“If it doesn’t work out, we can just get a divorce,” he said, trying to sound cavalier. He was caught up in the romanticism of the occasion and the fact that this beautiful woman, who had remained in his heart for ten years, was going to be his wife. He saw her as a deeply spiritual life partner, with high aspirations for mankind and the desire to create a community where the leading spiritual teachers and minds of the century could come together.
This, Max was certain, was to be the marriage that would give his life purpose.
Chapter Eighteen
The Tibetan Miracle
1996
IT WAS TWO SUMMERS AFTER THE WEDDING, AND MAX’S MARRIED bliss was already teetering.
Ever since she had returned to California, Grace had made it clear that this wasn’t where she wanted to be. Her dream home, she explained, was an estate in Virginia, and she constantly pressured him to move. But this was where MAXimum Productions was based, and it was Max’s company that kept her in the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed.
Despite her continued activities as a meditation teacher, Grace was the most self-absorbed person he had ever met. She had little-to-no interest in his career, and the things that fascinated him.
He tried to tell her about the Twelve, and she always started out interested, then feigned the need to do something very important. If he mentioned it again later, she had no idea what he was talking about.
She decided to go to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for a special retreat at the ashram of the only blue-eyed Tibetan nun in the world. The nun was Agatha Winright, who at age nineteen had gone to Tibet and been ordained. A few years later she realized that the celibate life wasn’t for her, found a compatible spiritual partner, married, and had four wonderful children, all while maintaining her Tibetan Buddhist practices.
She eventually raised enough money to purchase a four-hundred-acre tract of land outside Jackson Hole and founded Mandala Mandala as a retreat center for spiritual students. Agatha had announced that a famous Tibetan monk would be giving a special class at the end of August. This monk was six foot two inches tall—almost a foot taller than the average Tibetan. It was rumored that he had magical powers and could put his hand through boulders.
This was the kind of spiritual teacher Grace longed to meet, so she signed up immediately. She encouraged Max to participate, as well, but he was resistant.
She told him that she didn’t want to nag him into attending the retreat, but instead handed him a little blue book with the title Dzogchen Meditation. Max opened it up and read the first sentence.
The goal of meditation is not to meditate.
“Well, that’s a nice change,” he said wryly. “I might actually read this book.”
But Grace was undeterred.
“I think you’ll have a totally different take on meditation if you join me on the retreat,” she said.
Max wasn’t convinced, but he wanted to keep his wife happy and to show her that he was open-minded—if not eager—to learn a new discipline.
So, he paid the registration fee and soon he was headed to Jackson Hole with Grace to learn this meditation that would guide him toward not meditating. She tried to explain that the goal of not meditating was in essence to be meditating all the time, in every conscious and unconscious moment—what the Buddhists called mindfulness.
Eventually she gave up, but still Grace was ecstatic.
“I’m so glad you decided to come,” she cooed. “You’re going to love this retreat.”
Landing in Wyoming, they picked up a rental car at the airport and drove to the retreat center. It was hot and dusty, and the final three miles of road were unpaved, rutted, and challenging, even in their luxury car.
Max hadn’t been paying much attention to the accommodations, which he assumed would be rustic, and as they arrived, he saw signs that pointed toward campsites, and realization set in.
Max wasn’t the camping type—he had never set up a tent in his life. It was almost seven in the evening by the time they arrived and getting dark. Except for the flashlight that Grace had brought, there was no light.
Apparently the entire site was electricity-free.
Grace remained undaunted as she selected a campsite and directed Max in the proper way to erect a tent.
***
An hour later, frustrated and irritable, he and Grace joined the rest of the group in the main building, where the meditation classes were to be held. A warm-up meditation was about to begin, and Max and Grace were given pillows and told to follow along.
Fortunately for Max, it was a short, fifteen-minute sampler. Everyone else in the room had been meditating for five years or more, and after the session, everyone was asked to introduce themselves and express their goals for the retreat.
Most of the meditators were hoping to elevate their practices to the next level. Many felt they were close to reaching nirvana, or at least a state in which they had no attachment to their bodies or their senses or any thoughts related to normal human activity—something they called “Samadhi.”
Max was last, and when it came his turn to reveal his goals, he spoke frankly.
“I’m really just here to accompany my wife, Grace,” he admitted. “I know nothing about meditation, but she has been meditating for twenty years, and this is important to her. So here I am.”
This didn’t seem to sit too well with his new classmates, and from what he could gather, the retreat was only for advanced students. Many of them felt as if Max had slipped in as the spouse of an advanced student—it was rare that an advanced practitioner would be married to anyone who wasn’t similarly advanced or at least highly motivated.
Max resented the fact that he was being judged in this way. He saw it in the faces of the people around him—these so-called advanced students. It reminded him of the spiritual leaders he had met on his travels who refused to accept those who were different.
It was okay if you agreed with the doctrine they were practicing, he noted, but if not, your value as an individual was diminished. He hated the hypocrisy of it all and realized that was why he had never embraced any particular religious belief system. Max was on his own path of discovery and didn’t want to be distracted from the truth of who he was and the discovery of his true purpose.
The next person to speak was Agatha herself, the organizer and founder of the retreat center. She looked from one person to the next, engaging each with the kind of calmness that came from thirty years of meditating, and started speaking.
“We’ve had a change of instructors for the week,” she admitted. “I realize most of you came specifically for the opportunity to meet and meditate with Tulku Hanka. Unfortunately, the Chinese government has denied him the visa he needed to leave China, and he is unable to join us.”
A murmur rippled through the crowd, and she waited for it to subside, then continued.
“Tulku Rinpoche Chiba, founder of the Turquoise Convent in Nepal, will be taking his place. Tulku Chiba was coming anyway, since he was scheduled to perform the ceremonies to dedicate the new stupa, which will be finished this week. Tulku Chiba is the foremost authority on stupa ceremonies in the world.”
While he understood “Turquoise Convent,” he still couldn’t quite make out the names of the persons who seemed so very important to the crowd. Since there was no difference among them, as far as he was concerned, he just shrugged it off.
“He is also a great teacher,” Agatha continued, “so I hope you will find the retreat just as rewarding as if Tulku Hanka had been able to attend.”
Max had learned about stupa ceremonies when he was working on In Search of the Historical Jesus. A stupa was a round structure filled with sacred articles, such as pictures of the Buddha and relics made by monks, around which devoted Buddhists would circumambulate while making their prayers.
It was believed that a stupa was the physical representation of the Buddha on Earth, and actually drew Buddha’s energy to itself, then passed it along to those who fin
anced, built, maintained, and paid homage to it, as well as to those who prayed around it.
Despite her entreaties, the news that Tulku Hanka was unable to attend did not go over well with the attendees. They had paid good money and flown from all over the country specifically to meet with the tall monk of miracles.
This Tulku Chiba was no miracle monk.
Grace was the most vocal in expressing her disappointment.
“This really isn’t right,” she said loudly. “I came in part to interview Tulku Hanka for a book I intend to write. You should have let us know before we arrived.
“We’ll stay,” she continued, “but it’s more than disappointing.”
A rumble of agreement spread throughout the crowd, but before Agatha could respond, her husband walked into the retreat room and drew everyone’s attention.
“Who owns a car with license plate 4G 18VR?” he asked, speaking over the hubbub. “It’s parked on the campsite, and all cars must be parked in the special parking area only. This is sacred land and ecologically delicate. We must all honor it, so whoever owns that car, please move it immediately.”
The car belonged to Grace and Max, so off they went, and she was able to fume all the way back to the campsite, then from the campsite to the parking area, and then back to the tent.
It was past eleven by the time they returned and complaints or not, there was nothing left to do but go to sleep.
***
The next morning the teacher, or Rinpoche, as he was called throughout the retreat, arrived at the camp. He was a well-built man with a buzz cut and sharp Tibetan features and was dressed in a purple robe.
Rinpoche spoke only Tibetan—not a word of English—so he came with his own translator.
The sessions did not run on time, but once Max got used to the delays, the classes were more or less like any other college class. Much to his surprise, he found it amazingly interesting—at least on par with the best classes he had attended at Harvard and Yale. It was the first time since he had been banned from taking philosophy courses at Yale that he was genuinely stimulated by a professor.
Rinpoche, however, was better than the Yale professors. He didn’t merely ask questions such as: What is the shape of the universe? Or, what color is the universe? He also had the answers. But rather than simply reciting his own opinions, he seemed intensely curious to hear what people in the group thought.
Most of the attendees wouldn’t even volunteer an answer, but Max was used to participating . . . and being right. For some reason he said, he thought the universe was blue.
When he gave this answer, he was told that he was wrong and that he should go outside into the surrounding forest and meditate on the correct answer. He was told that Rinpoche would send for him when enough time had passed.
Max ended up spending more time in the forest than all the rest of the meditators combined.
He envisioned the universe shaped as a double helix. According to Rinpoche he was wrong.
Out to the forest he went.
He began to feel as if going to the forest was like wearing the dunce cap back in second grade and sitting on the stool in the corner of Miss Montaldo’s second-grade classroom where the other children would snicker.
But these meditators didn’t snicker, though some couldn’t help but smile at the frequency of his trips.
Nonetheless, this was serious business for the participants, and they did seem to appreciate that Max was engaged. Grace never went to the forest because she never volunteered any answers to Rinpoche’s questions, nor did most of the group. The nature of the teaching didn’t require being called upon, and no grades were being given out—other than the grade each participant might give himself or herself on the road to enlightenment.
***
Max learned many things, including the fact that their teacher had a wonderful sense of humor.
At the age of three, Rinpoche had been annointed as the lineage carrier of a great monastery in Tibet. At the age of six he was recognized as a tulku—or high priest—of a neighboring monastery. This was most unusual, since such appointments meant being discovered as the reincarnation of a past tulku, much as the dalai lamas are selected. It was rare indeed to be selected twice, as the reincarnation of two different enlightened souls, but apparently the Buddhist path allowed for such exceptional occurrences.
Even rarer, from Rinpoche’s perspective, was that both lineages he represented had enjoyed more than five hundred years of uninterrupted autonomy, then came crumbling down during his reign.
He was only fifteen when the Chinese—who had already invaded Tibet—decided to imprison all lamas and put them in the highest security prisons, in essence work camps situated in deep forested regions, where the prisoners were compelled to cut timber all day and then be tortured at night. The only other prisoners in the camps were murderers and others who had been condemned to death.
The guards came in the middle of the night and chose a lama or murderer, and more often than not the individual would never appear again. In the few cases when they were returned, they had been brutally beaten. Yet it would only be a matter of time before these tortured prisoners would be taken out again for questioning, and after every second questioning, they never returned.
“I actually was grateful to the Chinese for my incarceration,” Rinpoche explained through his translator. “It was like being in the highest lama university in the world. The Chinese had gathered up the wisest lamas from all over Tibet, and I learned from all of them. I was young and strong, and one of the best workers. So I remained low on the list of those to be tortured and executed.
“But of course, nothing was certain,” he continued. “When I meditated, I was able to meditate on the nature of impermanence in a way that I might never have experienced without the very real awareness that I might be killed in any instant.”
After fourteen years of hard labor, Rinpoche said, he had been released and made his way to Nepal, where he created a monastery for female nuns—mostly refugees from Tibet, many of whom had been beaten and raped by the Chinese conquerors. It was there that he had met Agatha and was invited to perform his sacred rituals for the dedication of the stupa.
He was from a lineage of Dzogchen Buddhists, who had combined the teachings of the Bon people—a shamanic tribe that existed in the mountains—with the teachings of Padmasambhava, the great Tibetan Buddhist master and founder of the religion. The Bon people had existed centuries before the Buddha, and were believed to have magical powers. The goal of Dzogchen Meditation was to be able to take “rainbow-body”—a designation used when a soul fulfilled the all-knowing, and could take any form at any time.
This was much like reaching a state of nirvana, but more colorful in that the subject was able to reincarnate at will as any entity or substance the soul might choose, whether as a bird, a mountain, a stream, a stone, an animal, another human, or the rainbow itself.
***
On the fifth day of classes it was time for the stupa dedication itself. The interpreter asked everyone to gather round and told the students that while everyone would participate in the chants, Rinpoche was going to need an assistant to help him with the ceremonies. This would be a great honor.
Max was the only one there who had no attachment to being chosen. Whether Rinpoche knew this or not, he ended up choosing Max.
While he still didn’t feel Rinpoche was enlightened, Max had come to like and respect Rinpoche. He had a disciplined work ethic that had him up at 4:00 a.m., giving private consultations, then teaching from 8:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., Most evenings he performed rituals in meditation huts, sheds, and cottages spread across the four-hundred-acre retreat center.
Max also liked the fact that Rinpoche was a confirmed meat-eater. He had mutton at almost every meal—usually in a nice curry with rice and vegetables—but always meat and a lot of it. This was refreshing for Max and somewhat amusing since Grace and most of her fellow vegetarian friends thought meat-eaters were automatical
ly condemned to one of the inner circles of hell.
For two full days, Max served as a kind of sorcerer’s apprentice. He would hold the tray upon which the sacred rice was placed, and hand sacred objects to Rinpoche, who would toss them among the gathering of students as he dedicated the objects to different sacred gods and goddesses.
When it came time for the lengthy recitation of precise rituals, it was Max who would turn the pages on the ancient scrolls, and many times a single ritual encompassed twenty or more pages, taking an hour or more to recite.
After each break, Max assumed that his time was done, but each and every time Rinpoche sought Max out. Before long he was caught up in the pageantry of the ceremonies. Time seemed to stand still during these rituals, and strange cloud formations would appear in the sky.
The attendees were convinced that the clouds were in the shape of the Buddha and were a sign that he was present. Max was less certain, but he did find a sense of familiarity in assisting Rinpoche, and even without words, he had a sense that they had formed a bond for life.
He still couldn’t meditate for more than twenty minutes without becoming seriously bored though.
***
When the ceremonies were completed, there was a great feast in which every kind of food—sweet and sour—was presented to the group, along with wines and other beverages. The theme of the feast was “one taste,” reflecting the concept that all is equal and that they shouldn’t prefer one food over another.
They weren’t supposed to look at the food on the plate, which servers kept refilling. There were no utensils, so each person would simply grab whatever he or she first touched. Max might find a sweet cookie in his hand along with a vegetable concoction of some kind or other unidentifiable delicacy. It was an adventure of sorts, and he enjoyed every minute of it.
The Twelve Page 14