The Story of a Wall Painting

“The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world.  See each thing in this world as a moment of time.”

“Things do not hinder one another, just as moments do not hinder one another.  The way-seeking mind arises in this moment.  A way-seeking moment arises in this mind.  It is the same with practice and with attaining the way.”

“Thus, the self, setting itself out in array sees itself.  This is the understanding that the self is time.”

-DOGEN ZENJI

And as such, time being or being time is constantly breathing in and out, incessantly reconfiguring cloudland, not made of substance – only in the continuity of its trajectory.  Moments of it we remember as meaningful.  But all moments are that, and no moments are that. 

In March 1972, I moved to France to become a volunteer in a home for socially handicapped children, the Institut Camille Blaisot in Caen, Normandy.  Two months later I rented an apartment in the old center of the city.  It was a 16^th or 17^th century building with no right angle anywhere to be found, a winding staircase, made of solid granite blocks, and slightly undulating walls throughout – one of the few houses of its kind that had survived intact the 6-week battle between Nazi and allied forces in and around Caen in 1944. 

My neighbors were Alain and Nadine Roussel, living on the second floor whereas I lived on the third.  Nadine worked as a teacher where I worked.  But we had more in common than the workplace.  I had just recently come back from my first trip from India and Nepal, and so had Nadine’s husband Alain, a year before me.

We got close.  We had so many stories to share, usually over bottles of beer and wine that seemed to keep uncorking themselves all of their own.  But we never passed out drunk.  We were just deliriously perky.  Conversation just kept flowing – and to this day, I feel that one needs to speak French with gusto to really appreciate this particular kind of flow.  No other language seems to be so enamored with its own sound of nonchalant, self-assertive perfection, full of itself in best and worst possible ways.  By the way, it was taken for granted that I spoke it fluently too, free of any German accent that is.  As the standard phrase went, “You cannot speak French like everybody else, can you?  Ah, but no, you should”.

In short, we were vibrant, vivacious, expressive 20-somethings, quite unafraid and did not censor – neither our thoughts nor our words.  Young people today seem so much more guarded, self-conscious about the image they present and their impact on others.  This trend will get worse in the days to come too, due to pernicious social media impact, and the increasing pressure it creates to ever more conform.

My apartment had two rooms, all of mixed usage.  For example, the toilet was behind a curtain (no door) in the much larger living cum bedroom (not too far from the dining table).  There was no shower; the only washbasin was located near the window overlooking the backyard.  For showers and baths we went to the nearby campus of Caen University.  The kitchen space was mostly empty, and of course had three whitewashed walls.  Cooking utensils were at a bare minimum.  There was only one cupboard and a 2-flame gas stove.  Later we got the luxury of a n oven and started making pizzas.

One night, we specifically remembered that these whitewashed walls had nothing on it.  We sat, the four of us, Alain, Nadine, Susy and myself around the dining table of their apartment.  For some inexplicable reasons we started discussing the Evans-Wentz translation of the “Tibetan Book of Liberation”, a Padmasambhava terma text.  Alain owned the French version; I went upstairs to get the German edition.  I don’t remember the actual content of the conversation, only that at one instant Alain noticed the beautiful frontispiece in color of a Padmasambhava thangka in the German book, voicing regret that the French edition did not have it.

Then I probably remarked that a large-scale painting like this would look great on the whitewashed wall on the far end of the kitchen space, which was half separated from the front part of the room by the large old cupboard hosting our plates and pots and pans.  Alain spontaneously voiced great enthusiasm for the idea. 

It was early September; his semester would start in late October.  So, he would have the time to launch himself into a crazy venture like this.  He just said something to the effect of, “Let’s do it”.  Which came unexpected.  I had simply voiced an idea and not given a thought to putting it into action.  He grabbed it and ran with it.  For me the actual doing was still a mystery.   Therefore, I enquired how we would go about it.  He said, “The easiest would be, if we had a clear line drawing of Padmasambhava and created a grid of 1cm squares under it and the we divide the wall into 10cm pencil lined squares.  It’s a piece of cake to transfer one to the other.  The grid will make sure that the proportions stay correct.”

At which point I ran upstairs again to fetch the Tibetan rice paper print from over my bed of the trikaya of Amitabha, Avilokiteshvara and Padmasambhava.  I had bought this on the last days of my Kathmandu visit, and it was based on a drawing by the then Khamtrul Rinpoche.  I showed it to Alain, and he judged it the perfect Padmasambhava for our purpose.  The color scheme we decided to copy from the German edition of the Eventz-Wentz book.  Alain would draw the central figure and I would take care of the decorative artwork surrounding it.  Drawing a life size human shape appeared too daunting to me, and way beyond my meager artistic skills.

So it was decided, and so it was done.

The end product of our combined efforts, completed by mid-October 1972, must have been the first life size Padmasambhava on a wall in a French house.   It, of course, looked much more vibrantly alive than the reproduction shown here, made from an old slide from which almost all its color has faded out.  The only thing that neither Alain nor I dared to do was, to give eyes to Padmasambhava.  We were so happy with the mural, and so afraid of ruining it all by making a mistake while painting the eyes.

I guess the eyes of Padmasambhava only came to France, when Dudjom Rinpoche settled there partially, in 1973.

In my early twenties, I didn’t know anything about traditional pujas or other kinds of formal practice.  I remember how we offered incense every once in a while.  In general we really loved the image.  We worshipped it even, like one adores a lover or a really good friend.  It assumed the role of a perfect, silent companion, a protector of sorts.  Each time when I opened the apartment door, my eyes usually wandered first to gaze for a second at Padmasambhava.   Starting in December, when we started to have several guests in a row, we put a second mattress in the cubicle-like space in front it – and there we also made some wild love, some nights and on Sundays.  But there never arose a feeling that the Lotus Born Guru would have minded.  Then around Christmas ’72, I was initiated into Transcendental Meditation Maharishi Mahesh Yogi style, and sometimes meditated in front of the image.  It was a good place, our time in Normandy very happy and harmonious.

In August 1973 we left.   My time as a volunteer had come to an end.  I remember that Susy and I lit two full packets of incense and bowed before the image before closing the door for good. 

But was it ever closed? 

What is open?  What is closed?  What is past?  What is present?  What do our ordinary, linear minds really know – beyond how to help us navigate through the everyday maze of conventionality?     

 And what do we know about the ramifications of painting a Padmasambhava on a kitchen wall?  What had we called into being?  Does it continue to call us, beckon us?  - There is no definite answer to these questions that bears scrutiny.  Yet it is important to ask them – and leave them unanswered. 

I met Alain and Nadine for the last time only two years after I had left Caen, in the summer of 1975.  Writing this, I now wish they were well.  And if they have passed on, which they might, considering the number of Gitanes and Gauloises ‘papier mais’ they were smoking per day, I wish that Padmasambhava would have remembered them, and they would have remembered him.  He has certainly never left me, not even when I planned on leaving him.

Body Focus

The body is the main focus, the well from which awareness springs.

You can consult ancient scriptures like in the following quote from the Samputa Tantra,

“If you don’t know the nature of the body [through direct experience], all the [other] methods that the Buddha revealed in his 84,000 teachings will not yield any fruit.”

Or you can listen to present-day experienced practitioners and teachers like Professor Reggie Ray who recently summed up the view in these words,

“The somatic view of the vajrayana has revolutionary implications for our meditation practice as modern people, and for our spiritual journey altogether… It means that our spiritual life, far from involving a distancing and separating from our body and all the realities of our physical incarnation, requires just the opposite: we must turn toward our body and our life as the proper and possible arena for authentic spiritual development – as the only place where our path can unfold and as the only true access point for genuine realization.  Anything else is a chimera, a dream… Connecting with our body and ordinary life are not add-ons: they ARE the practice of spirituality.  They are what the spiritual journey is all about.”

Buddhist Yoga and the Continuous Diving into Direct Experience

Originating from the teachings of the Buddha, the form of yoga that I teach and call Nadi Prana is mainly about releasing our clinging to the same old habits and patterns that make us suffer.  It cannot be otherwise, as the Buddha's way of teaching was to point out ways that help us to eradicate the causes of suffering from our own mindstream.  Inner imbalances and disharmony have to be dealt with first.  

Why? Because our ego-centered and fixated concepts and patterns are the root of our existential predicaments.  They make us suffer mostly emotionally and mentally at first; later the same trends manifest physically.  All physical problems start as mental/emotional problems before they turn into an outright disease - or in another manifestation: social injustice and the rape of the planet.  It all starts at home, here with each and everyone of us.  We better understand who we are, what what we are doing and what's the purpose of it, before doing anything else.

Therefore, in this yoga, we are not trying to achieve the ideal posture that plays into and/or reinforces our idealized self-image, the way we would like others to see us.  Rather, we use postures only for the purpose that they may reflect back for us to see what is happening in our bodies and minds, moment-to-moment  With their help, we can observe ourselves in slow motion so to speak.  As a result, feeling deeply what is passing through us, we become slowly and gradually very natural and gain the kind of inborn self-confidence that doesn't deflate when ego is deflated.  Our suffering over emotions, concepts and ideas decreases. Although this process takes time and we will need some patience.

In the words of Tarthang Tulku, it works something like this, “Breathing we allow our awareness of the sensation to expand, noting how it ripples outward, shifting its tone over time.  Fierce anger rises, peaks, and settles down.  Amusement may come up suddenly in its wake, leaving a trail of shining bubbles as it flows through us.  It is all subject to change.  It is gradually changing.  As we allow ourselves to feel the great breadth and depth of our sensations, they lose their discreteness, merging with one another at their outer edges.  The stormy weather ebbs away. Leaving us in a quiet sea.”  

From this we can deduct that the whole point in practicing is not to continue with making us suffer over our own concepts, ideas, ad emotions – and not making others suffer either.

But we can explain the result of such practice even more simply, more in terms of our actual palpable, physical experience.  

In these terms, the benefits of Buddhist yoga help us set in motion and enjoy a feedback loop of open-ended and natural, uncontrived positivity.  It starts out with:

Relaxing body and mind.  That’s what we do in the physical exercise. Even when they are a little strenuous we focus on the relaxation that follows.

• Through relaxation we become more aware
• Through becoming more aware we awaken to our direct sensory experiences
• Through awakening the senses we start enjoying every moment
• Through such enjoyment we start nurturing our whole being
• Through nurturing our whole being we are becoming grounded in our own reality
• Through becoming grounded and real we feel embodied in all aspects of our lives
• Feeling thus fully embodied makes us even more relaxed, while likewise deepening our responsiveness
• Deeper relaxation and responsiveness deepen awareness even further
• Such deeper awareness empowers our sensory experiences to become even more fine-tuned, subtle and even continuously self-transforming.

And so forth

Nadi Prana is not a head oriented practice.   Over time you learn how to let the entire unbroken bodymind guide you, not just the brain, let alone your ideas of ‘how things are supposed to be and behave’.  Buddhist yoga has no issue or problem with the body and the senses.  It doesn’t look down on them.  It actually cherishes the body in a non-ego fixated way – as an ever-flowing continuum.

Unlike many other forms of yoga, it does not preach the virtues of the ordinary shortsighted kind of spirituality of forced renunciation that puts ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ on a pedestal, while denigrating the allegedly ‘lowly’ body.  NadiPrana doesn’t just make use of the body; rather it helps us appreciate its richness of so-far undiscovered possibilities.

Being with the body, moving it (mostly) slowly (but sometimes also fast) and feeling the feelings that such movement and attention produces, in and of itself will over time dissolve all preconceived limited ideas and notions that we have.  When the body feels more alive, it becomes less of a conceptual prison but a matrix through which the freedom of spirit can be naturally expressed.

Through the yoga of the Buddha, the open-ended feedback loop of direct experience will make us physically and emotionally much more flexible.

© Matthias Dehne/Choyin Dorje 2017

NadiPrana Experiences

Here is a short piece that I wrote about my experiences during a retreat in 2014.  I found it in an old file tucked away in a folder that I rarely access.  Although in the meantime, I have done three more such retreats, one in 2015 and another one in June 2016 and a 6-week retreat in June & July this year, I still feel that my observations could be helpful to others.  These types of insights don’t come with a shelf life. They are always fresh and new.  Which is why I am sharing the piece here. 

In general, I hope that this kind of retreats can be offered to more people and more often, in the future.  So far, my teacher has not felt very keen on doing so.  He is a rather private person.  He likes to work one on one with a few students that he has known for years, rather than jumping into the ‘fray’ of commercialized yoga.  However, the results that everyone observes in themselves who does work with him, and the positive shifts and changes they experience in their lives would warrant that he play a little more active and public role.  At least that’s what some others and I are thinking. 

In Buddhist yoga, nothing is forced, everything manifests out of your own being, provided the intention is there and motivation enough to put in a little effort to live a fully embodied life rather than a life narrowly defined through ‘heady’ concepts.

I attended the 7-day NadiPrana Buddhist yoga retreat this time with no ulterior motive, like in the pursuit of a particular goal.  I just wanted to be quiet; I needed to relax. Hence, I enjoyed the first four retreat days like a vacation from all of my everyday concerns.  This felt sooo good! It felt like coming home and settling in myself; letting go of all the accumulated stress from the hectic time in the monsoon months that same year when I had been setting up my new clinic. In short, for four days I felt like a happy go lucky child free of all cares.

Day 5 came, and the mood pendulum shifted in the opposite direction.  It brought up deep resistance. As a result, I felt like not wanting to continue with doing more postures.  Likewise, I didn’t want to focus during the silent meditation sessions between postures. While sitting upright, my body started to hurt all over, and I therefore decided that I had felt enough into and of my life and didn’t want to feel anything any more:  No energy movements, no emotions no nothing!  Enough of this spiritual gobbledygook!

However, on closer scrutiny, I could easily discern that this wish to suppress the free flow of sensations and feelings released by NadiPrana was clearly a rather aggressive and self-destructive form of self-denial.

I was simply resisting the next step that had opened up before me as a result of the first four days of practicing, which had allowed me to go deeper into the subtle, internal energy movements at the basis of it all. These subtle life giving energy movements indeed permeated my entire bodymind continuum.  Therefore, what I had labeled as ‘unpleasant’ or even ‘pain’ was in truth the deep-seated resistance against feeling the energy and bliss waves that naturally permeate the body when we connect to its fluidity and ever flowing presence. I felt so much more and in such greater detail than I had ever felt before; and actually when I paid attention, my whole being was vibrating with energy. 

In short, what happened on day 5 was that I became aware of how much I am resisting my own bliss; resist feeling the bliss inherent in the free flow of energies through the body – and this bliss is actually accessible to all of us, every moment.  May be we are resisting it because we are afraid that our narrow minded views regarding ourselves and our world would simply disappear in this sea of energy, leaving us bereft of the concepts that make up what we belief is our precious ‘self’; whereas there is so much more to it, and so much more enjoyable, too.

Thus I had two very important realizations:

1.     I had read many times before, both in modern books on meditation or in ancient dharma texts that all of existence is the projection of one’s own mind. I have always accepted this statement as a working hypothesis, or as a basic ‘theory of everything’; yet I had also never actually ‘tasted’ this truth, or felt it deeply from inside out.  For the first time during the meditation sessions in this retreat, I realized that this view is not merely a theory about reality but reality itself – a palpable presence free of rigid separation; or an inseparable free flowing sense of being that can likewise easily accept and work with the boundaries of our ordinary existence as part of the flow.

2.     Whenever I had done this kind of slow movement exercises before in previous retreats or on my own, my attention had been mostly preoccupied with either maintaining the posture, or feeling pain here or there because of the stress created by holding the posture, or energies rushing through.  I had been lost in these events, totally absorbed by them. But during this retreat for a couple of moments, I felt this amazing connection of body and mind when the posture holds itself, and I felt stable and weightless at the same time; totally grounded in ‘earthiness’, yet lighter than a feather. I have had this experience in previous NadiPrana retreats only fleetingly but never this intense, and never for longer than a few moments.  Usually, the sense of the total balance of feeling grounded in myself had vanished as quickly as it had arisen.   This time there was a sense of abiding in it and with it, some form of calm abiding.  It persisted; it could be explored and relished.

Post retreat, I am noticing that my capacity to hold my breath has deepened, my fear for heights has considerably reduced. I also discovered how strong the tendency is In me to put myself down and deny my capabilities.  The events on day 5 and 6 brought to my attention how much and how often I am stopping myself or shutting myself down when I am just starting to experience some of the most amazing feelings and realizations that I have ever had, or presently have. 

By noticing this tendency, it naturally vanishes.  I can enjoy being alive a whole lot more.  Considering how short our human lives really are, enjoying the moment as it arises and disappears is a precious gift.  I don’t underestimate its value any longer.

I thank my teacher Choyin Dorje for his constant guidance.

Dr. Shikha

How the Great Stupa Became & Remained as Refuge

The way I understand how it has worked out in my life: guru is heart, guru is luminous, substanceless mindessence.  By the virtue of his or her own training and devotion to benefit beings, the guru in human form embodies heartmind, and by embodying it brings it out in those with eyes to see and ears to hear, who also have a body alive enough to feel their own life and what is around.  Like the real authentic guru himself or herself, heartmind remains ungraspable and indefinable, even as a person.  But heartmind has purpose.  Through which it defines our purpose in life.  How developed or how weak it is, respectively, shines through in the quality of our actions.   

Being around and living around the Great Stupa for a while as a young man, acted as a medium for me to connect with the Buddha’s dharma and to call some real teachers from afar into my life without knowing that I did, in whom the teachings are living in every cell and every breath.  The Great Stupa was a great catalyst that revealed purpose and direction.

The Great Stupa is the Body of Infinite Simplicity, the heartmind of all Buddhas.    

It was one late October morning 1971, when I first laid eyes on the Great Stupa in Bodnath, today better known as Boudha.  But even though the eyes saw it, little inner recognition followed.  My heart didn’t skip a beat.  The place felt like a good place for sure – a place much more to my liking than the center of even then comparatively noisy Kathmandu.  But no epiphany happened.  The stupa didn’t make me a believer in Buddhism right away.  It didn’t change my life on the spot.  I am anyway the kind of person who would be suspicious of dramatic shifts, like ‘on the road to Damascus’ type conversions.  I simply don’t trust them.  Too much drama usually translates into fanaticism.  Therefore, at first the stupa was merely registered as a curiosity, an oddly shaped structure, nothing of the likes that I had ever seen.  It also looked a bit desolate.

Back then hardly anyone lived in Boudha.

There was one row of buildings forming a circle around the stupa, and one monastery inside the circle (which still exists).  Outside on the main road there stood four, five houses to the right and left of the gate, yet as far as I can remember no buildings on the other side of the road.  Apart from these, outside the circle to the west it was rice fields, rice fields and more rice fields all the way to Pashupatinath and the outskirts of the city near the new Royal Palace, whereas to the east, the rice fields didn’t seem to end.  Or did they end where Mt Everest glowed purple and lavender in the evening light, on the far horizon, fully visible on every pristinely clear day – and every morning, too, but only as a dark shadow against the rising sun? 

In 1971, it sure appeared as if pollution would never taint this Shangri-La!

Unlike today, the whole Kathmandu Valley basked in pristinely clear sunlight, waves upon

waves of rice terraces undulating under a high altitude deep blue sky.  And even with the sun in full force, the weather was quite a bit cooler than nowadays because the foothills to the south, west and north had not been yet clear-cut of their thick forest overcoat.  As a result, and because there were hardly any concrete buildings in the valley that could have stored the heat of the day, temperatures dropped considerably at night.  Neither did they rise, much before 10am.  Beyond the Kopan hillock in the old growth pinewoods on the slopes leading up to the 12.000 feet high foothills, rumor had it that tigers still roamed.

Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa of fame to come already lived in Kopan.

But of course when I ventured to explore the Kopan hill and the slopes beyond in the course of my stay, I recognized these Lamas as little as I had recognized the gradually growing impact of the stupa on my own life; a slow growth indeed, more like a tree is growing over the years or decades rather than a weed over a few days.  Actually, I was blissfully ignorant of most of anything and everything.  In a sense, my mind hadn’t adapted and opened to the new surroundings.  My eyes were still wide shut.  Which is only natural.

Our ordinary sense of vision cannot perceive what we can’t conceptualize.

The synapses hadn't formed.  Everything was so new and foreign: people moving about in colorful more free flowing fabrics never seen before.  Clothing that let the body breathe and surge forward, rather than restricting or encasing it.  Men and women with gestures and habits never encountered, like men peeing while squatting down rather than standing up; village women sucking the smoke of their beedis through the opening between index finger and thumb, not touching it to the mouth.  Buses packed with clusters upon clusters of people, more densely packed than cattle carts.  No familiar sight for the eyes to grasp on, and for the mind to identify with.  Different architecture.  Different noises all around.  No traffic rules whatsoever that anyone deemed worth following, except for the one and only one that makes sense: of not banging into another vehicle, or a cow or a pedestrian.  No international brands of anything to purchase, not even Camel cigarettes or Marlboro – except for the universal presence of Coca Cola.  And one more: when you enter a temple, it is you who rings the bell to announce your coming.  It is not the bell that is calling you to service.  You introduce yourself.  You announce your coming to the gods.  The gods don’t boss you around. 

Splendid, I thought. 

It was indeed a world different in every conceivable way from everything that I had known and met with thus far.  Until 1971 the east had staunchly maintained its character, unfortunately more out of habit than by crediting itself with the inherent value that it carried, higher than any western import.  Even Istanbul on the way had been an oriental city than, rather than the modern metropolis it is now.  I certainly had loved how the east displayed its otherness even though it took time to get used to it.  What I didn’t notice was that this splendid otherness was totally lacking in self-confidence.  Which is why it is long gone, buried under the rubble of foreign aid and foreign direct investment, not to forget under the corruption of a rapacious homegrown ruling class.

Change being the only constant, this is not a lament.

It goes without saying that my coming to Nepal didn’t have a well-defined purpose.  Yes, there flickered some nebulous spiritual yearning in the back of my head, some undercurrent inherited from a buried transpersonal past.  This past had sunk irrecognizably into the unconscious, though.  I couldn’t fathom yet how it might influence events to come, or even what it really asked of me to do and how to live.  I only knew that I didn’t want to live the way that society wanted me to live.  I might have stated to my family and friends before leaving Europe and after reading Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi that I would make this trip in order to search for a guru.  But I had no a clue of what a real guru might be like, or what would be involved in working with one.  It goes without saying that I did not find that guru. To be honest, I didn’t even look that hard.  In a much different way than I might have foreseen the guru appeared however, without me recognizing.  This guru did not come in human form.  It manifested as the dynamic, like ripples, like waves, set in motion by the journey itself.  The reverberations extended far into the future, reconnecting with threads way far back from the past.   Whereas for my family and friends back home the trip no doubt looked like the turning my back that it also was on everything that my generation despised as ’the establishment’: hence leading me on to the ‘Hippie Trail’.

So, here I was on ‘Freak Street’, Kathmandu.

But only a visitor there, not a long-term resident.  Freak Street wasn’t really for me.  When I had arrived in the valley on a Volkswagen bus a week earlier, call it by a stroke of luck or by the workings of karma, I had been invited to stay in the home of hip and single tourist guide, Mr. Chatterjee (which is how he had introduced himself).  In his attitudes and actions, Mr. Chatterjee was way ahead of his time while acutely aware of his home country’s glorious past, and also knowledgeable about it.  He worked at the then only 5-star hotel in Kathmandu, the Soaltee Oberoi.  Actually, I hadn’t come alone.  I had a girl friend with me, and the two of us had traveled together with five more guys (she the only woman) in the same Volkswagen from Herat in Afghanistan all the way to Nepal and somehow and mysteriously ended up in Mr. Chatterjee’s large apartment.

Talking about interdependent connection. 

To be invited into the homes of hospitable (and curious of everything western) locals was not uncommon in those days.  People were much more open than they are now, less afraid of strangers (the media had not yet started to broadcast their pernicious mass paranoia creating messages, designed to alienate people from each other and from their inborn humanity).  As a result, we met many in India and Nepal who wanted to connect – and not always was there an agenda behind the hospitality; like our dear Mr. Chatterjee here, he had no agenda.  There was nothing he could have wanted from us young people, who all were seekers in need of an inner compass.  He had been born and brought up with that compass.  He apparently had it all, landowning gentleman that he was with a good job, conversing fluently or at least semi-fluently (his Italian was not up to the mark, whereas his French was excellent) in five, six languages: English, French, Italian, Nepali  & Newari; and I suspect he spoke Bengali, too.

Worthy oriental gentlemen indeed existed. 

This Mr. Chatterjee was actually a rather colorful character, not your average tour guide (far too polished for that plus we later found that not only did he have his own desk at the hotel, but his own office).  After three, four days staying at his house, he revealed himself quite a yogi, as he displayed to us the mastership over his body one evening in front of our group of seven – and it was impressive to see how he could bend, twist and turn it.  On that occasion I might have gained some measure of respect with him when I politely pointed out that yogic achievements were not meant for public display but for private practice and accomplishment to be shared by teaching formally, and indirectly. (Remember, in those days yoga had not yet turned the fad it is now, to be learned in 4-week teacher training programs.  It was still regarded and respected as a semi-secret spiritual discipline.)

When not tied up in yoga business, yogis can generate some real energy.

But there was more to Mr. Chatterjee than even the yoga.  In fact, what I also was soon to learn was that he was married with kids.  The wife and the children, however, lived in the fold of the extended family not very far away, whereas he had his own large apartment near New Road, to which he occasionally invited single European ladies.  Without their prior knowing they had come to be introduced to the charms of the east, let’s say, more intimately than anticipated.  Considering Mr. Chatterjee’s mastership over his body and the finesse, sensitivity and social graces he displayed, I am sure they were not disappointed.  However, for all intents and purposes, it was equally conceivable that there was no sex involved at all.  We will never know.  We were not with them in the bedroom.   It is imaginable that he could have introduced the women he brought home (we met two of them in the kitchen over coffee on different mornings) not to his particular style of sexual prowess but to some secret meditation, or yoga routine.  Not the least smell of impropriety or illicitness hung in the air, neither in the mornings nor in the evenings.  The whole scene was stress-free.  It felt clean.

Traditional Asian family arrangements have their unique pros and cons.

When I let Mr. Chatterjee know a week into our stay with him that we would like to explore Kathmandu and surroundings beyond our two-week visa, he proved extremely helpful in two ways.  First he managed to get the visa extension for six weeks for my girlfriend and myself that we had asked for, which we would otherwise have never gotten.  Actually, all we did was handing over our passports to his brother-in-law, who took care of the matter.  According to Mr. Chatterjee his brother-in-law was the head of the local immigration office, and so he probably was.  Second, Mr. Chatterjee had pointed out that we should part ways with the group that we had come with and that we should seek to live in Boudha near the Great Stupa by ourselves.  It made sense, as the group didn’t like us.  But from his side, Mr. Chatterjee gave no reasons for his suggestions, and naturally it didn’t even occur to me to offer to pay him for his services of getting us the visa.  He was not that kind of a person.  When I suggested that he maybe could help us find us a place in Boudha, he simply said that I should go and find one myself.  It wouldn’t be difficult.  And it wasn’t.

Which is how I came to know the Great Stupa better, gradually.

The very next day after this discussion, I rented the upstairs floor in a farmhouse, located somewhere on or near the property of the present day Shechen monastery.  The farm was not far from one of the many age-old wells that dotted the paddy fields where the locals took their baths and washed clothes.  Besides, these were the places where women got together and gossiped over the laundry.  At first, cool hippie or not, I felt a little shy washing let alone bathing myself in the midst of colorfully clad and half-clad women of all ages.  They did not flaunt anything, yet were not squealing with embarrassment when a bit of breast openly showed for a second or longer.  I remember Nepalis being so much more natural then, than how they are now, and so much freer, more relaxed at ease with themselves and their being in the world to which they were still fully connected – and from which they are now uprooted,

We fit right in some ways, even if in other ways we didn’t.

But at least with every day, we relaxed a little more.  As far as speed is concerned, and even if everything was slower in the west back then, compared to the way things moved along in Nepal, westerners were still speed freaks in 1971 as much as they are today, and in need of relaxation.  The need for relaxation included smoking dope, too, of course.  But even with smoking dope, our western drivenness to get everything done and out of the way ASAP hadn’t dropped off.  Besides, I was only a budding dope head.  My career as one had started for real not before I had crossed the Iran-Afghan border (in High School I had only been an occasional smoker of pot), in other words less than two months prior to coming to Nepal.  Which is why my girlfriend needled me with ‘not hip enough’ for her taste.  Women know what they consider the shortcomings of their partners unusually well.  She was probably right, too. I never turned out a ‘real hippie’, as I didn’t let go of certain values and didn’t cross certain lines.  Basically I never indulged to the point of losing it.  May be that’s what she would have preferred: the guy who gave himself a needle with LSD-25 to the head for faster kicks.  I would never go that far.  From my point of view, oral ingestion served the purpose just as well.

Not to forget: mature conservatives usually make good liberals.   

For hippie standards we got up early every morning. The sun flooded the earthen floor around seven, as the windows had full eastern exposure.  It would only have remained dark in the room, had we closed the wooden shutters, but we never did, or only did partially.  We liked the fresh night air.  Usually we were hung over a bit at first due to too much pot the day before, due to the pattern that had emerged and become the daily routine. Wherever we went or whatever we did, it was interrupted by the smoking of five to seven joints and chillums in a day, and sometimes a hookah, spiced with a little opium on top of the hash, at night.  And yes, of course, we would follow that same routine again in the day to come.

We relaxed, but it would take time to wake up from the deeper slumber.

Waking up from the deep emotional slumber and sloth would actually take a few more decades.  But anyway, this is, how the day started… every day: rolling the early morning joint, sitting at the open, beautifully wood carved window frame, covering the full height from ceiling to floor, leaning the elbow on the mid-section railing and smoking while looking at Mt Everest to the east, and the light-bathed glory of the valley below and the hills above – kind of getting lost in the symphony of after-monsoon greens slowly turning brownish under an overarching almost painfully brilliant blueness.  There were instances when the mind was merging with this blueness – forgetting everything else.  But like the stupa in the beginning, these instances almost went by unnoticed.  I had not yet met the mirror in human form, the person who would introduce me to the space-like openness of mind.  As the saying goes, there is a time for everything.

Without such mirror we will remain essentially closed. 

After the morning joint came the bath.  For breakfast, it was porridge cooked over our small kerosene stove, plus the inevitable chai, which we had learned how to prepare.  The landlord’s cows provided the whole, unpasteurized milk, fresh from the udder.  Nowadays there are all kinds of restaurants in Boudha – Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Tibetan, mixed cuisines: the works.  None of these existed.  At some point we were lucky to discover Dolma’s place.  She must have been among the first Tibetans settled there.  To reach her, you again had to pass by the stupa.  The room where she served (you couldn’t call it a restaurant) was located in one of the houses to the right of the entrance gate on the main road, and in order to get there you had to grope your way through the pitch dark cow shed in the ground floor and up a small ladder to the first floor, where she cooked over a combination of wood and kerosene stoves.   The room was usually smoke filled, but also oozed with the woman’s irrepressible kindness.  Hers were the most delicious buff momos that we had ever tasted, and we liked them fried not steamed. But then, we hadn’t tasted anyone else’s momos for comparison.  And we never ate momos for breakfast, only for dinner, and not ever day.  We kept cooking for ourselves, mostly.

But somehow Dolma’s simple kindness would become another link.

I read a lot during these Boudha farmhouse days, usually some place outside.  There was a bluff overlooking a deep ravine or nullah, about a five-minute walk from where we lived.  Under a few larger trees it also offered some shade.  You had a full view of the Langtang range, Ganesh I and Dorje Lakpa, the peaks and ranges closest to Kathmandu.  But usually we had our noses on the page.  I read tons of Hermann Hesse in English, books that I had already read in the German original years before.  In addition I discovered my passion for Somerset Maugham: The Razor’s Edge and Of Human Bondage, The Moon and the Six Pence, plus a bunch of short stories.   I read all of Lobsang Rampa’s I could get a hold of, and in the Kathmandu of hippie glory days, they had each and every volume of his ‘collected works’, of course.  Nobody would look at these books now.  From today’s sophisticated dharma knowledge they would be so embarrassingly funny in their fakeness.  But strangely enough, we seemed capable to extract some genuine insights from the ‘false’.  We didn’t always need the right book to give us the right kind of information.  The wrong book would do.  In some magical-alchemical way, it would still yield what needed to be processed.   

It is helpful to be able to learn from the false.

There is an additional twist to the connection with this particular spot of land where we went to read and smoke joints so often, almost every day.  In 1971, I could not have foreseen that twenty-nine years later I would sit a hundred meters inside from our old spot again, in early 2000, attending a land blessing puja for my guru’s house.  Lama Dawa had bought a plot exactly on the same bluff there in 1999 to build his house, to where I was to return many times over the past 17 years until today.  In some ways these connections are not important, one should read too much into them.  They don’t happen or exist to inflate ego with importance.  From another perspective they point to an organic way of maturing, rich in meaning, because outside of the control of our ordinary mind.  As Lama Dawa says, “Samsara means that everything is possible.”  Everything can happen.

Invisible threads to places and people make up the tapestry of life.

And even of what should be in plain sight and right in front of our noses, we usually see less than half, often less than a fraction.  When our minds are non-receptive, so are our senses, and vice versa. – Susy and I lived near the stupa for about seven weeks, late October to mid-December.  I passed by it several times every day.  It sort of grew on me, but I cannot say that I understood it.  After some days, we first dared to venture into the walled enclosure that surrounds it.  We went up and around on all three levels several days in a row, probably counterclockwise, as there wasn’t anybody there to indicate the correct way according to Buddhist understanding.   Even if we made mistakes, we had finally arrived where we had landed a little more, bonded a little more.  Everything had become a little more real.  

It takes time to arrive where you are destined to be.

This whole trip from Cologne to Kathmandu overland represented a string of bold beginnings, like falling in love.  And all bold beginnings take root slowly.  If they flourish too fast they may perish.  Likewise, while near the stupa, I fell in love not so much with Buddhism as a conceptual framework, but with the earth in Boudha that was soaked in dharma.  I fell in love with the Great Stupa Jarungkhasor as a larger presence, yet at the time, it didn’t even dawn on me that I had.  It didn’t even occur to me once while there that it would become the leitmotif for a lifetime. 

Falling in love is always a bold beginning. 

Falling in love with the apparently useless and hopeless, like the stupa or even the dharma of the Buddha, is even bolder.  No doubt, from an ordinary life practical perspective such things as Buddhism or the stupa are absolutely useless.  They don’t generate a profit.  They don’t bring food on the table.  They cannot be manipulated like people or worldly circumstances, or if you do manipulate them to your ego advantage, then only at the peril of a rebirth in hell, or somewhere else highly unpleasant and prisonlike.  In some ways, this utter uselessness makes love for the dharma or its representation even sweeter.  It cannot show too much on the outside.  There are few flashy displays, if any.  Love simply grows on you.  For some of us this falling in love business happens in a moment, for others only gradually.  Bold beginnings can be sudden, or they can slowly unfold.  Never in my life have I fallen madly in love with a woman at first sight, but I have learned to deeply love a few slowly and over time.  I still love them when they are gone, even if I initiated the leaving.  But the stupa never left.  The dharma never left.  And even when I tried leaving them in my late thirties to early forties, they didn’t let me.

This is why I speak of the Great Stupa in Boudha as my first refuge teacher.

The weeks passed.  A war came.  Indian troops whipped the Pakis in the east pretty good.  And people started talking about the “7-17 War”, meaning that it would take India 7 days to conquer Eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and 17 days to mop everything up in the west.  All of this trouble meant a visa extension for foreigners in Nepal for another month, which was automatically granted at the beginning of the hostilities.  The war also ended soon in a ceasefire.  US threats intended to protect Pakistan and Soviet counter threats against any US intervention forced a stalemate.

We were not affected but it changed the situation.

Besides, the young ones get bored quickly.  After six weeks, I started feeling tired with our 7 or some more joints a day routine, although I didn’t stop.  Susy loved that shit (pun intended) still too much, well and I loved my inertia, even when I didn’t.  A very common human predicament: we sense the need to change, but gravity is against it and we are too lazy to make an effort.  But, then, if we are lucky, or in Buddhist terms: when there is merit – circumstances conspire against the inertia.

No doubt, helpers, guardian angles and protectors are there to assist.

And they take whatever form it takes to get the job done. – One afternoon, we had decided to visit the “Monkey Temple”.  Everybody only called it that and not Svayambhunath, the second great stupa in the Kathmandu Valley.  There were lots of monkeys there, hence the name.  But before climbing up (Svayambhu is located on a steep hill, at that time directly rising from the bottom of a riverbed, which by now has disappeared, I believe) we had to inevitably stop in a chai shop and smoke another joint.  There were some more hippies crowded into the tiny space, with whom we entered into a vivid conversation, and as a result one joint quickly became four.  We must have sat there for two hours or more, because the sun was much lower when we finally crossed the rickety bridge leading to the stairwell that would get us in one straight climb over probably a few hundred stairs right to the top.  I started walking.  Soon I also started sweating, like a horse after a 30 mile run.  I felt dizzy.  I felt like eighty years old.  And someone inside of me said, “You just turned twenty-one.  You’re not eighty.  Stop smoking pot and get in shape.” Or something to that effect.  I followed the advice.  My pot smoking days had ended.

But let’s not make this a moral issue.  It was a personal choice.

The Kathmandu and Boudha days petered out.  Mr. Chatterji helped us with booking tickets to Bombay and further on to Istanbul, which again was very welcome support as many wanted to fly after international flights to and from India had been grounded for a few weeks.  I chose Istanbul over Frankfurt, because felt that we needed to get back into the west gradually.  The direct train from Istanbul to Munich took 2 1/2days.  That seemed fast enough, especially with a few more days in the Orient before.  I had decided against going back overland.  In my view, whatever could have been experienced on this trip had indeed been experienced.  Susy toyed with the idea of going to Goa, venturing out on her own, of course in the in the protective company a bunch of other travelers like her but then discarded it, which was another case of inertia. 

Susy’s and my karma together hadn’t run out, yet.

Before departure we moved back into a hotel in town where two more small incidents happened that pointed to future developments.  One of the early American Buddhists in town sold me a few Tibetan block prints, based on drawings made by Khamtrul Rinpoche.  I then was to meet Khamtrul Rinpoche three and a half years later in Tashi Jong in 1975 where his pith instructions helped me open to the vastness of the blue-sky space. Khamtrul Rinpoche became one of the great dharma inspirations in my life, albeit not my root teacher – and according to the way that I see it, the connection for our meeting in this life was made through purchasing and cherishing these wood block prints.  On the day before we left I also met a French guy in one of the restaurants frequented by us hippies near Durbar Square who raved about a book by the title Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism.  I immediately went to buy it.  But it was stolen hours later, from another restaurant table when I wasn’t looking.  No great loss, I would purchase it again in Cologne in German language, only a month later.

Small ripples can grow into towering waves.

The Great Stupa in Boudha sits in the center of the mandala of these events, including today’s developments.  It has drawn me in and set me free at the same time.  It bound me to the dharma, but when life itself becomes dharma, dharma is freedom – not a prison of indigestible religious customs.  I am very thankful to the Great Stupa for acting as my first source of refuge, a very earthy and grounded teacher – made of mud, deeply planted in the mud connected to this vast starry unfathomable space that I watched one night sitting on its third level, even when stoned totally sober, nested in the same vastness that I observed.