HOME TRUTHS

By Adele Hulse

Guru devotion means different things to different people; some come to Dharma upon seeing just one photo of the guru, never having heard teachings or seen anything in print. I guess we could call this spontaneous guru devotion. It is a common experience. Someone would dream of a face, a specific face, then a year later see just that face on a course brochure.

Then there is slow-growth devotion: this is when you have sat through a few courses, listened to the teacher, practiced a few of the recommended ideas, seen the change in your life and slowly become aware of what kind of person it is who is able to teach you this. For me, this is very much linked to Lama Tzong Khapa, who, not being alive or having extant photos, does not fall into the celebrity guru category very easily.

Then there is get-out-of-my-way devotion: this is where you hustle to be the one sitting next to the guru, the one to bring in the tea and the meals, to open the car door. You can tell if you’re in this category if you get hot-eyed watching other people doing those things and feel a blinding stab of pain if the guru doesn’t acknowledge you personally.

Then there is cultural devotion. This is where you pretend you are Tibetan and that being Tibetan is an essential part of the process of being on the path to enlightenment. There is a wonderful anecdote of Lama Yeshe whacking a student all carefully bent over to greet him, saying “Stand up properly – you’re not humble!”

I heard another story of a Westerner bent double offering an important Tibetan dignitary a worn old khata and the man refused to take it, saying “I don’t want that dirty old thing!”

I recently had a big revelation about this. Ribur Rinpoche was visiting Tara Institute in Melbourne and I looked at that beautiful old face on the throne and thought, “I want to have a relationship with this person.”

So at the end of the teaching while everyone was going up with their khatas, I fiddled in my bag and realized I didn’t have one. Suddenly I was struck: I didn’t need a khata. Khatas are exclusively cultural, they aren’t even objects of generosity because you get them back. If I really felt such respect for Ribur Rinpoche what on earth was I doing playing this phony khata game? He was certainly not going to send me away and if I really did want to give him something (which is after all the idea, isn’t it?), $20 in a piece of white paper would definitely do the trick.

The result of this rabid iconoclasm was that Rinpoche clapped me on the shoulder and laughed as if he could see the joke – which he probably could. Every time I ran into him around the center it was the same – a burst of laughing recognition and a very warm clap on the shoulder. Since then I have virtually renounced the khata.

After all that there is genuine guru devotion. This is what you see when you see Lama Zopa Rinpoche prostrating, or around His Holiness the Dalai Lama, or indeed any of the old senior lamas. When Lama Yeshe was around his guru Song Rinpoche, people knew they were seeing the real thing – the bowed head, the averted eye, the small attentions and the deep prostrations – all of which suddenly looked nothing like what everyone else did.

Ah well, we all have to start somewhere.