By Adele Husle

In 1980 Lama Yeshe visited Pyramid Lake in the Nevada Desert, where he performed a burning offering of sage and said prayers. “Lama and the Indians had a great deal to talk about – politics, rituals,” said Carol Fields who arranged the trip. “They talked about medicine-belts warriors wore into battle that made white men’s bullets just bounce off them. Lama talked about Tibetan monks who had done the same thing in 1959.

“It was very overcast when Lama started the puja. He rang his bell the whole time and the clouds parted and it got so hot we were in a sweat. As soon as it was over, the clouds folded in again and there was this intense cool breeze. Suddenly a flock of white pelicans the Indians are trying to protect there rose up and flew right down around Lama, then off to the south, and we all just broke up laughing and couldn’t stop for 20 minutes and that laughing atmosphere lasted the whole day.”

My friend Jenny Brown, who wrote this column in the May-June ’98 issue, has this story about an Australian Aborigine elder Guboo Ted Thomas who attended His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s 1996 Kalachakra initiation in Sydney. She’d met him years before.

“As a young reporter I was sent to a place on the southeastern coast of Australia to meet an old aboriginal man who had a story to tell. Logging companies were denuding a sacred mountain. Guboo (‘Good Friend’) was the elder whose duty it was to protect this place of initiation.

“Full of city sass and the borrowed importance of a professional role, I thundered into his presence with a barrage of questions. Within half an hour I was reduced to silence. The gentleness and patience of his presence against my working personality was something I would meet again later, when I encountered Tibetan lamas.

“I had the questions, he had the answers, and he would give me the answers when I was ready to hear them. He was the judge of that moment. Of that much I quickly became aware.

“After sharing a meal in an atmosphere that was so still and connected with the earth that I felt like a five-generation alien against the 1,600 generations that his people had lived in Australia, we made an appointment to spend a few days exploring the sites on monumental Mount Mumbulla.

“Guboo showed us the women’s initiation sites, the natural standing stones now surrounded by stumps where pubescent girls went with the tribal ‘clever women’ to learn the lore. He showed the camping sites of the boys and ‘clever men’ who taught them. Initiate males would spend three weeks camping around the mountain learning tribal lore.

“He showed us the huge ‘meditation rock,’ now blasted to smithereens to accommodate one leg of a communication tower. He fed us bush tucker, delicious berries and fruits. He showed us the devastation left by the timber getters. Guboo’s sadness at these scenes was as understated as his demeanor.

“On the third day Guboo took us to a place of celebration where the final initiation ceremonies took place. It was a waterfall cascading down a natural water slide into a deep cold pool. At this joyful place the old man bestowed what I presume was a truncated, white man’s version of his tribe’s much more complex initiation rituals.

“I was given a red headband ‘to remember to use my mind.’ I was given a totem animal (to remain my secret). I was given the water baptism – a plunge into the cold pool. I was given a tiny stone cutting-tool for my journey. I was given his blessing – he held my head in his hands and looked deeply into my eyes so I would remember ‘Dharma’ the creator spirit, and a lifelong onus to be ‘a good friend to all the people and to the earth.’ Finally, Guboo lit a fire to both warm us up and to symbolize the completion of the initiation cycle.

“It was a wonderful privilege but I didn’t realize quite how extraordinary it was until 10 years later when I underwent the Kalachakra initiation with the Dalai Lama in Bodhgaya, India. The resonances were so uncanny it made my head spin.

“Here again were many of the same processes and symbols: the teaching, the red headband, the water, the flower petal, the Buddha family totem and the sacred responsibility to cherish others. The fire puja would follow the retreat.

“As I sat under the Bihar skies in India, surrounded by 300,000 fellow initiates, I kept recalling my earlier initiation and couldn’t help but wonder if, way back then on Mount Mumbulla, I’d actually encountered what was perhaps the aboriginal version of tantra? Some timeless, universal rite of passage into a sacred, intangible realm.

“I still choose to believe that’s exactly what happened.”