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March 22, 2013 by Michael Jolliffe

The Path to Changing One’s Mind

At the Lawudo Lama’s cave, Nepal, 1972. From the left to right: unknown monk, Lama Zopa, Massimo Corona, Lama Yeshe, Jhampa Zangpo, with two new Mount Everest Centre novice monks. Photo courtesy of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.

Long-time FPMT student Massimo Corona shares his journey on the road to Kopan:

“1968 was a special year: students were in revolt, the psychedelic universe was coming into being, and I was looking for the real meaning of life. I was born into a rich family, had gone to school in Switzerland, and a position in my father’s company was assured. But something was missing. The thought of being a rich entrepreneur like my father was not attractive at all. That year, I was attending – or pretending to attend – the second year of the Bocconi Business School in Milan, Italy, but I was also smoking a lot of pot and doing some LSD. Slowly, something changed in my vision of life and I started looking for some answers. After reading a few books on Eastern religions, I decided that I had to find a master who could give me those answers. I had a couple of friends who had already left for India and Nepal and from their letters it seemed that they found their answers. So, I decided to drop out and go to India …”

From Mandala April-June 2013

February 15, 2013 by Michael Jolliffe

No Victim, No Perpratrator

Art by Shirley Dodge

“I was sexually abused by a daycare worker the year before I started kindergarten. It was one of those situations that are often reported in newspapers, except this time no one was caught and there was no story. I forgot all about it until I was in my early thirties, yet it colored every aspect of my life, and when I started to remember the abuse, it ruled my life,” writes Ven. Gyalten Mindrol. “… Although I was fortunate to find a deeply gifted psychotherapist, who gave me a place to talk and didn’t overload me with theory and advice, it was the Dharma that helped me assimilate the abuse into my conscious life, and it was the abuse that radically deepened my understanding and practice of the Dharma, my faith in it, and my longing for it.”

From Mandala June-July 2006

January 17, 2013 by Michael Jolliffe

An Irresistible Pull, Marcel Bertels’ Road to Kopan

Marcel Bertels, at the Third Kopan Meditation Course, December, 1972. Photo courtesy of Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive.

“As a child, I had an enormous attraction to and curiosity about Christianity,” shares long-time student Marcel Bertels, “but as there was nothing and no one to nurture this curiosity, even in the Roman Catholic system of which I was part, it was gone by the time I was eight or nine years old. After that, I basically had no more space for anything to do with religion.”

However, Marcel later did find space for Buddhism.

“Lama Zopa Rinpoche was a huge shock to my system. I had never seen or met anyone who was so far beyond a normal human being. Rinpoche’s demeanor was always very stern and serious in those days, completely single-minded, like there was simply no time to joke, quite different from how we experience Rinpoche now…”

From Mandala January-March 2013

January 16, 2013 by Michael Jolliffe

Finding Inspiration in FPMT Centers: An Interview with Geshe Sherab

Geshe Sherab, Tasmania, Australia, August 2012. Phots by Kunchok Gyaltsen.

Geshe Thubten Sherab was born in 1967 in the Manang district of Nepal. He entered Kopan Monastery at age nine. He completed his Geshe degree at Sera Je Monastic University in South India, followed by a year at Gyumed Tantric College. Over the last decade, Geshe Sherab has taught all over the world as well as serving several years as Kopan’s Headmaster.

In 2012, Geshe Sherab spent three months touring the FPMT Australian centers, organized by FPMT in Australia. Mandala spoke with Geshe Sherab in October 2012 while he was at Kadam Sharawa Centre, located on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia.

“Mandala: Are there advantages that Westerners have in terms of studying Dharma?

“Geshe Sherab: Yes, absolutely. One of the advantages they have is that most have a good basic education, so when you explain the Dharma, I think it much easier for them to understand and to really get the essence of the Dharma. They are more interested in meditation and the essence of the Dharma than the ritual aspects. I believe that is good, it’s an advantage I think. When someone gets too into the ritual aspects, sometimes it is possible that he can lose the essence of the Dharma.

“Westerners also come with a bit of a skeptical mind and I think that helps them too. When you come with that kind of skepticism and doubt, you take more caution, you reflect more, you contemplate more, and therefore you can develop greater understanding and knowledge.”

From Mandala January-March 2013

January 10, 2013 by Michael Jolliffe

Paul Donnelly on the Creation of “Like a Waking Dream” [Audio Interview]

Geshe Sopa at Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s house in Aptos, California, 2009. Photo by Kalleen Mortensen.

Wisdom Publications has just published Geshe Lhundub Sopa’s autobiography, Like a Waking Dream. In it, Geshe-la shares detailed memories of his youth and early days in the Tibetan monastic system and offers a first-hand perspective on exile and establishing Tibetan Buddhism in the West.

Paul Donnelly served as the editor of Like a Waking Dream. In 1989, Donnelly entered the Ph.D. program in Buddhist Studies at U.W. and became a student of Geshe-la. He graduated in 1997 and now is an associate professor of religious studies at Northern Arizona University.

Mandala managing editor Laura Miller talked to Donnelly from his home in Flagstaff, Arizona, about working on the book with Geshe-la. The conversation took place over Skype in October 2012. They began the discussion talking about how the book came to be.

Listen to the audio interview on mandalamagazine.org.

From Mandala January-March 2013

January 8, 2013 by Michael Jolliffe

Geshe Lama Konchog, “An Extraordinary Modern-day Milarepa”

Geshe Lama Konchog. Photo by Nick Dawson.

Geshe Lama Konchog came to Kopan Monastery in 1984, where he spent nearly 18 years devoting himself to teaching the monks and nuns there. Before arriving at Kopan, Geshe Lama Konchog had spent twenty-five years meditating in caves in the Tsum region of Nepal. Geshe Lama Konchog was born in Tibet in 1927 and educated as Sera Monastery. He was known then for his profound commitment to Dharma practice. But it was only after his death in 2001 that his extraordinary qualities were revealed to a wider circle of Dharma practitioners and students. His disciple Geshe Tenzin Zopa detailed the accomplishments of this modern-day Milarepa and shared them with Ven. Robina Courtin for this story published in Mandala March-April 2002.

January 7, 2013 by Michael Jolliffe

Ancient Philosophy in Everyday Life at the Himalayan Buddhist Meditation Centre, Nepal

Himalayan Buddhist Meditation Centre, 2012

In 1982, the Himalayan Buddhist Meditation Centre (HBMC) was founded in Kathmandu as the Himalayan Yogic Institute (HYI) by Pam and Karuna Cayton, long-time students of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Thirty years later, their daughter Arya became the spiritual program coordinator there, bringing her experience and fresh perspective to the city center.

“It wasn’t my plan to work at the center my parents were involved in starting 30 years ago. I came to Nepal in 2011 with an idea for starting a social/creative business venture and with an undeniable interest in connecting more with the country where I was born and where spiritual practice is encouraged and accessible.

… After finishing college and doing the November course for the first time in 2009, I was amazed by how many people my age were there at Kopan. Up until that point, if I went to teachings at a center, I was usually the youngest person in the room and because of this I never really had Dharma friends my age. As my personal connection with Buddhism developed, the need for support from peers became more important. At the 2009 November course, I found it really refreshing and inspiring to meet so many young people from all over the world who had a genuine interest in the Dharma. Since then, I have noticed that many people my age are interested in Buddhism, but they just haven’t met with the right situation to learn more. Now as the current SPC at Himalayan Buddhism Meditation Centre, my wish is to help create a really welcoming and comfortable community space for people of all ages and backgrounds to explore Buddhism.”

From Mandala January-March 2013

November 9, 2012 by Carina Rumrill

An Interview with Åge Delbanco

Åge (pronounced Oh-wa) Delbanco, a Danish hippie and spiritual seeker who was given the nickname Babaji, and who became an early student of the Lamas. Photo from 1970.

In the late 1960s, Åge Delbanco (also known as Babaji) followed the “hippie trail” from Denmark to India and then found his way up Kopan Hill in Nepal. He arrived about a year after Lama Yeshe, Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Zina Rachevsky had begun creating what would become Kopan Monastery. Later, he went to Vajrapani Institute in Boulder Creek, California, and ended up staying for 13 years. Wolf Price talked to Åge about the early years at Kopan and the time he spent at Vajrapani.

“[In Kopan] Lama Yeshe would be so accepting of everything. There was this English girl who came and she wanted to meditate. She sat down in her room and didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, she just sat down and meditated. I thought that was not so good, but Lama Yeshe said, ‘Oh meditation, very good, very good.’

“I think she meditated for two weeks and then keeled over exhausted. Her father came at that time and brought her home. Later she wrote a letter to Lama, thanked him, and said it was great to go through that and not be stopped. It was always like that. I had all these ideas – Western ideas about what was good and what was bad, right and wrong. It always turned out that I didn’t know what I was believing.”

From Mandala April-June 2012.

October 26, 2012 by Michael Jolliffe

Word Power: A Journo’s Story, Adele Hulse talks about writing and Lama Yeshe

Adele Hulse

“Back in 1976 Lama Yeshe called me up to his house at Chenrezig Institute in Australia and said: ‘You. You writer. You good understand my language. I want you write por me. You take Chenrezig teaching notes here and make book.’ Lama Yeshe couldn’t say his ‘f’s,’” writes Adele Hulse.

“I spent the next year in a caravan in the mountains rearranging Lama’s ‘language’ into what later became a Wisdom Publications booklet. I loved living alone in the mountains but realized there was more I had to do for Lama, so I moved to Melbourne and began importing books from the Tibetan Library – there were very few Dharma books available in English. This went on for some years and I wondered again about ‘writing por Lama’. How?”

Find the complete PDF on mandalamagazine.org.

October 24, 2012 by Michael Jolliffe

Meher Baba Clearly Told Me in a Dream, the story of Ven. Thubten Wongmo

Feather Meston with son Daja Wangchuk, 1973.

“The only explanation that makes any sense as to how I ended up walking up the hill to Kopan in 1973,” writes Ven. Thubten Wongmo (Feather Meston), “is that the walk up that path actually began in various past lives. I mean, think about it. How else would a young, nice-enough-looking social worker turned hippie gal from a rather famous Jewish Hollywood family possibly end up at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Nepal? Traveling with her bearded Jewish hippie-artist-poet ex-husband and two-year-old son. But of course, it’s different these days … anyone who knows anything eventually finds Kopan and takes a meditation course, preferably the famous annual November course.”

Read her complete story of her travels through Europe and Asia, her star-studded family, and the dream that brought her to Kopan Monastery in Nepal.