--Thinley Norbu
Unfortunately, I recognized only very few of Lama Dawa’s displays. I was lucky if I every once and a while
caught one of the sparks when he shot them spontaneously through the pitch-dark
night sky of my closed, rigid mind.
Even more seldom, were the occasions when I interpreted them correctly
and translated them into suitable matching action. Mostly, I didn’t.
And many times I must have not even recognized that I had missed
something important. Here’s an example for my failing to see the meaning of one
such display, and its long-term ripples extending into what lay then still in the
future.
One day I was again sitting in Lama’s room. It must have been shortly before my
departing back for South India, around 2004. All of a sudden, Lama rose from his carpeted bed, his sort-of
teaching throne when he was home in Kathmandu, went over to the metal cabinet
where his clothes and some valuables were kept, and pulled out a letter size
manila envelope. He handed it to
me unopened with the cryptic comment that soon I would need what was contained
therein. I was too arrogant to
have a peak on the spot, and so I took the envelope to the guesthouse where I
opened it.
I don’t know what I had expected. Clearly I had expected something big, portentous, although I
have no clue what that could have been.
But I hadn’t expected what I held in my hands: about two dozen laminated
color photos of Thinley Norbu Rinpoche, showing him in layman’s garb on the
shore of the Tsangpo River near Lhasa.
The picture is quite famous and by now has been used by many, many times
over to illustrate their Facebook posts. Thinley Norbu also included it in his autobiography, A Brief
Fantasy History of a Himalayan.
When I arrived back home in Karnataka, I burned the photos
except for one, which I put up on my desk. For me the case was closed, filed under: ‘one of Lama’s
incomprehensible actions’. I did
not think about the matter any further.
And I had totally forgotten about it until a few days ago when I started
writing this article first in my head, and especially about the ramifications
of my reaction and action.
A year or so after the incident with the photos, I received
a communication from one of the publishers in Germany with and for whom I had
free-lanced since the late 1970s quite a bit, asking me if I was interested in
translating Thinley Norbu’s Magic Dance and White Sail into
German. Nothing was definite yet,
but they were about to sign the contract with Shambhala. Of course, I was. More than that, I was delighted.
It so happened that shortly after receiving the offer I was
seeing Lama in Kathmandu, again. I
asked him to ask in Sarasvati’s mirror about the chances of success for the
project, which he did. The answer
came that, “there were obstacles, which
might be vanquished, if a certain puja was done, even though the outcome was
far from guaranteed.” Lama
just commented, that we had to do the puja, which he arranged for through a
yogi friend. What Lama didn’t do
was to remind me about the photos and the auspicious connection that he had
seen possible and thus had tried to establish in the past. As stated above, I had totally
forgotten about the photos, and as usual he was far too subtle to rub my nose
in it.
But, looking back, I am sure that Lama hadn’t forgotten. He had the memory of an elephant, and
elephants are said to never forget anything. He could remember a text after reading it once. On occasion he quoted something that I
had said in the past verbatim, and several years later. You could say that all the networks and
files in his data collection were retrievable at any moment - and not just the data collection from
his personal memory bank.
Naturally, most of the time he gave no clue of possessing such abilities
and actually could play dumb very convincingly, at least to the unsuspecting.
A few weeks later, I was requested to hand in a sample
translation for Thinley Norbu’s people to check for accuracy and style. I felt absolutely up to the task. I have great confidence in my stylistic
sensibilities especially in my mother tongue. This is generally not misplaced, yet in this case my habitual
arrogance was to be deflated. I
made one big stupid error, which was more like a typo than anything else, by
forgetting to add a required negation, which I did not catch, although I read
and re-read my two sample pages several times before sending them in. The reaction came promptly, “If
the guy is not able to get a simple sentence right, even turning the intended
meaning into its opposite, how will he translate the book correctly.” Result: I did not earn the privilege of
translating Thinly Norbu’s two books… that I still cherish and still keep
reading to this very day; now even more than ever.
At the time of this happening, I did not connect the failure
to my ignoring of the tendrel (or
auspicious connectedness) that Lama Dawa had tried to point out through his
non-verbal communication or display.
Now, I do. However, one
should not confuse such synchronicities for mechanical causalities, which they
are not. Even though as sharp as
the tip of a sword, the Lama’s displays always remain as light as a feather. They do not create do-or-die
situations, even though in a way they are. As we all know, one has to die many times before wizening
up, if at all.
A few years later, after Thinley Norbu’s parinirvana, he
appeared to me in a vision in the course of one of my dakini retreats. He stood clearly before me as a man in
his prime, like in the photos of his that I had dismissed as ‘un-portentous’
and said, “Although we were supposed to
meet in this lifetime, we didn’t. My promise is that we will meet many times in
the future.”
What else could one wish for? Well may be, that I won’t be such a knuckle head as I proved
to be in the context of this story, for the remaining years of my life. But then again, one shouldn’t entertain
high hopes against the odds.
“To show true respect in a consistently deep and subtle way we
must make our minds pure. Then,
our respect will not be two-faced.
It is always best to examine our mind before automatically saying that
we respect someone, remembering that true respect always comes from the
mind. If traditional outer rules
of respect for body and speech are taught rigidly, without skillful means, we
become fearful that we will disobey or betray the tradition. When our minds are fearful, our pure
inner elements become congested, and we can react by becoming wild, rebellious
and disrespectful. If we learn the
inner respect of good intention, which exists within the pure light essence
within the elements, then the outer expression of our body and speech will be
open, pure, and unobstructed, and our respect will always be continuous.
--Thinley Norbu
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