July-August 1998

By Adèle Hulse

Buddhism very nearly stopped me having a child at all. I figured that as I’d had uncountable children in previous lives, all of whom I had forgotten, that it was not an essential experience to have one in this. I had also stopped having sex anymore because I no longer respected why I did it, I needed new reasons. So when my son’s father suggested breeding it was a new reason. I thought about it for a few weeks and decided I did have something worth passing to a child – in lieu of money – so I got pregnant. His daddy didn’t hang around too long after but I never thought he would. (“She threw me out!”)

I always knew a lot of Buddhists having babies and they always thought theirs was a rinpoche, incredibly special, more special than other babies and gave them ridiculous Tibetan names. I didn’t like that so, being an inverse snob, gave mine a simple family name. Then when he was 14 months old Lama Zopa Rinpoche said he had a very short life expectancy and I should change his name to Thubten Yeshe. I was thrilled because I couldn’t think of a better name and could never have done that myself. We call him T.Y.

I met Lama Yeshe the day I received news of my father’s death. It was death that woke me up to Dharma, so from his earliest years I was always showing T.Y. insects and small creatures in the garden, how they were alive and then dead. “If we’re still alive,” I prefaced things with constantly. “If you die before me, if I die before you.” My son was not going to grow up in the la-la land of eternal youth in which I had been stupefied for so long. When news of Rinpoche’s divination reached the grapevine we were for some time known affectionately as “dead Adèle and her dead baby.” It’s great to have friends like that.

When he was about 6 and could count, I taught him how to watch his breath. He sat for 10 minutes a day counting breaths and we wrote down the number until he’d counted a few thousand. I figured he had the idea by them. He came to a lot of teachings with me when he was very small, sleeping on the gompa floor and waking up for tsog.

In the meantime we had moved into a residential center where he was the oldest child. Frankly, he couldn’t win a trick there: people accused him of stealing from the in-house candy store and his basketball was confiscated because there was a rule against them. He was even kicked out of the children’s Dharma class – he can’t remember why.

During pujas he liked to lie on the floor with his friends and silently color in pages from Tara’s Coloring Book, until another very strict student said it was bad to have those pages on the floor and made a new rule against it. T.Y. stopped coming to pujas. When we left I was careful to move to an absolutely ordinary place so he could have the experience of not living in an unusual atmosphere.

Now he is 18, keeps a Buddha statue, a photo of the Dalai Lama and his refuge guru Geshe Lama Konchog beside his bed, always reads Lama Osel’s page in Mandala and thinks about gifts and games he might like. Whenever T.Y. has a hard time with someone who is annoying him he tells me he just watches his breath while he’s around them, so he doesn’t get angry. He calls himself a Buddhist, always wears a blessing thread and never ever kills anything – every insect life is sacred at our place. When he was small he used to kiss raw meat and say sorry. I never taught him that.

Living in the center also gave T.Y. a good look at our geshe and some Sangha members and he saw human qualities that automatically commanded affection and consistent respect. There aren’t many objects of consistent respect around for a boy who isn’t impressed with footballers. He also witnessed the decorum accompanying high lamas, another rare thing in this world. Those images went in deep, alongside Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s regular little tugs at his earlobes.

I ran away from Catholicism because I was told I’d go to hell if I didn’t follow my religion. I will never say such words to my son. He will have to find his own way in Buddhism.