Big Love Excerpt
October-December 2011
FPMT HISTORY
Chinese troops beneath the Potala Palace, 1951. © Tibet Images
Big Love, the long-awaited authorized biography of Lama Yeshe, provides an intimate portrait of not only FPMT’s founder, but of the earliest students that placed their trust in him. This excerpt is taken from the chapter chronicling Lama Yeshe’s life after he fled Tibet in 1959 and made his way to Buxa Duar, India – a former prisoner-of-war-camp that became home for hundreds of Tibetan refugees.
Many Tibetans arrived in India suffering from starvation and exhaustion. On top of this, hundreds of Tibetans suffered dreadfully from the change in diet. Tibetans were used to a diet of barley, meat, and butter, but now they were forced to eat rice, dhal,1 and potatoes. That, together with exposure to a myriad of new parasites and bacteria, brought about an epidemic of amoebic dysentery and other serious diseases among the refugees. Thubten Yeshe was among those who suffered from the change in diet: “We had rice and dhal every day … no variety. How I hated the smell! My stomach was so bad, I had diarrhea for months. But slowly, gradually, I adjusted.”
Bacterial infections, skin diseases, intestinal parasites and tuberculosis raged through the camps. Poisonous snakes lived inside the hollow bamboo, and the summer heat was a torment. Disease was a serious problem at Buxa throughout all the years the monks resided there. As well, some suffered severe depression and succumbed to mental illnesses. Many had left Tibet thinking that they would soon be able to return. When they realized that this was unlikely, many fell into even deeper melancholy and depression, losing all hope and becoming overwhelmed with despair. Some suffered constant anxiety, afraid of the potentially harmful spirits of those who had once been executed there. The environment at Buxa – the prisoner-of-war-camp atmosphere created by concrete block buildings and barbed wire fences – was itself oppressive. Several monks even committed suicide.
In Tibet, many young men had become monks simply because it was traditional to do so. Now that the monasteries were no longer able to support them as they had before, many of these monks disrobed and entered lay life. Others may have felt so shattered by their traumatic experiences that nothing made sense any more, including their ordination as Buddhist monks. For many, however, the difficulties they were experiencing only strengthened their renunciation, their dedication to their practice of the Dharma. Those monks who were determined to maintain their ordination were fiercely committed to their studies. One monk was quoted as saying, “All I thought of was debating. What I had debated yesterday, with whom and how and what I was going to debate tomorrow. If it rained, I worried that the debating sessions might be cancelled!”2
In the new monastic refugee communities, religious texts were in desperately short supply. The 108 volumes of scriptures recording the actual teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha himself (known as the Kangyur) and the 227 volumes of commentary to these teachings composed by the great Indian masters (the Tengyur), as well as the various collections of works by Tibetan masters, are the tangible heart of the Buddhist teachings. They help to ensure the purity of the teaching lineages passed down from the Buddha himself to his disciples, from them to their disciples, and so on to the lineage holders of the present day. To recreate this written Buddhist canon was of the highest priority for all the refugee monks and nuns. The main concern of all these scholars and practitioners was to acquire texts. They knew that the survival of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition depended on them and took their responsibilities very seriously. Young monks would copy a few pages or entire texts by hand on whatever paper – itself a precious commodity – they could find. Scriptures and study texts were handwritten on the strong paper wrappers that butter came in or the wrappers from cans of donated powdered milk from the U.S. Eventually, the monks bought an old, extremely labor-intensive Indian printing press. Some time later, the American Emergency Committee for Tibetan Refugees under the leadership of the American adventurer and writer, Lowell Thomas,3 provided funding for lithographic presses. The monks were finally able to start producing properly printed texts.
In Tibet there had always been a certain amount of rivalry between the various schools, monasteries and colleges, but those at Buxa considered themselves to be members of one big family. Drawn together in one place were some of Tibet’s most distinguished teachers.4 Geshe Ngawang Legden, a senior monk from Sera Je who had settled in the cooler mountain climes of Dharamsala and who would in the future become abbot of Sera Je, received a letter from his students at Buxa requesting his teachings. In response, he returned to Buxa to help them.
An Unusual Decision
Sometime after settling in Buxa, Thubten Yeshe, the model student, suddenly developed some unusual ideas. Later, he explained, “In Tibet I was educated in philosophy and had done much study, but there had been very little time for me to digest it all. When I got to Buxa, I decided I wanted to isolate myself, to do more retreat. For nearly five years, I only did retreat. I didn’t engage in study anymore because I thought life was just too short. I thought, ‘Now I am in this unknown place and maybe in a few months I too will vanish!’
“My friends noticed that I no longer attended classes; they begged me to continue my studies, but I told them I was not interested. They were so shocked! They said I was making a mistake, but they never thought I was being lazy. Jampa Gyatso and others in my class would come to my room and asked me to give up the retreats, but retreat felt right for me. No one else could know my needs. In the dormitory we were bed by bed, and people wanted to talk and talk. Sometimes I felt like I was suffocating there; at other times I’d just lie down and pretend to be asleep, in order to find some peace and quiet. Sometimes I would just go outside into the jungle.
“Actually, in most of my big decisions my friends have always advised the opposite to what I wanted to do. I guess I am stubborn, or skeptical. But I also feel that I have some intuitive intellectual understanding. In my thoughts I feel certain, clean-clear. I had no regrets or guilt about my decision, but it was a revolutionary thing to give up study just like that. But if, after checking up, I feel that something is 100 percent right, then nothing can stop me. That is my character. It’s not at all that I chose an easier way of life. So I just dropped out.”
By this time Thubten Yeshe’s class was beginning to study the vinaya, the rules of monastic discipline. It was a most unorthodox step for a monk trained in orthodoxy since the age of six to skip the vinaya studies. In the room next to his, however, a young monk loudly recited the vinaya text every night, and Thubten Yeshe listened, thinking deeply on its meaning.
On the fateful day of March 20, 1959, Geshe Sopa left Sera Monastery with Khamlung Rinpoche, Gen Tamdin Rabten and his companion, Gonsar Tulku, and another geshe. (Tamdin Rabten didn’t receive his Geshe degree until 1964, but out of respect for his qualities, he was known as Gen, “teacher,” until then.) As Khamlung Rinpoche and Gonsar Tulku were both from wealthy families, they were able to obtain horses and considerable assistance on the journey to India. After two months at Missamari, they were sent to Dalhousie. There was constant traffic between Buxa and the new seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile nearby, and Geshe Sopa was delighted to hear that Thubten Yeshe was safe.
One day Geshe Sopa received a letter from him. As Geshe Sopa recalled, “Thubten Yeshe wrote asking whether it was better to finish his studies or go and meditate in a quiet place, without all these hundreds of people around and so many meetings to attend. He wrote to me, ‘Now I have no interest in staying and studying philosophy. The water and food here is not good for me. I really want to leave and go to some hermitage. So please, may I go?’
“It seemed he was not very healthy. I replied telling him that since it was so rare to have such an opportunity to study the Dharma, it was better not to leave but to continue studying until he became a geshe. I heard that he kept that letter all his life.”
Geshe Sopa also reminded Thubten Yeshe of the urgent need for teachers. He advised him to end his retreats and not to turn his back on his students. “His letter touched my heart,” said Thubten Yeshe. “I immediately started memorizing the vinaya texts. Its outline is so mathematically profound that in one month I was able to memorize a huge amount. Geshe Sopa was my most important teacher from the age of 14 to 25. He had so much influence on me. I studied the abhidharma5 with him and Geshe Rabten and took vinaya teachings from Zong Rinpoche. It was not that I had rejected these studies. My idea had been to do retreat for a certain time and then come back to them.”
Adèle Hulse is an Australian journalist, a long-time student of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Big Love is to be published by the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive in 2011.
1. Dhal is Hindi/Nepali for lentils. A very common, and cheap, meal in India is dhal bhaat, rice and lentils.
3. Lowell J. Thomas (1892–1981) was an American writer, radio broadcaster, and traveler. Known as the person who made Lawrence of Arabia famous, Thomas traveled the world, bringing eyewitness news accounts and a sense of adventure to American radio listeners for many decades. He was also the first person to film the Dalai Lama in Tibet. After the Chinese occupation of Tibet, Thomas participated in a number of philanthropic efforts to help the Tibetan refugees in India.
4. Adèle Hulse: “I never made it to Buxa. People told me there was nothing left to see, just a number of abandoned buildings in an officially restricted area. Yet every time I interviewed a monk who had been at Buxa, I sensed the energy of the place as it had been back then, the passionate resolve of the refugees to rescue Tibetan Buddhism and their efforts to re-establish their monastic culture in India. Classmates had always been very close, perhaps closer to each other than to their own families, of whom they saw so little. Exile had brought them even closer together.”
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