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by Michael Jolliffe

Pilgrims’ Progress: “Chasing Buddha” in Nepal and India

October-November 2004

By Lisbeth Elvery

Many of us had never met Ven. Robina Courtin before, much less traveled under her tutelage throughout strange lands. However, any vague sense of trepidation was – certainly for me – washed away on that first night the “Chasing Buddha” pilgrims met in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Ven. Robina, an ordained Buddhist nun with over 20 years’ experience integrating Tibetan Buddhist practice with the Western way of life, has been leading these pilgrimages throughout Nepal and India since 2001. Her main project and the key beneficiary of the funds raised from the pilgrimage is the Liberation Prison Project.

…  Twenty-three budding pilgrims from throughout the United States and Australia came together for four weeks in late October/early November 2003. It was a journey that was to take us to the sacred Buddhist sites of Nepal and India. On a spiritual level, we would travel much further …

Read the complete article as a PDF.

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. 

by Carina Rumrill

Postcard 20 from Robina: Stradbroke Island, Australia

A new Postcard from Robina, Ven. Robina Courtin’s blog about her travels and teachings around the world. “A month has passed since I was at Maitripa in Portland. It’s Tuesday March 6 and I’m in tropical Queensland, settling in for a month’s editing retreat. Kathleen Surawski has kindly offered me her house: a raised wooden structure with a deck, on a cliff overlooking the ocean at Point Lookout, on the tip of Stradbroke Island, just off the main coast, 20 miles east of Brisbane.”

by Michael Jolliffe

Proceeds of Sale of Videos of Australian Documentary Film to Benefit Milarepa Prison Project

March-April 2000

The producers of Chasing Buddha, a documentary film about Ven. Robina Courtin, shown in January at the Sundance Film Festival, have offered it to the Milarepa Prison Project for Buddhist Practitioners (a project of Mandala) which she coordinates. “We are happy that the project use it in any way they wish to raise funds for their work,” said the film”s director and co-producer, Australian Amiel Courtin-Wilson, a nephew of Ven. Robina.

The film is scheduled for showing on SBS television in Australia this year, and will show at other film festivals in the US, Europe and Australia.

Having already won an award for his film work in Australia, Amiel was delighted that Chasing Buddha was accepted at Sundance. “Documentary work is generally swept under the carpet, so it was even more exciting to have Chasing Buddha placed in the World Cinema section along with other dramatic feature films,” said Amiel.

The film is an exploration of an aunt “who has always occupied a mythological position in the family landscape.”

Amiel and his cameraman Vincent Heimann traveled with Ven. Robina throughout the United States for three months in early 1998, and filmed her at Kentucky State Prison in Eddyville, interviewing some of the men, including several on death row.

by Adam

Conversations with a Nun: Opening the Prison Door

September-November 2003

Ven. Robina CourtinIn this fifth incarnation of Mandala, we wanted to feature Ven. Robina Courtin, its editor for six years (1994-2000). She’s hard to pin down, always traveling the world, teaching, overseeing the activities of Liberation Prison Project in the USA and Australia, visiting and writing to prisoners, and editing teachings. Then Lyn Siegel, freelance writer from North Carolina, sent us an interview she and psychiatrist Dr. Norma Safransky did with Ven. Robina last year, and voila! We have a conversation with the Australianborn nun who is still subject, reluctantly, to international fame since the release in 2000 of the documentary movie about her life, Chasing Buddha.

Q: In Chasing Buddha you said, “I found what I lost” when you found Buddhism. Do you feel that we are born inherently knowing what we want in this life, and that it’s a matter of getting through the experiences and obstacles of life to realize one’s path, or is it more a case of needing those experiences and obstacles to tap into that energy, the talent, the passion that brings us to where we are now?

A: Yes, when I met Buddhism I felt like I had found something I had lost, because, from a karmic point of view, it was something I’d had before, in previous lives. When I heard it again, it was like coming home. You could have a familiarity with anything, whether it is called killing or stealing or being a footballer. Whatever you have familiarity with is what you’re strongly attracted to again.

I’m not sure that it’s a question of “needing” our experiences; rather, it’s that we simply have them as a result of our past actions, karma. Based on Buddha’s view that we all possess the potential for perfection, it’s our job to work through our experiences, based on the laws of morality: cleaning up the negative and growing the positive.

Q: Do you believe in reincarnation in a literal sense, in the sense that you are preserved as a soul and continue to develop as a sort of separate entity? Or are you speaking more generally as a pool of consciousness splits off and evolves and then goes back into a vast pool and then reemerges with some change?

A: None of that is a Buddhist way to express things. Firstly, it’s not a question of belief. The Buddhist path is very much a way of discovering for oneself the truth of the teachings, or indeed not the truth. The Dalai Lama says that if we discover that what Buddha says is wrong, we should reject Buddha. Buddha himself said, “Don’t believe a single word I am telling you.” We need to check it carefully, making sense of it, and finally testing it by practicing. We’ll then discover that it’s either true or it’s not.

Second, according to Buddha, the being that is inside the womb is not a soul. Buddha would use the words “mind” or “consciousness,” which refer to the entire spectrum of our inner experiences. There is the grosser level – the conceptual, the sensory, and the emotions – but Buddhism would also assert that we have much subtler levels of conscious awareness. And so at the time of conception, what goes into the egg and sperm of the parents and what causes the beginning of Robina, basically, is a previous moment of this very mind that we call “Robina” now, which is necessarily very subtle, and which manifests at the grosser level as the person develops. Each living being has its own personal river of mental moments, if you like. At the first moment of conception we are not a blank slate that our parents and society begin to fill up. We bring with us all our own tendencies and imprints, interests and characteristics, things that we have thought and said and done before.

What causes Robina to be the kind of person she becomes is her past karma – not God or Buddha or parents. Karma is a Sanskrit word that means “action”. Whatever we say or whatever we do or think leaves an imprint or impression or a seed in our mind that ripens in the future as our experiences. We are the fruit of what we have done before. You could say that karma is the “creative principle” in Buddhism. So, yes, reincarnation is a literal thing …

The complete article is available as a PDF.

by Michael Jolliffe

Who Are We Really, and To Whom Do We Pray?

CONVERSATION WITH A NUN

December 2003 – January 2004

Who are we really, and to whom do we pray?

In our last issue, the conversation between Ven. Robina Courtin, free lance writer Lyn Siegel and psychiatrist Dr. Normal Safransky began with the Australian-born nun’s observations on karma and what life can be like for prison inmates – something she knows well through her work with the Liberation Prison Project. The story continues …

Q: With more and more people practicing mindfulness and working on these negative qualities, do you think human beings as a whole are becoming better people?

A: Not necessarily. Look at the world. More violence. Look at this country [America] alone. Look at the number of children born now who are experiencing incredible suffering: kids who are on drugs already by the age of five, kids with attention deficit disorder, kids who are violent, homeless kids. There are so many more children now with mental suffering. You could say that the human race is going downhill, couldn’t you?

Q: What is the point if things don’t get any better? Why bother?

A: If you’re alive, then you don’t have any choice other than to practice virtue, to make yourself a better person, to try to help others. It doesn’t matter what the outside world does. If I look into my mind from day to day, and I see that anger, jealousy, fear, and neuroses make me miserable, then do I have a choice? No. Even if I just want to be happy, not to mention helping others to be happy, then the only thing I can choose is to be kind and loving and patient and generous. Because they’re the things that will bring me more sanity and contentment. Then, when you’re doing the job yourself, you can help others do the same, one step at a time.

Q: Many people have an idea that meditation and embracing Buddhism will lead to calm and stillness, yet you’re clearly a high-energy individual who approaches a variety of projects at high speed.

A: I think there are some pretty clichéd ideas of what a good Buddhist should be like, and of what meditation is. The Tibetan word for meditation, gom, is “to become familiar.” “Meditation” refers to a series of sophisticated psychological techniques – Buddha didn’t use the word “psychological” because it wasn’t coined then – that enable a person to familiarize themselves with the positive, appropriate states of mind. To think that meditation simply calms you down is simplistic. You don’t need to sit looking holy to do that; you can just lie down and go to sleep.

There are many techniques to help us get a handle on our mind. A natural consequence of that – and this is the real point – is to have a mind that is more steady, more controlled, more happy, more wise, more clear, more loving, more proactive, more beneficial. That doesn’t necessarily mean being more “slow” or ”quiet.” The point isn’t just to walk slowly and look like you’re being this thing called “mindful?” His Holiness the Dalai Lama is renowned for talking fast and walking fast!

… Q: Do you ever find yourself at a point where you don’t feel like you have the strength to go on?

A: In a sense, all the time! When you learn anything, whether you want to become a carpenter or a skater, all the time you’re pushing yourself against your limits, aren’t you? You’re getting out of your comfort zone and you’re trying to become better and better at what you’re doing. And that’s sometimes very scary, very painful. You have to struggle all the time. I don’t mean struggle in a neurotic way. But, all the neurotic. That takes a lot of work …

Read the complete article as a PDF.