he had been killed by a weapon of some kind and his body swept away in a fast-moving nearby river. Tharchin was convinced by the evidence and left it at that. The strange thing was that Bernard had been settled in Kalimpong and planning a study period there with some geshes—the western equivalent would be “doctors of philosophy”—including Geshe Wangyal. He had left to avoid the rainy season, which he found disagreeable and, wandering west, had been caught by the Muslim-Hindu violence that was raging, particularly in the valley near Ladakh he had been visiting. From the beginning his life had many strange twists to it and it ended the same way.

  JoAnne and I were not in Kalimpong very long before we were directed to the Tharpa Chöling Monastery (Tharpa Chöling means “the Place of Liberation”). I had been asking around if there were yogis living in the area, though truthfully, I had not as yet had much success. Still, I had continued making routine inquiries as we traveled. At the monastery we were welcomed by some of the monks to look at the wall paintings and I asked if there was a yogi residing at the monastery. We had almost no common language between us, but the word “yogi” is always understood. One monk nodded his head and pointed to a house on the road at the edge of the monastery compound.

  After months of traveling around India and Nepal, I was in no hurry to knock on another door, but after a little while, I did just that. I was shown into a small waiting room and, after a few minutes, into another, larger ceremonial room to find myself in the presence of Tomo Geshe Rimpoche, a young man about my age (his birthday turned out to be ten days before mine, and in the same year) dressed in extremely simple maroon robes. He and I spent a few minutes together with barely enough words between us to talk at all, but I understood that I should come back the next day, and this time a translator would be waiting.

  At that very moment I knew that my search was over. I didn’t need an explanation or a sign of any kind, though perhaps there were some but not easily described. It was all very surprising and I did not know what to make of it. The young man didn’t say very much to me, but I understood through the little I knew at the time that he was a practitioner of the kinds of esoteric practices and traditions in which I was interested. Finally, I had found a doorway that would open the unseen world to me.

  The next morning, Tomo Geshe Rimpoche himself welcomed me in the same room and introduced his translator, a middle-aged man in yellow robes named Rinzing Wangpo. I later found out the interpreter was known in the region as “the Yellow Monk,” though in fact he wasn’t a monk who had any affiliations at all. He had lived an ordinary life as a layperson with a wife and a daughter and then in middle age had taken (unofficially) monk’s vows and began wearing yellow robes. He was not a scholar or solitary practitioner—just a man who decided, late in life, to become a monk. He didn’t even belong to a monastery. He lived alone in a one-room apartment in the town. One of the odd and unexpected parts of his story is that the Tibetans loved him—monks and laypeople alike—and I immediately liked him, too.

  Rinzing Wangpo’s English was quite good and over the next week we met often with Tomo Geshe Rimpoche, discussing what kind of work I could do with him. I was invited to come and stay as his guest in his home, not the monastery. Geshe Rimpoche, as I began to call him, wanted me to begin a study of the Tibetan language, and he said that he would begin to learn English. I also made a commitment to visit him regularly. He was planning his first visit to America. He told me that he expected to be in the States at some point with a traveling exhibit of thangkas from Tibet House in New Delhi, a combination library and cultural center.

  I was slowly beginning to realize that he was far from an ordinary lama, but, instead, a man venerated by many and admired by almost all who knew him in the Tibetan community. As previously mentioned, in his “former body” he had been the spiritual inspiration and adviser to Lama Govinda and had been the very Rimpoche who was featured in The Way of the White Clouds, a book that I had already read. I discovered all this during the next several weeks, before JoAnne and I began our return to Europe.

  “What would you like to do?” Rimpoche asked me.

  “I’d like to learn from you what you are willing to teach me,” I said.

  Rimpoche paused as if in thought, then continued.

  “Normally, you would have to be here for months and weeks, and there would be all kinds of tests of your commitment and interest. However, I understand that you’ve come from very far away to be here. It was a difficult journey and somehow you found your way here, and that tells me that these other preliminaries will be unnecessary in your case. We can start any time you want.”

  We began with very simple things, such as making a commitment to follow the teachings of the Buddha. More developed practices would follow—things that are familiar to people in that tradition such as mantras, visualizations, texts, and so forth. In order to prepare for the practices, the mind has to be settled and quiet. It has to be free of the ordinary disturbances of the day. A typical method is through counting the breath, which can be done in many ways. The Indian yogis, for example, like to bring the breath through the right nostril and to exhale through the left nostril, and then alternate by bringing the breath through the left and exhaling through the right. This very basic practice is usually the first thing that is taught. Breathing is not the only way of bringing the mind to a state of attention. Walking is another. A walk of attention can bring one to a similar state.

  These practices, though very simple at the outset, when extended and developed by the practitioner will remain right up through advanced teachings. There will always be meditation; there will always be breathing; there will always be focusing of the mind; and very often, in most traditions, there will be visualizations. These techniques are not secret—they are described in detail in many books—but Geshe Rimpoche taught them to me through the power of oral transmission. It is a conviction of many traditions that transmission doesn’t happen through a book but must be received in person from a qualified teacher.

  Transmission is the beginning of acquiring. It can lead to strategies and even the ability to visualize this other world that I had read about. It’s not an easy thing to do, and I can’t claim to have done very well by it. However, people who are adept can go very far. I have had two of the very best teachers in Tomo Geshe Rimpoche and, beginning in 1987, Gelek Rimpoche, another Tibetan Buddhist teacher to whom I was introduced by Geshe Rimpoche. Ev
en with the best teachers, and with a clear desire and commitment, what I’ve acquired is limited. Remember, there I was at the age of twenty-nine, almost thirty, meeting the first real teacher in that tradition. These Rimpoches are men who began training when they were six years old or younger, and to catch up to that level is a daunting exercise. It would be a great deal to accomplish in such a short time.

  The eagerness I had to understand these things had led me to travel overland from Europe all the way to the foothills of the Himalayas. I had been on the road for weeks to do that, without much money, and in all I spent four months on that journey. When Geshe Rimpoche told me that because of what I had done, I had exhausted the preliminaries, he surely must have possessed some insight into my motivation.

  I never thought, Oh, this is a wild goose chase, or What am I doing here? I was on the trail of something. The motivation was very deep and it had to do with, as I called it, an eagerness, a desire for understanding, and finally I had found access to it. From my first visit in January 1967, the month and year of my thirtieth birthday, I began, through Tomo Geshe Rimpoche, a relationship with another lineage of work that continues to this day. I see these many interests that I have taken up and kept alive as powerful threads—or themes, if you like—that together make up a real and recognizable totality.

  Over the next thirty-five years, I made many short trips to India—probably twenty visits in all—each usually for two to four weeks. Many of them included a stop in Kalimpong, but not every one. India is a very big country, much like the United States in its size and diversity of populations. From the beginning, I knew that only by planning many short trips would I be able to develop my professional and family life in New York and, at the same time, cultivate my connection to India in general, Indian music especially, and, above all, my connection to the culture and tradition that Geshe Rimpoche represented in his own person.

  In the early 1970s, when Geshe Rimpoche was getting his green card to stay in the United States, I found a lawyer who offered to donate his services pro bono. I took Geshe Rimpoche to the lawyer’s office, where a very nice young man said he would fill out the papers.

  “Now tell me,” the lawyer said, “what is it that you teach?”

  Very quietly, Geshe Rimpoche replied, “Mind training.”

  “You teach what?”

  “Mind training.”

  And that’s what he taught, sometimes in a very vivid way. On one occasion in the 1980s, I was visiting him at his upstate New York home and we were were sitting at the table having tea.

  “Be careful of Sindu,” Geshe Rimpoche said, pointing to his dog. “He’s going to be under the table. Be sure you don’t kick him. He fools around under there and you might accidentally kick him.”

  “No, no, don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going to kick the dog. I would never think of kicking him.”

  Yet less than a minute later, boom! I accidentally kicked the dog.

  At that very same instant, Geshe Rimpoche clutched his side in pain. He bent over as though he himself had been kicked in the ribs.

  I don’t know how he set this up—I actually think he and the dog had worked it out, so that virtually within seconds, I had kicked the dog.

  He didn’t see me kick the dog, but he was such a master of compassion that he somehow felt the dog’s pain immediately.

  This is very typical of how Tomo Geshe Rimpoche taught.

  Through Geshe Rimpoche I made a connection to Phintso Thonden, the head of the office of Tibet in New York. Part of my commitment was to study the language, and I began with the Tibetans. There wasn’t anyone else teaching, so I studied with Phintso Thonden’s wife Pema, who for more than three years was my Tibetan language teacher. I had just come from learning French at the Alliance Française and the Institut Phonétique, so I had the tools to notate the language, in terms of getting the sounds right. I had no books, however, so we did conversation. Pema would say, “How are you?” in Tibetan and I would answer, in Tibetan, “Very well, thank you.” After a few years, my Tibetan, at one point, was quite passable, but in recent years and through lack of regular practice, a lot of it has been lost.

  Another close friend of Geshe Rimpoche was Khyongla Rato Rimpoche, a Tibetan monk and scholar living in New York. I had the great pleasure of helping with the establishment of his teaching center, the Tibet Center, there. Also, I began making weekly visits to Freehold, New Jersey, to the teaching center of Geshe Wangyal, the same lama who had been in Kalimpong only a few years earlier. I was not one of the brilliant young American students who, along with Robert Thurman, Alexander Berzin, and Jeffrey Hopkins formed the first wave of American translators and teachers in America, though I knew them all (and Geshe Wangyal, too) from my visits to New Jersey. I was there to take lessons from Ken Rimpoche, an elderly Tibetan gentleman who had come to New Jersey at the invitation of Geshe Wangyal. My lessons were astonishing and concrete. Using the Charles Bell Tibetan-English dictionary, Ken Rimpoche gave me the task of learning the correct pronunciation of every Tibetan word in the dictionary—a most difficult but surprisingly useful, if not always illuminating, exercise. Those meetings lasted about one and a half years before he returned to India.

  The last and certainly one of the most important meetings Tomo Geshe Rimpoche arranged for me was with Gelek Rimpoche, the old friend of his from Lhasa who moved to the States in the 1980s and is the founder and spiritual leader of the Jewel Heart organization. Tomo Geshe Rimpoche was what was called a “heart teacher,” and there is another kind of teacher that’s called a “text teacher.” These kinds of teachers can teach both ways, but if you have a heart teacher, he won’t teach you the text, you’ll have to go somewhere else to do the texts. This is an old-fashioned way of doing it, I think, and that’s how it happened with me.

  Tomo Geshe Rimpoche told me, “If you want to learn the texts and study, then you have to go see Gelek Rimpoche. He can teach you that.” In this way, I began studying with Gelek Rimpoche, who, for me, is one of the most brilliant minds I have ever encountered. Geshe Rimpoche died in September 2001 but I remain very close to Gelek Rimpoche.

  AS I MENTIONED, MY THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY, in January 1967, found me in Kalimpong. Soon, JoAnne and I would begin our return to New York by way of Paris. While we were waiting for a jeep to take us down the hill to the railroad station at Siliguri, a young Tibetan boy wanted to show me a thangka. By then we were getting too low on cash to risk another purchase, but he wouldn’t give up and wanted to know if I had anything to trade. He spotted my little transistor radio and said that would be fine. At first I wouldn’t make the swap, because I knew the radio was on its last legs and would soon need to be repaired. He then assured me that he was completely capable of making any repairs himself. I finally relented and accepted the trade. This had all happened at his home, and then JoAnne and I returned to the marketplace. Less than twenty minutes later he ran into the square and found us in a jeep all loaded and ready to leave. He had a pair of fur-lined boots and told me that he felt very bad about getting too much the better of us in the swap. He pressed the boots on us, refusing to leave until they were accepted.

  On our way to Bombay, clear across the country, there were some very long train rides. Once we arrived, we found good accommodations at the Salvation Army. For thirty rupees a day a couple could have a room and three (vegetarian) meals. If you counted the four p.m. tea—which we never missed—that made four meals. The energy and beauty of Bombay attracted us, and we decided to stay on for a few days.

  By good luck, JoAnne was hired to play a part in an Indian film. No doubt her blond hair and obvious Western appearance got her the job. That went on for a week, while I happily strolled around on my own. The Salvation Army was on a little street right behind the Taj Mahal Hotel, where the Beatles were said to be staying. I was also told that Raviji was there, but I didn’t look him up at that moment because there was a huge amount of security around the hotel that arrived with the Beatles. I guessed that I
wouldn’t even make it to the front desk. Nearby was not only the Prince of Wales Museum, which had a beautiful collection of Indian miniatures, but also a number of antique stores, where sure enough, I found a set of three thangkas for sale at a ridiculously low price. Nowhere in India had I found anyone who understood their value, the Tibetans being such fresh arrivals.

  Once the film work was over, we booked passage on a liner from the fleet of Messageries Maritimes, a French company that had a line of ships that traveled between Vietnam and France, Marseille being the first European port. The ship had only two classes, cabin and steerage. The cabins were taken up entirely by ourselves and men who had served with the French Foreign Legion. We found them to be odd but friendly, and a hard-drinking bunch. There were no Frenchmen among them. The stories I had heard—of men escaping their past by giving up their normal citizenship and identity and joining the Foreign Legion—were, as far as I could tell, completely true. However, for the four or five days we spent together, they were very good company. The Indian passengers were all below deck and seemed to be overcome by seasickness the moment they boarded the ship. In any case, we didn’t see them until, five days later, we arrived in Europe.

  In contrast to our outbound voyage, the route back was very straightforward. We crossed the Arabian Sea, through the Gulf of Aden, which took us past Yemen, Somali, and Djibouti then up the Red Sea to the Suez Canal. We passed Alexandria, Egypt, and crossed the Mediterranean Sea, docking at last in Marseille. I don’t remember any day stops at all on the way. From there we traveled by train to Paris, staying there only a few days to collect our belongings and repack our bags. The timing was good and we left for Le Havre a few days later, where we began, at last, our long transatlantic passage back home.