SANGHA

Ven. Lobsang Yeshe, Michael Cassapidis, has been a Buddhist monk in Tibetan monasteries for 24 of his 29 years, first at Kopan in Nepal, and then at Sera in south India where he was one of the attendants of Lama Tenzin Osel, the reincarnation of Lama Thubten Yeshe. Now he is translator for Geshe Kelsang Wangdu at Tushita Mahayana Meditation Centre in Delhi, India, and will accompany Geshe-la when he comes to the United States to be the resident lama for the three FPMT California centers. Born in London of a Greek father and a Belgian mother, Michael is in fact more Tibetan than anything else: “We Tibetans…” he says. Michael talked to Ven. Robina Courtin about how he became a monk, and of his years with Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche.

The lamas have been like fathers to Michael for as long as he can remember. As vividly as yesterday he recalls the love of Lama Yeshe’s greeting when he entered Kopan at the age of four in 1970, soon after the lamas had established it. “My son is back!” exclaimed Lama, holding Michael to him.

He first met them the year before in New Delhi. His mother, Olivia, was fleeing from her recent divorce with his father Yorgo – “And she was looking for someone to take care of me.”

Her friend, Zina Rachevsky, by now a close student of the lamas, introduced them, and apparently Lama Zopa from his own side at that first meeting offered to take Michael. Olivia soon came to trust that this was the thing to do.

He moved to Nepal and lived in Bouddhanath with Lama Yeshe and some young monks, the nucleus of what would soon be Kopan. Michael was happy, he remembers that. He felt at home.

One day, unexpectedly, Olivia bundled him into a taxi. Michael recalls the urgency:

“Where are we going?”

“Just come. We are going away.”

“But shouldn’t we tell Rinpoche?” he asked unhappily.

Apparently Olivia’s family, Belgian aristocrats, had heard of her plan to leave her son in the care of the lamas, and were shocked. They had asked the American Embassy to find him (Olivia is an American citizen). “That’s why she kidnapped me!” jokes Michael now.

But then he was miserable. They returned to Delhi, and as time passed he became increasingly unhappy and aggressive. But a month later they received a visit from Lama Zopa. How happy Michael was to see him! Rinpoche hugged and kissed him and held him in his lap.

Olivia was torn. It was a shocking thing, from her Western perspective, but seeing them together it seemed so natural that her young son stay with Rinpoche.

At one point during Olivia’s conversation with Rinpoche about her doubts, Michael sat up very straight in Lama Zopa’s lap, looked directly into his mother’s eyes and said in his clear, bright little voice, “You are only my mother! He is my guru and I am going with him!”

And so he went, and his life as a monk began.

Ten years Michael spent at Kopan, living and studying with 80 other young monks: Sherpas, Tamangs, Manalis, Tibetans, and one other Western boy [Daja Wangchuk Meston, see his obituary in Mandala October-December 2010]. Often he felt like an outsider and he remembers the difficulties of that. “But it made me strong,” he says now.

Some of Michael’s happiest memories are of being with Lama Zopa in his Himalayan mountain village of Lawudo. He would sleep with Rinpoche in his cave, curled up behind him in his meditation box.

“There was Lama Zopa sitting up meditating next to me when I went to sleep, and there he would be, still meditating when I woke up.

“Rinpoche would ask me about my dreams, and I would tell him. Some days I would not have any, but because they seemed to have delighted Rinpoche I would make them up!”

Michael learned his first prayer from Lama Zopa. Sitting on the floor at his guru’s feet, his hands folded at his heart, he would recite:

Sang-gye tan-che du-pa-ku

Dor-je sempä ngo-wo-nyi

Kön-chog sum-kyi tsa-wa-te

La-ma nam-la chag-tsäl-lo

Embodiment of all the Buddhas

Essence of Dorje Sempa,

Root of the Three Jewels –

I prostrate to you oh my lamas!

Michael met his father and sister Melina when he was seven. He’d scarcely given them a thought, so was surprised when they turned up at Kopan.

“Do you know who I am?” the strange foreigner asked him.

Mostly, Michael felt shy. But Yorgo was shocked at the sight of this skinny, ragged, shoeless little boy. He wanted to take him away right then and put him into “some nice school in Europe for a proper education.”

Eventually, though, Yorgo came to see how right it was for his son. And he, like Olivia, studied Buddhism with the lamas at Kopan. Now Yorgo supports Michael completely. “As long as you are happy,” he tells him.

When he was 24, Michael affirmed his parents’ support, and his own decision made as a little boy in Lama Zopa’s lap: he received his full ordination, gelong, vows from his Holiness the Dalai Lama.

At his ordination he retained the name given to him as a little boy by Lama Yeshe that day Lama greeted him so lovingly to Kopan.

“From today,” Lama told him, “your name is Lobsang Yeshe.”

“I am happy to be a monk,” says Lobsang Yeshe now. “And regardless of whether I stay in the monastery or go to the West, I want to remain one always.”