By Adele Hulse

If Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa’s Diamond Valley course in Queensland in 1974 was the Woodstock of Tibetan Buddhism in Australia (as Sharon Gray suggested in the special Mandala produced for His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s September visit to Australia), then the Kalachakra initiation in Sydney was its evolution into something like a Rotary Convention. Most of the original players were still there – older, balder, fatter, grayer, all delighted to see each other and still, after all these years, passionately committed to the Dharma cause.

Some brought their children, their children brought friends. In between the elderly hippies with their long hair and rare ethnic jewelry were crowds of New Age ravers with neon heads and bright questioning minds.

My job for the week was to select their questions from a box in the foyer which filled daily and put them to a panel of experts every evening for an hour. Of course everyone wanted His Holiness to answer their question, and for the first three days of preliminary teachings he answered as many as time allowed. The rest came to us. It was some panel, including three Lharampa geshes and FPMT Western monks and nuns who had been ordained for 22 (Ven. Yeshe Khadro), 20 (Ven. Thubten Gyatso), 18 (Ven. Robina Courtin) and 17 (Ven . Jampa Ignyan) years.

The questions reflected the wide range of Dharma experience of the audience and we agreed to use those which would best benefit the largest number of people. This naturally excluded the most esoteric (generally on details of the Kalachakra initiation). Many were on the position of women in Tibetan Buddhism (why are there so few female tulkus, why are women so poorly represented in Buddhist hierarchy, will there be a female Dalai Lama), and homosexuality (is it okay, what can we do when we love each other but our families won’t speak to us).

Many questions were unaskable: I rejected all those relating to extra-terrestrials and numerology. My favorite unaskables were: “Will Tibet be represented in the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games?” and the delightful “Would His Holiness like to go surfing?” Also out of the mainstream was one from a person declaring they had earned their living for many years from the sale of marijuana and wondered whether they should give themselves and the money up to the police or use the money to re-educate themselves for a right livelihood. Another person asked what was the karma of being a prostitute.

The panelists met for half an hour before we went on and selected the questions they preferred to answer. Sometimes I would put forward a topic that had been dealt with before and they rapidly rejected it in the same way His Holiness does. “I think I have already answered that. Next!”

The humorist of the panel was undoubtedly Geshe Jampel Sengye, who has recently arrived in Australia to be resident teacher at the two FPMT Western Australian centers. No one present will ever forget his suggestion on how to stop falling asleep during teachings, which he added to a competent reply by another panelist who advised sleepy people to remember death, the perfect human rebirth, etc. Geshe-la said that in India they had another trick: put a little chili powder up your nose. Guaranteed.

Generally the quality of the questions was incredibly high. I was staying with non-Buddhist friends in Sydney and one night three lawyers and two journalists helped me look them over, the lawyers obviously fascinated by the style of questioning and an angle of debate they had never encountered before.

I still have them all. Lama Zopa Rinpoche suggested we select one or two of them at a time, collect short written responses from both Tibetan geshes and Western sangha and publish both answers together in Mandala. The editor says we can start in the Jan-Feb issue.